“Conformity defined us — and then it didn’t,” Yvonne Daley writes of her generation in her latest work.
Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont
Yvonne Daley (2018, University Press of New England)
Journalist Yvonne Daley didn’t know she was receiving her latest assignment when a friend sent her a book about the 1960s and 1970s counterculture in the high desert of New Mexico.
“You should write this story in Vermont,” came the suggestion tucked alongside.
Daley seems the perfect candidate: She not only has penned five books and four decades of articles for publications ranging from her local “Rutland Herald” to “Time” and “People” magazines but also knows the counterculture firsthand, having traded a mainstream childhood in Boston to tend goats and a vegetable garden upon moving to the Green Mountain town of Goshen in 1967.
The result is Daley’s new book, “Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont,” a 288-page paperback released by University Press of New England.
“This is the story of how thousands of young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods, small towns and cities of rural Vermont,” the book begins, “spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation.”
Daley and her fellow baby boomers, born at a time of peace and prosperity, weren’t raised to rebel. Then she said goodbye to her high school sweetheart turned Vietnam War soldier one Easter Sunday, only to learn of his death less than a month later.
“Conformity defined us — and then it didn’t,” she writes of her generation, “And so, some of us said no. No to conformity, to suburbia and the ‘straight’ life, no to haircuts and ties and button-down collars, no to permanents and rollers and bras, no to nine-to-five and church on Sunday, no to segregation and bigotry.”
Daley has spent the past three years interviewing peers who settled at such places as Guilford’s Total Loss Farm, deemed “one of the enduring communes and perhaps the most successful” by the Vermont Historical Society. She also offers personal perspective, recalling the pull of the state, even though her single childhood memory of it came when her father took a wrong turn during a family vacation in New Hampshire.
“I felt the belief to go back to the land,” she says. “Start over. Simplify.”
Then reality hit.
“We were kids from the suburbs. We didn’t know how to grow a tomato plant. What we were thinking?”
Daley learned, her gargantuan backyard garden attests. Many fellow transplants who stayed also found success, be it hippies turned household names Ben & Jerry or Bernie Sanders. But the author is careful to extend credit to longtime locals with deep roots, as well as acknowledge not everyone’s pleased with the seeds of change she and her peers sowed.
“Yet even they will concede,” she writes, “that the very character of Vermont, a place that has always honored independence and the right to be different, a place whose residents have always been grounded by weather and the land, remains strong.”
Madeleine May Kunin is set to speak at the Brattleboro Literary Festival Oct. 11-14. Her latest book explores the physical and emotional experience of aging.
Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties
Madeleine May Kunin (2018, Green Writers Press)
Madeleine May Kunin wrote her first memoir a quarter-century ago to tell how she became Vermont’s first and so far only female governor (serving 1985–1991). Kunin since has served as U.S. deputy education secretary and ambassador to Switzerland. But her follow-up to 1994’s “Living A Political Life” is decidedly more personal. In “Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties,” Kunin — set to speak at the Brattleboro Literary Festival Oct. 11-14 — explores the physical and emotional experience of growing old in a book published by Vermont’s Green Writers Press.
Bury the Lead: A Joe Gunther Novel
Archer Mayor (2018, Minotaur Books)
If it bleeds it leads! Advance press is good for Newfane novelist Archer Mayor’s 29th mystery.
Newfane novelist Archer Mayor’s 29th mystery, “Bury the Lead,” features his usual murder and mayhem amid Southern Vermont locations from Brattleboro to Bromley Mountain. But besides featuring the familiar detective Joe Gunther and his fictional colleagues at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the new book from Macmillan’s Minotaur imprint offers a character who works at the “Brattleboro Reformer” newspaper. Perhaps as a result, the advance press is good: “This enjoyable ensemble effort,” “Publishers Weekly” reports, “is sure to please Mayor’s many fans.”
VTDigger.org book reviewer Kevin O’Connor shares these new Vermont titles.
