Yvonne Daley with her dog, Daniel.

photo: Pamela Gerard

When writer Yvonne Daley identifies a good she can contribute to the world, she makes it happen. Just months after tropical storm Irene hit Vermont in 2011, Daley saw the need to record instances of community togetherness in the face of devastation, so she authored A Mighty Storm: Stories of Resilience after Irene.

That same year, she published Octavia Boulevard, chronicling her years on the San Francisco boulevard, from 2003 to 2007. A 20-year part-time resident of the city, Daley had noticed her neighborhood was losing its affordable housing to Silicon Valley gentrification and gave the poor and homeless on her street a voice in this innovatively narrated memoir.

And that’s just her own writing (and barely a fraction of it). Having attended numerous writing workshops where she witnessed young writers lose confidence after hearing ill-expressed criticism, Daley and her husband, Chuck Clarino, started the Green Mountain Writers Conference, a five-day workshop she has held at a wooded retreat the past 18 summers—most recently at the Mountaintop Inn and Resort in Chittenden. There, the website promises, writers are “critiqued in ways that are helpful rather than hurtful.”

Verdant Is Born

So it’s no surprise Daley started her own small publishing company, Verdant Books, in 2010, when she found that traditional publishers no longer met the needs of many of the state’s writers—herself included. As it’s often noted, Vermont has an unusually high number of writers per capita compared to other states, and many are literary writers producing worthy works that appeal to a limited readership—not the stuff of Big Publishing.

Verdant is focused on bringing each author’s vision to life, according to Daley, who collaborates closely with writers on everything from the book’s reason for being to line editing. So far, Verdant has produced nine customized, beautifully designed books, including poetry collections by Verandah Porche, Tom Smith, and George Mathon; short stories by Laird Harrison; and memoirs by Martha Molnar and by residents of a home for seniors in Rutland.

Daley published three of her own books through Verdant: Octavia Boulevard, A Mighty Storm, and The Bend in the Road, an account of Rutland resident Lenny Burke, who sustained a brain injury at age 17 and whose family and community rallied to help both him and others with brain injuries. That last book is formatted much like the pages of a newspaper and reflects Daley’s long career as a journalist: she wrote full-time for daily newspapers and other publications for almost two decades, and she has taught journalism at San Francisco State University for the last 18 years.

Daley has also published her work in the traditional manner with major publishers. In 2003, Simon and Schuster put out An Independent Mind: Adventures of a Public Servant, Jim Jeffords’s autobiography, which Daley coauthored with him and Howard Coffin. And University Press of New England published her anthology Vermont Writers: A State of Mind in 2005.

These experiences were mixed, at best. Despite a contract naming her coauthor, Simon and Schuster wanted to drop her name from the cover at the last minute, and she had to fight to keep it on. The academic press, meanwhile, was pleasant to work with but had no marketing budget, so she scheduled her own author readings and wrote the press releases advertising those appearances. That experience helps her coach new Verdant authors on creating their own PR.

Daley doesn’t dismiss established publishers. She continues to use an agent to shop around her own new manuscripts if she deems them appropriate for the larger market.

In short, Daley is extremely knowledgeable about publishing. According to Debbie Wraga, Northshire Bookstore’s publishing coordinator who has worked with Daley on Verdant Books since its start, “Yvonne has a wealth of knowledge about editing, marketing, social media,” and the many routes of getting a book to its readers.

The Small Print

Though it’s not quite a trend, several Vermont women with deep experience in the publishing world have lately begun offering literary writers a more personalized route to publishing. These include Dede Cummings, a West Brattleboro resident with a long career as a book designer who founded Green Writers Press in her home; and Holly Johnson, owner of several Vermont newspapers and the magazine Destination Vermont, who founded Wind Ridge Books in Shelburne, now led by managing editor Lin Stone.

Verdant shares these small publishers’ raison d’être. As Stone puts it, “It is a response to the big publishers going for more formulaic successes and not representing the smaller communities.” Drawing on a localvore metaphor, Stone says Wind Ridge is trying to “reinvent publishing” the Vermont way by offering not a “cheap orange cheese but an artisan, cave-aged cheese.”

