About a year ago, Scott Beck got an email that cost him $75,000. It wasn’t from a Nigerian claiming to be the administrator of a millionaire’s estate, but from a company in New York called On Demand Books. In the email was a picture of something that looked like an office copy machine, but could take a digital file and turn it into a library-quality paperback book in a matter of minutes.... Read more

It’s hard to escape the bare butts in John Douglas’ current exhibit at Burlington College. Like the steelworkers in The Full Monty, produced by Lyric Theatre last weekend, he lets it all hang out in some of his images.... Read more

When the barn door of the Vermont Woodworking School opens, the smell of sawdust sweeps like a wave. Inside is a neat mix of machines, books and dust. Carina Driscoll, the school’s cofounder and executive director, is as no-nonsense as she is knowledgeable, explaining the founding of the school, its recent relocation from Colchester to Fairfax and the woodworking programs, which offer total-immersion instruction toward associate’s and master’s degrees in fine-furniture making.... Read more

In one of Valerie Hird’s large, untitled drawings, five women inhabit the paper like uneasy roommates. Each woman’s gaze guides the viewer’s eye through the picture. Each individual refers to the others while remaining distinct. This sense of separate yet shared experience permeates Hird’s exhibition of “The Maiden Voyages Project” at the Flynn Center’s Amy E.... Read more

One day while walking in the Northeast Kingdom, Meredith Holch noticed one of her dairy farmer neighbors was building a new barn. “A light went off in my head, and I thought, Oh, they must be getting migrant workers,” recalls Holch. She looked out for the workers on her daily walks for several months, but never saw any. Then an ESL teacher of her acquaintance confirmed that the farm had been employing migrants for a year and a half.... Read more

Deep recession, rampant unemployment, disaffected youth — Road, staged this weekend by the Middlebury College Theatre Department, seems to feature ripped-from-the-headlines themes. But Jim Cartwright’s play doesn’t take place in Anytown, U.S.A., in 2009. These circumstances grip an unnamed town in the playwright’s native Lancashire, England, in 1986.... Read more

A piece of painted wood in the University of Vermont’s Davis Center bears these words: “I try to remind myself that I am on the outside free looking in at my mother who is trapped in this prison. But in reality I live in a cage as well, a cage without love and affection.”

The words, written by the child of an imprisoned woman in Columbus, Ohio, pop off their makeshift canvas. They bring to mind urban graffiti, only far more poignant.... Read more

Jay Fleury is a private man with an aversion to cameras. Ask his age and he replies, “Over 35 and under death.” He could be St. Albans’ most eccentric enigma. With gold-topped cane in hand and either a leather baseball cap or brown ushanka covering his clean-shaven head, Fleury takes daily strolls along St. Albans City’s Main Street, visiting downtown merchants and patronizing various restaurants. He calls St. Albans his baby.

“And I should take care of my baby,” he says.... Read more

The late 1960s movement in Italy called arte povera (literally, “poor art”) rejected traditions of elegance in favor of funky art-making that relied on ordinary, even unsightly materials. Of course, those artists were consciously choosing to use dirt, rags, leaves and similar elements rather than canvas, oil paint and all the other supplies they could have purchased at local art stores.... Read more

Last January in this space, we reported on Cambridge resident Christine Sullivan’s self-published book 44 Days Out of Kandahar, which told the story of her desperate search for a puppy lost halfway around the world. Sullivan’s Navy reservist brother, Mark Feffer, had befriended the flop-eared red mutt named Cinnamon in Afghanistan, but circumstances derailed his plan to bring her back to his Annapolis home.... Read more