Welcome to the Upper Kingdom
| Upper Kingdom’s latest arrival is Crossing Jack Book: Love and Death in the Woods. It’s a memoir about grief set among a host of characters — some back-to-the landers, some natives — that make up the most colorful and poorest region in the state. As in: “I love logging. It don’t pay nothing and it’s dangerous.”The Upper Kingdom is also home to Perimeter Check: A two- volume collection of essays written by Lefebvre about a people and a place that he characterizes as located at “the headwaters of the cash flow.”
Paul occasionally performs with Susan Reid in which he reads his stories while she supplies a musical transition on the fiddle. View a sample performance.And check out the calendarfor a schedule of performances.Better yet, if you’d like to schedule a performance, please contact Ginny McGrath. Feel welcome to look around. Thanks, and keep checking the perimeter.
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“Upper Kingdom? Where’s that?” she said
“It’s a place in the most rural corner of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. Only there is more than one kingdom. There’s a Lower Kingdom and an Upper Kingdom.
“What’s the difference?
“The two are like fraternal twins: the same but different. The Lower Kingdom is bigger, more densely settled, richer, more benign, more polite and more approachable. It is where people settle who want a more refined rural life.
“The Upper Kingdom is often seen as a desolate place with tracts of big woods spotted with beaver bogs and bracketed by backroads that seemingly go nowhere. It is where people come to hunt moose and spend deer seasons in hunting camps with outhouses and wood burning, cast iron cookstoves that once graced the kitchens of old farmhouses.
“It is where people come to put themselves in touch with a different, more rural part of Vermont, a place where they might rub shoulders with the past.
“It where when people take a ride they say they’re going to check the perimeter. It’s a place where stories breed.”
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