Avery Delisle reported this story on assignment from the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
Virginia Barlow, Dave Mance, Amy Peberdy and Patrick White have worked together for decades now, creating and publishing the Northern Woodlands Magazine, a quarterly chronicle of the forests of the Northeast. For the past four years, however, they have dedicated themselves to something a little closer to home: the Vermont Almanac.
The Vermont Almanac, published annually in the fall, is a book chock full of stories from local agricultural workers and citizens. It contains data and illustrations and, organized by month, works as a review of the year in the nature that surrounds Vermonters.
For the four founders, the almanac was borne out of a shared love of Vermont and its natural world. It is a way of preserving Vermont’s rural identity and building a record for the future while promoting an environmentally friendly approach to economic vitality.
“The stories we tell about ourselves and the stories we live in come to define that place,” said Mance. “We thought the woods, the wildlife, the working lands and the working force and farms, you know, we needed to tell these stories.”
The founders work to ensure these Vermont voices are heard by interweaving profiles of the people who contributed material — stories, art, scientific insight or even just two-sentence musings.
The almanac uses an old Native American calendar, in which the year starts in the fall and winds through the seasons and months before ending in summer. Throughout each chapter are personal essays, industry outlooks, sights to look for in nature and even some practical tasks you could be doing around the house.
“We’ve got extension researchers and artists making ink out of stinging nettles. It really runs the gamut of different things,” White said, referring to the University of Vermont Extension program.
Mance and Barlow were quick to agree. Being a small state, they believe, fosters a sense of cohesion, of shared understanding in rural life.
But that shared understanding spans a range of voices and experiences, Barlow said, so many stories and oddball things people are doing that make reading the almanac so interesting.
The almanac is also about giving attention to the land, added Barlow (or Ginny, as the other founders affectionately call her).
“That side of Vermont, the land-connected side, doesn’t get the attention we thought it should get,” said Barlow.
And in that statement lies their mission: raising awareness of the connection between humans, nature, industry and identity. Their hope, White said, is to document that web of connections so that people can read, reflect and understand it better. They also hope to preserve the vitality and identity of Vermont for people in the future to trace the evolution of the state’s environment through time.
The folks behind the almanac want to capture the history of Vermont communities and Vermont nature — and ultimately create a legacy through the tireless work of recording stories and putting issues together.
And they have been doing just that. The almanac started publishing in 2020, just a few months shy of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Starting in a season fraught with illness wasn’t without challenges, but the founders persisted out of a belief in their mission. They believed this kind of publication should have existed years ago.
Since the first volume was published, the group has printed physical copies and made them available in local bookstores or, digitally, through their website.
The fourth volume is set to come out in a few months, and pre-order is already available on the group’s website.