You could almost set a timer —every 20 years or so, the Northampton-area music scene attracts national attention. Bands get signed, stories get written, hype builds. Then, like a lighthouse beam, the spotlight rotates away to the next town or sound. A couple of decades go by, and the whole process repeats: starting in the late 1960s with western Massachusetts acts like Arlo Guthrie, Clean Living, and Fat; continuing into the late ’80s and early ’90s with Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Scud Mountain Boys; and moving all the way up to a crop of current groups that includes And the Kids, LuxDeluxe, and California X.

Yet as any music fan in the region knows, the local scene doesn’t rely on outside illumination to thrive. For more than 45 years, the sound of music in western Massachusetts—in Northampton, but also throughout the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires—has been abundant and varied. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, punk, and various indie rock sounds have all taken root, along with heavy metal, jazz, and plenty of folk. Bands have come and gone; venues have opened, closed, and burned down; and the scene has flourished through it all.

“I just always marvel at the richness of it, considering how small the area is,” says David Sokol, who was music editor at the Valley Advocate from 1977 to 1993.

Dave Sokol, photo by Izzy Berdan

Billboard magazine expressed a similar sentiment in a slightly condescending frontpage story in 1992 that described the area as “a picturesque, place-that-time-forgot farming community.” Yet despite a population less than a quarter of the 3.4 million people in greater Seattle—the aspirational baseline for music scenes since the city birthed the ’90s grunge explosion that gave us Nirvana and Pearl Jam—the four counties of western Massachusetts have for years had the essential ingredients of any successful music scene: a creative class of musicians; places for them to play; audiences who will go see them; and supportive local media, including radio station WRSI-FM and the Valley Advocate, that will play their records on the air and write about them.

Western Massachusetts is also an affordable place to live, with a youthful atmosphere that flows from the local colleges, most notably Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s also near the intersection of two interstate highways, which is helpful when it’s time to go on tour. Those attributes have made this area attractive to a continual flow of music-minded people, far more than there’s room to mention. Some of them got famous; more of them, then and now, play music simply because they love it and it’s fun.

“Northampton is an incredible place to emerge as an artist and to find that group of people who support what you do,” says folksinger Dar Williams, who moved to Northampton in 1992 and began building her career. So far it’s yielded 10 solo studio albums, including this year’s Emerald. Though she relocated to New York in 2000, she adds, “I would say it’s the reason I’m still doing what I’m doing.”

Ray Mason, photo by Izzy Berdan

The beginnings of the western Massachusetts scene date to the mid-1960s, when musicians like Holyoke native Ray Mason would play the local YMCA and slip an occasional original song into sets of covers of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Rascals. The covers-are-king attitude started to fade when bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods from Boston and The Wildweeds from Connecticut came through playing their own songs, almost as if they were demonstrating that such a thing was possible for regular guys from New England.

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The result for nine years and counting is the “surrealist cabaret,” an interactive, walkable performance set in the fields of western Massachusetts, punctuated by crisp autumn air, framed by the setting sun, and characterized by multiple takes in multiple media around a single unifying theme. Last year’s theme was “home,” a resonant, deeply personal concept that can be both comforting and dark. Members of the Royal Frog Ballet Corps scatter to do their various work and art for most of the year, but they trek back to the Pioneer Valley each fall to undertake large-scale performances and installations. Here are snapshots of some key members.

