I haven’t been posting, because I’ve been writing a book. It’s A Guide to the Battle of Bennington & the Bennington Monument (West Mountain Press), scheduled for publication on Battle Day, August 16. I wrote it with visitors to Bennington in mind, but we all need to revisit our history now and then. It’s quite a stirring story – if I were making a movie of the Battle, I wouldn’t change a thing. With the help of my terrific designer Leslie Noyes, I’ve tried to make the book visually appealing. Here’s what the cover looks like:

The book will be available at outlets in Bennington County and through direct ordering. I’ll be posting information about how to get hold of it as soon as I have it in hand next week. In the meantime, I’m going to be speaking about it on VPR’s “Vermont edition” tomorrow (Thursday, August 11) at 12:35 pm.

On July 16, 2009, the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) published a little confessional essay of mine in its Op-Ed pages. I received compliments from a couple of American subscribers at Anatolia College in Greece, where I was teaching English, a piece of fan mail from a woman in Amsterdam, and a check from the IHT. End of story.

Until a week ago, when I mentioned “Render Unto Larry’s” to my girlfriend Amelia. She googled it in my presence. A link to its original appearance was the top hit. But not the only one.

“What this?” she asked. “‘Holland’s purpose in telling the general public’… It’s from a site called Course Hero.”
“What’s going on?” I wondered out loud.

Lower down in the search results we found the answer: there was my essay listed in the Table of Contents of the 2^nd edition of Back to the Lake: A Reader for Writers, ed. Thomas Cooley, an anthology published by Norton in 2011 for the college market. The rest of the links came from various student papers and study guides that had made their way online. We could access online only the Table of Contents of the anthology, but I was able to see the names of some heavy hitters (Dillard, Russo, E.B. White) in proximity to my own. The publisher had neglected to inform me that I had become a classic author. I suppose the Times had given permission to reprint my piece. No mysterious royalty payments have arrived in my bank account. I was the last to know.

The student search results were more productive: “‘Render Unto Larry’s,’ Strategies and Structures,” for example, by Alexia Hankerson for Course Hero. I could only view 2/3 of the first page without paying for further access, but Hankerson seems to be helping others with their homework (for a fee). “Holland’s purpose for telling the general public about ‘the first time’ he confessed to stealing from Larry’s is because it was more difficult the first time he wanted to make amends.” The thrill of seeing my name in the third person, as a man with a purpose no less, quickly faded as the sentence grew murky, beginning at “is because.” It doesn’t speak very well for Course Hero, I’m afraid, but it is perhaps to be expected from a site which offers students 7 million course-specific, crowd-sourced study documents, one dedicated to my Larry’s piece as taught in English 103 at Northern Illinois University.

Wait, there’s more. A student named Schmicker (location, somewhere in cyberspace) wrote his first paper on my essay. He summarized it well, then said, “Reading this story, many memories from my childhood came back to me, but one in particular stood out.” My commentator was another juvenile thief, it seems, even younger than I was. He went on to tell his own story of transgression and deliverance, which shows the influence of Holland on Schmicker. Perhaps he was a student at Illinois Valley Community College (I seem to be well liked in Illinois), which assigned my essay in English 1001 in the fall term of (no year given). Meanwhile, at Sowela Technical Community College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, students were called on to discuss Holland’s use of dialogue and point of view as they relate to the definition of the narrative essay. After learning about the “success story” formula used by Franklin in his Autobiography, they are told that “one reading which uses a variation on this pattern is Phil Holland’s ‘Render unto Larry’s’.”  Franklin is actually in my story in the form of the face with pursed lips on the hundred dollar bill.

“Larry’s” also shows up as a 3-page homework assignment in Miss Abram’s honors English class at Wissahickon High in a suburb of Philadelphia. Miss Abram assigned, besides essays on me, Shakespeare, and other distinguished authors, the following intriguing paper topic:

Write a one-paragraph essay proving the thesis below. Pick two sins and give examples from the text that prove your thesis. Thesis: The members of St. Mary’s of the Immaculate Conception Church are very sinful, indeed.

Kinky! Especially for a public school. But I see now that the assignment refers to an article in the Onion that also landed in Narrative.

Amelia clicked on another link and found “Larry’s” coupled with an essay by Toni Morrison at St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Michigan. The next entry transported us to the English 103 syllabus at McCook Community College in McCook (pop. 7,698), Nebraska.

