copyright the Chronicle November 22, 2017
by Elizabeth Trail
WEST GLOVER — Peter Gould is a small man with crinkly eyes and a quiet smile that lit up the shadowy nighttime interior of the West Glover Community Church Friday night.
He was there to read from his new book, Horse-drawn Yoghurt, a memoir of his life on a communal farm near Brattleboro.
He’s honed the stories for years, carried them in his head and told them over and over before finally setting them down on paper.
They’re meant to be read aloud, he said. Their rhythms, their cadences, roll off the tongue even better than they read on the page. And like any good writing, they also have a philosophical takeaway that lasts.
Mr. Gould has spent most of his life in the southeast corner of the state, but he’s no stranger to the Northeast Kingdom. His summer theater program for teens, Get Thee to the Funnery, has been a staple of summers in Craftsbury for two decades.
He gets an appreciative audience in this corner of the Northeast Kingdom, which has its own history with the back-to-the-land movement.
In fact, many of West Glover’s most solid citizens once lived on one or another of the communes in the area. So, after sharing a community potluck to get in the mood, the audience was laughing or groaning even before Mr. Gould got to his punch lines.
People here know his stories. They’ve lived them.
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