We hope you will join us as Peter Gould presents his new book, Horse-Drawn Yogurt: Stories from Total Loss Farm, here at Brooks Memorial Library, on Wednesday, June 14, at 7 pm, downstairs in the Main Reading Room. Horse-Drawn Yogurt, from Green Writers Press, is his first published non-fiction book. It’s a collection of true-life stories of a young man’s life on a Vermont farm commune at the height of the movement. The performance is free, accessible, and open to the public. Gould will read from the book, and will have copies for sale.
Gould was a founding member of the 1970’s “Back-to-the-Land” commune movement in Vermont, a story he has told in various ways in his two nationally-known novels, “Burnt Toast” and “Write Naked,” which won the 2009 National Green Earth Book Award.
In this book, readers learn how locals and newcomers helped each other out in a pivotal moment of U.S. history, and how young people, new to the land, learned to cut wood, clear fields, tend organic gardens, and raise animals, while still belonging to a national movement against the Vietnam war and for peace and justice around the world.
“But, this book is not a memoir,” Gould says. “It’s a comforter. I didn’t throw all those old clothes away. I cut and pieced them and sewed them together. Now they keep me warm.”
The Vermont Historical Society says “Peter Gould’s voice and personality shine through all the stories with wit and incisive insight. His perspective on life in Vermont’s 1970s counterculture is an invaluable one…incredibly helpful, personal and emotional,” Vermont author and National Book Award Finalist Howard Norman says, “Gould is the dramaturge of our worldly problems and sense of wondrous possibility—he is a national treasure.”
Across Vermont, Gould is known for more than his writing. Peter received the 2016 Arts Education Award from the Vermont Arts Council. In the 1970’s he was one of five growers who started the Brattleboro Farmers Market, now a centerpiece of our community. He founded and still runs the “Get Thee to the Funnery” youth Shakespeare camp in theNortheast Kingdom, directs at the New England Youth Theatre, and he will always be the smaller half of the legendary physical comedy team of Gould & Stearns.
For more information contact Brooks Memorial Library at 802-254-5290.