Sophie Wood

Wood studied theater for social change at Hampshire College, and the work she did then was overtly political. But around the same time that Wood began thinking about making art with her housemates, she had an epiphany. “Social change, those two words—social is one of them,” she says. “And dialogue is a huge part of how inclusive change happens. My hope is that this whole shebang is where artists can have conversations with each other, but it’s also happening with the audience.” Wood is acutely aware of how powerful art can be but doesn’t believe it has to be sharp-edged. In fact, at its most effective, its borders can blur. “I think there’s a softness about making things a little dreamlike. People can connect things.” For last year’s “home”—themed cabaret, installations included egg-based breakfasts and laundry hanging from a line—deceptively simple tropes meant to evoke losing home, not having a home, missing home. But there was no narrative, so audiences—and actors—were left to figure out what their subconscious was telling them. “You wake up and you’re like, ‘That didn’t make sense—but it all made perfect sense in your dream.’ ”

Julia Read

Read set the idea of “home” to music, writing a waltz. “The words were from the perspective of a house that missed the people that had lived in it,” she says. But she brought another piece to the cabaret as well, thinking about her mother who had passed away years prior. “I found a dress that was my mom’s—a beautiful long blue dress with flowers on it—and we hung it from a branch of a tree. I would go up to the dress and smell it, imagining my mom was inside it and what it would feel like to touch her and see her.” Then Annie Burdette and Molly Greene, two more members of the Corps, approached. “Annie came up behind me and took my shirt and began doing the same thing, except that my body was inhabiting my shirt, and Molly Greene came up and did the same to Annie’s shirt.” One didn’t need to know anyone’s backstory to sense the intimacy of the moment. “The audience was really quiet. I feel like it helps drop me into being present, having the audience nearby, to see people’s faces.” On any given night, Read may recognize some audience members, but not all—and she likes it that way. More than anything, she appreciates the precipice of performing. “I love the moments right before. As the audience is gathering, people are bundled up and chattering, and the light is usually dramatic. I love those moments. It sort of feels like we don’t know what will happen yet as we move into this world.”

Chelsea Granger

Granger is up for almost any kind of project, but she’s most excited about the ones she undertakes with other people. This is not an accident. “My first few years [with RFB] it was hard to find my footing as a visual artist who makes smaller works on paper,” she says. “It took a while to understand what my work could be outside in a large field setting with big crowds.” But eventually she got it. Her project for “home” was truly collaborative—and truly huge, compared to the small-scale work she was used to. “I wanted to make a really big painting, a cantastoria, with Sophie.” A cantastoria, or “story-singer,” is an ancient melding of visual art and theater where a series of paintings are narrated by a live performer. “Eventually I made a huge painting of a vase of flowers, and Sophie wrote a prayer for flowers to go with it.” Because several members of the Corps had recently undergone loss and were processing grief in various ways, the prayer held special meaning. “It was about creating rituals, showing up for each other in the time and space. I wanted rituals, needed rituals.” Religious expression can be deeply personal, but many of the most powerful rituals happen in community—or collaboration. “I think that’s the thing. It’s not just your voice, your ideas, but your voice and ideas meeting someone else’s voice and ideas. Sitting alone in a room drawing is nothing compared to the alchemy that happens when people make things together.”

Jazer Giles

The natural, outdoor theater is central to the RFB experience, but Giles has fond memories of a rare indoor moment: a monthlong installation at the APE Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, when the troupe created a boat-shaped stage in the space. “We spent most of the time building it,” says Giles. About a week before the show, they realized they still needed to come up with a performance. “I had built an artist posing figure, a puppet that mimicked my movement, and I hooked up to it with four coat hangers attached to my limbs with leather straps. I built a small bird outfit for him, and we made this event happen out of the ether.” Some performers might have been daunted, but Giles is less attached to the outcome, more interested in the process. “You’re always pulling art out of the air.” With its outdoor performances, RFB is “harnessing the magic of the place, distilling it, setting it up in a certain way—or just framing it. Of course, sometimes it rains. Often it’s freezing! But you can’t fake things like space. When you put people out in a field, 50 feet away from people, and put them in costumes, you can’t translate that to an inside space with a stage.”

