BRATTLEBORO-ByWay Books & More, 399 Canal St., is supporting the Vermont Reads Community Program by hosting a “pick-up party,” an all-community event centered around the book Charity & Sylvia by Tillie Walden (Drawn & Quarterly Press) Wednesday, July 22, from 4 to 6 p.m. A copy of the book may be “picked up” for free by anyone who participates.
“Weybridge, Vermont, in February 1807 is small, cold, lonely, and beautiful. As an unwed woman with few prospects, Sylvia Drake resides with and cares for her sister’s rambunctious family. But today the house is abuzz awaiting a guest — Charity Bryant.”
So opens Charity & Sylvia. Walden is an award-winning, Vermont-based cartoonist and author of Spinning and On a Sunbeam. She served as Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from April 2023 to April 2026.
Charity & Sylvia is a biography that is also the story of 19th-century America. For 44 years, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake lived together as life partners in small town Vermont. And in Walden’s graphic novel, America grows alongside these women. We see the arrival of railroads, the terms of 14 Presidents, and the experiences of riots, rebellion, and plagues.
Walden created her work from archival materials at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History with other primary and secondary sources. Walden also drew on Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, published in 2014 and first to unearth the story of Charity and Sylvia.
In 2024, Vermont Humanities appointed Walden as the first cartoonist-in-residence. She was commissioned to research a graphic novel based on Charity and Sylvia’s story, so that the story could reach a wider audience, and to be accessible to the middle and high schools who take part in Vermont Reads.
“I am fascinated by life in Vermont in the late 1700s and the 1800s,” said Walden. “I want the readers [...] to feel like they understand a sense of how the days felt for these women. It is a story about queer love, it is a story about commitment and spirituality, but it is also a story of how we lived back then.”
“Tillie’s work on the story of Charity and Sylvia is a deeply moving meditation on rural life, community, spirituality, and love,” said Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, executive director of Vermont Humanities. “I have been working with the Sheldon Museum to bring the story of these two women to a wider audience for a dozen years, and I can’t imagine a more moving culmination to that partnership than Tillie Walden’s masterwork.”
Walden won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work at the age of 22 for her graphic memoir Spinning. Her work includes a graphic novel trilogy featuring The Walking Dead character Clementine and two middle grade graphic novels created with musicians Tegan and Sara. She is a graduate of The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) in White River Junction and became a professor at CCS in 2021.
ByWay invites teachers, clergy, teens, and the Brattleboro community to participate in the pick-up party on Wednesday July 22, sign up for a discussion session, and enjoy light refreshments while meeting fellow readers. For anyone who wants to join the discussion but cannot attend, contact ByWay Books at 802-490-8014 or [email protected].
People are encouraged to pick up the book early to have time to read before the first of three group discussions based on the book. The first is scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 26, at 6 p.m., with the ByWay Books Book Club. The last two discussions will be scheduled after the new year in honor of Women’s History Month and LGBTQ+ Month.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.