I did not think I would spend
the winter in Vermont.

The snow came last Tuesday, and by Thursday the road to the barn had narrowed to a single track. The plough takes its time up here. The plough should take its time; the road is older than any of us, and it has its own ideas about what hurry means.

I had thought, when we laid the year out in November, that I would be in Lisbon by now, doing the last edit on the book over a table by a window that did not open quite right. I was wrong. We finished the edit here, in the barn, with the stove lit, and it turns out the book is better for it. Books usually are when they are finished in the place they were begun.

A few notes on the year, for those of you who read these.

On the book.

Eleanor goes on press in March. The linen arrived from Jena in December and it is the right colour, which is to say a colour I could not have named to you in October but would have rejected any substitute for. The paper is from a mill in Sweden that makes exactly one kind of paper, which seems about right for a first book. The printer in Verona has been binding small runs of books for four generations. Three of those generations were doing it already when Sloane and I met.

We will ship in June. Five hundred copies, numbered, signed. When they are gone they are gone. I am told by the people who do this for a living that we should print more. The people who do this for a living are often right. They are not right about this.

On the Fund.

Four grants this year, announced in full on the Fund page. I will say, only, that I read two hundred and sixty seven applications between September and Christmas, and that it was harder to choose four than it has ever been. I have watched rough cuts from three of last year's grantees in the last two months. One of them made me cry in a way that felt earned. One of them did not, but will, once it finds its ending. The third is already a film I will be recommending to strangers in airports for the rest of my life.

This is the seventh year of the Fund. It is the first year it no longer feels new. That is a quiet kind of milestone, and probably the one that matters.

On the Table.

We added a seventh seat in December. I am not going to say which company, because they are not ready to say, and I am not going to speak over a founder who has earned the right to choose her own timing. The work is the kind I have been hoping to find for two years. I will write more when there is more to write.

One founder left the table this year, on good terms. Her company is doing what she hoped it would do, which is the point. The Table is not a life sentence. Most arrangements end, eventually, and the good ones end well.

On what we are not doing.

We are not starting a newsletter. We are not starting a podcast. We are not opening a second imprint, although I have been asked, kindly, twice. We are not growing the staff beyond the three of us who already carry the place. We are not selling the boat, although I thought about it for a long week in November.

We are, however, planning to open the barn for two evenings in October, for subscribers to the book. Fifty seats each night. Dinner will be cooked by a friend. The candles will be beeswax, from an apiary thirty miles north, which is as close as anything gets to local, up here.

That is the year, more or less. Thank you for reading. Thank you, especially, to those of you who write back. I try to answer everyone. I am often late. The mail here comes up the drive in the cab of an old Ford that is older than I am, driven by a woman who is older than the Ford. This is not an excuse. It is just the condition of the work.

The stove is warm. The book is almost finished. There will be four films to watch this autumn, in rooms we do not yet know the names of. The road will widen back to two lanes in March or April, depending on the weather and the plough.

With care,
Wells Connery
Vermont · 20 Jan 2026