Beth Kanell's Blog

It was such a pleasure (and honor!) to recently share poems and ideas, focused around how poetry connects with transitions in life -- and to do this with a group of community members, for an enjoyable hour that also included some impulsive moments of song, and plenty of laughter and learning.

Catch up with it all here, in this recording courtesy of OLLI St. Johnsbury, Catamount Arts, and KATV community access television: https://www.katv.org/vod/osher/2025/20250925 

 

This year's two directions for this set of essays relate to what I write: poems, and fiction set in 1850s Vermont. But sometimes I like to chat about other authors' work.

Charles Fergus first came to my attention (and that of my late husband Dave) for his book BEARS in the Wild Guide Series. Later, as we began to share research on America's 1800s for the historical fiction we both craft, we also exchanged book recommendations, especially for crime fiction and some literary work, too. 

Last year, Charles mentioned that he'd been asked by publisher Globe Pequot to prepare a new edition of his 2005 book TREES OF NEW ENGLAND: A NATURAL HISTORY. As the publication date neared, I ordered a copy so I could read it right away.

But this isn't a book to be devoured with speed. Instead, it offers a slow, comprehensive, and highly personal ramble (alphabetically) through the trees that surround and often support New England residents. There are no color images -- the book is not a field guide, this author warns at the outset -- but instead delicate and detailed black-and-white drawings from the pen of Amelia Hansen. Though I missed the familiar bright field-guide images at first, I soon discovered that between Hansen's unusual details of bark growth and leaf individuality, and Charles Fergus's meditative reflections on each tree's structure and growth, I felt more capable of identifying the trees around me, including my beloved maple sapling rescued from a backhoe and beginning to show serious growth in the front garden.

This year I've become a daily reader of excerpts from the classic American philosopher of outdoor New England, Henry David Thoreau. And that's one voice I hear in the writing in this new book -- along with others like Aldo Leopold and Louise Dickinson Rich.

Here is a sample from this Charles Fergus book: 

"I have watched ruffed grouse eating aspen buds. In the last day's light, the birds alight in a winter-bare tree. Their feathers fluffed against the cold, they clamber about on the swaying branches, using their beaks to wrench off the energy-packed buds. ... Aspen buds and catkins are favorite foods of the ruffed grouse throughout the bird's range, which largely coincides with the range of bigtooth and quaking aspen in North America."

Or in the section on yellow birch:

"Fence-row trees cast sharp shadows in the moonlight. Beneath my snowshoes the snow groaned, and when I kicked a ball of ice, it made a hollow tinkling as it rolled along the top of the crust. I crossed our hay field to where a logging road led into the woods. Trunks of maple and ash etched dark vertical lines against the snow. I was brought to a halt by another tree that presented a different aspect. Its bark was pale and burnished. Thin, ragged strips of bark curled away from the trunk, catching the moon's glow."

Will you be within driving distance of Lyndonville, Vermont, on October 2? As the poster here shows, there's a great opportunity to meet this thoughtful and knowledgeable author at the Cobleigh Public Library there, and to hear more about his observations of the trees that surround us. 

The earliest poems in my life were lullabyes and nursery rhymes, and I remember them well. In fact, I still sing them. But I've never quite gotten used to the shivery side of this one, which somehow reappeared around bedtime:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall

and down will come baby, cradle and all! 

Come on, who would sing that to a baby? A baby they cared about? Well, my parents sang it to me, and somehow the melody and the arms around me took away the sting. 

On Thursday Sept. 25, I'll be leading a discussion of the Poetry of Transitions, at Catamount Arts, 115 Eastern Ave, St Johnsbury, starting at 1:30 pm. I hope you'll come and bring with you some ideas about the poetry that stays with you -- poems that are memorable -- and why and how that happens. And I'll share with you some of my ideas, as well as some poems of others and some of my own new-ish ones, and a taste of my 2026 book, THRESHOLDS.

We can figure out this puzzle! 

In surprise news today, an editor at All Things That Matter, the brave and clever publisher of THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, said there will soon be applications open to record this Vermont historical novel as an audiobook. I am thrilled! People often ask me about this, and it's the first time a publisher has offered to invest in the special version like this.

The first related author task for this process was to provide the sounds of unusual words in the book, like characters (popular names in the 1850s have sure gone out of fashion today) and places. That second part surprised me for a moment, but then I realized that St. Johnsbury might seem a strange name to a "voice actor" from, say, Georgia or Oklahoma.

