Gather ’Round for Some Perspectives on Life and Learning

What often goes unnoticed about a good book is that the book’s origin story is often as interesting as the story within the book itself. Understanding the author’s own life journey adds perspective and inspiration to the reader’s experience.

That’s why, if you attended Norwich-based author Ken Cadow’s talk at the Norwich Public Library earlier in April, you might have a new window into his recent novel, Gather – a coming-of-age story set in present day Vermont, that explores themes of youth, education, family, struggles with addiction, and resilience – told through the eyes of a teenager named Ian.

Ken Cadow grew up in Rhode Island and spent his summers on Block Island. He later graduated from Rhode Island College with a focus on computer science and English and ended up jumping around in professions and interests.

“I would describe myself as an avid lifelong learner, always wanting to know more, but I really don’t care about formal credentials,” he says. Realizing this, Cadow opted to drive a taxi cab after graduating college instead of putting his degrees to ‘logical’ use. He joined the Navy where he was an officer for four years, then opened up a grocery store and wholesale business in Rhode Island, then he met his wife and started a family before landing in Norwich in 1997, where they have lived ever since. This is where the writing comes in.

For Cadow, writing and publishing Gather was a process spanning years, full of starts and stops, re-routing and re-writing, and lots and lots of thinking. In 1999, Cadow was inspired by an encounter he had while interviewing local hunters for an oral history project through the MALS (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies) program at Dartmouth College. “I was really struck by how, typically, you put a bunch of teenagers with a bunch of people who are older than they are, and they don’t say much, but I found that in the hunting camps, they were really leaning into the whole experience and part of the conversations.” A big parcel of nearby land had just been posted, and the hunters were sharing their disdain for this newfound situation. “They were talking about how it was harder and harder to find places to hunt,” Cadow says. “I thought, it would be really interesting if one of the kids in this hunting camp fell in love with the daughter of the family who just bought this land and moved into town…that would be an interesting dynamic to explore in a book.”

Where Ken has spent countless hours contemplating,
curating, developing, writing.

Cadow had been jotting down notes to develop a plot, “But I could never find the character that I wanted to stick with to tell that story,” he says. Twenty years later, “Ian walked onto the page.”

With another two decades of Vermont living under his belt and having worked with local kids in various educational roles, Cadow felt better equipped to bring this story to life. From the winter of 2019 when Cadow picked his pencil back up, it took him about eight months to finish the first draft. “After a while, I stopped paying attention to who the audience was and paid a lot more attention to who the narrator was,” he says. “My whole focus really became owing it to the character to get the story out.”

Inspired by some of Cadow’s real-life observations and experiences, but completely fictional, Gather takes a thoughtful approach to define learning, battling the notion that a “one size fits all” education isn’t the answer, or even close to it. In Cadow’s experience, he learned how to do things in school, but later learned how to use those things outside of school. “For me, that’s the ideal learning environment – through application,” he says. “The most important thing for me was always not necessarily utility, but the satisfaction of putting knowledge to work…[Things] have come a really long way since I was in school in terms of how we reach kids and have more opportunities than just desk learning,” he adds. “But I think we still have a long way to go.”

Gather’s main character, Ian, exemplifies an all-too-common struggle between student and the “system” – an educational model that’s outdated, inefficient, and “top down”, as Cadow describes. “The creativity is happening at the ground floor,” he explains, with passionate teachers who want to meet students where they are. “I wish we didn’t make such a huge distinction between learning by doing and desk learning that we do in our system,” Cadow says. “Everybody needs the exposure [to both types] to figure out what they might want to do next; figure out where their strengths are.”

“One of the things that drives education to be so expensive is that we’re trying to make something that’s busted work for too many people,” Cadow adds. “Instead of simplifying the system, we’re trying to simplify how we pay for it.”

As a former educator at various schools in Vermont and as the current administrator at Oxbow High School in Bradford, VT, Cadow witnesses the educational lives of his students daily, celebrating their wins and coping with their struggles alongside them. The shift in recent years has prioritized testing – especially since Covid-19, which focused more on learning lost than the potential for learning gained, Cadow says. Instead, Cadow raises the questions: “Why have kids stopped associating what they do at home with learning?” and “How can students see themselves as learners 24/7?”

With that in mind, Gather is more than a book – it’s a testament to the very real experiences of learners and educators everywhere – rural and urban, young and old, those concerned with tradition and those who desire to stray from the norm. Ian’s story represents that of “good kids who struggle with a system that’s not as flexible as we need it to be,” when “the systems that are intended to support him don’t.”

“I would love to challenge every person who’s looking at public education to ask themselves a couple of things,” Cadow says. “One is, ‘if it’s all this race to the top, what are we doing with everybody else and why do we have to define it that way?’” And, “Another thing that I wish we paid more attention to is – when the supply chain got really tight – how much we need our people who are capable of producing that which literally sustains us…I think Norwich is pretty great about that, but it’s a little bit of a bubble economy. How do we make it less of a bubble?”

Now, Cadow has been spending time on another book that’s been in the works since 2002 (he points out that with a full-time job as a principal, he only has time to work on his book over school vacations and for a few hours at a time on the weekends). He’s always keeping notes on a potential sequel to Gather, but for now, it’s one book against the world – a world that could use some added perspective.