Feature Articles

Homegrown in Hard Ground: Writing and Publishing in New Hampshire
by Rick Lugg (R2 Consulting)

"A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of those city dolls. […] He has not one chance, but a hundred chances." [Emerson, "Self-Reliance"]

Leaving aside Ralph Waldo's misguided inclusion of the Green Mountain State in this sentiment, and further adjusting to include sturdy lasses, this fine quote remains as true today as when he wrote it. As a native Granite Stater who has tried a few professions myself (teaming it, peddling it), I can attest that New Hampshire breeds headstrong individualists, people used to fending for themselves and getting along at whatever they do.

This is a state where media consultants are not needed to craft a political statement. In the town of Epsom, N.H. a few years back, one property owner erected a massive wooden horse on wheels (and thus Trojan) looming over dozens of white crosses, labeled "Estonia," "Lithuania", "Vietnam, etc." Beside the horse stood a tall hand-lettered sign: "KEEP THE U.N. OUT OF THE U.S." No spin needed there. Someone burned it down, but the owner just built another one. This is the state where Manchester Union Leader editor William Loeb made presidential candidate Edmund Muskie cry in the snow. No taxes; no frills. A land of harsh winters, muddy springs, black flies, hot summers, and about ten temperate days a year. You have to want to live here; it's not easy. The state motto sums it up best: Live Free or Die.

New Hampshire writers and publishers draw their character from these very wells, and a surprising number live and work here. Draw a 50-mile circle from YBP's home in Contoocook and within its arc you'll find J.D. Salinger (well, maybe not), a host of Dartmouth and UNH dons, Yankee Magazine, a university press, and my high-school English teacher Merle Drown, whose 1982 novel Plowing Up A Snake captured small-town New Hampshire as well (and grimly) as any author has. Maxine Kumin lives up the road; Robert Frost used to. Poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon made their life together here; since Jane's untimely death, Hall continues alone. Even CEO of the Sofa P.J. O'Rourke, a transplanted Buckeye, lives and writes on a spread near Jaffrey, N.H., when he's not training his hunting dog.

Close the circle to ten miles from YBP, and we find other authors and publishers toiling, many trying on the profession as a second or third career. George Geers, founder of Plaidswede Publishing, grew up in Concord, N.H. Through out his career writing and editing for several New England newspapers, he always yearned to try his hand at book publishing. When he left his last post as editor of the Telegraph of Nashua (N.H.), he took the plunge, driven by a vision of bringing out works from and about New Hampshire. Plaidswede's list ranges widely, from children's books and collections of New England newspaper columnists to a history of the Nashua Dodgers minor league baseball team, and even includes some works suitable for academic collections.

Most notable is Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire's Native Son (0975521616), whose author Peter A.Wallner showed true granite himself when he left his job "keeping school" as a headmaster in Pennsylvania to move to New Hampshire and begin research on the first new biography of Pierce in seventy years. Franklin Pierce himself embodied Emerson's "hundred chances" approach, first working as a school-master in Maine while attending Bowdoin College, then becoming an attorney and running for the State Legislature (where he became Speaker of the House in 1830). He commanded 2,500 men in the Mexican War as a militia colonel, before being elected to the US Congress in 1834 and the Senate in 1836. Finally, of course, he became our 14th president.

While it may be a stretch to call Pierce's record distinguished, this first volume of Wallner's re-evaluation of this sturdy lad from New Hampshire shows the most obscure and maligned President in a somewhat more favorable light, especially his conviction that morality had no place in legislation. The second volume will be published in 2008.

Also from Plaidswede: Only in New Hampshire (0962683256), a first-person account of grassroots organizing for the ill-fated Bill Bradley campaign in 2000. Like Wallner, author B.J. Rudell moved to the Granite State, in his case to participate in the "retail" politics peculiar to the New Hampshire primary. The resulting book offers a primary source (no pun intended) of reportage and insight into how presidential campaigns actually work so early in the process. Although Rudell's candidate lost to Gore by 6,000 votes, "Bradley prevailed in 45 of my 64 towns." Not bad for a 25-year old former civics teacher.

Finally, right here in Contoocook, poet L.R. Berger has practiced her craft for more than twenty years, with support from The National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN New England Discovery Award, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the American Academy in Rome, the MacDowell Colony, the Appalachia Poetry Prize, the Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook-not to mention her own work as a therapist. Her collection The Unexpected Aviary (0971248826) (published by Deerbrook Editions, a small publisher from Maine) is the fruit of those twenty years of walking back roads, watching closely the natural and human worlds, listening for the undertones, and slowly, stubbornly finding the exact words to connect one to the other. The Unexpected Aviary won the Jane Kenyon Prize for Outstanding Book of Poetry upon its publication in 2003.

These writers, publishers and their works have been grown in and shaped by New Hampshire. These are people who sustain their crafts with their own resources, and embark on projects mostly for the sake of doing them, of seeing if they can be done. These are among the "hundreds of chances" each has taken, and if their authors are worth a hundred city dolls, then the works themselves are worth a second look.