TRELEVEN - Key Persons
Anna Mullen was the inaugural resident. Anna's cover letter explains her project. While at Treleven, she spent every day with the sheep trying to determine if she could tell them apart, understand their relationships with one another, and learn their daily cycle. Her observations were recorded in a series of essays and poems.
B. Amore is an artist, sculptor, writer, and social justice worker. The Invisible Odysseys project was her creation.
Beth Anne Royer works for the City of Bridgeport, CT as a Project Manager (busting out 500 page budgets) and webmaster. She lives in a city, works in a city, and spends a lot of time thinking about why they do & don't work. She enjoys contemplating spaces where commerce, surprises, and art can all get along. She writes poetry and other prose, and reads a lot. She helped Treleven get this virtual space together.
Cheryl Mitchell lives on a three-generation sheep farm; home base for her teaching, research, and social justice work. Her particular interests are issues that affect vulnerable families (child care, health care, education, social policy, housing, immigration, youth justice and economic justice). She is fascinated by the relationships between people, place, spirit, and social action. She co-created the Addison County Parent/Child Center, the Vermont Parent/Child Center Network, the Addison County Community Trust (a housing and land preservation trust), the Vermont Children's Forum (now Voices for Vermont's Children), the Vermont Early Childhood Educator Licensure Project, and the Addison County Farm Worker Coalition. She served for ten years as Deputy Secretary of the Agency of Human Services under Governor Howard Dean. She is currently on the Board of Treleven, Inc. the Early Care and Learning Partnership, Inc. Nomadicare, and Beacon Hill Friends House. She has served on the Boards of Lets Grow Kids, the Vermont Community Foundation and the Vermont Children's Hospital.
Don Mitchell's father, Wayne Mitchell, was actually born a Treleven-a very old Cornish surname that roughly translates as ‘the homestead on the level land.' It's a name that Don has been trying to keep alive, since his own name would have been Donald Treleven if not for a long-ago legal name change on his father's part.
Don is a novelist, essayist and sometime screenwriter whose most recent books are THE NATURE NOTEBOOKS (a novel) and a guidebook to Vermont in the Fodor's/Compass American series. He's also the architect and builder of over a dozen low-cost, energy-efficient structures on Treleven Farm, and a shepherd with 35 years' experience managing a flock of sheep there. One of his current interests is forest management with the goal of enhancing habitat for endangered bats.
From 1984 to 2009 Don taught courses at Middlebury College, primarily in creative writing-especially narrative fiction and writing for film-and environmental literature. Now he devotes most of his time to projects designed to enhance the farm and support the vision of Treleven, Inc.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Writer
Erin Ruble is a writer and lawyer. After completing law school at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, she clerked for the Hon. William Wayne Justice and interned for the International Criminal Court for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania. She then moved to Vermont, where she engaged in general private practice for four years, handling cases ranging from environmental justice issues to family law. She currently focuses primarily on complex immigration matters.
Her law practice as well as her writing have been shaped by her deep interest in human rights and social justice, as well as curiosity as to the varieties and interactions of human culture. Her fiction writing explores the deep connection between culture, history, and the land, and investigates how meaning is ineluctably created by the physical landscape.
Erin has relished the chance to enter into Vermont's rich community life, to participate in municipal and service organizations and to volunteer with a science and environmental program at the local elementary school. She lives in New Haven with her husband and their two kids, who help to manage a vegetable garden and a sometime population of chickens.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Vermont Advisor and Project Leader
Ethan Mitchell, is currently a Vermont Advisor and Project Leader for not back to school camp.
He is a scruffy-looking gentleman who likes to work with stone, ideas, and paper. He collects questions. He has spent most of the last few years taking care of his lover, who got (and so far has beaten) leukemia. He is eternally inspired by unschoolers, and yet remains somewhat suspicious of unschooling. Having worked for the last few years at a homeschooling center that has evolved into a school, Ethan is now mostly leaving the teaching gig to become a mad scientist. We'll see how that goes.
In five or so sessions at NBTSC, Ethan has taught workshops on the history of unschooling, statistics, the Bible, stone carving, alternative currencies, natural history, how to ask questions, and he can't remember what else. He recommends reading William Blake and Ursula Leguin, walking across a major city and a major mountain range, getting a job you hate and a job you love, and learning to cook something incredibly complicated. He has opinions about things. Ethan serves as an educational consultant for the Walden Project, where he teaches social history. His class is popularly known as the Ethan Mitchell Show. It draws on his widespread and eclectic reading and his social research.
Ethan is a classically self taught individual. He traveled around the world (mostly on foot) when he was 17: learned carpentry and community engagement working for Habitat for Humanity in the inner city of Baltimore and the Altiplano of Bolivia. He learned about global economics working in the aging gold mines of Bolivia, about ecosystems traveling down the Amazon to collect botanical specimens and about political processes and social change helping to build roads, lay in water lines, and prevent violence as a friendly presence with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, He is a writer, blogger, builder, and ecstatic cook.