So here's my list. Do you remember where in the book each one comes up? And if your answer is, you haven't yet read this third book in the Winds of Freedom -- what are you waiting for? It's available on request from local booksellers, as well as online, or you could encourage your local library to pick up a copy that more neighbors could share.

The Bitter and the Sweet -- Pronunciations

 

Almyra: al-MY-ruh

Antoinette: an-twuh-NET

chamomile: KAM-oh-mile

Crimean: cry-ME-uhn

Dana: DAY-nuh

Eli: EE-lie

Eliphalet: ell-IF-uh-let

Ephraim: EE-frum

Grimkeé: GRIM-kay

Hazen: HAY-zen

Isaiah: eye-ZAY-uh

Jerusha: juh-ROO-shuh

Jewett: JOO-it

medicament: MED-ick-uh-ment

Myles: miles

Peacham: PEECH-um

Potton: POTT-un

Rokeby: ROKE-bee

Stanstead: STAN-stead

St. Johnsbury: Saint JONS-burry

Stowe: STOH

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There's always someone creative taking charge of after-school groups of students who want to spend a few hours doing something "interesting."

So when one reached out to me a few weeks ago, asking what I could offer to her eager and probably very active students, I spilled out my enthusiasm about this new niche of mine, the poetry of transitions. I explained how it could become a nifty activity after school. I guess I had seventh and eighth graders in mind.

But these kiddos are younger than that, it turns out. So, the leader asked, what did I have up my sleeve that might suit that crew instead?

It took me back to my early years of poetry, when my mother modeled how to craft a birthday or Christmas card by making up a rhyme about the person, the occasion, or the things you love, like snow falling on a quiet evening or the first ringing bells of a holiday.

I emailed back:

How about "poems for special occasions" -- where we could lay out a range from birthdays and Christmas to completed homework, awesome book reports, new friends, broken friendships, and more. 

And that, of course, spun me into wanting to write some of those childhood rhymes again. It's always fun, and often surprising. The following is NOT, of course, for an after-school program, but thoughts on where my own poems have been wandering.

Over Labor Day weekend, one of the poets I studied with, Rachel Richardson, suggested ways to make a collage out of lines that others had already written. Using lines from e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Ted Kooser, Dyaln Thomas, and Nick Laird (new to me that day), I put this together:

my father moved through dooms of love
Captain, oh my captain
although I miss you every day
do not go gentle into that good night
what are the ceremonies of forgetting?

It's actually not a bad place to start, as I approach another anniversary of my father's death. And indeed, what a "transition" that was, 27 years ago, for me and for my siblings. 

Now, where will I take this? Where will you take your own? Can you still talk with your father face to face, or do you summon up his spirit for conversations while you're making a long drive? What would he say if you surprised him with --

Go ahead. Let a line form in your thoughts. That's the point of poetry ... or one of them, anyway. 

By the way, if you're curious about what poet Rachel Richardson achieves with her poetic collages -- check out her newest collection of poems, SMOTHER. I bought a copy to treat myself. 

Both softcover and ebook available!

Blame it on that heirloom gold locket that my dad gave tome, after my house burned to the ground. The midwinter fire devoured all thejewelry my mother gave me over the years, all her knitting projects, ahalf-made crocheted bedspread for my youngest brother that I claimed after hersudden death a few years earlier, saying, “I’ll finish it for you.” Raging on atwenty-three-degrees-below December night, the fire took our clothes, my work,the children’s new Christmas toys. None of that compared to the importance ofthe three of us escaping, with burns on our faces and frostbite on our toes,from sock-footed hike a third of a mile to the nearest neighbor.

Dad drove north to check on us, a day later. He brought some family photos, thoughtfulnessthat impressed me; he brought my youngest brother the contractor, who’d neverreceive that bedspread after all, but who brought me boxes of his spare tools;and he brought the locket. Gold, shaped like a tiny box on a short chain, itopened to emptiness. No photo of anyone inside, but I saw an intricate goldgrating that flipped outward. “It’s a hair locket,” he explained. “You put alock of hair of your beloved into it.”

 

During the night of the fire, a mile from where myex-husband lived, the only “boyfriend” in my life was playing music in NewOrleans. He got a busy signal when he tried to phone me, and bitterly assumedI’d taken the phone “off the hook” to silence it during a date with someoneelse. Days later, he’d finally phone a neighbor and learn that a fire burnsthrough phone and electric lines. I didn’t put a lock of his hair into thelocket; he left not much later, for a dancer he’d formed a crush on.

