BRATTLEBORO — Teacher Jennifer Kramer will share her place-based research work with students around renowned science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft's stories linked to sites such as Round Mountain in West Brattleboro for the January Brattleboro Words Project's monthly Roundtable Discussion on Thursday, Jan. 10, from 6 to 7 p.m., at 118 Elliot.
The event is free and refreshments will be served.
According to a news release, Kramer is a longtime sixth-grade teacher at Guilford Central School. She also often leads placed-based and nature-inspired teacher workshops with her husband, Antioch University Professor David Sobel.
Attendees will learn more about how Lovecraft was inspired by his time in Vermont and how a seasoned teacher uses place-based pedagogy to enliven curriculum and spur students' interest and learning.
Roundtable Discussions are also an opportunity for Project research leaders and teachers to share information and inspiration and for the public to discover how they can participate in making podcasts about sites and themes important to our region's storied past.
Lovecraft's story, The Whisperer in Darkness, was set in West Brattleboro after the massive flood of 1927.
“I've never seen no country niftier than the wild hills west of Brattleboro,” Lovecraft wrote to a friend. “The nearness and intimacy of the little domed hills become almost breathtaking. Their steepness and abruptness hold nothing in common with the hum-drum standardized world we know, and we cannot help feeling that our outlines have some strange and almost forgotten meaning.”
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a film about the story, which was shot in the area.
Previously, Brattleboro Area Middle School students under the tutelage of teacher Joe Rivers made a podcast about Lovecraft for the Brattleboro Historical Society's “This Week in Brattleboro History” series (brattleborohistoricalsociety.org/news/2016/04/week-brattleboro-history-h-p-lovecraft).
Student work will be incorporated into the Project website and for professionally produced audio for the Brattleboro Words Trail, the audio walking, biking, and driving tours of the greater Brattleboro area that are a principal product of the Brattleboro Words Project.
For more information, visit www.brattleborowordsproject.org.