Saturday Story Time with Karen Sturtevant & Susan Bahr: The Adventures of Gert and Stu and Zippy Too (Burlington)
Join us for a special Saturday Story Time with children's author Karen Sturtevant and illustrator Susan Bahr! Your little ones will love the story book The Adventures of Gert and Stu and Zippy Too.
Every parent knows how a simple cardboard box can become their child's favorite toy. Gert and Zippy are thrilled to have Stu, a new friend, join them in make-believe using Gert's adventure box. What happens when they land in a strange world and the box gets eaten by a dragon? How will they get home? Using creativity and bouncy rhymes these beautifully illustrated characters delight us with their story of friendship and remind us to appreciate the wonder of a child's imagination.
Karen Sturtevant is a freelance writer, member of the League of Vermont Writers, staff writer and editor-in-chief of Vermont Bride magazine. She's taught preschoolers when she experienced the wit and wonder that come with those magical years. This story, in part, started during that time and has developed over years with the character addition of her Russian tortoise, Zippy.
"Diane Swan writes about deceptively ordinary life in deceptively ordinary diction. I say “deceptively” because what makes the transparent language of her poems into poetry is a flawless sense of rhythm, proportion, and narrative that isn’t ordinary at all. Her poems go down like a glass of water that turns out to have been 180 proof vodka— in this case, the punch is pure emotion, most often emotion for someone else, about someone else, an emotion of concern or love, passionate and hard-won. They aren’t egotrapped in the theatre of her own mind. “We dare not be boring” wrote Marianne Moore, and Diane Swan never is, as we read the poem or when it’s finished. The turns in her poems— their shaping, the angles they take on experience— entertain me as much as individual details made palpable, all of it operating inside a live voice on the page talking about what matters to her as if she were sitting across from you at a table. Sir Philip Sidney, echoing Horace’s idea of the social function of poetry, said its purpose was “to teach and to delight.” This is what Diane Swan’s poems do. They are implicitly moral: like beautiful music, they teach us how to feel. Though she would never make this claim for herself, the world would be a better place if we all felt for others as unsentimentally and honestly as she does."
Diane Swan was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She and her husband moved to Vermont in 1970 where she attended Community College and received an Associate degree. She later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing from Warren Wilson College. She has worked as a poet-in-the-schools, taught in the Step-Up program for women, the EXCEL pro-gram for gifted high school students, and on the faculties of the New England Young Writers Conference at Breadloaf, and the Champlain College Young Vermont Writers Conference. For over twenty years she facilitated writing workshops for residents in nursing homes, day centers and assisted living facilities.
She lives in Barre, Vermont with her husband, artist Fred Swan.
In a fast-paced culture where everything, even sex, is pared down to the bare minimum, it’s easy to forget that human connections can be emotional, significant, and even spiritual. In Spiritual Lovemaking: Relax into Sex & Awaken into Life, authors Jody Baron and Peter Beamish explain that by slowing down and embracing relaxation and mindfulness, we can create more fulfilling sexual experiences.
Join us for an event with Linda M. Maloney, a
priest of the Episcopal diocese of Vermont and the Anglican diocese of
Montreal. She
has been a professor of U.S. history and of the New Testament, and will speak about her recently re-issued book, The Captain from Connecticut.
Listen to and enjoy stories with your little one!
Listen to and enjoy stories with your little ones!
Join Adrie Kusserow for a reading from and discussion of her latest book, Refuge. 
