October, 2004

Interview with General Martha Rainville

 

Vermont Woman publisher Suzanne Gillis and editor Margaret Michniewicz spoke with Major General Martha Rainville in her office at Fort Johnson in Colchester. Rainville is the first woman adjutant general in the 364-year history of the National Guard. Elected in 1997 at age 38, she ran against Adjutant General Donald Edwards, who had held the position for 16 years. Clearly, there was a great deal to cover about her 22-year career, and the U.S. military’s current reliance on the National Guard. Here are the highlights of that talk.

 

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Dispatches from Afghanistan

 

Our Afghanistan correspondent writes this month about what liberation currently looks like at street level, where al Qaeda and the Taliban are back in action—a Vermont Woman exclusive from Kabul.

 

Read the full article: Dispatches from Afghanistan

 Deb Boyer

Arts-Putney Artist Bonnie Mennell

 

Possessing a living essence of their own is how Putney artist Bonnie Mennell seems to perceive her assemblages of found objects. As she talks about them, it is almost with deference, revealing a peaceful and profound respect for life and an understanding that living beings, herself included, experience transitions and passages.

 

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Abenaki Basketmaker

 

Jeanne Brink makes mostly smaller baskets. “I like to have something I can get my hands around,” she says while rifling through her cupboard of supplies. She is a master Abenaki (pronounced Ah-BAN-ah-kee) basketmaker, continuing a family tradition that stretches back over two hundred years. Her great-grandfather, originally from the Odanak Reservation in Quebec, moved to Vermont in the early decades of the twentieth century.

 

Read the full article: Abenaki Basketmaker