Join us for this free event:
What’s Past is Prologue!
Saturday, April 1st
Workshop: 3PM - 5PM
Public Performance: 6PM - 8PM
Ages 16+
FREE
Hardwick Municipal Meeting Hall
What you did yesterday, or last year, or back when you were six years old; all are important and make for a good story… if you can tell it!
Join WonderArts for a celebration of storytelling April 1st at the Hardwick Municipal Meeting Hall. At 3pm, Peter Gould shows us how he takes his personal experiences and makes them into stories that are fun to write, great fun to share, and more fun to hear. Peter teaches us how to use things we can see, like jackets or shoes or tools or books, to bring the story to life. Participants will be inspired by examples of Peter’s prose and stage presence and will start to extract their own stories from their time on the farm, in the sugar house, advocating for a public library, or spending a beautiful day outside.
At 6pm, we close the afternoon of workshopping with a performance, inviting friends and neighbors to sit and listen to our stories. Any who may be inspired are invited to share their own stories, too.
Peter says, “Let’s share in the unmatchable fun of hearing each other's stories!"
Peter Gould (he/him) moved to Vermont to join the back-to-the-land generation in the 1970's, an experience he wrote about in his first novel, BURNT TOAST (Alfred A. Knopf). Since then, he has been a writer and a theater worker. His most recent book, HORSE-DRAWN YOGURT (Green Writers Press) tells true life tales about those commune years. For more than twenty years, as half of the duo Gould & Stearns, Peter performed physical comedy and story theater and taught residencies with young students, more than 3000 times in nearly every state in the USA. He continues this work solo today.
Peter founded the youth Shakespeare program, "Get Thee to the Funnery," in 1998, and continues to direct the summer camp to this day. Peter has directed nearly one hundred youth theater productions of all kinds in many places, including England and India! In 2002, Peter earned his PhD from Brandeis University and in 2009, he went on to write WRITE NAKED (Farrar Straus & Giroux), a Young-Adult novel that won the National Green Earth Book Award, a prize given each year to a book that inspires environmental activism in youthful readers. In 2016, Peter was the recipient of the Vermont Arts Council/Governor's Award for Arts Educator of the Year.
Peter continues to write books and direct plays engaged with issues of our time. He lives in Brattleboro with his wife, Vermont State Representative, and visual artist Mollie Burke. They have three children and five grandchildren and are active around Vermont in the areas of climate change, migrant workers' rights, food and farming, prison reform, restorative justice, cross-cultural communication, and always arts-in-education for young people: especially for families who need support.
