Granite & Cedar: The People And The Land Of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom

Granite & Cedar: The People and the Land of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom is the compelling result of a unique collaboration between renowned author Howard Frank Mosher and veteran documentary photographer John M.Miller (Deer Camp ,$30.00). Together they have produced a haunting portrait of the people and the land of Vermont's most rural area,often referred to as the "Northeast Kingdom." Miller uses his brilliant collection of elegiac,but unsentimental,images dating from the 1970s to evoke the disappearing folk- ways,the rugged people,and the desolate and abandoned landscape of his native corner of the Green Mountain State. Miller's austere,black-and-white photos richly detail the erosion and the breakup of the small farms of the region and of the families who worked those farms. While they emphasize the stark beauty of the land,they also pay homage to the innate dignity and fierce pride of the people who live in such hardscrabble circumstances. As both a counterpoint and an underscoring of Miller's thesis, Mosher describes the evolution of a fictional Northeast Kingdom community and its families over several generations.Taken together, these two accounts paint a poignant yet compelling picture of the epochal change that time and societal upheavals produce in a rural population. Stone walls are the hallmark of New England.

The Vermont Folklife Center’s latest publication, Granite and Cedar, captures the people and land of the Northeast Kingdom during this critical period – when an isolated place made accessible is forever changed...the fiction of Howard Frank Mosher and Miller’s striking photographs are joined to further the center’s mission of recording life in rural Vermont. —Vermont Life

An unusual collaboration between a documentary photographer and a writer of fiction to produce a haunting portrait of the people and the land of Vermont's most rural area, often referred to as the "Northeast Kingdom."

Granite and Cedar represents an unusual collaboration between a documentary photographer and a writer of fiction to produce a haunting portrait of the people and the land of Vermont's most rural area, often referred to as the "Northeast Kingdom."

Veteran photographer JOHN M. MILLER (Dear Camp: Last Light in the Northeast Kingdom) uses his brilliant collection of elegiac, but unsentimental, images dating from the 1970s to evoke the disappearing folkways, the rugged people, and the desolate and abandoned landscape of his native corner of the Green Mountain State. Miller's austere, black-and-white photos richly detail the erosion and the breakup of the small farms of the region and of the families who worked those farms. While they emphasize the stark beauty of the land, they also pay homage to the innate dignity and fierce pride of the people who live in such hardscrabble circumstances.

As both a counterpoint and an underscoring of Miller's thesis, popular Vermont writer HOWARD FRANK MOSHER (The Fall of the Year, Where the Rivers Flow North, Northern Borders, Stranger in the Kingdom, and many others) describes the evolution of a fictional Northeast Kingdom community and its families over several generations. Taken together, these two accounts paint a poignant yet compelling picture of the epochal change that time and societal upheavals produce in a rural population.