Alyssa Grosso

Spreading kindness

A Brattleboro author’s new novel speaks to the middle-school experience and the effect of ‘ripples of actions’

Author Ann Braden shares her experiences and steps leading up to writing The Flight of the Puffin.

Braden, who wrote The Benefits of Being an Octopus, said that with the new young adult novel, she set out to use her 11 years of writing to promote kindness, lessons, and hard topics for an audience of a younger age group.

This book tells the journey of the protagonist, Libby, and how her past with bullies and hardships evolves into her spreading kindness through a postcard.

The puffin is used to symbolize many meanings in the book.

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Portraits capture, honor contributions of essential workers

Ezra Distler brings his lens to the workplace ‘to photograph the people who deserve to be highlighted’

Adapting his work to the global pandemic, photographer Ezra Distler is creating black-and-white portraits of essential workers. Distler, who has taken “maybe 1,500 or more” portraits of townspeople over the years, had received a grant last year from the Arts Council of Windham County for the Brattleboro Town Arts...

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