Showing results by author "Bill Schubart" in All Categories

Raised as a Catholic in rural Vermont, I was infused with an awareness of sin and penitence, but also absolution and forgiveness. My late teenage encounter with Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor shattered my youthful allegiance to Catholic dogma, but it’s one thing to walk away from Catholic doctrine and quite another to lose the weight of its beauty, fear, and guilt.

The Priest follows a working class altar boy's decision to become a priest, exploring the struggle many boys have becoming men, especially around sexuality. Pierre finds safety within the vocational confines and celibacy of his Catholic faith, only then to be astonished as he experiences life vicariously in the shadow of the confessional. Ultimately, he must confront his own emerging sexuality in the real world and reconcile the inevitable collision between the security of doctrine and the risks of being human - all of which takes him to a surprising place.

Nadine Hoover was sighted at birth and blinded by the drunken doctor bringing her into the world. The daughter she had herself as a teenager by a foster father who raped her became her greatest friend and comfort and Nadine kept her close until she died. Nadine renamed herself “Baybie” when she and her friend Virginia Brown moved to the streets of New York City where, she became a licensed minister and founded her church in an abandoned apartment in Brooklyn.

Lila & Theron is set in rural America and relates a personal story of love and sacrifice. Lila and Theron do not imagine themselves poor, nor do they covet what they don’t have. They are whole in themselves and on their land - in marked contrast to today’s victim culture of safe spaces and narcissism. Bill Schubart grew up among farmers and loggers in Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom, where survival depended not on institutions but on family, neighbors, hand tools, and the bounty of wilderness.

Schubart brings to life the friends and characters of his native Lamoille County, where in the late 1950s and early 1960s, life was lived close to the earth and often against the grain. Schubart’s collection of 22 stories captures Vermont in its transition from an enclave of hill farms and small towns where everyone knew your grandfather to a place where vehicles bearing license plates from “away” mix with hippie vans filled with born-again Vermonters getting back to the land...until snowfall.

Fat People is an entirely unique fictional look at the emotions and experiences of those who live to eat: the estrangement, loneliness, embarrassment, fear, defeated sexuality, unresolved anger, but also the simple pleasure of food.