Castleton poet Tom Smith, whose collection From the Raft was published by Daley in 2012, says he chose Verdant for similar reasons: “It seemed like the ecological thing to do, sort of like buying local.” Smith, who has published 13 books, all with small publishers in New York, California, and elsewhere, particularly enjoyed working directly with Daley instead of through e-mail. “I was totally involved,” he says, deciding on the front-cover design (photo, format, color) and back-cover copy.

In one important aspect, however, Daley’s approach to publishing is different from Cummings’s or Stone’s: it’s idealistic. While Cummings says Green Writers is starting to turn a profit after a year and a half, and Wind Ridge just became a nonprofit in part to access donations and grants, Daley says frankly, “I’m not doing this to make money. I’m a college professor; I’m doing better than I ever thought I would. The point is to make a book the writer wants.”

Verandah Porche, the Guilford poet who published her collection Sudden Eden with Verdant and has often led workshops at the Green Mountain Writers Conference, describes Daley as “a rare person” with a “profoundly ethical heart.” Verdant Books, Porche wrote in a recent e-mail, “springs from [Daley’s] conviction about what the world needs now: a small, independent publisher for work that might otherwise be overlooked, to produce beautiful books with power for the authors.”

Doing Good

Idealism is deeply rooted in Daley, a factor both of her historical moment and of her understanding of Vermont. The 70-year-old moved from Boston to Goshen, Vermont, in 1967, driven in part by her opposition to the Vietnam War, in which her boyfriend had been killed. As she writes in Octavia, her generation was “in search of something we couldn’t articulate” but aware that it rejected “a way of life that... justified the sacrifice of young people in the name of democracy and honored money over most everything else.”

In the Addison County hamlet of Goshen—whose population was 227 in 2000— Daley “practiced being a hippie,” she jokes. She lived in a farmhouse, ran a food co-op, and had five children in fewer than 10 years, eventually rearing them as a single mom. “I lived on nothing with a ton of kids,” she recalls. But in 1979, she decided she needed a steady income.

The Herald was advertising for stringers. Daley had never written for a newspaper and had only half a master’s degree in philosophy, but she was determined. “I had nothing to show them,” she recalls, “but I kept going to the news room and talking to the city editor.” Finally, the editor told her to report on a controversial school official in nearby Brandon. When the man wouldn’t answer her calls, Daley intercepted him at a school-board meeting where, before her eyes, he was fired. She called the paper that night and saw her first story in print the next day.

Daley went on to write for the Herald for the next 18 years. During her tenure, the paper was considered one of the best in New England; it is still the only Vermont newspaper to have won a Pulitzer Prize, in 2000, for David Moats’s editorials on civil unions.
Daley was an environmental reporter whose investigative work was so respected that the Herald allowed her to freelance for other publications, including the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and Time magazine. For one Globe story in the 1990s, Daley lived for three weeks with the Cree and Inuit on Hudson Bay to learn how Hydro-Quebec’s proposed dam expansion would threaten their ways of life. She won New England’s and Vermont’s top journalism awards, including several Vermont Reporter of the Year awards and the Mavis Doyle Award, named after the former Vermont statehouse reporter and awarded, quips Daley, “for digging persistence.”

In 1997, Daley’s life took a different turn when she won the John S. Knight Fellowship, which awards talented midcareer journalists a year at Stanford University to study what moves them. Daley had recently earned her MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier and was developing an interest in other kinds of writing beyond environmental journalism. At Stanford, she studied with English department faculty Eavan Boland, John L’Heureux, and Elizabeth Talent. And she felt the pull to do more good. “I starting thinking it was time to share what I knew with younger people,” she recalls.

Just north of Stanford, San Francisco State University (SFSU) was “diversity central,” as Daley describes it, packed with nonnative English speakers and first-generation college students. Again, with no experience, Daley started leaving samples of her writing with the English department chair. Eventually, after one rejection, she was hired to teach journalism in 1998.

