Granite and Cedar

Granite and Cedar represents an unusual collaboration between a documentary photographer and a writer of fiction to produce a haunting portrait of the people and the land of Vermont's most rural area, often referred to as the "Northeast Kingdom."Veteran photographer JOHN M.

MILLER (Dear Camp: Last Light in the Northeast Kingdom) uses his brilliant collection of elegiac, but unsentimental, images dating from the 1970s to evoke the disappearing folkways, the rugged people, and the desolate and abandoned landscape of his native corner of the Green Mountain State.

Miller's austere, black-and-white photos richly detail the erosion and the breakup of the small farms of the region and of the families who worked those farms.

While they emphasize the stark beauty of the land, they also pay homage to the innate dignity and fierce pride of the people who live in such hardscrabble circumstances. As both a counterpoint and an underscoring of Miller's thesis, popular Vermont writer HOWARD FRANK MOSHER (The Fall of the Year, Where the Rivers Flow North, Northern Borders, Stranger in the Kingdom, and many others) describes the evolution of a fictional Northeast Kingdom community and its families over several generations.

Taken together, these two accounts paint a poignant yet compelling picture of the epochal change that time and societal upheavals produce in a rural population.