And there the trail ended, in the middle of the Great Plains.

I ordered a second-hand copy of Back to the Lake. It just arrived. I see that it is not unlike the anthology that I have been using this term at the Bennington branch of the Community College of Vermont, except that I am in it. There is even a brief biography, lifted, it seems, from the website of TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, on whose board I once sat. And, of course, my essay is accompanied by a battery of thoughtful study questions about Holland’s purpose, point of view, etc.

Before you rush to order Back to the Lake, I must advise you to seek out the 2^nd edition; “Render Unto Larry’s” has unfortunately disappeared from the 3^rd. Sic transit gloria.

I guess I should explain the woodpiles. I have 21 of them. I counted them today, taking as one pile one stack of firewood piled 3 to 4 feet high on rails with cribbing at both ends, that is, with towers of half-round, cross-piled logs to bookend each pile. Each stack contains one-third to one-half cord of wood, so I figure that I have at least 8 cords on hand. That is what I should have: 4 to burn this winter and 4 to season for next year.

Last week I visited the man who grew up on the farm of which these 23.5 acres were a modest part. In his boyhood (be was born in 1925) this land, now mostly woodland, was pasture for sheep and cows. The woodlot was elsewhere on the property, and they took 30 cords of firewood out of it each year: 10 for the family house, 10 for his grandfather’s house across the road, and 10 for sugaring. His father always had it stacked a year ahead of time, too. He would have had nearly 60 cords laid up at this time of year, which puts my 8 cords in perspective. All that wood would have been cut before chain-saws and splitters, moreover. I do split with a maul myself, but my woodpiles are child’s play compared to the cords of the past.

I am not much of a quant, but let me do a little arithmetic. My woodbox holds roughly 40 pieces of firewood. It’s 10 or so cubic feet. That works out to 500 pieces of firewood per cord. That means I have cut, split (as needed), and stacked around 4000 pieces of firewood since October of last year. I had to cut most of those trees down anyway, and the biggest ones, an oak, a black birch, a red maple, and two beeches, had outgrown their welcome in the backyard.

I have come to know my wood well during these encounters. When a cord and a half gets stacked on my front porch over Christmas (I am expecting the help of elves), I imagine playing the 16-foot-long pile like a xylophone, according to the day’s needs: selecting a fanfare of split red maple for the first fire of the morning, then variations on the theme of heat with maple rounders or pieces of black birch, giving way to well-seasoned oak or (depending on the temperature outside) a riff of hot-burning hornbeam, and then in late afternoon, when the fire has died down, a piece of popple or paper birch to quickly reignite it for the evening burn.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.  I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. 

Everyone who heats with wood knows who wrote those words. The guy had a small house by a pond, and an open hearth instead of a stove. And he too used his wood strategically:

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other.  I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing.  My house was not empty though I was gone.  It was as if I had a cheerful housekeeper behind.  It was I and Fire that lived there.

I too can see, and smile at, some of my piles out the kitchen window, but I haven’t developed that same intimacy with this not-yet-arrived winter’s god of fire yet, especially during the sweet, mild December days we’ve been having lately. It is 6 pm, and the biscuit fire I laid this morning has long gone out. I may or may not light another one this evening. But I remember how close I felt to Fire last February. That was more like survival than housekeeping, though. I am ready!

These were not the first snowflakes. Those fell briefly at the peak of autumn foliage. Even these did not accumulate: it turned out to be just a dusting. Delicate flakes dropped from a cloud that was enveloping the mountain and seeping through the woods. I watched them fall through the frame of an eastern window, with the bare-limbed trees behind them. They descended gently in straight lines at a modest diagonal in the soft wind. The flakes were heavy enough to fall, not drift, but slow enough that the eye could ride a single flake from the top of the window to the bottom: Zen skiing. The lines bent and straightened as the breeze rose and fell.

At the same time, a fire was burning in the woodstove at half the distance to the window. My old Resolute has a stove-glass fanlight across the upper portion of its doors, with iron ribs like rays and curving elements festooned between their terminations. The orange of the fire through the frosted glass was the orange of the rainbow, bright and warm. Pieces of the sun were burning slowly in my woodstove: What is the energy in wood but the light of the sun in organic form? The fire breathed and glowed in the fanlight while the snowflakes fell steadily in the window.