Job Titles:
- Director of Beacon Hill Friends House
Treleven was delighted to welcome Holly Baldwin, director of Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston as a fall resident. Holly proposed using the quiet of the farm, and the support of Treleven Board members, as a way to plan out the three month sabbatical that she had recently been offered. While here, she spent lots of time walking/hiking, reading, and enjoying the solitude. For 11 years she directed BHFH, an intentional community of 21 people. As she said "when you live where you work, and are responsible for the well being of your community, there is little time or space for quiet contemplation". You can read more about BHFH and Holly's thoughtful articles here: Beacon Hill Friends House.
As you will see from the post, her sabbatical opened up so many new avenues of thought that she has decided to take a new step in her career. We were grateful to be one of the way stations on her journey toward new experiences.
Jane Jackson is a nurse midwife, social justice advocate, writer, and quilt maker. She spent her first residency at Treleven editing a series of letters she had written to her deceased husband Blyden (a civil rights activist who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King) and the grand daughter he had never met. these were recently published as Letters from La Pineta.
John Elder taught English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College from 1973 to 2010. His special interests in the classroom were American nature writing, English Romantic poetry, Basho and the haiku tradition, contemporary poetry of the earth, and environmental education. His most recent books, Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run, and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa, combine memoir with literary discussion and description of the Vermont landscape. A forthcoming volume, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, will complete this sequence when it appears in 2012.
Along with his wife Rita and the families of their sons, John helps to operate Maggie Brook Sugarbush in the hills of Starksboro, Vermont. He is also active in statewide environmental organizations including the Vermont Land Trust, the Center for Whole Communities, and Vermont Family Forests
Kirk Webster is a master natural queen bee breeder living in New Haven, VT. He has no online presence, nor cell phone, but once we got a hold of him and went out to see his hives we were taken aback by his generosity and charm. He brings students from his internationally famous class on beekeeping out to the farm once a year.
Luke Concannon is a singer songwriter who spent his residency at Treleven wandering the woods and fields and working on new lyrics. We were introduced to him by our friends at Whole Heart, with whom we conducted an Inter-generational Leadership workshop. You can read the biography of his musical, spiritual, and social activist development on his website.
Luke will be returning to Treleven in the summer of 2020 to conduct a social justice workshop for song writers. Let us know if you would like to be on the invitation list.
Peggy Sax lives in Cornwall, Vermont with her husband Shel. Ever since their children, Peter and Jordan were little, they have been visiting Treleven Farm for replenishment, friendship, and inspiration. Since the pandemic, Peggy has moved her office home to work part-time as a psychotherapist and consultant. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Re-authoring Teaching - a global learning community of narrative therapy practitioners, teachers, and enthusiasts.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Learning Specialist
Rita Elder spent her professional career as a Learning Specialist, the last 25 years at Lincoln Community School. In her work she combined formal assessment with diagnostic teaching to study the learning profiles of young students who were failing to learn with traditional classroom methods. She enjoyed the challenge of tapping the non-linguistic intelligences of dyslexic children to design teaching methods and classroom accommodations which would allow them to learn successfully. Rita had a particular interest in visual processing and language disorders.
Rita has always had a passion for growing and preparing delicious food. Related to this interest she helped form the first organic garden at LCS and move the school's lunch and snack program to a healthier local/organic base. She has also taught private cooking classes in the community and regularly cooked for a halfway house for former prisoners.
Rita and her husband, John, raised three children in Bristol, Vermont, where they continue to live. Within the community, Rita has served on the Bristol Recue Squad and on the Bristol Conservation Commission. She was founding director of Bristol Friends of the Arts and served as chair of the Tari Shattuck Educational Foundation.
Rita has recently retired from teaching and is relishing the chance to develop new skills as a concertina player, an active grandmother and a volunteer for a number of causes.
Susannah is a human-environment geographer and political ecologist who completed her PhD at Clark University in Massachusetts, USA in 2010. Her fieldwork in the U.S. and Latin America focuses on questions of conservation of privately-held land and the possibility of that it may function as a commons; and how gender, race, and ethnicity affect rights of access and movement. She has taught human geography at the University of Vermont, environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and worked formally and informally with organizations focused on land reform, community forestry (Vermont Family Forests), ethnbiology (International Society of Ethnobiology), environmental justice (Worcester Roots Project), and migrant farmworkers (Addison County Farm Worker Coalition). Raised in Vermont, USA, Susannah is interested in the critical intersections between viable landscapes and just human livelihoods. Susannah is a native speaker of English, and also speaks Spanish and French. She is presently employed as the Interim International Program Director for the Global Diversity Foundation. Susannah lives at Treleven Farm with her husband, Ethan Mitchell.