Litchfield County resident and Kent School English teacher Dr. Athenaide Dallett is the author of the newly published book, "The Absinthe Association." Based on a true story, the book chronicles the lives of a group of college grads who distill absinthe for fun, but find that its popularity in the underground music scene of Boston and Providence leads to dangerous consequences. As Dallett explains, the real-life Absinthe Association first distilled the illegal liquor at a camp in Kent Hollow, CT. The novel weaves together the Association members’ stories — the search for a satisfying job and the pain of a love triangle — with their increasing involvement in an outlaw world that culminates in violence. Hear more at Kent Memorial Library on Saturday, June 13 at 3 p.m., when the author will further discuss this intriguing, true-life tale. My introduction to Kent occurred one weekend in the summer of 1991, when I traveled from Cambridge, Massachusetts to observe fellow Harvard grad students and various other over-educated ne’er-do-wells distill absinthe at a camp in Kent Hollow. I was immediately taken by the bucolic beauty of the Litchfield Hills —an oddly serene setting for the woolly enterprise of the weekend — but didn’t return until two years later, at the invitation of old friends teaching at Kent School. While staying with them, I met a handsome young skier/cyclist/English teacher who could recite most of the Monty Python oeuvre. It was my great good fortune to marry him, twenty years ago this month, and move to Kent permanently.
As readers, I think most of us marvel at coincidences in nonfiction but view them with skepticism in fiction. So when I decided to write a novel based on the mishaps and love triangles of the actual Absinthe Association, I couldn’t let a member of the group die in a soured-drug-deal-turned-massacre, as one actually did, because he was there by sheer coincidence, and I couldn’t have a major character end up teaching high school in the same town where she first witnessed the distillation of illegal absinthe — but in real life, she did. The story of the Absinthe Association both begins and ends in Kent, Connecticut. My husband John and I live at Kent School, on the banks of the Housatonic River. On summer afternoons, we drive our children to a point upstream where we set them afloat in our inflatable dinghy to drift and paddle the four miles of river back to our house. It takes them about three hours, and they return with tales of rocks and rope-swings, eagles and heron, and once a black bear. In this part of the world, we can raise our children that way, yet still take in a performance at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, see contemporary Russian art at the Ober Gallery, or hop on the train and be in New York City two hours later. But we don’t have to go to New York for a heterogeneous environment: with the Kent School student body 30 percent international, our children have friends from almost every continent in the world. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
