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Author Howard Frank Mosher finds inspiration among the people of northern Vermont
By Ben Beagle, Daily News Lifestyles Editor
March 20, 2004
First there was the story of the shotgun-toting grandmother who blasted
the snow owl that had been picking off the laying hens from the farmyard.
Then came the story about the Kingdom County fair and how a grandfather
outsmarted some disreputable carnies and also rescued an old elephant.
And finally, there was the novel -- Northern Borders growing out of a collection of short stories by author Howard Frank Mosher.
"I liked the characters," said Mosher, who feels most at home among the independent and tough-minded individuals that populate his remote corner of northern Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom.
"I realized that these stories go together in some fashion and that they might actually make a memoir-like novel," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Irasburg, Vt., about 10 miles south of the Canadian border.
Northern Borders, this year's selection for "A Tale for Three Counties," does not follow a traditional story arc where a single event provides the broader story.
Instead, Mosher's collection is like a Kittredge family album seen through the eyes of young Austen Kittredge III. It is filled with stories of perseverance and community in an unforgiving rural landscape.
"Probably among Vermonters, people think it's the only place these characters can be found, but I think they're recognizable as rural characters and anyone who has shared that experience can relate to them," said Donna Urey, owner of White Birch Books in North Conway, N.H., and a Mosher enthusiast.
"You can feel the heart in them. Their personalities come not from a book, they come out of his own personality. It's like you're living with the people in a community," said Urey, a past president of the New England Booksellers Association, which honored Mosher's A Stranger in the Kingdom in 1991 with its top award.
His own grandparents
Northern Borders was first published in 1994. It was re-released in paperback last year. But the story actually began decades earlier on Mosher's grandparents' farm near Syracuse.
"I just moved my grandparents' farm to the Northeast Kingdom, or what I call Kingdom County, Vermont, and that's what I had in mind," said Mosher, who was born in the Catskills.
"But like all my books, Northern Borders went through, oh, my gracious, probably 50 revisions and by the time I got to 50 that farm and the grandparents were quite different from the place where I grew up," said Mosher, whose folksy writing style is echoed in conversation that elicits the occasional "gracious sakes" to express surprise.
Mosher's grandparents were high school sweethearts. His grandfather bought the farm for his grandmother because she wanted a big farmhouse and a place in the country, Mosher said.
"They had their ups and downs, and sometimes they would argue," he said. "I can actually remember sitting at the kitchen table and having them conduct conversations through me, like the grandparents in the book, because they were annoyed at each other."
But, Mosher said, his grandfather was not misanthropic like old Austen Kittredge, and his grandmother didn't have a special room she retreated to like Abiah.
"I don't know that young Austen is really based on myself, or that the grandparents are based on my grandparents, but I think that Austen feels about them the way I felt about my grandparents," Mosher said.
'A lot of invention'
The fictional milieu that is Mosher's Kingdom County is filled with rivers, forests, villages and a history all of its own. It is an amalgam of the upstate New York region where he grew up, parts of Canada where he visited with his father, and Maine and northern Vermont.
"And just a lot of invention thrown in," he said.
Mosher acknowledges that the Kingdom County he invented is probably not an accurate depiction of the northern Vermont of the era in which he writes.
"Someone once asked me if I wanted to create a record of Vermont the way it was during the '20s or '30s, and I said, 'No, I'm not a historian or sociologist in disguise. I'm a storyteller and these stories are all made up,' " he said.
"I never was looking so much for historical verisimilitude as I was just a good story," Mosher said. "What intrigued me most about writing fiction was being able to create the characters who I wanted to create, who are more inspired by real people than they are based on real people."
Filmmaker Jay Craven has adapted three of Mosher's books and is working on a fourth. He said Mosher's stories are all rooted in historical moments, presenting a kind of historical image -- even if the stories are not historical fact.
"These stories connect us to who we are, even if they are not about the lifestyles now," Craven said in a telephone interview from his Barnet, Vt., office. "They preserve the culture, the historical perspective of who we are."
Ferreting out stories
After Mosher and his wife, Phillis, settled in the Northeast Kingdom in the early-1960s, Mosher sought out stories from the area's old-timers who had lived through the Depression and Prohibition.
