Former Staples English Teacher Karl Decker Speaks About “The People of Townshend, Vermont” at Westport Library on Oct. 30

Photographer, writer, and former Staples High School English teacher Karl Decker has published a documentary book of portraits and accompanying stories about small-town Vermonters. With a foreword by Vermont writer Nancy Levine, “The People of Townshend, Vermont” includes two articles by Decker about the project and his life as a photographer. Decker will speak about the book on Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 7:30 pm in the Westport Library’s McManus Room. Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event, which is free and open to the public.

“Karl has captured on film the fleeting image of the soul, or the still luminous fragments of memory,” says the writer Lynn Stegner. Vermont photographer John Miller says the accompanying stories are “sometimes elegiac and often humorous.”

Decker was a newspaper editor for five years and a SHS English teacher for 43 years. He studied at Maine Photographic Workshops and did an independent study funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He had a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center and belongs to the American Society of Media Photographers.

For more information, phone (203) 291-4800, or visit the library online at westportlibrary.org.