Author Presentation: T. Stores

T. Stores
Frost Heaves
Event date:
Saturday, November 17, 2018 – 6:00pm
Event address:
4869 Main St
Manchester Center, VT 05255
In the physically harsh rural environment of Southern Vermont, an eclectic mix of characters are forced by proximity to interact, to negotiate community, and to confront the realities of their own individual strengths and weaknesses

In southern Vermont, the annual freezing and thawing of the earth forces stones to the surface, breaking asphalt, disrupting civilized life. This is the setting for the stories in Frost Heaves, a physically harsh and rural place within a few hours’ drive of Boston and New York. It is a landscape where retreat, even escape, to a quaint and bucolic lifestyle is regularly upset by reminders that a human is, in the end, another part of the natural world and a part of a larger social organism. In this collection, an eclectic mix of characters interact, negotiate community, and encounter the natural world–bears, otters, moose, insects–in confrontations with the reality of their own individual strengths and weaknesses, the welling up of hard truths in the seasons of each life. T Stores is a storyteller, probably because she grew up in a huge extended American Southern family and spent much of her childhood hiding under the kitchen table listening to her elders’ gossip and fables of the past. Teresa Stores writes with compassion and insight, finding the inescapable truths hiding in plain sight layered over an ordinary life. Though these stories are individually complete, in the book collection they are also connected by theme, character, and setting, and with an understanding that individual experience is a shared human story sometimes only barely perceived as overlapping, cohesive, and common. The book’s structure is both seasonal and cyclical, with each section of stories (each close third person point of view, focused on the experience of a protagonist) introduced by a story that shifts point of view in rapid succession, connecting the community of voices to place.