"I've always loved stories," he said. "My grandparents were great storytellers themselves. So I went right to work and ferreted out all I could find out from this area."
Many of these stories have become part of the lore of Kingdom County, a locale featured in several of Mosher's novels.
His first landlady inspired a story in his second book, Where the Rivers Flow North. During the Depression she saved the family farm by selling moonshine -- even after nearly being arrested by a "revenuer."
Years later she answered a knock at her door and recognized the man in the suit as the same man she saw "wearing a pair of city shoes" and watching her along the moonlight brook years earlier.
"And she said to him, 'Have you come to arrest me again?' And he said, 'No I've come to marry you.' And in fact this was the revenuer and they did get married," Mosher said. "That was the kind of story that if you want to write fiction you just can't not write."
Another local, an old logger named Jake Blodgett, provided inspiration for the grandfather in Northern Borders -- and the name of Mosher's son.
After returning to Vermont from a brief trip to California the only work Mosher could find was with Blodgett, who needed somebody to help him cut pulp and drag logs out of the woods with a horse.
"I remember going out and asking him about working for him. He asked, 'Well, what have you done before for work?' And I had to admit to him that I'd been a teacher. He didn't think too highly of teachers," Mosher said. "He said, 'How much would you want for pay?' I said, 'Well, I've never done this type of work before. You'll have to try me out and pay me what you think I'm worth,' and instantly, looking me up and down he said, 'That wouldn't be much, school teacher.'
"But I did go to work for him that fall and winter, and he told me a lot of the stories that appeared in my first novel Disappearances and the short novel Where the Rivers Flow North," Mosher said. "And in some ways I think he inspired that crusty old grandfather in Northern Borders."
Inventing 'the Eastern'
Mosher's romantic view of Vermont's rural life has drawn comparisons to William Faulkner's writing about the South.
"Mosher, like Faulkner, digs his roots deep in a specificity of place, but with more whimsy, more irony. He draws on literary traditions," said Craven, the filmmaker.
Ernest Hebert, a writer and professor of English at Dartmouth College, credited Mosher with inventing "the Eastern" -- a kind of Western, but one set in the East --after reading the rum-running tale Disappearances.
"It has wild characters, a lot of action, a lot of mythology about the northern Vermont landscape," Hebert said in a telephone interview from his New Hampshire home. "It's like reading a literary Western.
"Howard takes core things and exaggerates them," Hebert said. "It's just like why the Wild West is not really as it is remembered, but as a mythology."
Mosher no longer objects to reviewers and readers referring to him as a regional writer.
"I've come to realize that's probably what I am," he said. "The region may be to some degree invented, but I do write primarily about one part of the country and for better or for worse that's the way it is. And it maybe to some extent limited the sales of my books, the scope of my reputation, but it's also been my making as a serious fiction writer because I've gotten to know this one area well enough to be able to do it."
Mosher is an icon in Vermont, says Sandy Rouse, a spokeswoman for the Brattleboro Literary Festival which featured Mosher in 2002.
"He's very well respected among readers and writers," said Rouse, who also owns The Book Cellar book store in Brattleboro. "He loves to talk to people. His books are all about people, and that interest comes through in his writing."
Attached to the people
Mosher began his career as a high school teacher. He intended to become a college literature professor and short-story writer. Teaching, however, demanded a lot of time and didn't leave much room for serious fiction writing.
In his late 20s, while struggling to get published, Mosher and his wife headed to California. He was going to study in a master's program at the University of California-Irvine, and hoped to discover a short cut to getting published.
They stayed two days.
"We hated everything about southern California, including the writing program," Mosher said.
The author, feeling cut off from his work, came home to Vermont. It is here, in Irasburg, where Mosher has found his greatest success and inspiration.
The secret, he said, is the people.
"This is a tough place to make a living. I think that people originally came here because they wanted to be independent, and they must have known when they came up into these mountains that they would have to live pretty hardscrabble lives," he said. "I think what they wanted was to work for themselves and be their own men and their own women and above all not be told what to do."
"I think as we made friends we became attached to the people and the country, too," he said. "I have more stories about this area than I would ever begin to have time to write and I continue to find new ones all the time."
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Lifestyles Section
Courtesy of Batavia Newspapers Corporation