 

When I turned fifty, in accordance with the answer aprayerful friend of mine had received, I met and fell joyously in love with mysoulmate. By then, the kids were grown and gone, but on their rare visits home,they agreed I’d finally found the right partner. Next time my darling got hishair trimmed, I collected a curl and popped it into the locket.

 

Historical fiction already meant a lot to me; a lifelonghistory writer, and a fumbling novelist, I found the combined threadssatisfying. And I wanted very much to give readers a vicarious experience of Vermont’sapproach to the Abolition movement and to diverse settlers (setting aside forthe moment the state’s sometimes cruel treatment of Native Americans; I’daddressed that in my first work of historical fiction, and the book is aclassic, The Darkness Under the Water, but also controversial). Ifigured, if readers followed along with the teens in my new story, they’ddiscover for themselves that Black people in Vermont in the 1850s were “freeand safe,” as one of the state’s great historians puts it.

 

If you haven’t yet written a novel, this might surprise you:Often the characters stubbornly diverge from where you thought they were going.So did the girls in The Secret Room: One morning, halfway throughwriting, I realized at least one of them would head into a dark collapsingtunnel, in a desperate rescue effort. As dirt fell into her eyes and mouth andshe moved resolutely forward, one hand landed on an object that she reflexivelytucked into a pocket. Later, in daylight, she discovered it was an antiquelocket.

 

Yes, there you have it: Dad’s little locket had crept rightinto my story. So it felt obvious, later, that I’d write another novel, thistime set in 1850, when that locket first hung at the throat of a Vermont teen.That turned into The Long Shadow, a book I’d never imagined would be thefirst of a series.

 

Yet when I turned it in for publication, the cheerful editorsaid, “I hope we’ll be hearing more from these characters!” Shaken, I asked,“You mean a series? How long?” She replied, “How about until everyone is free?”

 

It doesn’t take a lot of American history to recognize that“when everyone is free” probably means the end of our Civil War: 1865. If Iwrote a book for each year from 1850 until then, there’d be 15 books in theseries. A nifty idea! However: My teenaged characters from the first book wouldbe in their thirties. That wasn’t an age I wanted to write about – I love thevoice of a teen observing her world. How could I solve this?

 

It took another week for the idea to arrive: If the teenshad a reason for vanishing from the village at the end of each book, or maybeeach second book, and the next book’s protagonist became a girl who’d beenyounger at the start, and I kept passing it along that way — well, you see howit would work, right? Sort of a relay race, passing along the Vermont fight forhuman liberty to each new girl, or set of girls. Yes! On the spot, I decided(since I’m far from young) that there would be two-year jumps between the booksin the series. That meant seven or eight titles, which seemed workable, as longas I took my vitamins and avoided any repeat of the disastrous housefire.

 

Now we are in book 3 in what the editor and I decided tocall the Winds of Freedom series. Almyra Alexander, who showed up in book 2 asa fashionable girl from Boston, longs to be a minister, a difficult if notimpossible path for a woman in 1854. The Vermont village, with its changingideas about people and their roles, may give her a way forward toward herdream.

 

But first she’ll have to puzzle out several newly arrivedwomen at the local tavern, what they are carrying around the county, how tohandle an aging criminal who arrives while her uncle the minister is out oftown, and whether she can effectively assist the cause of Abolition.

 

If you’re ready to find out whether Almyra is up to thosechallenges, and what the risks are, and what allies she’s recruiting — getready to read The Bitter and the Sweet.

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Today it seems to me that nurturing poetry skills is a bit like childrearing: If your kiddo grows up well enough and heads out into the world, you don't say it's because you learned something in the last week and that made it all work out. It's the long haul, the small things like food allergies and birthday cakes and helping the unexperienced hand to shape a perfect O or the teen to question and improve an essay. It's being willing to let them try evenings in town with friends, and not flinching (much) when you accidentally overhear those first romantic diversions. No parent can do a perfect job -- we're human -- but bringing a child to maturity, reasonably healthy and brave and independent, is worth the years leading up to that.

When THRESHOLDS is published in February 2026, I expect I'll feel much the same way about that. But there's always the next poem and wanting it to be better, and that's a difference, for sure. Most of us don't start a second family, just to see whether we can do it better ... or have I missed something?

