The Most Costly Journey is the Vermont Reads book from July 2022 through June 2023. It’s an anthology of comics that depict the oral histories of migrant workers who traveled from southern Mexico and Central America to work on Vermont farms.
Throughout the program year, we’ll create and post videos here to reflect upon the book and deepen your study of The Most Costly Journey.
Trauma-informed journalist and essayist Lori Yearwood explores what it means to be a trauma-informed journalist when reporting on difficult topics. Having experienced homelessness herself, she suggests key ideas to keep in mind as journalists engage with populations who face dire situations and systemic poverty.
In this First Wednesdays event at the Brownell Library on November 2, 2022, author/illustrator Glynnis Fawkes reads from and discusses her latest work-in-progress and describes how the storytelling elements of comics—panel design, pacing, research, and narrative—are employed in creating non-fiction graphic novels. She also reviews the comic she contributed to the Vermont Reads 2022 book, The Most Costly Journey (El Viaje Más Caro).
Author and Middlebury professor Gloria Estela Gonzalez Zenteno discusses her new novel Arribada, about a woman pushed to confront her role in environmental and social injustice, and a well-to-do family’s realization that their comfortable position rests on crimes against the natural world, their town, and their loved ones.
A finalist for the Vermont Book Award, North is a moving story about a Vermont monk, a Somali refugee, and an Afghan war veteran whose lives converge on a snowy Vermont night. Author Brad Kessler reviews the creation of the novel and his ongoing work with new Americans in Vermont.
Andrew Ingall, creator of the project “Warlé, Yesterday, and Today,” presents a slide talk and storytelling exercise inspired by the lives and legacy of Warren Kronemeyer and Leon Ingall, a Vermont couple who were entrepreneurs and civic leaders in Townshend, VT during the 1980 and 1990s. Leon was a refugee twice: first fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1918 and then again from the Nazis in the late 1930s.
Hosted by the Center for Cartoon Studies, this lively presentation about the making of Freedom and Unity, A Graphic Guide to Vermont Democracy features the cartoonists and scholars that helped create a comic book about the past, present, and potential of democracy and civics in Vermont.
In his award-winning Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, journalist Eyal Press examines the morally troubling jobs that society tacitly condones, and the hidden class of workers who do them. Press, a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, discusses his reporting for the book, which won the 2022 Hillman Prize for book journalism and appeared on numerous “best books of 2021” lists.
Author and cartoonist Rachel Lindsay explores the themes of mental illness and psychopharmaceutical advertising, as chronicled in her book RX: A Graphic Memoir.
Over 1200 migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries labor on farms and for businesses in Vermont. Their stories are not often heard. With the help of the Open Door Clinic, we spoke with several of these crucial workers. Some wanted to conceal their identities.
Three people central to the creation of The Most Costly Journey discuss migration, farming, mental health, cartooning, and the Latinx farmworker experience in Vermont.
This video about the making of the pamphlets that became The Most Costly Journey includes a conversation between Vermont farm worker “El Enmigrante” (the immigrant) and cartoonist Marek Bennett about collaborating on his story.
Poet Sarah Audsley joined us at the Taconic Mountains Ramble State Park for Words in the Woods.
Humanities Camps are filled with reading and writing projects, field trips, and outdoor activities.
We won a 2020 Schwartz Prize for best public humanities programming in the U.S. for Vermont Reads 2019: “March: Book One.”
We supported Historic New England’s “More than a Market” project that explored the experiences of new Americans through food markets.
Our free public events help bring the power of the humanities to communities across Vermont.
