Notes of a Self-Seeker
Published 2021, 432 pages $20 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
Notes of a Self-Seeker is a novel about a divided country, the role of journalism in society, and the most tumultuous year in modern American history–no, not 2020, but 1968. Told from the perspective of a southern reporter who travels north in January to take a job on a Vermont newspaper, each of the thirteen chapters chronicles the events of one day in a year like no other. If you thought 2020 was a rocky ride, reacquaint yourself with the news of 1968. Reporting, writing, drinking, the cycle of a daily newspaper is the rhythm of Bud Willis’s life, an unhealthy progression from job to job that lands him in a frigid Yankee backwater. He’s an outsider and an insider, a reporter writing about events but also turning them into the record that history will remember, a southerner getting the inside scoop in a northern state, and before long he’s caught between a scary police chief, an ambitious state’s attorney and an unfolding story he can’t quite wrap his head around. To make matters worse, Sy, the managing editor he has come to admire, is in a war to prevent his newsroom from unionizing. Read more…
Barry’s Wake Through the Forest
Published 2021, 66 pages $12 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
Our emotions can be the dictators of our lives: fear, doubt, anger, and sadness can at times consume us, leading us to believe we may be a monster, that something deep-rooted may be wrong with us.In Barry’s Wake Through the Forest, young author Kameron Shepherd brings that internal monster to life in the form of a lost and voiceless creature, Barry, who lives in a swamp. Read more…
Spiral
Published 2021, 369 pages $18 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
Spiral is one man’s story of the true cost of greenbacks stolen, the interest accrued and his path to redemption. If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to rob a bank and get away with a bag of cash and an exploding dye pack, or live life on the run, or spend years in prison, or escape from prison multiple times, you’ll find this book fascinating. If you’ve ever wondered how you could turn your life around, this is Troy’s compelling story of how, through meditation, an epiphany, and service to others, he found peace in the chaotic brutality of America’s prisons. Spiral is full of vivid characters and the reality of bad choices and life in prison, and yet, in many ways, it is an uplifting book about a man overcoming himself to make a meaningful life under the most difficult of circumstances. Read more…
Concrete and Culture
Published 2020, 436 pages $18 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
Personal essays on a wide variety of topics from training oxen and building rustic furniture to the purpose of life, marriage, hunting, investing and American culture.
Doodlebug
Published 2018, 199 pages $12 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
In 1994 two brothers, 10 years apart in age leave rural Vermont and cross the United States in a truck only slightly younger than its passengers. Mutual interest in the American landscape and culture is one of the rare points of agreement as they head south and west taking two months to reach LA. Now, 24 years later, Robby Porter has published the daily journal he kept during their trip. Read more…
Unexpected Grace
Published 2017 👉Purchase paperback 👉Purchase hardcover 👉Purchase from Amazon
This book is about the kind of issues we all face sooner or later, sickness, old age, the death of a loved one. Here is a look at how some people have faced what they had to face. It is 2010, Alyssa and Richard Bradshaw are living in West Severance, Vermont, in a house they built beside a rocky brook on land they bought from the Martel family. The Martels live next door on a farm that has been Martel land for generations. The two families get along, even though the Bradshaws are transplants from Connecticut, and the Martels have been Vermonters forever. There are many generations that are a part of this mix: Monika, Alyssa s eighty-four-year-old mother, Danny, Sam Martel s grandson, and lots of others. This is the story of what life throws at people and how they deal with it, not exciting, but real, a window into the lives of ordinary Americans. Read more…
The Mermaid is Drowning
Published 2014, 50 pages $8 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
The poems of a Vermont girl wrestling with the important questions of life and death. A young poet writes her way into adulthood. Read more…
Ordinary Magic
Published 2009 👉Purchase paperback 👉Purchase hardcover 👉Purchase from Amazon
The first thing that happens is that Cal Willard gets shot in the foot. It s 1977, the day after Thanksgiving, which means that deer season is almost over. Cal s brother George goes to the hospital to see him, even though he hasn’t had much to do with Cal for years, really since he got a law degree and moved to town. George has two daughters, now both grown up. Nora is secretly pregnant and trying to figure out what to do about it. Her sister Lena is married with two small children and problems with her husband. Then there is Cal s son, Conrad, whose life is very different from that of his cousins. He decides to buy a log skidder so he can go into business for himself selling firewood to people who are burning wood because of the oil crisis. These are ordinary events, but there s magic in the way they play out over the winter and into the spring. A good read for people who liked Porter s previous novel, The Simple Life, or for people who like stories of ordinary life, truly rendered, with horses and dogs, children and winter weather— Vermont life in the country and in town. Read more…
A Minor Odyssey
Published 2016 $12.50 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
Hitchhiking through Europe and the Middle East. Surviving an encounter with the East German authorities just days after Kennedy’s assassination. Getting lost in the Bermuda Triangle. As she camps along the Nile, works in an Israeli kibbutz and later adjusts to living in Bombay, join the author, a former Peace Corps volunteer and enthusiastic wanderer, for a different view of our world. After two years in the Peace Corps, learning to love her new country and then meeting the king and queen of Sikkim, Keekee Minor continued her explorations in China, arriving in the midst of a three day parade to celebrate the end of the Cultural Revolution. Not finished with adventures she went on to become the Peace Corps Country Director in the Marshall Islands. A unique historical perspective from someone who lived it, this is one woman’s odyssey through the second half of the twentieth century. Read more… or visit http://emilierichards.com/2016/08/write-your-own-book/
The Simple Life
Published 2006 👉Purchase paperback 👉Purchase hardcover 👉Purchase from Amazon
What is happening in Vermont now that new people are moving in and the old agrarian ways are dying? THE SIMPLE LIFE is a deeply engaging rural tragedy about well-meaning ordinary people whose lives tangle with each other in a destructive way. The only true innocents are the team of oxen whose own story is one of the central threads. In 1991, Isabel Rawlings, a middle-aged suburbanite, recently divorced, moves to Severance, Vermont, to try to live a simple, rural life. She gets romantically involved with Leroy LaFourniere, a real estate developer and small-town hustler, and she makes friends with an old ox teamster, Sonny Trumbley, and his great-granddaughter, Alison LePage. After a tragic farm accident, everything unravels, and Isabel realizes that the simple life isn t as simple as she had fantasized. Read more …
Father to Daughter
Published 1994, 254 pages $12 👉Purchase 👉Purchase from Amazon
The letters of the editor, Maxwell Perkins, to his daughters with his drawings on almost every page. Read more …