NEWFANE-Mankind is a narrative species, argues Newfane author Deborah Lee Luskin, and hunting has been one of its chief topics for thousands of years. Now she is adding to the conversation.
Luskin's new book, a piece of narrative nonfiction called Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress, is the story of how she, a New York–born Ph.D., a writer, and an educator, turned herself into a Vermont deer hunter.
The book will be published Nov. 4 by Sibylline Press. The release date nestles close to Vermont's rifle and shotgun deer hunting season, which runs from Nov. 15 to 30.
Luskin, 69, a Vermonter for 41 years who long served as Newfane town moderator, started learning to hunt because she was frightened of getting lost in the woods. Her book describes the four-year journey of becoming a hunter, from its inception as an idea, to her discovery that she is a naturally good shot, to page 230, when she finally kills her first buck.
"People say, 'Heard you got a deer,' and they want to hear that story," Luskin told The Commons (where she was a regular columnist and remains an occasional contributor). "As if the story was just that moment between the time I sat down to drink my water and the moment I shot the deer."
But that's not it, she said.
"It was four years getting there, and another two weeks before he went into my freezer, and another week before we ate it," Luskin said. "Then there's the afterlife, the story of how it changed me. How I went into the woods that day and felt the tree against my knee and had that sense of, 'I'm part of the forest.'
"The trees are breathing. There's all this rich decay. I just had that moment," she continued. "That's what I was hoping to leave people with, this awe and connection to nature, and that I have a place there."
Her new book touches, in a thoughtful, memoir-ish way, on the history of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt and the wilderness. She writes about being a woman, the death of her parents, the loss of a close friend, her long marriage to Dr. Timothy Shafer of Grace Cottage Hospital, on becoming a mother and raising three daughters, on searching for and finding hunting mentors, on learning about guns and rifles, and on learning the forest.
The only thing missing is recipes.
In a book rich with insight, Luskin frankly acknowledges certain truths. The first is about hunting itself.
"When I heard the call to hunt, a voice from the universe vibrated inside me," she writes. "It was a sensation I couldn't ignore."
Her second truth is fiercer.
"I'm more interested in becoming intimate with the landscape of home than sightseeing in faraway places, and photographing wild game isn't high-stakes enough to motivate me to learn how the flora, fauna, weather, time of day, time of year, and animal behavior are all interrelated, because I don't just want to read the landscape. I want to eat it," she writes.
Too many deer
As a hiker who has completed the Long Trail, which runs the length of Vermont's Green Mountains and is the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the U.S., Luskin knows the land. Vermont may have many farms and gardens, she said, but its essence is mostly forest.
"I've been to the top of enough mountains in Vermont to see that we're mostly wild," Luskin said. "The parts of the landscape that we inhabit and that we think of as built up are the very thin margin along the major arteries of roads. Most of Vermont is still covered in trees, or is again covered in trees, because there was a time when it was deforested."
In 1942, Walt Disney produced a feature cartoon featuring the evils of hunting. Called Bambi, it is the story of a baby deer who loses his mother because "Man is in the forest." The film may have soured an entire generation on deer hunting.
Luskin, however, has never seen the movie and rejects its premise. Instead, she embraces the newer idea that hunting does a favor for the herd; it controls deer overpopulation.
"It is a very new idea that there can be too many deer," she said.
She remembers the pain she felt at the end of winter, when she watched thin and hungry deer stagger out of the forest near her home.
The wolves are gone. There are fewer predators in Vermont for deer. They reproduce in abundance. Yet the food supply for them is diminishing.
"If there are too many deer, there will not be enough food. If the winters are too warm, deer don't die. There are more deer than the land can support," Luskin said.
So they die naturally.
"Coyotes will chase them down, and so will your family dog. We've had deer here on our field that died because they got hit by a car. Their legs get damaged, and a deer with a damaged leg is a dead deer."
She also pointed out that deer are "vectors of diseases that can transmit to humans, like Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases."
A healthier food choice
Luskin observed that hunting "is also an act of conservation as well as a very low-carbon way of getting red meat on the table."
Eating venison should be considered healthier for the herd, the forest, and the hunter, she said.
"It's certainly healthier than eating beef from a concentrated agricultural feeding lot or a CAFO, a concentrated agricultural feeding operation," she said.
"Commercial beef is raised in these feeding lots, where the animals are in such crowded and poor conditions that they have to be pumped full of antibiotics," Luskin added. "It's just awful, and it's also not particularly healthy for the people who consume it."
This kind of diet is also bad for the conservation of the planet.
"It takes a lot of fuel, mostly carbon-based fuel, to grow the corn that the cows feed, to transport them to run the operation where they are slaughtered and butchered and wrapped and shipped," Luskin said. "That's all a hugely, hugely heavy carbon footprint, as opposed to eating locally and seasonally. And if you want to eat red meat, there's none better than venison."
Luskin has eaten from local foodscapes since 1975, when she was a college student, two decades before the word "locavore" made its way into English.
"My sophomore year, I ended up in the natural foods co-op, where we had to decide whether we were going to eat meat or not," Luskin said. "And we agreed at the first meeting that we would eat meat if we could find a grass-fed calf. This was in northeastern Ohio, where there were still farms and some grass-fed animals."
The students were influenced by the 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet by onetime Brattleboro resident Frances Moore Lappé. "So we had all learned that it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat," Luskin said. (The agriculture industry disputes that statistic, popularized by Lappé's book.)
"An enterprising young man in the co-op went out and found the animal. Then we had another vote. Should we slaughter the animal and eat meat, or let him live? And the vote was to let him live, even though that meant he was going to go into the barn for the winter, be raised on corn or on grain, and then be slaughtered. So that was the beginning of my awareness of where our food comes from and how far it travels."
Luskin and her family have continued the locavore tradition. They have grown a pig for slaughter and done the slaughtering themselves. They keep a large garden. They have 20 plump and happy hens who provide eggs and, occasionally, a soup or a roast.
But in Vermont one cannot be a complete locavore. When Luskin bakes bread, she acknowledges, she uses wheat grown elsewhere. Her coffee and chocolate are also shipped in. But adding self-caught venison to the diet takes the locavore idea one step further.
"I think we're all healthier for eating local, wholesome food," she said.
The intimacy of writing
Luskin may now be a hunter, but she is still first and foremost a writer. A columnist, essayist, educator, book reviewer, and lecturer, she is in the middle of writing two more books.
She has been a commentator for what then was Vermont Public Radio. Her first book, Into the Wilderness, was published in 2010 and won the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Regional Fiction. It will be republished in 2026.
To celebrate her new book, Luskin is working overtime:
• There will be a signing event at Wild Book Company (47 West St., Newfane) on Sunday, Nov. 2, at 4 p.m.
• She will be reading at Brooks Memorial Library (224 Main St., Brattleboro) on Friday, Nov. 7, at 6:30 p.m.
• She will be signing books at ByWay Books (399 Canal St., Brattleboro) on Sunday, Dec. 6, from 2 to 4 p.m.
She will also be reading and signing books in Burlington and Boston.
"Writing is one of the most intimate things we can do with a reader," Luskin said. "Writing and reading. What I write comes out of my brain, my body. It goes on a page. Someone reads it. It goes into their eyes, goes into their brain. It's in their body. I mean, that's that's pretty sexy to me.
"And you can change people's minds, or you can at least make them question what they believe or what they think they believe," she added. "And there's no better way to do it than to tell a story."
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.