In a place like Saxtons River, with its cluster of old Vermont homes all painted white, it is sometimes hard to imagine the vastly individual worlds that exist behind the prevailing façade.
From outside, Julia Zanes and Donald Saaf's house doesn't stand out from its surroundings. It too is painted white, with nothing to really distinguish it to the casual observer.
Approaching it, however, a few things could catch your eye: a giant soapstone carving, for example, or an impromtu icicle sculpture, with what looks like a jellyfish atop a forest of icy spears. You might catch a glimpse, through the window, of a giant painting that turns out to be a door, or perhaps you'll spy a Pomeranian jumping through a hoop.
“This is Snufkin,” Zanes explains. “We just rescued him, and we're thinking of putting him in our puppet show.” As Saaf holds the hoop, Snufkin jumps startlingly high, soaring through the hoop to the treat waiting for him on the other side.
Area residents will remember David Chase, whose play As Fair as You Were will premiere at the Vermont Theatre Company this month, as the founder of Brattleboro Community Television, a "caustic columnist" for the Brattleboro Reformer, and the author of the novel A Peasant of West Brattleboro. The (sort-of)
Comic books have long been considered kid stuff, bought at newsstands and drugstores and hidden under the bed with the other unwholesome goods of childhood. With a new name and revamped image, graphic novels are finally working their way into the mainstream of literature, newly finding their place as...
Doug “Ten” Rose has made writing his memoirs a three-dimensional project. His new book, Fearless Puppy on American Road, chronicles 35 years of hitchhiking beginning when he left Coney Island at age 15. Rose, now living in Brattleboro, intertwines accounts of his experiences with the extraordinary people he met on the road with his personal philosophies and adaptations of Eastern spiritual ideas into his own life and language. “I have attended eight different colleges and universities,” Rose writes in his...
In an unassuming white house on Route 9 in West Brattleboro, a wealth of culture from such places as Nepal, China, Turkmenistan, and Japan is stored: some things crafted locally, and others brought directly from Asia. The house contains both the C.X. Silver Gallery and the Asian Cultural Center, directed by Chinese artist Cai Xi Silver and her husband, Adam Silver. “We've been married 21 years and have been thinking all this time to found a nonprofit Cultural Center and...