GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Another warm stunner. We've still got that high pressure around, at least for today, so... Fog and clouds to start, then clearing to bring us a straight-on sunny day, temps getting into the mid-80s. Increasing clouds tonight, lows in the upper 50s. Grab it while it lasts!It's not just the days that are beautiful. The nights have been, too, as this quiet, moonlit scene of Lake Fairlee from Jim Burnet proves.Today at 2:20 pm: Not so quiet. In case you've missed the stories or saw one and forgot, FEMA and the FCC will be testing the federal Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts. This means that not just your radio or tv, but your cellphone (if it's on) will emit that impossible-to-ignore (and illegal to imitate) screech; phones will also get a text message. It is only a test. The radio/tv version will only last a minute. Cell towers will broadcast the alert for a half hour, though your phone should only get it once. CNN's got the details.Advance Transit's new Saturday ridership: "Way beyond our expectations." Back in mid-September, the local bus company launched Saturday service on three lines, including one that runs from Sachem Village by the Norwich Farmers Market and another that runs from Hanover into Lebanon and West Leb. AT head Adams Carroll tells the VN's Liz Sauchelli that they'd expected a slow start—assuming that ridership is work-focused. "If anything, we may have underestimated demand," he adds, noting that hourly ridership on the route out to Leb and West Leb outstrips weekday numbers.Now there are five: Ken Cadow's Gather named National Book Award finalist. Ever since Cadow's young adult novel about a rural Vermont teen was "longlisted" for the award in young people's literature last month, Cadow's had to juggle his day job as principal at Oxbow High School with the sudden attention he's getting from the literary world. That task got harder yesterday, when Gather was named one of five finalists for the award—on the day it hit bookstores. The winner will be announced at a Nov. 15 dinner presided over by Oprah Winfrey.SPONSORED: Coming soon, a day of films, fun, food, and farming! The Farm to Film Fest—on Saturday, October 21 in White River Junction—is a community celebration of what farmers near and far are doing to restore a livable and healthy climate. Free, hands-on activities for kids and families, award-winning films, workshops, farmer meet and greets, and great local food and music. Co-hosted by Vital Communities and Junction Arts & Media with support from King Arthur Baking Company and Vermont Humanities. Register today! Sponsored by Vital Communities.It starts with a dead body, but really it's about love. That body's discovered at the bottom of a well on Chicken Hill in Pottstown, PA in 1972, and James McBride takes pretty much all of his new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, to let us know how it got there in the 1930s. But as Carin Pratt notes in this week's Enthusiasms, that mystery is really the least of this buzzing, character-filled, story-on-every-page novel about immigrants—Jews and southern blacks—making their way. "This has been a banner year for fiction," she writes. "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the year's very best."At Northern Stage, a play—and Afghanistan. The theater company "comes roaring into autumn" with Selling Kabul, writes Susan Apel in Artful. But what's on the stage is only part of this production of Sylvia Khoury's play about a former US military interpreter hiding from the Taliban. Northern Stage hired an Afghan-American consultant to keep even the tiniest details culturally accurate, is working with local and regional groups that are working with Afghan refugees, and is partnering with ArtLords—the Afghan refugee artists in Brattleboro—to display their work. Opens next Wednesday.At Billings' "Vermont Female Farmers" exhibit: "There's tenderness in the images. There's tenacity. There's exhaustion." That's Northfield farmer Hannah Blackmer talking to Seven Days' Will Solomon about how photographer JuanCarlos González captured both the hard work and the love that can go into farming. Solomon checked in with González about how the exhibit came together (one farmer would recommend another), and to Blackmer about what she wants people to see: "We have muscles, and we sweat, and we're exhausted."Echo Brown, author of coming-of-age story on being black at Dartmouth, dies at 39. Brown first made waves with her one-woman show in 2015, "Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters." Without professional stage experience, she still had audiences "eating out of her hand," wrote SF Chronicle critic Robert Hurwitt. Her 2022 novel, The Chosen One, used magical realism to plumb "the feeling of being out of place, of being in this new world, of being isolated and alone"—as she put it to WBUR—at Dartmouth. In the NYT obit at the link, Richard Sandomir writes that her cause of death remains undetermined.Asteroid? Volcanoes? Dartmouth researchers let machines decide what killed the dinosaurs. For decades, there's been raging debate over whether it was gases released by volcanism from India’s Deccan Traps or the asteroid that created a huge impact crater in the Yucatan. The debate's reflected scientists' biases, so grad student Alex Cox and Earth Sciences prof Brenhin Keller put a set of processors together to crunch some 300,000 scenarios until they got to conditions that existed at the time of the extinction. The result? The volcanoes would have been enough. But there's room for debate."