Julia Shipley is a 2010-11 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant recipient, completing a manuscript of braided essays about small scale agriculture. As both a professional writer and subsistence farmer she's interested in the overlap and interplay between these two fields. Her chapbook, Herd was published by Sheltering Pines Press and her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alimentum, Hunger Mountain, Small Farmers Journal, Vermont Life, Vermont's Local Banquet and Whole Terrain. Former Director of Writing Studies and Faculty in Sustainable Agriculture at Sterling College, she's now immersed in writing endeavors as a newspaper columnist, freelance writer, writing workshop facilitator and caretaker of a writer's retreat, as well as growing and raising great food on Chickadee Farm in Craftsbury, VT.
Read more about Julia at the Vermont Arts Council and Whole Terrain.
Contact Julia at: julia@writingonthefarm.com
Vermont's Local Banquet
Have a Cow
by Julia ShipleyHow badly do you want a cow? True or false:
1. ___ I like the smell of a cow.
2. ___ I can commit to never being away from home for more than 23 hours.
3. ___ I know and trust at least one other person who will help me milk this cow.
4. ___ I hate when flies land on me.
7. ___ Cream on strawberries, cream and butter on potatoes, creamy milk poured over granola, yellow butter slathered on toast…. These violate my diet, and I am opposed to them.If you answered False to #1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, then perhaps pillows, magnets, and T-shirts with bovine imagery will best fulfill your desire to have a cow.
If you answered True to #1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, and False to #4 and 7, then you crave more than Holstein home decor. Here's the story of how I fulfilled my craving for a cow.
I, too, wanted to milk a cow—my cow.
I wanted to milk a cow the way Thoreau wanted to build a house on a pond and live deliberately: not just because, gee, wouldn't it be nice, but because I wanted to make a pilgrimage without a suitcase, a quest without leaving town. To Milk A Cow became my goal, my dream, my mission. Not just any cow, my cow. I pictured our milking chores like vespers, the two of us sequestered in the cob-webby milking chapel, me with my forehead bowed against her flank, the strong streams of milk chanting when they hit the side of the steel pail. Read more...
Having Both Lives: Farming and Writing in Vermont before 1972
by Julia Shipley"Why anybody would want to be either a farmer or a poet when there were spools turning in factories was beyond the grasp of the old man. That his grandson should desire to be both was almost enough to bring on a stroke."
According to the grandson's biographer, "Determined in his course, Robert laid the whole matter before his grandfather. He would have a farm, live on it, produce his food with his own labor, and write poetry."
And although the grandfather eventually purchased a farm for his grandson, he turned it over to the young Robert Frost with no real encouragement. "You've made a failure out of everything else you've tried. Now go up to the farm and die there."
As we know, Frost exceeded his grandfather's expectations. And many more have succeeded in this stroke-inducing thing—being both farmer and writer—and particularly here, in Vermont. And because of these dual efforts, we have a cultural harvest of literature. All of the farmer-writers mentioned in this article had firmly established their books and crops by the time I came into the world in 1972 (hence the title of this article), and all of them have inspired me since I moved to Vermont in 1997 with foolishness and feistiness, endeavoring to cultivate a farming and writing life of my own. Read the full story...
Burlington Free Press: I Believe
Mapping our places helps us know where we are, who we are, and what we have
by Julia ShipleyDo you know the best climbing tree in your neighborhood? Or where wild leeks grow? Could you point out the perfect spot to watch the Fourth of July parade? Can you explain why Rural Route 1 was renamed West Hill Pond Road and then renamed Coits Pond Road? Which is the steepest sliding hill? Could you show exactly where the cows get out each summer and munch the roses?
The people in Cabot can answer all those questions, and furthermore can describe and explain their intricate connection to the place they live. As part of a Community Mapping Project, residents ages 5 to 75 have been making maps of meaningful places within their community for almost a year. They've charted everything, including the scary spider that lives in a woodshed, the old town water pump at the far end of a front lawn, the best place to consume Starbusts purchased from the Cabot General Store. Read more...
Cabot Chronicle: Our Town
Our Town is a monthly column appearing in the Cabot Chronicle about mapping a sense of place, featuring a hand drawn map made by a Cabot resident, with an accompanying essay by Julia Shipley that informs and strengthens our connections to land and community.
Our Town
By Julia ShipleyWhen Gage Hale, a nine-year old who lives on a big hill in Cabot, was asked by Mrs. Tormey, his 4th grade teacher, to make a map of his neighborhood, he drew the house first and the darkest, at the dead center of the paper. But before his pencil even touched down, he had to ask himself - which was the tallest part? Read more...