Mike Gundlach

Gundlach began as the mess cook for the Corps, but he quickly found his role morphing. “Sophie asked me to collaborate to make an outdoor-feast show. The food was interspersed with two or three acts in between each course of people popping out of the ground and having dinner.” After that, Gundlach was both company cook and performer, and has been contributing edible art ever since. “We’ve made a pepper-infused, chocolate-covered asparagus as an aphrodisiac course that was served on spires. We’ve hung Turkish delight from trees for people to pick and eat,” he recalls. “Molly and I performed a piece with soft-boiled eggs and volkenbrat, this German rye bread that people would make in the fall and survive on all winter.” They garnished the peasant food with chives and edible flowers, then dumped freshly squeezed grapefruit juice on top and served [the dish] in small planter trays. “For one show we had a bunch of rain and made pizza in the rain. We just figured it out,” he shrugs. “If people can see you be excited, you get that energy.”

Molly Greene

In her other life, Greene is completing a PhD at Yale University in American studies—an interdisciplinary field that explores how elements in society intersect. One could argue that RFB does the same. “The themes of the cabaret are always threads that weave in and out of aspects of our lives,” Greene muses. “Sometimes they congeal into a single idea, but usually it’s a constellation of terms that connect, then get kind of carried off in various trajectories, then get rewoven into something we hope is coherent.” Greene’s printmaking work is solitary and quiet. “I’m kind of a hermit. Being in front of people performing . . . there’s a little bit of tension in it for me, but it’s also rich and nourishing. One of my favorite moments is when we’re literally hiding in a ditch somewhere as your next costume is being assembled or whatever, and the sky is doing something incredible, and it’s fall in New England. You’re listening with one ear for your cue, but you’re also just conscious of being outside, and there’s a heightened sense of purpose and consciousness and collective awareness of just being in that place. I have that moment every year, and it is always all-consuming.”

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2016 issue of Take, which is available here.

Royal Frog Ballet
Amherst, Massachusetts
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All images by Candace Hope

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It was the middle of the night when writer Jedediah Berry first heard the voices.  “A chorus really,” he says, speaking in the rambling house he shares with his partner, Emily Houk, and a host of other Amherst, Massachusetts, artists and musicians. “It feels lucky when something comes out of nowhere like that.”

So lucky, in fact, that Berry forced himself to get out of bed and start writing. He didn’t reach for his computer, or even a notebook, but instead grabbed a stack of index cards. “I think I wrote five or six of them that night,” he recalls. Each card contained its own small story, told by a different voice.

Berry is well tuned to the reception of midnight voices. The protagonist of his first novel, The Manual of Detection (The Penguin Press, 2009), is a detective to whom clues appear in dreams. The book, which won the 2009 Hammett Prize for crime fiction, was hailed by the New Yorker as “the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka.” Berry had once envisioned The Manual of Detection as a type of Choose Your Own Adventure story, although he ultimately wrote it with only one ending. But after the novel’s completion, Berry’s interest in multiple versions of a story remained, which might explain his attention to those voices and their sometimes-contradictory tales.

The Family Arcana is → composed of 52 stark prose-poem narratives that tell a shifting story.

Those voices, Berry quickly surmised, were a pack of siblings with some dark tales to tell. Think disappearing and reappearing children; think bankers hidden under floorboards. Berry crafted these dictations into The Family Arcana, a haunting narrative of a family’s fight to keep their decrepit farmhouse from foreclosure and their buried secrets from the light of day. But here’s where it gets (more) interesting: The Family Arcana, in keeping with its index card origins, is not a book. It’s a deck of playing cards that can be shuffled, cut, and read in any order, creating a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes. Printed by the United States Playing Card Company, The Family Arcana is composed of 52 stark prose-poem narratives, any one of which can be the story’s first line or its last. “Taken as a whole, it tells a story,” Berry explains. “It’s just a shifting one.”

This narrative feat is made possible by Berry’s careful attention to voice and pacing in each card. First lines cast either a wide and suggestive net (“How it goes is this.”) or are compellingly specific (“Father buries himself in his sleep again.”). Each last line contains both closure and possibility, like a flower that blooms or wilts depending on the time of day (“And then we will need more words, and heavier boots, and a song like a lantern to make us brave through the night.”). It takes a reading of only a few cards to realize that Berry is a master of the subtle cues and linguistic evocations necessary to make these individual cards come together as a story.