[My son] learned how to walk at a correctional facility." That's Amber, whose son is now 15, talking to Amanda Pirani in NH Bulletin about what it's like to be imprisoned while a child grows up. “They question, why did you leave me? Why was this more important? Why did this happen? And it’s such a struggle for them,” she says. Pirani profiles NH's Family Connection Center, which helps incarcerated parents maintain a relationship with their kids and offers support with parenting challenges. "Family is what we all have in common," says director Tiffani Arsenault. "So we need to invest in that.”In first day of Clegg trial, attorneys give a preview of what's to come. There's no hard evidence tying Logan Clegg or his gun to the murders of Steve and Wendy Reid in Concord last year, his attorney argued as the trial got underway yesterday at Merrimack County Superior Court. Instead, she said, Clegg was hiding from police because of an outstanding Utah warrant. Prosecutors countered that bullets fired from his handgun were consistent with fragments found at the autopsy. The court spent the afternoon surveying the woods where the Reids were found, reports NHPR's Todd Bookman.Administrators propose program, faculty cuts at VT State U, including at Randolph campus. In all, writes Anne Wallace Allen in Seven Days, the cost-cutting proposal would eliminate 10 academic programs—including ag, forestry, and landscape contracting, all housed at VTSU-Randolph—and consolidate another 13, while cutting 33 full-time faculty positions. In announcing the plan, interim president Mike Smith said he also plans to look at the system's management costs, and release recommendations by the end of the month.Want to check out your town's climate "vulnerability"? This new map has the details. It was released Monday by Texas A&M and the Environmental Defense Fund, and it pulls together not just details on, say, heat or drought or wildfire smoke for 70,000 census tracts, but social, economic, and infrastructure stats that can affect a community's resilience in the face of extreme weather or disruption. Overall, both VT and NH rank among the least vulnerable states in the country, but there are definite differences from town to town. The map includes a tutorial on how to use it, if you feel like digging."Can we bring our own food?” “This is Amtrak. We can probably bring our own livestock.” Harrison Scott Key was one of 15,976 writers not chosen for Amtrak’s Residency for Writers. So he set out to create the experience himself. On Longreads, he details his journey on the track not taken with his friend and muse Mark, “a wayfaring evangelist in the Church of Saturated Fat.” With the goal of writing something—anything—together, they ride the City of New Orleans 900 miles from Chicago to New Orleans. It's a lazy trip for them, a rollicking one for us. “Speed and convenience … maybe we’ve got enough of both already. Maybe we need to slow the hell down,” Harrison concludes.The Wednesday Vordle. If you're new to Daybreak, this is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, with a five-letter word chosen from an item in the previous day's Daybreak.
Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
Daybreak tees, long-sleeve tees, and mugs. A
Lost Woods
mug or t-shirt from DB Johnson. Or maybe a Vordle t-shirt? Check out what's available and use it proudly!
This evening at 7, Vermont Humanities is livestreaming "The Joy of Lex" with Martha Barnette, co-host of the public radio show A Way With Words. Barnette, the author of three books on word origins (and a former reporter for the Washington Post), has been with the show for nearly two decades. She'll be talking about word histories, regional dialects, ancient linguistic roots, modern slang, and probably much else.
Also at 7, the Dunbar Free Library in Grantham is hosting a New Hampshire Humanities event with cartoonist Marek Bennett, "Comics in World History and Cultures." Bennett, who lives in Henniker, will use examples from ancient Rome to feudal Japan to the US in the 20th century to talk about how illustrated narratives "tell (and show) us about the people and periods that created them."
And also at 7, via Zoom, the Etna Library is joining with the Nashua Public Library to present Maggie Davis, associate producer of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," giving a behind-the-scenes look at late-night television and how it's put together.
And to bring us into the day...
In the circus world, Quebec's known, of course, as the home of Cirque du Soleil, with its world-conquering spectacles and shows crafted for Vegas. But it's also home to smaller troupes that reject glitz—like, for instance, Cirque Alfonse, which roots itself in both circus and Quebec tradition while crafting new work. Likewise, on the music scene, the province has bred an abundance of bands that do the same: build from French and Celtic tradition to create new sounds. Seems pretty natural for them to get together, which is what Le Vent du Nord and Cirque Alfonse do from time to time.
from a couple of years ago.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
Want to catch up on Daybreak music?
Want to catch up on Daybreak itself (or find that item you trashed by mistake the other day)? You can find everything on the Daybreak Facebook page
, or if you're a committed non-FB user,
.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to hit the blue "Subscribe" button below. And thanks! And hey, if you're that friend? So nice to see you! Subscribe at no cost at:
Thank you!