Garnette Arledge, author and writing mentor

Opportunities to enhance your writing. Join Garnette for:

Scrabble Night, call to play
Jane Austen and Friends Book Club
Reading Your Works in Progress, Third Saturdays
Classics in Mind/​Spirit, one book for one month, Previous books: Markings by Dag Hammarskjold, Path with a Heart by Jack Kornfeld, Hafiz, I Heard God Laughing tr. by Daniel Ladinsky, John Burroughs, naturalist, selections. Upcoming Prema Choden in October, 2011.


All groups are by donation to a basket. Come when you can and jump into literature for fun.

On-line Writing Group, see Garnette Arledge on Facebook, or email for details to participate from wherever you are located.

What’s New in Andes? Garnette Arledge

By Buffy Calvert

May, 2010 - Garnette Arledge moved into her home at 295 Main Street, in the Shellman house on December 1st, 2009. She has weathered the winter and made a cozy, comfortable home in the big pistachio green building. Now she plans to open Andes.Books.Com, a ‘gently used’ bookstore there on Memorial Day weekend with a outdoor sale. She will also launch bookstore events in the bookstore in April and May.



Garnette grew up in Bethesda, Maryland spending long happy summers in her grandparents home in Western North Carolina where twelve generations of Shipmans and Arledges lived in Polk County and Hendersonville, southwest of Asheville. Our far western Catskills, part of the Appalachian range, and our valleys threaded by rushing trout streams seem just like home to her. She has recently lived in Stone Ridge. Teaching The Writers Circle, a memoir group, in Hobart Book Village drew her to Delaware County and thence to Andes.



After graduating from the University of Maryland with a journalism degree, she raised her two children Elizabeth and Drew in Princeton, New Jersey later serving as the Editor of a small town Morris County newspaper, The Florham Park Eagle. When she found herself interviewing the mother of a six-year-old killed by a hit-and-run driver on a street without sidewalks as the little girl was coming home from school, Garnette had a deep movement in her heart. Holding the distraught mother in her arms, Garnette knew she needed a role where she could be ‘overtly compassionate’ not a cool observer as a reporter.



She signed up to be a Hospice Volunteer and was quickly moved into the Volunteer Training job, so she quit journalism but continued writing. Eventually she deepened her commitment to the suffering by attending seminary at Drew University, the Drew Theological School, where she earned a Masters of Divinity degree magna cum laude. She served as an ordained interfaith minister as Hospice Chaplain. With the sage advice of her Life Companion Christopher Stickler, she wrote a book for family members caring for their loved ones dying and death, On Angel’s Eve. “I based the book on what I learned working in hospice as well as the manual I wrote to train volunteers. I felt the family and friends should have access to the skills and education the final stage of life requires.” After his sudden death on the New York Thruway, Garnette turned to writing and teaching writing full time. “To help people tell their stories is part of the Hospice Philosophy, I combined both those trainings, listening to clients’ stories and capturing them on paper.” In the past ten years Garnette has authored ten books of memoirs for families, one of which she acted as agent, selling Wise Secrets of Aloha to a national publisher. For the last six years she had been teaching writing fiction, flash fiction, and memoir, as well as a course called Jane Austen and Her friends, the six Austen books and one hundred and forty five sequels by other writers. She also has taught her Angels book to groups at Bard College and SUNY New Paltz in the life long learning system designed by Elderhostel. She now brings her skill and enthusiasm to Andes ~

My Own House
By Elswyth Thane
Author, The Strength of These Hills about her life in Vermont plus 30 other books.

The smoke of my own house is better than my neighbor’s fire – Spanish proverb

I was driving to New England in the spring. Little white houses along the way, green lawns, old trees, early bloom – snug, serene, enigmatic. My own house when I came to it would look very much the same. But I carried to it an unreconciled grief and a bottomless fatigue.

So I began unconsciously to play a foolish game with myself as I went. That one, with the window boxes and the picket fence and a collie dog asleep on the porch steps – how would it be by some miracle to escape into the life which went on there, instead of my own? Who came home to it every night and from where? Or that one, with the two-car garage, and the awnings going up and the gardener setting out plants – a lot of money behind that one. How many people, to so much space? I’ve always wanted a really big house . . .

Or that one, just the size for one person, an elderly spinster with a competence, perhaps, self-sufficient and entire, all passion spent. How would it be to live her life from today on, what there was of it – restful and secure and without obligations? Or to start all over again in that one, very new and a little bare, but prosperous, with an almost bridal look in spite of the child’s small wagon in the yard – it was all ahead of them there.

I was feeling old and sick and platitudinous. I wanted to “get away from it all.” Anywhere out of here. That sort of thing.

The game lasted quite a while. I sampled vicarious paradises for about a hundred miles, willfully ignoring the obvious catch in it: each one of those establishments housed its own problem behind the serene front. There isn’t a house without one these days. Would I exchange? Would I really jump blindfold into anyone else’s life and take it up at that point and give them mine to live?

I would not!

The car turned into the winding dirt road that leads to my own white house with green shutters. It was waiting with the sun on it, the meadows on either side frosted with bluets, the red barn planted four-square in what in July would be deep hay.

No miracles, please. My sorrows are familiar ones, with roots. My joys are old and dear. My own is my own and I am at home there. I’ll sit this one out, where I am.

Wilmington, Vermont



(Reprinted from unknown source from a scrapbook found by the kindess of Meg Streeter)

Author Garnette Arledge books include On Angel’s Eve: the caregiver’s manual for meaningful times with your seniors and Wise Secrets of Aloha, as well as numerous newspaper, magazine and journal articles, poetry, fiction and her own grandmother’s collected stories:
Mama Sallie Would Love you: for great grandchildren, Eliabeth and Drew and his children, great-great grands Lilly and Cloux. More details on Biography Tab, just click above on dashboard.