What happens when a couple combines high intelligence, high creative writing and art skills, along with what a native New Englander might call a "wicked good sense of humor"?
For over 20 years, Rolf and Cynthia Parker-Houghton have merged their skills and talents to leave their creative marks - from the concrete to the absurd - on the region, creating institutions like the University of Brattleboro, which Rolf refers to as the "oldest non-existent university in the world." Its official disclaimer? "We don't exist, but we do good work."
Cynthia has painted murals celebrating both the fact and fiction of historic Brattleboro, including one of the elusive free-range dinosaur Chicken-Rex in the downtown Harmony Parking Lot.
"There is real history," Cynthia said, "and there is the fictional history that we create. The idea is that we are having fun with it."
They have also created and helped organize events investigating fictional alien spaceship crash sites in Brattleboro, burying and then re-excavating "dinosaur bones" for local paleontology digs, and documenting sightings of the extremely rare Green Mountain Tiny Foot.
Flotillas and catapults are also a recurring Parker-Houghton theme, used in one instance to launch Easter eggs into the Whetstone Brook. The Parker-Houghtons have also organized a popular October jack-o'-lantern flotilla on the Connecticut River.
They also helped with the Riff Raft Regatta, where participants build large boats - more accurately, human-powered floating devices - that they hope will last long enough to finish the 50-yard regatta course, usually held at The Marina on the West River.
And that is very much just a partial list of Parker-Houghton projects.
Looking for, and helping create, community
Originally from Connecticut, Rolf said he first came to the Brattleboro area in 1999 after graduating from the University of California at Irvine. He had a master's degree in entomology and was working on a Ph.D. project involving the study of flatworms.
He said he was looking for a creative community where he could live and work. Brattleboro seemed ideal in many ways, but at the same time, Rolf said, he also became well aware that it was a town with its share of challenges.
Some of those challenges hit painfully close to home.
One of the first local friends he made, and an early member of the University of Brattleboro project, was a talented, creative, and funny artist who had struggled all his life with alcohol addiction. This friend's suicide was part of Rolf's introduction to the continuing cost of substance abuse in the region.
Rolf said he also witnessed a drug-fueled, extremely violent fight on Elliot Street when he first lived here, which shocked and upset him.
"I had never seen violence like that before," he said.
Humor as an antidote to despair
Finding creative ways for a community to use humor to deal with despair, and to help people heal from trauma, became a goal of the Parker-Houghtons.
Thus began the list of local projects they became involved in for over two decades, from fake alien crash sites to fake digs of highly unlikely dinosaur fossils, to the very real Brattleboro Words Project and the Brattleboro Words Trail app, for which Rolf served as the main historian. Cynthia created ceramic map murals for the project, which provides a walking tour of the town's and the region's literary and publishing history with recorded narratives about the people and the projects.
Even with those projects that are fictional, funny, and seemingly silly, the Parker-Houghtons' intent is deep, serious, and concrete. For example, the motto of the mythical University of Brattleboro is "Pugna desperandum cum humor et in conventu cum aliis", which loosely translates as "We fight despair with humor and in community with others."
And that is the key to understanding the science and art of the Parker-Houghtons: using humor to attract and bring people together, to create a sense of hope, and to help develop a sense of community.
"Brattleboro has a lot of challenges," explains Rolf. "It always has. If you can make part of something where we do goofy things, and then tie that in with actual local history, that's a way we can use humor to help people deal with the challenges of day-to-day life."
A creative team
Rolf can be a challenge to interview - ideas stream out of him at a rapid rate, and one idea leads quickly to another. Cynthia, an artist, seems both uniquely equipped and in tune enough to help turn Rolf's visions into a version of reality.
That includes altering photos of local construction projects by digitally inserting dinosaur bones, creating obviously fake "ancient" artifacts with Viking runes, or designing and crafting objects intended to resemble fossilized donuts, then placing them around the community.
Cynthia took Rolf's idea that Vermont should have its own mythical variation of Bigfoot, and she turned it into Green Mountain Tiny Foot, a hairy, 6-inch-tall doll, crafted from what used to be a GI Joe action figure.
