Battles at Plattsburgh: Keith Herkalo (Burlington)
Join Keith Herkalo to mark the 200 year anniversary of the land and naval battles of Plattsburgh, and to learn about the battles themselves.
Both Roosevelt and Churchill recognized the importance of the land and naval battles of Plattsburgh. Many other, more famous, engagements were ruses meant to divert U.S. troops away from the prize Plattsburgh would afford: a clear pathway into New England. If not for the exemplary skills of two young military officers, Commodore Macdonough and General Macomb, and the force they commanded—regular army and naval personnel, New York and Vermont Militia, Native Americans, Veteran Exempts and boys from the local school—the war and the nation would have been lost. In The Battles at Plattsburgh, using original source documents, author Keith Herkalo retells the battles at Plattsburgh—the key battles of the War of 1812.
Keith Herkalo was born in Plattsburgh, New York, in 1948 and raised in Philadelphia and Plattsburgh (the family summered in Plattsburgh every year). After more than a decade in the military and an additional decade working for military equipment development firms in the Washington, D.C. area, he returned with his family to Plattsburgh (the proverbial return to Woebegon). It was then that he became more interested in Plattsburgh’s history and specifically Plattsburgh’s involvement in the War of 1812. He is an amateur historian who is the research catalyst behind the archaeological rediscovery of the 1812 camp known as Pike’s Cantonment, the editor of The Journal of H.K. Averill, Sr.: An account of the Battle of Plattsburgh and Early North Country Community, has authored numerous local history articles and has been a frequent speaker in local history venues for many years. He is the city clerk of Plattsburgh; a founding member and current president of the Battle of Plattsburgh Association; a musician, theater buff, boat builder, sailor, diver, woodworker, plaster restorer and an 1812-era reenactor. With his wife, Dr. Joy Demarse, Keith is currently building their energy-efficient, solar-powered retirement home.
There’s a new set of 3Rs for our kids – respect, responsibility, and resilience – that will better prepare them for life in the real world. Join Vicki Hoefle, founder of the Parenting On Track™ program and author of the new book Duck Tape Parenting, A Less is More Approach to Raising Respectful, Responsible and Resilient Kids, for a one-hour presentation on becoming a “Duct Tape Parent”. This counter-intuitive – yet much more effective than a quick-fix – approach is for parents to sit on their hands, stay on the sidelines, even if duct tape is required, so that the kids step up and take charge of their own lives.
True or false:
S.J. Richard is a graduate of Marist College, where she studied the art
of racking up student loans and the entertaining effects of sleep
deprivation. She worked for several New England newspapers while
exploring the dynamics of not having a savings account and methods of
living off the kindness of tolerant and pitying relatives. She won top
honors from the New England Press Association in the late 1990s for her
reporting and feature writing. She currently lives in Vermont. Her new book is entitled The Peacemaker.
About the book: With war scars that no one could see and that would not heal, Jack O'Malley drifted into Kanen, Colorado in the summer of 1873. Hired to be the new marshal, he is confronted with the suspicioun and anxiety of a once peaceful, small town with a growing mining problem (or perhaps it is a mining town with a small growing problem). Whatever the case, O'Malley swiftly learns that the invisible foes that stalk him in his sleep are nothing compared to the passionately pious force that is the Ladies' Church Society and the beautiful but feisty Amanda Morgan, a woman who finds O'Malley's lack of religion as disturbing as he finds her attractive. Their tangles over faith and propriety peak with the arrival of a sultry and scandalous songstress from O'Malley's past, a wave of criminal accusations from the town newspaper and a flood of questions from suspicious citizens about the mysterious stranger O'Malley is giving sanctuary in the town jail. With troubling questions being raised regarding O'Malley's personal history, the one thing even the most patient of townspeople are growing certain of is that the new marshal isn't likely to see the New Year in Kanen.
Daniel Lusk is author of Lake Studies: Meditations on Lake Champlain (Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, 2011) and Kissing the Ground: New & Selected Poems (Onion River, 1999). Since leaving his native Iowa, he has worked as a laborer, hospital intern, TV sound technician, door-to-door salesman, preacher, clerk, sportswriter, ranch hand, jazz singer, itinerant poet, free-lance writer, NPR commentator, teacher, university administrator, and as a Senior Lecturer in English Emeritus of the University of Vermont. He writes poems whose physicality reflects work in packing plants, on farms and ranches, and whose contemplative poetics betray his love of nature as well as his education in philosophy and religion and his background in the arts. He has been awarded grants and literary fellowships from the Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Arts Endowment and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.
Currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University in Virginia, David Huddle taught for thirty-eight years at the University of Vermont and continues to teach at the Bread Loaf School of English. He has published seventeen books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His novel The Story of a Million Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) was named a Distinguished Book of the Year by Esquire and a best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His most recent novel is Nothing Can Make Me Do This.
Jack Mayer's new book, Life in a Jar, is a work of creative non-fiction, recounting the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker during W.W. II, who knocked on doors in the Warsaw ghetto and asked Jewish mothers to give up their children in order to save them. She and her network rescued 2,500 Jewish children from certain death. After the war, her story, as well as those of countless other rescuers, was suppressed in communist Poland and forgotten. She lived in obscurity in Warsaw.
Sixty years later, her extraordinary history was rescued by three teenage girls in Kansas, who began a history project about Irena Sendler and ended up elevating her to the status of Polish national hero and furthering dialogue and education for 
Poles to come to terms with their traumatic W.W. II history. Each of these teens also carried a traumatic personal burden; the project changed their lives. And it changed the world. Because of their efforts, Irena Sendler was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize by the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of Poland. Students of history became agents of history.
Life in a Jar is based on Jack's interviews and research over six years in the U.S. and Poland.
Jack Mayer began practicing pediatrics in 1976 in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, a small town in eastern Franklin County on the Canadian border. His was the first pediatric practice in that half of the county. He was a doctor there for ten years, often bartering medical care for eggs, firewood, and knitted afghans. From 1987 – 1991 Dr. Mayer was a National Cancer Institute Epidemiology Fellow at Columbia University School of Public Health in New York City, researching the molecular biology of childhood cancer. Most of his scientific writing was done during those four years. He was also a pediatrician with Columbia’s General Pediatric Group Practice.
Dr. Mayer returned to Vermont in 1991 and established Rainbow Pediatrics in Middlebury, where he continues to practice primary care pediatrics. He is an Instructor in Pediatrics at the University of Vermont School of Medicine and a J-term adjunct faculty for Middlebury College pre-med students. Throughout his career, he has written short stories, poems, and essays about his years in pediatric practice and hiking the Long Trail in Vermont. He was a participant at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2003 and 2005 for fiction, and in 2008 for poetry. He lives in Middlebury with his wife, Chip. They have a grown son, Alex.
Join us in welcoming local author Joshua Masters to Phoenix Books Burlington! His new book, American Psalms, "challenges Christian patriots to put aside personal agendas, prejudices and partisanship, and pray for our leaders as God commands," says Mike Huckabee, author of A Simple Government.
Accredited by the Christian & Missionary Alliance, Joshua J. Masters is a Christian speaker, artist and author. He is a graduate of the Church Leadership Academy’s Ministerial Study Program and a Perspectives Alumnus. As a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, he’s also comfortable working both in front of and behind the camera. Born in Littleton, New Hampshire, Joshua lives in Essex, Vermont with his wife, Gina Masters, and their dog, Franklin.
