Audiobooks by Bill Schubart

The Correctional Facility: A Journey into Dante's Inferno and the Ensuing Metastasis of Evil

Raised as a Catholic in rural Vermont, I was infused with an awareness of sin and penitence, but also absolution and forgiveness. My late teenage encounter with Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” shattered my youthful allegiance to Catholic dogma, but it’s one thing to walk away from Catholic doctrine and quite another to lose the weight of its beauty, fear, and guilt. Shortly after I read The Brothers Karamazov, in which “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” occurs as a story told by Ivan Karamazov, the sybarite, to his novice monk brother, Alyosha, I read Dante’s Inferno. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayal of the hell I’d heard about so graphically from the Québécois sisters who came down to teach Saturday morning catechism. I saw in Dante’s work and the extraordinary illustrations of Gustav Doré the hell I had imagined in catechism, a hell that haunts my imagination to this day. Is sin a temporal concept? Some of the sins of Dante’s time are not viewed as such today: heresy, suicide, concupiscence. His simple architecture of human sin is lost today in scale and technology. In 1320, one killed with one’s hands or with a piercing weapon like a stiletto, battle-axe, or sword, or with poison. Today, we have drones, nuclear bombs, and industrial toxins leaching into our soil, water, food, and air — and Pharma: subliminal mass homicides. The Correctional Facility comes after a lifetime of living with Catholicism and Dante’s weight of sin, evil, punishment, expiation, and redemption, and is my effort to make sense of it all.

Bill Schubart (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Panhead

Paul and Glenda grew up on a farm in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom. They keep close to each other and have a shared sense that their way of life is coming to an end. But only when Paul returns home on his Harley Panhead to help his parents with the farm does the drama really begin. The dream of the open road—wind in the hair, power in the groin—is common among men young and old, but it is fraught with complexity and often danger. Panhead follows Paul on his journey from a hillside farm to college, to work in the Midwest and almost home again.

Bill Schubart (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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The Priest

The Priest follows a working class altar boy's decision to become a priest, exploring the struggle many boys have becoming men, especially around sexuality. Pierre finds safety within the vocational confines and celibacy of his Catholic faith, only then to be astonished as he experiences life vicariously in the shadow of the confessional. Ultimately, he must confront his own emerging sexuality in the real world and reconcile the inevitable collision between the security of doctrine and the risks of being human - all of which takes him to a surprising place.

Bill Schubart (Author), Mark Nash (Narrator)

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I Am Baybie

Nadine Hoover was sighted at birth and blinded by the drunken doctor bringing her into the world. The daughter she had herself as a teenager by a foster father who raped her became her greatest friend and comfort and Nadine kept her close until she died. Nadine renamed herself "Baybie" when she and her friend Virginia Brown moved to the streets of New York City where, she became a licensed minister and founded her church in an abandoned apartment in Brooklyn. If you lived in Manhattan and ever shopped at Bloomingdale's in the late 60's and early 70s, you met Baybie and Virginia singing there by the main entrance. 'I was born sighted but then was blinded by the drunken doctor who gave birth to me. I was raped by my foster father, and lied to when my little girl was born. She was sold for adoption without anyone asking me. When I had an abortion a few years later, the doctor told me he did me a favor by removing my ovaries, but he never asked me. The Lighthouse called us mendicants and wanted us to learn crafts, but we're working women -- buskers. We work for our living. I am the Reverend Baybie Hoover. I can sing for eight hours and never repeat a song. This is Ginger Brown, my Deaconess of Music. You are welcome to come to our little church.

Bill Schubart (Author), Bill Schubart Jody Petersen (Narrator)

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The Lamoille Stories

Schubart brings to life the friends and characters of his native Lamoille County, where in the late 1950s and early 1960s, life was lived close to the earth and often against the grain. Schubart's collection of twenty-two stories captures Vermont in its transition from an enclave of hill farms and small towns where everyone knew your grandfather to a place where vehicles bearing license plates from "away" mix with hippie vans filled with born-again Vermonters getting back to the land...until snowfall.

Bill Schubart (Author), Bill Schubart, Kent Cassella, Mary Catherine Jones (Narrator)

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Lila & Theron

Lila and Theron is set in rural America and relates a personal story of love and sacrifice. Lila and Theron do not imagine themselves poor, nor do they covet what they don't have. They are whole in themselves and on their land - in marked contrast to today's victim culture of safe spaces and narcissism. Bill Schubart grew up among farmers and loggers in Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom, where survival depended not on institutions but on family, neighbors, hand tools, and the bounty of wilderness. Lila and Theron are from a time and place where the arguments that divide us today would seem meaningless against the exigencies of kinship and survival.

Bill Schubart (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Fat People

Bill Schubart (Author), Bill Schubart, Bruce Campbell, Kathryn Blume (Narrator)

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