Patrons can borrow Tiny Foot from Brooks Memorial Library, and they are encouraged to photograph it in various locations.
That is the Parker-Houghtons' concept - goofiness helping to create community - put in action.
Cynthia is also part of the University of Brattleboro faculty, where she is dean of the art department, the paranormal paleontology department, and the reverse archaeology department.
If you create your own department, you also can become a dean at the university, or if you create a free, fun, and substance-free event, they'll award you a complimentary doctorate diploma - no pesky classes or thesis required. For a $25 handling fee, they'll even print and send you a copy of the diploma.
Faculty also have to create their own University of Brattleboro alter ego. Rolf is Prof. Balderdash; Cynthia is Dr. Rea L. Faux. Another faculty member is Dr. Very O'Kay.
Their approach to building community through humor is unique and admittedly different, and as Rolf noted, "Most people get it; some don't."
Writing your way out of depression
For some, one of the many side effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic was isolation and depression. Rolf said this happened to him.
Instead of "lying awake in bed" trying to deal with insomnia and depression, he decided he would "use creativity to help with depression during Covid" - in particular, writing poetry.
That led to one of the Parker-Houghtons' latest adventures earlier last year.
Rolf took part in the Ó Bhéal Five Words International Poetry Contest, where each week five words are released and writers and poets have a week to include them in a poem of 50 lines or fewer using the words. The poet could focus on the five words or use them to explore other ideas.
"I did several poems," he said. "I did it every week as part of my therapy, and then I'd share it with writers in the group."
Rolf's ideas about what to write began to center around what his life in Brattleboro had been. Eventually, his poem "The University of Brattleboro and the Uncluttered Table" was shortlisted in the contest.
"I knew there was a story I wanted to tell," Rolf said. He wanted to pull all of his personal history in Brattleboro into a single poem.
"There was the University of Brattleboro. Our relationship as a couple," he said. "There were the problems of Brattleboro. But it was mostly a poem about the joy of creation in a community."
Having his poem shortlisted opened up the opportunity for him to read the poem at a pub event in Cork, Ireland. The Parker-Houghtons decided to make an adventure of it and go to the reading.
The fact that they lacked passports complicated the situation, but with the help of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' office, they were able to get them in early April and left for Ireland the next day.
They jokingly refer to it as the "University of Brattleboro International Poetry Tour."
They were in Ireland from April 8 to 16 and did the reading on the 10th.
Rolf is part of the Write Action writers group in Brattleboro, and the reading opened up some new ideas about "what an open mic and writing group can be," he said.
"It was so friendly, and people stayed and listened to others after they read their own work. There was hugging, a feeling of community," he said. Writers also read the poetry of other poets and not just their own, and "having great poetry read by people who love it was wonderful," Rolf said. "It was exposing all of us to great poetry."
Being used to readings where poets come, read their own works, and get feedback, Rolf said it's been great to bring the poetry reading ideas he saw in Ireland to his readings in the Brattleboro area.
The third Thursday open poetry readings held at 6 p.m. at Brattleboro's Drawing Studio are open to all kinds of poetry. Rolf said that the poets first read and discuss a favorite poet's work before they read their own, which has helped turn the reading into a "mini-education symposium."
The couple always have projects in the works. The Parker-Houghtons unveiled the first of their Perpetual Treasure Code projects: a cryptogram on the side of the Boomerang Building on Main Street.
It's the first of 10 such crypto codes that they hope to get up on the side of several Brattleboro buildings, all leading to modest treasures hidden around the community.
The one going up in the alley by Boomerang tells people how to find a glass diamond the couple buried somewhere in the area.
"So many people are on the verge of giving up hope," Rolf said. "That is another form of depression. I believe that being creative with other people in a community is a way of dealing with that, a way of creating a completely different situation. Housing and other issues are extremely important to a community, but we also need to have community art spaces and events."
The couple funds all the projects through t-shirt sales available at the free events they run, and at Cynthia's website, houghtonart.com.
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More information and details about new projects - including an upcoming March 30 Eggster catapult event on Whetstone Brook - can be found on the University of Brattleboro website and its Facebook page.
This Arts item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons.