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Howard Frank Mosher only wanted to do one thing with his life. He wanted to write. From the time he was a young boy, growing up in Central New York, he confidently proclaimed that he would be an author.
It wasn’t something he simply aspired to do, it was all he could imagine. In the spring of 1964, fresh out of Syracuse University, Mosher and his wife, Phillis, moved to Orleans, Vermont, both hired as teachers at the local high school. |
It wasn’t something he simply aspired to do, it was all he could imagine. In the spring of 1964, fresh out of Syracuse University, Mosher and his wife, Phillis, moved to Orleans, Vermont, both hired as teachers at the local high school. On an early-morning walk from their apartment down to the falls on the Willoughby River, where rainbow trout were leaping upstream on their annual spawning run, Mosher knew he’d found a lifelong home.
Finding a home for Mosher’s fiction initially proved more difficult.
“Like any young writer, I had to find my voice,” Mosher once said. “It’s something that can’t be taught, and while I struggled – writing about things I didn’t really know enough about – I didn’t realize at the time that I was stepping over hundreds of great stories that had never been told right in my back yard.”
It took quitting teaching and going to work for a former whiskey runner, cutting cedar pulp in thick, Northern Vermont swamps for ten dollars a day, for Mosher to discover the basis for the stories he was meant to tell. He wrote a collection of Vermont-based short stories and a novella, Where the Rivers Flow North, and while Viking Press in New York liked it, the publisher wanted Mosher’s debut work to be a novel.
Now with two young children, Mosher and his wife sold their Brownington, Vermont farmhouse and moved their family of four into a small apartment, using the proceeds from the sale to finance a year’s time to write. There, a literal stone’s throw from the Canadian line, it took Mosher just ten months to write Disappearances, a novel based loosely on the life of Jake Blodgett, the logger Mosher had worked for in the woods.
“It just flowed out of me,” Mosher said. “I realized that it wasn’t merely a story that I wanted to write, I needed to tell it.”
Over the next 40 years, Mosher completed twelve novels and two non-fiction memoirs. He lent a voice – his voice - to stories rooted in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, becoming synonymous with the hardscrabble hill farms, north-flowing rivers, tiny, New England villages, and independent-minded people who live there.
Much of Mosher’s work revolved around the fictitious Vermont Kinneson family, following one of its eccentric members along the trail with Lewis and Clark, another through the Civil War, and still more who grappled with dark racism entrenched behind the bucolic setting of Mosher’s hub village, Kingdom Common, in the 1960s.
Sometimes called a regional author, Mosher’s writing, while all set in Vermont, boldly explored every aspect of human nature, from the commendable to the deplorable, forcing the reader through an entire gauntlet of emotions. From the omnipotence of love, to the inescapable ugliness of jealousy and racism, to the entirely-unknowable ways of fate and the future, Mosher built a world as real and large as the one he lived in.
Among many other awards, Mosher was the recipient of a Guggenheim, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, A Vermont’s Governor’s Award, an NAACP award, and a New England Book Award. He passed away following a short battle with cancer in January, 2017, days after completing his final book, Points North, in which he brought his beloved Kinneson family up to the present, leaving his readers with a sense that his stories were complete. He is survived by two adult children, Jake and Annie, both artists in their own right, and his wife, Phillis, who lives in their Irasburg home, right in the heart of Mosher’s Northeast Kingdom.
Finding a home for Mosher’s fiction initially proved more difficult.
“Like any young writer, I had to find my voice,” Mosher once said. “It’s something that can’t be taught, and while I struggled – writing about things I didn’t really know enough about – I didn’t realize at the time that I was stepping over hundreds of great stories that had never been told right in my back yard.”
It took quitting teaching and going to work for a former whiskey runner, cutting cedar pulp in thick, Northern Vermont swamps for ten dollars a day, for Mosher to discover the basis for the stories he was meant to tell. He wrote a collection of Vermont-based short stories and a novella, Where the Rivers Flow North, and while Viking Press in New York liked it, the publisher wanted Mosher’s debut work to be a novel.
Now with two young children, Mosher and his wife sold their Brownington, Vermont farmhouse and moved their family of four into a small apartment, using the proceeds from the sale to finance a year’s time to write. There, a literal stone’s throw from the Canadian line, it took Mosher just ten months to write Disappearances, a novel based loosely on the life of Jake Blodgett, the logger Mosher had worked for in the woods.
“It just flowed out of me,” Mosher said. “I realized that it wasn’t merely a story that I wanted to write, I needed to tell it.”
Over the next 40 years, Mosher completed twelve novels and two non-fiction memoirs. He lent a voice – his voice - to stories rooted in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, becoming synonymous with the hardscrabble hill farms, north-flowing rivers, tiny, New England villages, and independent-minded people who live there.
Much of Mosher’s work revolved around the fictitious Vermont Kinneson family, following one of its eccentric members along the trail with Lewis and Clark, another through the Civil War, and still more who grappled with dark racism entrenched behind the bucolic setting of Mosher’s hub village, Kingdom Common, in the 1960s.
Sometimes called a regional author, Mosher’s writing, while all set in Vermont, boldly explored every aspect of human nature, from the commendable to the deplorable, forcing the reader through an entire gauntlet of emotions. From the omnipotence of love, to the inescapable ugliness of jealousy and racism, to the entirely-unknowable ways of fate and the future, Mosher built a world as real and large as the one he lived in.
Among many other awards, Mosher was the recipient of a Guggenheim, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, A Vermont’s Governor’s Award, an NAACP award, and a New England Book Award. He passed away following a short battle with cancer in January, 2017, days after completing his final book, Points North, in which he brought his beloved Kinneson family up to the present, leaving his readers with a sense that his stories were complete. He is survived by two adult children, Jake and Annie, both artists in their own right, and his wife, Phillis, who lives in their Irasburg home, right in the heart of Mosher’s Northeast Kingdom.
