Behind the Scenes: The Shepherd
Thoughts behind a short story from the author
The Shepherd is a short story in my Trowbridge Dispatch series on Substack. During my recent week at the Vermont Studio Center (May 2026), I appreciate Emily Dickinson’s quote “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The quote had been offered by the Vermont poet laureate Bianca Stone during a reading and talk given to the 40 Vermont artists in residence. As I look back to this story, drafted in 2025, I see that I do this, rather unintentionally.
I have a goal when starting a story; often an emotion or a moment. The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County (novel, Catalyst Press 2024) explore the existential loneliness and isolation of a long-serving hero. Captain Henry (novel, Catalyst Press 2026) examines the sense of loss and confusion of being sent on “heroic” missions only to discover your efforts ignored by the very government that sent you. In Kahlil’s Wall (short story), I explore one quiet moment of peace during the Iraq War. I tend to take my readers through the viewpoint of a member of the team (medic, soldier, etc).
In The Shepherd, I want readers to feel a bit of magic. I don’t write magic primarily because I am so indoctrinated in science, it is hard for me to break long-held rules. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I deliberately start with mundane imagines of the vernal sites and smells of a New England forest. I carry forward through the forest in a smoother, slower slip into another realm, akin to walking into a faerie circle. I also knew that I would not call it magic, nor explain it. Bring the reader to the feel it, then let the reader go.
For telling the truth on a slant, I can assure you that both of the following assertions are entirely true. First, the story is fiction. It never happened. Second, everything in this story is true and ever bit of it has happened to me. As I (author) read the story, I see specific memories with my Rachel, the mother of an old friend, of sheep, of barns, of dogs, of travels, of my own mother.
During the pandemic (2020+), my niece Rachel left Brooklyn to work remotely from our place in Vermont. Over nearly forty years, she and I have explored the smallest of places or great places in the smallest of ways; both. Once at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, she and I explored the rooms with our ears. We would stand before an object, typically alone and in far corners then find a tone that resonated the room. We would then harmonize on each enjoying the waver in the pulsing sound. Listen, my father had been on the Board of (Trustees? Directors? Whatever). My mother was a visual artist. We headed to the MFA the way most family troupe off to amusement parks. In Vermont, during spring of 2021 we walked off our lunch salads in the hundred acre wood around our house chasing spring ephemeral, amazing plants with stunning color that reach for sunlight in the first moments of spring. This experience brings me to the opening
I chase a pink trillium into the forest. Correct that, for I am not a galumphing red hound pursuing deer. I had ambled past the line of greening grass, placing my feet on the forest floor. I need a special box of Crayola Crayons. Do they make a box of 256 browns? Imagine Crayola introducing the New England Series. In the May collection, the box would need more browns than there are browns. Like a dot painting, a color-blind test, or an abstract work of art, the colors appear in splotches looking very much the same up close as they do from afar. This mottled floor spent a winter crushed below layers and layers of snow.
I wanted to walk through our Vermont woods to a small sheep farm of my childhood home in Massachusetts. As a kid, I did walk through those woods to get to that farm, then. On rare occasions, I would feed her sheep when the family travelled off for an adventure that sometimes included competing dogs. My friend’s mother, the shepherd, remains in my mind yet because here in Vermont, my dearest friend, a friend who appears in many of my stories, has known this woman since my own childhood. He too is a shepherd and (used to) travel New England shearing sheep, doing sheep shearing demos, talking about wool, and demonstrating how his dogs return a flock to him. For more urban shows, he toted running ducks for the dogs to heard instead of a few sheep. My first birthing experience involved helping a ewe and her lamb. To transition to this magical place, a farm rocky New England farm that is out-of-time and out-of-place in 2026, I needed to cross boundaries and get pulled my the real magic of my woods. To do this, I return to an academic paper my mother once wrote on a New England Stone wall. I seem to own miles of them now in my own forest.
Amble, perambulate, scramble, ramble. The forest doesn’t really care where I go. Fine. The little chipmunk warns before dashing back to his stone wall. The squirrel argues with me while measuring me from her tree. She’s upside down, flat against the tree in nearly identical colors of greys, rust, and browns. She looks at me. I look at the floor. She yells at me. I find a trout lily. Kneeling, I flick a crispy beech leaf wishing to aid the lily’s freedom.
Then like entering a faerie’s circle, or a hidden glen, I must reveal the destination:
On the last wall, the forest ends. A pasture exists beyond these stones. To draw this, you’d need the Crayola box of a middle schooler, or the watercolor pencils of a pre-teen. That green has been trademarked as “Irish Green”. I would draw the sheep in “Woolie White.” The nineteenth-century farmhouse rambles irregularly. Red brick chimneys penetrate the roof without rhythm. The upside-down crenellations of the chestnut barn boards provide access for mice, voles, chipmunks. Come, go, be a mouse.
Then to help us escape the bounds of time, I draw on old images we each carry in our heads whether from movies or family photos.
It isn’t the woollies or the chill radiating up from my stone. And my exuberance for hunting trout lilies, red trillium, pink trillium, and white trillium quieted as I spied on a woman beating the ground with a bristly broom made with long tough straw, as seen in a children’s story. It is the self-same broom that comes alive to dance with a young movie mouse. It is the broom found next to old fireplaces. It is the broom displayed on those silly signs you find all around Salem Massachusetts every day of the year. Except in this Brigadoon view, I watch a woman use a real one, not something from a Halloween cartoon.
This woman stands alone in her field wearing a full skirt and leather ankle boots that either came from a Victorian washer woman’s lost closet or the back stock of LL Bean. Up goes the broom over her head, then down with a swish to the ground.
I debated adding a sound track to my reading of this story (available shortly via my podcast Trowbridge Dispatch by I.M. Aiken). I relented adding sounds I know, because others do not know. The hermit thrust, the state bird of Vermont, sings a multi-tonal/other-worldly song. To pull my listener/reader in, I brought the song with me as well as the caw of a blue jay. I also sang the ancient song a shepherd sings to her dogs: “Come By.”
One of the aspects of short story writing is that I get to play with words, word sounds, and the pattern of spoken language. I employ the tools of a poet freely. I let the words work for me.
Thank you all for the reading my stuff and dropping me email, hearts, and comments. It warms me and encourages me.
-Christina Aiken
Novel #3 drops in Sept 2026: Captain Henry: 2 ½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1 ¼ Centuries, and a Story of Love