Category Archives: The Vermont Book Shop

IPL/VBS First Tuesdays: Rick Winston – Save Me A Seat: A Life with The Movies!

 

Rick returns to IPL this time to share his latest book, Save Me A Seat: A Life With The Movies!  Rick Winston’s genial and companionable memoir is the chronicle of a lifelong love affair with movies. Movies, the pleasure of movies, the ways in which movies bring people and communities together and change lives, movies in general and movies in particular, fill the book. Rick moved to Vermont in 1970 and shortly afterward founded the Lightning Ridge Film Society, which morphed into the Savoy Theater in 1981. He was one of the founders of Montpelier’s Green Mountain Film Festival  and was its Programming Director until 2012.  VBS will be here will books for sale and signature.

Recorded 3/12/24  Producer: MCTV

IPL/VBS First Tuesdays: Jacquelyn Lenox Tuxill

 

Even as a child, Jackie Tuxill’s world view was expansive. Born in Chengdu, China, of medical missionary parents, as a toddler she escaped the final months of WWII with her family and celebrated her third birthday in India before obtaining passage to the US and settling in a rural West Virginia town in 1948. After graduating cum laude from Muskingum College with a BS in biology, she worked in a medical research lab while her husband attended medical school; they later moved to Alaska, where Jackie discovered a love of outdoor adventure and a passion for nature that led to a thirty-five-year career in environmental work. “Ashes and Rivers,” a chapter adapted from Whispers From the Valley of the Yak, appeared in the 2019 anthology True Stories: The Narrative Project, Vol I. For the past three decades, Jackie has made her home in Lincoln, Vermont. VBS will be here will books for sale and signature.

Recorded 2/6/24  Producer: MCTV

IPL/VBS First Tuesdays: Genevieve’s debut novel, In The Lobby of the Dream Hotel

 

A recipient of an O. Henry Award, her short fiction can also be found in New England Review, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, Literary Hub, and The Best Small Fictions 2018.  From Indie Bound – “In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel — a place two lovers who can’t be together in the real world might meet — is a beautiful meditation on love, madness, motherhood, and art. Plunkett’s writing is achingly gorgeous and Portia is a character for the ages.”  We are pleased to partner with Vermont Book Shop for this program

Recorded 11/7/23  Producer: MCTV

The Salvelinus, the Sockeye, and the Egg-Sucking Leech: Reflections on Alaska’s Bristol Bay Drainage

 

Matthew Dickerson, a local author and Middlebury College faculty member, will share photos, videos, stories and ecological lessons from a decade worth of trips to various rivers and lakes in Alaska’s famed Bristol Bay drainage. Dickerson was a 2022 artist-in-residence for Alaska State Parks, for which he spent time in Wood-Tikchik State Park (the largest state park in the country). He has also spent considerable time in both Lake Clark National Park and Preserve and Katmai National Park and Preserve, each of which is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. His experiences include numerous encounters with brown bears and a lot of time casting flies (like his favorite egg-sucking leeches) for ten different species of fish (including both sockeye salmon and three species of the genus Salvelinus, known more commonly as char). He spent time with fisheries biologists, park historians, fishing guides, and acclaimed bush pilots learning about river biology, fisheries, local cultures, and also environmental threats including proposed open-pit heavy-metal mines, proposed hydro-electric dams, and climate change—all on the headwaters of what many consider the most important salmon water of the world (Bristol Bay) that supports roughly 30% of the world’s wild salmon harvest.  Matthew Dickerson’s books that are set in the Bristol Bay region include The Voices of Rivers and the recently published The Salvelinus, the Sockeye, and the Egg-Sucking Leech, both of which are available through the library and The Vermont Book Shop.

Producer: MCTV

Author Talk: Jo Brunini – “Never a Cloud”

[ezcol_1third]

[/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end]Local Charlotte author,  Giovanna “Jo” Brunini Congdon discusses her new book, Never a Cloud.  Some things can only be hidden for so long. Some things are too difficult to talk about, and some things you have to repeat even when no one is listening . . .Never a Cloud charts the course of three women—Violet, Ava, and Margot— who find their way to a new understanding of home and family at Otyrburn, an estate in rural Scotland. We are happy to be partnering with Vermont Book Shop for this local author series.  Recorded 2/7/23 [/ezcol_2third_end][ezcol_1third] Producer: MCTV

VT Book Shop: Bill McKibben, author of “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon”

[ezcol_1third]

[/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end]

“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”

Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth.

But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril.

And he is curious: What the hell happened?

In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—the flag, the cross, the station wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.

 Recorded 6/20/22 at CVUUS.[/ezcol_2third_end][ezcol_1third]

Producer: VT Book Shop

VT Book Shop: Maria Padian, author of How to Build a Heart

[ezcol_1third]

[/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end]Maria Padian, author and Middlebury College alumna, will read from and discuss her new novel for young adults, How to Build a Heart.

Kirkus Reviews calls How to Build a Heart “an absolutely enthralling depiction of family and self-discovery” in a starred review!

How to Build a Heart is the story of one young woman’s journey to find her place in the world as the carefully separated strands of her life — family, money, school, and love — begin to overlap and tangle.

 Recorded 2/27/20.[/ezcol_2third_end][ezcol_1third]

Producer: VT Book Shop