“The appeal is the mutability,” says Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and cofounder of Small Beer Press, where Berry is an editor. “It’s quite a feat to pull off a story that thrives on being rearranged.”

When I first met Berry, I recognized him as the adult version of the clever and quiet friends my brother once brought home—the ones who arrived bearing velvet drawstring bags of 20-sided dice and armfuls of Dungeons & Dragons manuals. Perhaps it’s because Berry’s appearance is rather boyish: he is slight and wears dark glasses and, on the day we met, a scally cap. Or maybe I sensed the resemblance because Berry has created every gamer’s dream: a complex and malleable narrative whose outcome you can determine with your own hands.

Berry and Houk’s centuries-old Amherst house hides behind a thick hedgerow, and when I arrived for our interview, I had trouble finding the front door. The yard is expansive for a house so close to the center of town. Grass and gravel paths lead to overgrown and shadowy edges that suggest Berry didn’t look far for the setting of The Family Arcana.

The couple greeted me in the charmingly cluttered kitchen and led me up a narrow staircase to their second-floor office. The low-ceilinged room was filled with antique furniture and two large desks, a string of Tibetan prayer flags hanging over both of them. Through the open window I heard the faint sounds of guitar music. It was Matt Lorenz of the one-man band The Suitcase Junket, who also lives in the house. Lorenz makes his own musical instruments and, Berry told me, ferments homemade wine in the basement.

Berry offered me a glass of water before we got started, and when I reached to put it down, Houk warned me of a hole in the side table. I ran my hand over it, and sure enough, there was a drinking glass–size hole, invisible under the faded tablecloth. I was beginning to get the sense that things in this house are not exactly as they seem, and that this makes Berry and Houk—and their gargoyle-like chihuahua, Milton—quite content.

Author Jedediah Berry (left) conceived of The Family Arcana in the centuries-old Amherst, Massachusetts, house he shares with his artist partner, Emily Houk | Photo by Joanna Chapman

“This is an area with a lot of ghosts,” Berry says about the New England inspirations for The Family Arcana. “I try to keep their company.” Keeping company with ghosts is something Berry has done for most of his life. He grew up in the Hudson River Valley, where his grandparents owned a rambling and (Berry says) haunted house on a ridge above the town of Catskill, New York. He is rather matter-of-fact about the haunted bit. “There were definitely rooms you didn’t go into alone,” he remembers.

And while that Catskill farmhouse is the original model for The Family Arcana’s farmhouse, Berry was also influenced by Massachusetts farmhouses where he and Houk have lived, including the one they inhabit now.

“I think something that hangs over the history of this entire place is that there’s no way to completely put out of one’s mind the [deaths from] the conflicts with the natives,” he says. “Part of what I liked about writing this family was that their identity was so slippery. I could let their voices speak for the living and the dead, and not just the ancestors of the settlers, but all the ancestors before.”

This sense of history is part of what makes The Family Arcana more than a deck of dark tales. Many of the cards suggest a history of losses and dangers far deeper than the family’s present concerns. One narrator speaks of a spreading black square on the kitchen floor: “When Grandmother sees it, she says, ‘Oh, that old thing. Your grandfather caught it in the war.’ Caught like an animal? Or caught like an illness? Grandmother just shakes her head. We see the square in our dreams sometimes. If we talk about it, it only gets bigger.”

While The Family Arcana began as a solitary endeavor, after a few months of writing, Berry started bringing mocked-up Family Arcana cards to public readings, where he would have an audience member shuffle and cut the deck. “It was a bit of showmanship,” Houk says. “And people loved it.” Not only were the stories well received, but these public readings also allowed Berry to test his cards and discern what elements of the story were missing from that evening’s shuffle.