At any rate,  I opted to spend most of my Labor Day weekend pinned to my seat in Zoom'd poetry classes led  by five outstanding poets. There's still one more class to go, tomorrow. For the evening I'll be mulling over the lessons this afternoon about the power of short poems (if you want them to have power). It amazed me that I recognized the first poem that the teaching poet offered, an anonymous one:

“Western wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down can rain/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!”

And it amazed me even more to find online material from a class taught by Allen Ginsberg, opening with that very poem. Incredible to discover what those students were then exposed to. Check it out here. 

Okay, I'm off to scribble a bit. Or peel some of today's apples. Or take a walk first. Yep, that sounds about right. One beautiful day to be a poet, looking at life's transitions and wondering how to spill them and rearrange them in words on a page. 

I've always enjoyed historical fiction. It's the classic "spoonful of sugar" for the facts of our past. As a writer of historical novels, I'm responsible for getting the underlying details—skirt fashion, maple sugaring, weather extremes, and famous persons like Harriet Beecher Stowe (real-life author of Uncle Tom's Cabin)—all correct in the stories I spin. My goal is to give readers an enjoyable ramble through Vermont's 1850s in my Winds of Freedom series, while making sure their experience in the lives of the characters is true to life.

The Long Shadow, This Ardent Flame, The Bitter and the Sweet: These are adventures of teens in the village of North Upton (based on our real North Danville), and each one explores the level of risk the teens undertake. There are scary threats around them, and as anyone who's lived in snow country knows, winter can be the most potent threat of all.

But each book also handles the dangers of 1850s life, from bounty hunters to deadly disease to unquenchable fires that take down houses, barns, and life itself.

In The Bitter and the Sweet, one of the scary aspects is counterfeiting. It took decades for the American system of coins, paper money, and banks to develop. Rampant counterfeiting took place in the 1820s and 1830s, and the effects still made problems for anyone dealing in Big Money in 1854, the year of this novel.

Historians divide written evidence of the past into two kinds: primary, written by the people alive then, and secondary, the books that the historians then write, where they line up the details and pull together the themes. For The Bitter and the Sweet, I used a "secondary" source called A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, by professor Stephen Mihm. (He also kindly answered some correspondence as I narrowed the details I'd be using in my story.)

I already knew about Vermont counterfeiter Christian Meadows, whose history is repeatedly rediscovered for popular articles (here's one). A skilled engraver and silversmith, he strayed from his daily work into counterfeiting, applying his skills to the design and crafting of printing plates. He was captured, convicted, and imprisoned -- but did such elegant design work that Daniel Webster spoke up for him, and Vermont governor Erastus Fairbanks in 1853 pardoned him so he could return to the legitimate side of his engraving.

Devouring the well-written pages of Mihm's comprehensive book A Nation of Counterfeiters, I discovered an even more fascinating fellow: Seneca Paige, who led a major collaborative of "money makers," including multiple artists, just across the Canada border from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. In his later years he "reformed" and his grave in Bakersfield, Vermont, praises his life, saying, “His Loss will be felt by many; particularly by the poor. He was truly the poor man’s friend.”

I wanted my characters to meet this man (under a new name, of course, for the novel: Foster Pierce). But by 1854, the year of The Bitter and the Sweet, he was already that reformed character that won such acclaim. How could I include him in a way that would be true to the facts, but also potentially terrifying to the teens meeting him in their village?

Yes, I solved it. I won't spoil your fun by saying how! But I loved writing this book, and now that it's in print (softcover and ebook), it's a great joy to share the lives of "my" people with readers.

And I remind the artists I meet: 125 years ago, your precision skills could have been making you an excellent living ... as long as you didn't get caught. 

When I say I've been writing poems ever since I could shape the letters of the words, well, that was really my second stage. The first came as soon as I could repeat the lines my mother spoke or sang: "Jack and Jill -- went up the hill -- to fetch a pail of water," we repeated to each other. And very soon, I began to protest about that particular poem: "Mommy, water and after do NOT rhyme." 

But they almost do, and that too was something to learn.

In The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach teaches that "All poems live or die on their capacity to lure us from their beginnings to their ends by a pattern of sounds." 

Reading that, more than sixty years after Mom and I began poetry together, brought all the strands together for me. California poet Ellen Bass pointed to Longenbach's book during one of her classes that I first enrolled in during the Covid pandemic. Between her lessons and the resources she listed, I found new strengths.

