Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress

Finding a Place in the Natural World

Reviving Artemis is the unlikely story of a woman raised in mid-twentieth-century suburbia, then lived in New York City as a young adult, and moved to Vermont in 1984. For more than thirty years, she raised domestic livestock, kept bees, and cultivated fruits and vegetables while teaching literature and telling stories. But when she turned sixty, something shifted. Luskin was overtaken by a primal urge to step out of the garden, off the blazed trails, and into untracked forest by learning to hunt deer.

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Into the Wilderness

Could there be two people more different?

It’s 1964, and Rose Mayer is recently widowed, a Democrat, and Jewish. When she meets Percy Mendell, a born and bred Vermonter, who has never married and never voted for a Democrat, they clash before a surprising romance springs up, challenging all of the status quos. At age 64, they both must employ their humor, wit and compassion to even consider the other. Set against the backdrop of Vermont’s changing season and voraciously opinionated population, Into the Wilderness is both a love story and a testament to the surprising flexibility of the human heart.

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Deborah Lee Luskin

Deborah Lee Luskin

Deborah Lee Luskin moved from New York City to Vermont in 1984 to write, garden, keep bees, and raise daughters. Luskin has been an editorial columnist, radio commentator, pen-for-hire, and blogger. Her first novel, Into the Wilderness, won the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Regional Fiction. Luskin has also enjoyed a long career as an educator, teaching writing and literature-based humanities to gifted elementary writers, college students, new adult readers, life-long learners, healthcare workers, and prison inmates. She holds a PhD in English Literature and expected to become an academic, not a deer hunter. She lives in Vermont with her husband, their dog, usually a cat, and a variable number of chickens.

Living In Place

Raising a Writer

           My middle child is a playwright. If I were a responsible parent, I’d probably discourage her from pursuing a career in the arts, unless she were to go into arts management, where she could be regularly underpaid instead of intermittently so. Because face...

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Winning at NaNoWriMo

          It’s November twenty-seventh, meaning including today there are just four more days to finish the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in one short month. As of this morning, I’m at 42,452, so it’s nip-and-tuck whether I’ll cross the finish...

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Progress Report

Rather than wait until New Year’s Eve, when it’s too late to do anything about the year’s unmet goals, I took stock at the end of October. Despite grand ideas of writing a poem a week this year, I haven’t. In fact, I forgot about that resolution until I reviewed my...

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