Panhead is an exploration of hill farm life in Vermont in the sixties. Paul and Glenda are growing up on a small hill farm on the spine of Mt. Pisgah above the Northeast Kingdom's legendary Lake Willoughby.They keep close to each other and have a shared sense that their way of life is coming to an end. Their lives change when they leave for college and change yet again when Paul returns home to help his father keep the farm. But only when Paul returns home on his Harley Panhead to help his parents with the farm does the drama really begin. The dream of the open road--wind in the hair, power in the groin--is common among men young and old, but it is fraught with complexity and often danger. Panhead follows Paul on his journey from a hillside farm to college, to work in the Midwest and almost home again. For both brother and sister, Paul's trip home raises the question of when life is worth living and when it stops being so.

Panhead

Literature & Fiction

Schubart, Bill

Genre Fiction

Magic Hill Press LLC

This is a work of fiction based on the lives of The Reverend Baybie Hoover and her Deaconess of Music and dear friend, Virginia Brown. In 1976, Philo Records recorded an album of Baybie and Virginia (Philo 1019) and several of us became immersed in the narrative of their extraordinarily courageous lives.
The license taken in the writing of this first person narrative is broad. Some of Baybie's own language is used, drawn from recordings of her telling her own story and the same with Virginia. Other elements of their story are extrapolated from long conversations with the two of them. The narrative is further informed by a wonderful documentary film entitled "A Lady Named Baybie" made by Martha Sandlin in 1980, four years after the recording was made.
Some of the story, especially the later years, is largely surmised. Those of us who knew these extraordinary women have never lost a deep sense of respect and affection for them and their music. 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.
" I was born sighted but then was blinded by the drunken doctor who gave birth to me. I was raped by my foster father and lied to when my little girl was born. She was sold for adoption without anyone asking me. When I had an abortion a few years later, the doctor told me he did me a favor by removing my ovaries, but he never asked me. The Lighthouse called us mendicants and wanted us to learn crafts, but we're working women -- buskers. We work for our living. I am the Reverend Baybie Hoover. I can sing for eight hours and never repeat a song. This is Ginger Brown, my Deaconess of Music. You are welcome to come to our little church."

I Am Baybie: The Rev. Baybie Hoover

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Author Bill Schubart brings to life the friends and characters of his native Lamoille County where in the late '50s and early '60s life was lived close to the earth and often against the grain. Schubart's collection of 22 stories captures a Vermont in transition from an enclave of hill farms and small towns where everyone knew your grandfather to a Valhalla for urban expats seeking chairlifts or rural renewal. Schubart's full-hearted and compassionate evocation of this Vermont is by turns poignant, funny and savory. The stories give readers a good excuse to stay up late to discover how Wyvis will circumvent the new prohibition on having more than three junk yards in your yard or what bait Pete Trepanier trolls with inside Mer-Lu's bar in Hardwick on a Saturday night. This thoroughly enjoyable collection is as finely etched as the frost ferns on your winter window panes.

The Lamoille Stories

Humor & Satire

A wholly new collection of Lamoille Stories from Vermont author, Bill Schubart. Many of the original characters in the 2008 edition like Jeeter, Pete, Theron and Lila are back in this new set of stories. • Hiding his beer from his wife, Willy discovers that if he buries a 12 oz. bottle of Old Fitzgerald beer in the woods, in time it'll grow into a quart. • Auctioneer, Art Messier, comes unhinged when, at the end of his auction, his nemesis Pete and his boys bid up the value on an end-lot box of junk. • David unwillingly discovers the mysteries of the female sex when he loses his VW keys. • Eugenie raises pigs, but ever since childhood has dreaded the chaos of slaughter, until she cooks up the ultimate anesthetic send-off for her pets. • After 60 years of marriage, Theron's wife Lila succumbs to diabetes on their farm. Theron defies local funeral traditions and, with the help of his friend Dr. Phil, lays Lila to her final rest.

The Lamoille Stories II

The Priest explores the struggle many boys have becoming men - especially around sexuality - and how one boy finds safety within the vocational confines 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. The narrative follows a working class altar boy as he becomes a priest. His vicarious and then real experiences are increasingly at odds with his religion and he must choose between the dogmatic contraints of a crumbling Church and his own experience ministering to the needs of people he meets, all of which takes him to a surprising place.

The Priest

Schubart, Bill H

Literary

The Correctional Facility is an illustrated novella updating Dante Alighieri's 700-year-old classic The Inferno. Our guide however is not Virgil but Walt Whitman and Dante's flaming pits are succeeded by modern brutalist prison architecture. Many of the sins of Dante's time persist today, but mankind has scaled old ones and invented new ones. Invention, technology, economics, and politics have, since Dante's time, nuanced and scaled our concept of evil.

The Correctional Facility

Schubart, William H

Spirit Traffic recounts how, at the age of 50, the author learned to ride a motorcycle, overcame the terror of navigating her steep dirt driveway in Vermont, and, three days after her son's college graduation, set off with him and her yoga-teacher husband (his stepdad) on a 10,000-mile two-wheel adventure that took them all into uncharted territory-both as novice riders, and as a family. As if in the saddle of her dual-sport BMW, the reader will experience the good, the bad, and the heartbreak of her journey as a soon-to-be-empty-nester grappling with impermanence, sexuality, hot flashes, high winds, and tailgating tour buses.\nSpirit Traffic is at once a colorful travelogue of a bucket-list bikers' route across America and an unflinching memoir of a middle-aged mom conquering her fears (on and off the bike), unpacking a complicated childhood with an addict father and stoic mother, and ultimately, learning to let go of her only child. (Think Blue Highways meets Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets Operating Instructions meets Wild.)\nWith its first-person accounts of legendary rides such as the Burr Trail, Hell's Backbone Road, and the Pacific Coast Highway, Spirit Traffic will find a ready audience among bikers. But as a midlife memoir, Spirit Traffic will also resonate for anyone who is navigating the departure of a child, negotiating the dynamic tensions of family, or simply yearning for life's next adventure.

Spirit Traffic: A Mother's Journey of Self-Discovery and Letting Go

Taylor, C Jane

Parenting & Relationships

Lila and 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. Lila and Theron are from a time and place where the arguments that divide us today would seem meaningless against the exigencies of kinship and survival.

Lila & Theron

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