[V]ermont author Howard Frank Mosher’s storied half-century writing career begat a dozen novels chronicling the rugged physical and psychological landscape of the state’s Northeast Kingdom. But it began with, in his words, “the least likely source”: his eighth-grade grammar teacher.
“She hated kids — that’s why she had been hired to run our three-room school — and one day she caught me writing a story when I should have been doing my homework,” he recently told this reporter. “She said, ‘Now Mosher, if you want to write, you have to read the classics, revise your work and write about what you know — and you, my boy, have a long, long way to go in each of those departments.’”
Mosher laughed as he remembered those words (“the first and possibly the only good piece of advice I got about writing”) right up to his death Sunday at age 74.
“The light and love of my life, my precious Howard, is now at peace,” Phillis Mosher, his wife of 52 years, reported on Facebook.
Her husband, known for such fiction-turned-films as “Disappearances,” “Northern Borders” “A Stranger in the Kingdom” and “Where the Rivers Flow North,” had surprised friends and neighbors only a week earlier by revealing health problems on social media.
“In early December I thought I had an upper respiratory bug that has been going around,” he wrote Jan. 22. “Well, it didn’t seem to respond to antibiotics, so I had a chest X-ray and a CAT scan that found cancer.”
Specifically, in his lungs and “lots of other places.”
“I learned that what I have is a very aggressive and all but untreatable form of cancer that was apparently induced by the radiation treatments I had for prostate cancer nine years ago,” he continued. “I have gone from feeling pretty good to being in hospice care.”
Mosher, who died at his Irasburg home, had just received news that St. Martin’s Press was set to publish his 14th book, “Points North,” and that Burlington City Arts had awarded him the $10,000 Herb Lockwood Prize for “having a beneficent influence on the Vermont community.”
“He couldn’t speak, but he was cognizant right up to the end,” said Dede Cummings, a friend and founder of the Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press, where Mosher was an adviser.
Born in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains in 1942, Mosher first put pen to paper “when I could hardly spell cat,” he recalled in an interview before his recent diagnosis. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. My mantra as a kid was, ‘Tell me a story.’”
Mosher discovered Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom when he took a teaching job there in 1964.
“Though sheer luck I had stumbled on a gold mine of stories that no writer had ever told,” he said. “I was ready to hear them, but I wasn’t ready to write them.”
And so Mosher sought guidance by attending graduate school at the University of California at Irvine.
“A week passed before I realized that was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said. “I had cut myself off from all that marvelous material.”
Mosher was motoring through the famed Los Angeles intersection of Hollywood and Vine when the driver of a telephone truck spotted his green license plates and shouted, “I’m from Vermont, too — go back!”
“It was like one of the muses calling down from Mount Olympus,” the author recalled.
Mosher returned to the Northeast Kingdom, where he wrote his first novel, “Disappearances,” in 1977, followed by “Where the Rivers Flow North” in 1978, “Marie Blythe” in 1983 and “A Stranger in the Kingdom” in 1989.
The author based the latter book on the 1968 “Irasburg Affair” in which police responded to shots fired at the home of a black Baptist minister, only to spark national headlines when they investigated the victim rather than the white gunman who eventually faced charges of breaching the peace.
“That took place just 400 yards from our house,” Mosher recalled. “You couldn’t be a writer and live just down the street and not write the story, but it took me almost 20 years. I said, ‘Everyone in the Kingdom is going to be mad at me,’ and that’s one reason why you have to write it.”
Continuing to infuse real life into his novels, the author followed up with “Northern Borders” in 1994 (“the story of my growing up with my grandparents”), “The Fall of the Year” in 1999 (“the story of my high school romance with my now wife — just check out the dedication”), “The True Account: A Novel of the Lewis & Clark & Kinneson Expeditions” in 2003 and “Waiting for Teddy Williams” in 2004.
The latter book seemed less fiction than outright fantasy upon publication: It imagined the Boston Red Sox, which hadn’t scored a championship since 1918, walking away with the World Series.
“Then the Red Sox went out and won it that year. I just guessed, and I guessed right.”
Mosher’s most recent books have included the novels “On Kingdom Mountain” in 2007, “Walking to Gatlinburg” in 2010 and “God’s Kingdom” in 2015, as well as two travel memoirs, “North Country” in 1997 and “The Great Northern Express” in 2012.
The latter book chronicles Mosher’s discovery just before his 65th birthday that he had prostate cancer, leading to 46 intensive radiation treatments and a solo cross-country road trip in a 20-year-old Chevy Celebrity.
“The journey Mr. Mosher describes is very familiar to me,” fellow scribe and cancer survivor John Irving has said of the book. “Mosher has always been a gifted storyteller; this time, there is an added euphoria in his storytelling — borne by the hope he and I share: for now, we have dodged a bullet that 30,000 American men don’t dodge every year.”
Mosher is the third Northeast Kingdom writer to succumb to incurable illness in the last six months. In September, Mosher’s former student, poet Leland Kinsey, died of lymphoma at age 66. Eleven days later, fellow poet and playwright David Budbill died of progressive supranuclear palsy at age 76.
“Well, the best laid plans, as they say,” Mosher wrote in his last Facebook post. “Our kids and grandkids have been with us, and I’m comfortable. I’m also grateful for all my bookseller friends, writer friends, reader friends and friends in general who have been so supportive of me and my work over these many years.”
And so the author continued to share words, even when cancer had stolen his speaking voice.
“What’s it like to spend your life writing?” he said when he could talk. “I tell young people not to quit their day job. But I always say this: I never knew anybody who got to be my age and pursued an artistic profession and regretted it.”
