Inspired by Place

700 Bragg Hill Road,Waitsfield VT 05673

11 June, 2023

Description

Join us in the barn at Knoll Farm for an evening of music, wine, and lively conversations and readings from 7-9 PM. Composer and musician Ben Cosgrove will play from his latest album, Deirdre Heekin of La Garagista will offer a flight of 3 wines, and Vermont writers Megan Mayhew Bergman and Helen Whybrow will read short selections. Ben Cosgrove Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer-performer whose “compelling and beautiful” instrumental music explores themes of landscape, place, and environment. He has performed in every U.S. state but Delaware, collaborated with groups ranging from rock bands to research scientists, and held residencies and fellowships with institutions including Acadia National Park, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, White Mountain National Forest, Harvard University, Middlebury College, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the New England National Scenic Trail, NASA, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. Ben’s fourth studio album, The Trouble With Wilderness, an evocation of different expressions of nature and wildness within the built environment, was released in 2021. It has been the subject of an episode of the NHPR show Outside/In, was deemed one of the spring's best new releases by WBUR, and has been called "beautiful and fascinating" (The Maine Edge), "deeply impressive" (Independent Clauses) and "immediately evocative and fully arresting... brim[ming] with technical mastery and emotional capital" (Seven Days). In addition to his solo work, Ben has toured and recorded with a long list of artists that includes Ghost of Paul Revere, GoldenOak, Max García Conover, and many more. For more about Ben, please visit www.bencosgrove.com. La Garagista Farm and Winery We are located on Mount Hunger at the edge of the forest in the Châteauguay and in the Piedmont chain of hills in Barnard, Vermont. Here we grow alpine wine and ciders. Our land has been part of small homestead farming for over two hundred years. On the farm, we attend to the care and observation of our native terroir, a whole-farm and diverse agriculture where we are not only growing wine, but also vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for ourselves and our tiny kitchen and for our spontaneous, always last minute pop-up tasting room/wine bar, Hart: tavernetta forestiera + bar a vin, and Boîte: supper club. We farm four parcels of vineyard: the homefarm vineyard les bonnes femmes, a joint project just across the road, les forestières, and two older parcels in the Champlain Valley, les carouges and i selvatici. The work we do at the farm and winery, both in the field and in the cellar, is guided by regenerative, permaculture, and biodynamic thought. We try to let all elements of the farm speak for themselves accompanied by our stewardship. Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew-Bergman is an author, speaker, and teacher who writes about the natural world and unusual women in a science & art-forward way - and likes to help others do the same. She is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season, which Scribner published in March 2022. How Strange a Season was featured as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and in the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, and was longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize and The Story Prize. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, also with Scribner. Megan is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was awarded the Garrett Award for Fiction and the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, and, previously, fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Library in Paris. She currently teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Her photography has been published in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Audubon, and is forthcoming in Southern Cultures. She recently founded Open Field, a non-profit geared toward increasing the accessibility of environmental storytelling and advocacy skills.