The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

by Helen Whybrow

Overview

“Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book—beautiful, real, full of life.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Sheep have helped me become a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry."

In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner set out to restore an old two-hundred-acre farm. Knowing that “belonging more than anything requires participation,” they begin to intertwine their lives with the land. But soon after releasing a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the worn-out fields, Whybrow realizes that the art of shepherding extends far beyond the flock and fences of Knoll Farm.

In prose both vivid and lean, The Salt Stones offers an intimate and profoundly moving story of what it means to care for a flock and truly inhabit a piece of land. The shepherd’s life unfolds for Whybrow in the seasons and cycles of farming and family—birthing lambs, fending off coyotes, rescuing lost sheep in a storm, and raising children while witnessing her mother’s decline. Exploring the interdependence of animals, as well as of the earth and ourselves, Whybrow reflects on the ways sheep connect her to place and to the ancient practice of shepherding. 

Evocative, affectionate, and illuminating, The Salt Stones sings of a way of life that is at once ancient and entirely contemporary, inspiring us all to seek greater intimacy and a sense of belonging wherever our home place may be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317872
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Helen Whybrow is the author of A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800–1900. She is also the editor of many anthologies, including Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place and Coming to Land in a Troubled World. Her writing has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, EatingWell, and Orion. She is a visiting professor at Middlebury College and has taught at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she shepherds a two-hundred-acre organic farm.

Wren Fortunoff grew up farming and loves very long trail runs in the mountains. She has illustrated on paper bags, T-shirts, dead trees, feet, and walls. This is her first book.

Helen Whybrow is the author of A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800–1900. She is also the editor of many anthologies, including Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place and Coming to Land in a Troubled World. Her writing has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, EatingWell, and Orion. She is a visiting professor at Middlebury College and has taught at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she shepherds a two-hundred-acre organic farm.

Wren Fortunoff grew up farming and loves very long trail runs in the mountains. She has illustrated on paper bags, T-shirts, dead trees, feet, and walls. This is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

Spare prose, great storytelling.”—Esquire, "Best Books of the Summer 2025" 

"Revelatory. . . magical. . . Whybrow beautifully explores interconnectedness and disruption in nature."—Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post 

“Whybrow's closely-observed accounts of her working life as a shepherd are filled with muck, sweat and a hard-won sense of the interconnectedness of the natural world.”—NPR "Fresh Air" 

“Beautiful . . . Whybrow's prose is alive. In witnessing the hard but simple work of shepherding these animals, readers will feel themselves somehow tended to.”—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe 

"Whybrow writes in compelling, finely chiseled prose about the annual seasonal rhythms at her beloved Knoll Farm. . . . The perfect tonic for these turbulent times."—BookPage, starred review

“In achingly poetic prose, this forthcoming chronicle of life on a Vermont hill farm captures the familial responsibilities of the shepherd — for animals, parents, children, wild things, and the land upon which we walk for such a brief time.”—Rowan Jacobsen, The Week

“Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book—beautiful, real, full of life. You’ll reread it.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Riveting, breathtaking, intensely powerful, The Salt Stones pulses with life. I deeply love this wise and beautiful book about land and belonging, love and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, and so much more.”—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“In her poetic and provocative offerings on her life as a shepherd to a flock of sheep, Helen Whybrow evokes the spirit that Aretha Franklin brought to her transcendent recording of ‘Somewhere.’ Read Whybrow. Listen to Franklin. Rejoice!”—Evelyn C. White, author of Alice Walker

“This is a wise and beautiful book. Helen Whybrow calls it ‘my love song to this hillside,’ speaking of the Vermont farm where, for a quarter century, she has distilled wisdom from the land and its creatures—her family, the birds and trees, the flowers and frogs, a stream of visitors, and flocks of sheep—all of them teaching or seeking ways to live intimately in place. A truly moving book, in prose and spirit, filled with deep insights, rich stories, and memorable scenes, a book to be savored and widely shared.”—Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

“This profound book returns our gaze to forgotten connections with our animal kin, the Earth, and ourselves. Each paragraph shimmers with heart. With Wendell Berry’s sensibilities and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poetic insights, Whybrow leads her readers through fertile fields of discovery and knowing. Her sentences, like carefully placed stones, mark the path toward a calm awareness of what true relationships feel like.”—Hank Lentfer, author of Raven’s Witness

From the Publisher