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I Want to Talk

by Sylvia Worthley and Sherry Horton

1st Place in the Fine Art / Photography Category
2nd Place in the History / Nonfiction Category
2nd Place in the Women;s Interests Category
Honorable Mention in the Biography / Autobiography / Memoir Category
2020 Royal Dragonfly Book Award

Shortly after Sylvia Worthley turned eighty-two, she summoned her daughter Sherry Horton to her apartment. With her spine straight and hands folded in her lap, Worthley announced, “I want to get down what it was like growing up in Lunenburg,Vermont. Can you help me?” Over the next several weeks, Worthley spent dozens of hours talking about her childhood while Horton taped the conversations and took careful notes. Remembering events of her childhood fondly, Worthley became tearful only when describing aloud, for the first time, her mother’s death in 1933 when Worthley was just twelve. Horton listened eagerly to everything her mother said about the three generations of women who came before her, how they lived on hilly, remote family farms during the tumultuous decades of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. I Want to Talk, the result of compiling these taped conversations and notes, tells the story of a family and a village in northeastern Vermont during the years between 1920 and 1940. This portrait of rural life in New England is enriched with numerous photographs provided both by the family and by local groups focused on the history of Lunenburg, Vermont. 

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)

ISBN: 978-1-951651-25-1 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2020935778

Released 4-14-2020

144 pages

Author Biography

Sherry Horton is a retired English teacher. In 2016, Shanti Arts published Witness Chair: A Memoir of Art, Marriage, and Loss, a book about the final months and death of her husband, artist Chris Horton, when he worked on designs for sixteen “chair” sculptures to commemorate the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Two of the huge steel sculptures have been installed at outdoor sites in Massachusetts. Mother of two sons and twice a grandmother, Horton spends as much time as she can outdoors. While she has lived most of her life in Connecticut, she is still a Vermonter at heart.

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