At one of these readings—held in Berry and Houk’s current residence—artist Eben Kling asked if Berry was looking for an illustrator. Berry knew Kling’s work and was excited at the offer. Kling did the art for the card backs, the two jokers (a banker and a brother, the latter of whom has been pickled in a jar), and additional illustrations for the deck’s two extra cards. (Berry’s design adheres to the United States Playing Card Company design; in a traditional deck, the two extra cards are advertisements or rules for a card game.)

Other writers approached Berry at the readings, sharing their ideas for similar projects. Houk and Berry began to see The Family Arcana as the first of a series, a larger project involving other authors. “We thought we could publish stories in strange shapes,” Berry says. They decided to start Ninepin Press, and they took their idea to Kickstarter with the hope of raising a few thousand dollars—enough to print The Family Arcana. Their project quickly became a staff pick, and by the time the campaign ended, they had nearly 1,500 donors and a total of $32,000 in pledged support.

Berry attributes this success to the larger culture’s desire for projects like The Family Arcana. “Right now, it’s an interesting moment for objects of this kind, especially with so much happening digitally. This gives us an opportunity to rethink the book as object—what we can do to make this an interesting and compelling creation of its own. And I think people are hungry for that. You see it in music with the resurgence of vinyl. People want an object to hold.”

Artist Eben Kling illustrated the card backs, the two jokers, and the deck’s two extra cards.

Berry is thrilled with the result of the Kickstarter campaign, but he’s clear that that approach was very project-specific. He doesn’t plan to publish more of his own work with Ninepin Press or with an online fundraiser. “What I am excited about is publishing more fiction and poetry by other people interested in experimenting with form and taking exciting risks with language and narrative structure,” he says.

But when I asked him if he plans to return to the world of commercial publishing, Berry was quick to question the term. “I don’t really think of there being two worlds in publishing. It’s more of a multiverse at this point. And while it can be hard to survive as a writer, I am encouraged by the range of possibilities open to those who are willing to play around with different models.”

Berry and Houk are getting multiple opportunities to do just that. They are at work recording The Family Arcana audiobook, with a different reader for each of the deck’s 52 cards. Lorenz is composing and recording a Family Arcana soundtrack. And Berry has designed The Family Arcana Card Game, a classic trick-taking game in the style of spades or hearts, with some twists, of course. (The discard pile is called Poughkeepsie.)  In addition, Ninepin Press has published a few smaller card sets to complement The Family Arcana. The first is Cosmogram, a set of 12 horoscopes written by authors such as Mira Bartók and Alexander Chee. The second is a set of recipe and curiosities cards, which were created by Houk along with Michael Gundlach, a Pioneer Valley artist and chef. These cards include recipes for Mother’s Cornbread and Berry Shrub, a traditional colonial vinegar and fruit cocktail.

Berry is excited about these cards. “There are a lot of bad ideas in The Family Arcana,” he says. “I like to think that these recipes are a nod to the good ideas. The recipes say, ‘We have our gardens, we have our ways of preserving food, of living in a way that honors these patches of earth we live on.’”

“The recipes are about pickling food, not people,” adds Houk.

Berry has come to see The Family Arcana as a form of preservation. “I can’t brew beer, and I’m not a musician like Matt who can build his own instruments, but we can create this lasting object. We can preserve these stories. I want to sell The Family Arcana at our local co-op, right there with all the other homegrown offerings.”

While The Family Arcana may have arrived in Berry’s head without warning, it also arrived at just the right time for him. “I moved to Amherst 12 years ago and was happy to find this community of writers and small presses and people engaged in all these interesting projects,” he says. “I knew I would eventually want to do something that came from our place. The Family Arcana is a way to contribute to this community. In the last decade I’ve realized I am, in fact, a local—not a visitor—and I needed to write my way into this place. This story is very much a bridge from one river valley to another.”

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