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Tavern Village Tales
Tavern
Village Tales captures the essence of life
in a small hamlet of an old New England town and
a sense of its place locally and in the wider
world beyond its borders. ~Elizabeth P. Straw,
Weare Historian
Tavern Village
Tales is a New England journey across three
centuries -- in one place.
Place laps pleasantly
against the soles of the feet, like walks on roads
known for a very long time. It's absorbed through
the skin, a knowing of one's surroundings -- the
feel, sights, sounds, and smells -- on an intimate
level, and somehow, their knowing back. One fits
the land known as home like bark fits trees: no
matter where you go, you are bound to bear the
shape of it.
Tavern Village
Tales
by Sylvia Merrill Beaupré
Excerpts from the
Preface
A boy
longs in vain to make the village his. A man arrives
with nothing more than a jug and an axe, and leaves
the legacy of an inn. Men of war and men of peace
make the village their home and leave their mark,
along with women who raise the children and step
out into the world. Special animals, from spotted
salamander to hobbled calf, color village history.
A mysterious drowning and the vagaries and vicissitudes
of Mother Nature take their toll.
Photo: Tavern field, Roger Cody, 2011
Today,
trees - pine, hemlock, maple, beech, and oak -
have re-pinned many of the fields to earth, but
the stones the settlers hauled to the edges still
punctuate the landscape in irregular walls. Whether
bane or bounty, the woods have always been an
integral and meaningful part of the village. Here,
pride of place meant the way one felt not only
about people and buildings, but also about the
natural world.
A
native of New Hampshire, Sylvia Merrill Beaupré
graduated from the University of New Hampshire.
In 1980, she and her family settled in her childhood
home in Weare. Inspired by the town's rich history,
she wrote Common Ground, a chapbook of
poems about a New England village, a theme that
has reverberated throughout her writing for various
Weare Historical Society publications, and in
local newspaper articles and Chamber of Commerce
booklets.
Sylvia
was selected as a finalist for both Hunger
Mountain's Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry and
White Eagle Coffee Store Press' Long Fiction
Contest International. Her novel excerpt reached
semifinalist in the Boston Fiction Festival's
first contest.
Her
stories or poems have appeared in Yankee
Magazine, American University Journal of Gender
and the Law, The Granite Review, Northern New
England Review, South Boston Literary Gazette,
Pandora, Entelechy International, Byline, Color
Wheel, Earth's Daughters, November Third Club,
Ad Hoc Monadnock Online, Fearless Books' The
Light on Ordinary Things, Pudding House Publications'
anthology, Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in
a Consumer Society, and others.
Sylvia
is a member of the New Hampshire Writers' Project,
the Academy of American Poets, and "The Fridays,"
a local writers group that has been meeting weekly
for many years. She belongs to the New Hampshire
Historical Society, the Weare Historical Society,
and the South Weare Improvement Society.
Tavern Village Tales
Available from "The Store"
August 2011
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