And now a book of my poems, THRESHOLDS, will be published in a few more months. 

Starting with an OLLI (aka Osher) talk on September 25, I'm inviting you to join me to explore the poetry of transition. After all, autumn in Vermont practically defines transition: blazing with color, gusting with northwest wind, stripping the gardens and toughening our word-winged selves for winter.

As they say: Watch this spot for more.

* 

Eve in Vermont

 

She sits on thefront step

potato in her hand,peeling

turning the roundcool white

and brown form, rubbing off

the traces of soil, rejoicing—

“potato, potato,”naming it.

When the bird fliespast it calls

and again she says“potato” but then

she looks up, shakesher hair,

follows the angledwings in flight.

She grins and callsout “blue jay”

and it answers.

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Ready to detach from the politics of the moment, to celebrate the American Revolution? Although the big national festivities will blossom next year, when we reach 250 years from the Declaration of Independence, this past April marked a quarter century from the Battles of Lexington and Concord. In many ways the push for independence was already "old" by 1775, with initial historical moments coming in 1763 (end of war with the French) and 1765 (protests begin).

Vermont author Jessie Haas, an expert in the history of the Vermont towns of Westminster and Westminster West, provides an exciting, enjoyable, and yes, romantic way to step into the flow of revolution in her newly self-published novel DEAREST BLOOD. (I bet some traditional publishers are hating that they missed out on this!) Cleverly, she positions her 250-page tale on the very edge of the young adult/adult reading line: Fifteen-year-old Fanny Montresor is the daughter -- well, that's complicated, because neither of her parents in Westminster is her birth parent -- but let's keep this simple for now and say that, as the townspeople see her, she is the daughter of a British-loyal civil servant whose wealth is mostly in land, and a lovely and skilled mother who's even more loyal to The Crown. In a town and state on the verge of armed rebellion, that's not a helpful heritage. And it's a shock to Fanny when her mother prescribes marriage to a man of means, locally, as a way to keep Fanny safe in the likely dangerous times ahead.

But there's little time for Fanny to seek other options: "War was normal in America, and left its long trail of debris and grief." Whether battling Abenaquis or the French or pestilence, Fanny's seen enough to believe her mother's insistence that an arranged marriage is suddenly a must.

Armed conflict breaks out far sooner than either expects, and surrounds Fanny's home; she witnesses the death of a young man her own age, and there's ample reason to fear she and her mother could be attacked soon. Her discoveries quickly shatter her worldview, even bringing her toward the rebel cause in her own reasoning.

Haas is a seasoned author, noted for both her often horse-focused children's and adult fiction, and her dedicated historical research that bore fruit in her 2011 book Revolutionary Westminster. Scene by exciting scene, she draws Fanny into deeper understanding of what freedom and liberty might mean, personal and national. Sharp-eyed readers will spot the potential romance that will become a force in the second half of the novel, which jumps to the year 1783, when the Treaty of Paris affirmed America's liberation and (more or less) safety. 

But it is also a time of grief for Fanny, who's endured multiple large losses in the meantime. Returning to Westminster with her mother, she visits the grave of the man she saw killed, and here is the source of the book's title -- on his marker stone, "For Liberty and his Countrys Good / he Lost his Life his Dearest blood." Fanny reflects, "His dearest blood. In my mind's eye I saw that dark smudge on [friend] Isaac's handkerchief. The lump in my throat grew."

How Fanny will resolve her compromises and take agency in her own life becomes a delightful background to a much happier situation than an arranged marriage "for safety." The sweetness and cleverness of the remaining plot -- based on real people and events -- make this novel of the American Revolution into a swift and uplifting read. 

And that, in short, is why historians like Haas sometimes bring their deep knowledge around the corner to a fictional approach. Lucky readers: Those who love American history, Vermont history, historical fiction, and a true-life romance can all savor this book. Do you know a dreamer who's paying attention to friendship and maybe the scary edge of current events, and wish you could draw that person's eye to what this nation has achieved in the past? Here's a great gift, then. Order two copies, because you'll want to hold onto your own. 

DEAREST BLOOD can be ordered by bookstores, or online; read more about the author and her other publications at her website, https://www.jessiehaas.com.

PS: Watch for family names of people who settled much of Vermont; Haas writes that her "work of fiction" is "closely based on historical people and events." Maybe you will spot some relatives or familiar neighbors among the names. I did!