For the next 18 years, Daley led a bicoastal life, returning to Vermont during academic breaks and teaching intermittently at Vermont colleges, including Castleton, St. Joseph, and the Community College of Vermont. Daley is currently completing her last semester at SFSU and will return to Rutland this summer to live there full-time with her husband, Clarino, another former Herald reporter.

Daley is moving back for many reasons: to see more of her six grandchildren, to give more authors a voice through Verdant, to write more books. But at least one motivation is her horror at the damage capitalism has done to San Francisco—the subject of Octavia Boulevard. “The city’s wrecked,” she avers. “Little Victorians are selling for $2.3 million. Where are the teachers and writers and nurses and artists going to live? Well,” she adds wryly, “you move back to Vermont.”

A Love Affair

For Daley, Vermont has always been a place where community togetherness and self-determination hold greater sway than consumerism. For her introduction to Vermont Writers: A State of Mind (2005), she dug up a quote by one Vermonter who wrote in 1801 that the state inspires a joy “which surpasses all the pleasure that it is in the power of riches or splendor to bestow.”
Vermont Writers, the book for which Daley perhaps remains best known, distills interviews she conducted with 21 notable writers living in Vermont about their writing and their choice of locale. It was an attempt to answer the question of “why Vermont had attracted so many great writers.”

“Solzhenitsyn, Alvarez, Kincaid—they all found a refuge here to write about things that are disturbing,” Daley says.
Daley is often unabashed in her praise of Vermont. A Bend in the Road opens with an idyllic portrait of Lenny Burke’s young parents in the 1960s settling into “the small and close-knit town of Chittenden in the magical state of Vermont.” Such works put the author more in the tradition of Vermont admirers such as Frank Bryan, champion of Vermont’s town meeting tradition in All Those in Favor and other books, than, say, Nancy Gallagher, whose Breeding Better Vermonters documents Vermont’s early 20th-century eugenics program.

Daley doesn’t deny that Vermont has its difficulties. But, she believes that, when Vermonters encounter problems, they work together to solve them rather than clash over them.

“Take the heroin problem in Rutland,” she says. “Heroin is a rural problem everywhere in America. So what are you going to do about it?” In Vermont’s case, she points out, both Governor Peter Shumlin and Rutland mayor Chris Louras made it “their number-one issue.” And the city’s wealthy residents, she adds, “who wouldn’t have to deal with it if they didn’t want to, are trying to do something about it. In rural Vermont, people address problems. They’re a community. That’s why I like it.”
In fact, she adds, “It’s a love affair.”

Green and Growing

When Daley returns to Vermont, she’ll continue working on two books she is writing about the 1960s and ’70s in Vermont—the very historical moment she first got to know the place. Ever the journalist, when I first contacted her by e-mail for this story, she was conducting research for those books in Vietnam. (“I’m writing from a boat in the Halong Bay in Vietnam!”)

As for Verdant, Daley says she intends to keep it small “so I can work closely with writers on design and distribution.” And she remains selective about which books she thinks need to see the light of day: “I’m really interested in books with a socially conscious purpose, which have more to say than, ‘This is about me.’ A lot of contemporary work seems very narcissistic.”

“Yvonne works on books she becomes passionate about,” explains Wraga at Northshire. “With The Bend in the Road, you can’t help but pick up that book and feel the emotion through the paper. You take that journey with her, and it’s amazing.”

And she has the same passion for others’ works, as Porche can attest. The poet’s first book was published by Harper in 1974, but the experience was so bad that she retreated from publishing for decades. It was Daley who convinced her to try the Verdant way. “She made it easy for me to put many years of work before the public,” Porche writes. “Her commitment convinced me that the time was right to share my work.”

Daley’s faith in people and books is reflected in the name she chose for her publisher. “Verdant means forever young and green and growing. And,” she adds with a laugh, “it has Vermont in it.”

Amy Lilly, an associate editor of Vermont Woman, lives and writes in Burlington.