BRATTLEBORO-Retreat Farm presents “Resilience,” a series of four conversations and presentations with local luminaries on Thursday nights during the month of June. Each week will feature a different expert — a gardener, a filmmaker, a poet, and a musician — to show their work and share stories of their craft in the North Barn.
On June 4, there will be an “ecological resilience” talk and pop-up plant sale with gardener and nursery owner Helen O’Donnell, who owns and manages the Bunker Farm in Dummerston along with her husband, sister, and brother-in-law.
O’Donnell manages Bunker Farm Plants, a specialty plant nursery, as part of the farm operation, offering unusual annuals and perennials, natives and non-native, primarily grown from seed. In her gardening business, she designs, installs, and maintains gardens for private clients, works as a consultant, writes, and lectures.
She believes that design, maintenance, and growing are symbiotic practices and that a garden is an ever-changing, interspecies collaboration. O’Donnell says she loves plants — especially the unkempt wild ones — and is a painter and printmaker who spends time each winter making art. Food at the event will be by Anon’s Thai Cuisine.
“Family resilience” is the theme June 11, with a screening of Sugarhouse, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Jesse Kreitzer.
Kreitzer is a Vermont-based filmmaker whose fiction and nonfiction work explores rural life, folk cultures, and traditions. His films have received Oscar-qualifying and New England Emmy awards, and have screened at galleries, museums, and festivals worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, Raindance, Rooftop, Big Sky, Camden, and Oldenburg.
Kreitzer holds a master of fine arts in cinema and comparative literature from the University of Iowa and a bachelor’s in visual & media arts from Emerson College. He is the founder of Lanterna, a film and video production company specializing in short-form documentaries, narrative films, and commissions. Food at the event will be by Anon’s Thai Cuisine.
Poet Emma Paris will do a “wild resilience poetry reading” June 18. Paris was the 2025 Vermont Youth Poet Laureate, and is an undergrad at Bennington College where she studies poetry and environmental science.
She has an American Voices nomination from Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, is a 2025 Adroit Commended Writer, and has been nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. She has interned at both Green Writers Press and the Bennington Review, working as an editor and reader. Food at the event will be by RVQ Smokehouse and Taste of Wantastegok.
The series concludes June 25 with a “cultural resilience” musical performance and talk by Brendan Taaffe of The Bucolics Project.
Taaffe is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist who lives outside of Brattleboro. His most recent work, The Bucolics Project, is a long-time collaboration with Kentucky poet Maurice Manning. The project is a collection of songs based on the poems in Manning’s 2007 collection, Bucolics, a conversation between a field hand and a divine being known only as Boss. Each song references an archival field recording from the Appalachian Sound Archives at Berea College, where Taaffe was awarded a research fellowship in 2017.
The bulk of Taaffe’s choral compositions can be heard on four albums with The Bright Wings Chorus, recorded between 2011 and 2018. As a song leader, Taaffe has taught with Village Harmony for the past 20 years and has worked extensively with community choirs in the U.K. He holds a masters degree in performance from the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and has spent extensive time studying music in Zimbabwe (mbira and song traditions) and southern France (song traditions).
An active crankie artist, Taaffe has been directing The Vermont Crankie Festival in Brattleboro for the past 10 years. He also works in schools as an artist-in-residence teaching children how to contra dance. Food will be by RVQ Smokehouse.
Doors open at 5 p.m., with the featured event beginning at 6 p.m. Tickets are $15 per event, or $25 for all four events, with no one turned away for lack of funds. More information can be found at retreatfarm.ticketspice.com/resilience-series. Support for this series comes from Vermont Humanities.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.