With all due respect to the artists exhibiting work at Middlebury’s Mahaney Center for the Arts, the most electrifying stuff here on a recent afternoon isn’t hung on the walls, tinkling from the pianos, or even gleaming from Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture outside. It’s a collection of paperback books strewn across a coffee table in the lounge.

But these are no ordinary paperbacks. Slim and popping with color, they beg to be picked up and opened—to worlds where perfectly imperfect sea dragons slither through oceans, cosmic creatures spin in circles, and impish spirits slide down mountains on blocks of ice. Small enough for small hands and with such titles as Fearless Fifi and Silly Jack, the books are for children, yes. But what makes them extraordinary is the fact that these volumes are also illustrated by children.

“It’s a new business model that I really think the world could use,” says Jessica Riley ’98, the founder and owner of Kiba Kiba Books LLC, as she glances across her collection of publications. “I’m hopeful that it does take off and that people get it. It’s such a beautiful thing when you realize how it’s connected and how the pieces fit together.”

Riley never intended to be a book publisher. As a kid growing up in Saratoga, New York, she wanted to be on a TV show; later, she wanted to be a screenwriter. But from an early age, Riley had a knack for art. “I think I was four or five, and somebody bought me a paint set that was intended for an older kid, with really small brushes and really small tubes of paint,” she recalls. “When my parents were in another room, I opened it up and painted in a picture that came with the set. I remember my mom coming back into my room in shock because all the little spaces were filled in perfectly with different colors. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why am I getting so praised for something that was so easy for me to do?’”

Riley found that she was also pretty good at making life more joyful for other kids. On a youth speed-skating team, she was appointed “games coordinator,” whose job it was to get everyone else to play and have fun. Flash forward several years to Riley’s time at Middlebury, where, as an English and film major, she took a “body and earth” dance class with Professor Andrea Olsen. “She taught me the creative process,” says Riley. “After I graduated, I said to Andrea, ‘Whatever it is you taught in the class, that’s what I want to do, but I don’t know how to get there.’”

It would be a colorful journey. Riley spent two years designing handbags in Park City, Utah, and four more working for PBS. “But people my whole life always told me, children’s books, children’s books,” says Riley, who had, in fact, been compiling a list of children’s books she wanted to do eventually.

Then, in 2005, while Riley was volunteering back in Saratoga, she held a workshop for local kids, reading them a story she’d written about the endangered Karner blue butterfly. The kids illustrated it and the result was Blue Blew (now out of print). After searching for a publisher, Riley decided to start her own publishing company. She called it Kiba Kiba, which, in the language of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, means peace. The word was one of several Riley had stumbled across and written down over the years, along with the number 72—for how many books she’d like to publish. Why 72? The number just came to her, says Riley.

The pieces started coming together—literally. At another workshop, Riley showed up with snippets of fabric she had cut into various shapes, and she read aloud such phrases as “I dream trees grow tall enough to reach the sky.” The children began creating images for Riley’s words with the fabric, and the result was The Dream of the New Earth. “It’s amazing,” says Riley. “When you give children abstract ways to paste and beautiful fabric or beautiful materials, then it’s really easy to come up with a beautiful thing and art.”

The Dream of the New Earth has now been translated into six languages and has been followed by five more stories. All but one are illustrated by kids, ages four to 13, who’ve enrolled in one of Riley’s weeklong workshops. “It’s so cool,” says Riley of witnessing the children at work. “You have no control over what the kids are going to do, and it always works out. By the end of the week, we’re all like, ‘Wow!’”

Five of the Kiba Kiba books may be purchased with their original artwork or as a “companion art book,” with space for young readers to paste, paint, or draw their own creations. The exception is Kiba Kiba’s newest book, OMG! One Million Giraffes, which features drawings from all ages and from all over the world.

But that’s not all. Because every Kiba Kiba book has its own special vision of cleaner water, a healthier Earth, etc.—Riley has dedicated a “pod” to each project, detailed on the Kiba Kiba Web site, whereby children can send in artwork and songs; teachers can create lesson plans; and artists, musicians, and community organizers can help build grassroots campaigns.

Kiba Kiba is preserving the magic of the printed page, but is also embracing the connectivity of the digital age. In the process, this small company is making books fluid. Soon, The London Frogs will be republished with a foreword by Chad Urmston ’98 of the band State Radio; Riley hopes this will help inspire new songs for the pod.

“Together we can change the world,” she promises readers on the Web site. And she may be right. The nonprofit Water.org, cofounded by Gary White and Matt Damon, has agreed to partner with Kiba Kiba to share its Global Water Supply Curriculum as part of The London Frogs pod. “Everyone benefits,” explains Riley of her pod concept. “My books are being utilized, nonprofits are getting a campaign, and the schools and the children involved feel good about what they’re doing.”

This is the new business model of which Riley speaks. And while it may not be the most lucrative one—she is hardly the first to admit that there’s not a lot of money in children’s books (Harry Potter excluded)—the fluidity of Kiba Kiba books and the flexibility of Riley’s life point to the power of possibility.

Take, for example, The Play Spirits’ Playground, one of Kiba Kiba’s latest projects, whose vision is free play and movement in nature. Co-written by Hedda Bernsten ’99, Riley calls the book her “great work” and “meant to be.” The pair wrote the story just days before Bernsten won an Olympic silver medal in Vancouver, where children from the St. George’s School illustrated the book. Now they are focusing on creating the Play Spirits concept into a TV show and are pitching it to various children’s television networks.

Riley says she gets goose bumps when she thinks about how The Play Spirits’ Playground came to be and how she came to be not a book publisher but a “creative project facilitator.” Looking around the Middlebury arts facility, Riley says she wishes Olsen would appear. “I’d be like, ‘I did it!’” says Riley. “I came full circle, and I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do 10 years ago. It’s just being in the moment, and whatever comes next is what I do next. In the process you can see the greater work.”

Sarah Tuff ’95 is a freelance writer in Burlington, Vermont.  Jessica Riley’s Web site can be found at www.kibakiba.com.

Overhead rail lines shadow wide avenues of bargain shops and fast-food restaurants, and vast housing projects give way to streets of 19th-century row houses, churches, and defunct brick breweries. One of these large Bushwick, Brooklyn, edifices, just across from a row of pastel stucco houses, is the new home to Remains Lighting, a business run by husband-and-wife team Alexandra (Alix) MacGowan Calligeros ’90 and David Calligeros. While the streets are clogged with buses and taxis, the four-story space that houses Remains is open, spacious, and flooded with natural light.

Remains Lighting has showrooms in London, Chicago, Manhattan, Greenwich, and Los Angeles, and its antiques and original designs appear regularly in glossy spreads in Elle Decor, House Beautiful, and Architectural Digest. But as Alix says, “It’s not just the beauty of the design that matters to us, but the structural integrity of the pieces and the processes by which they’re made—the effort to manufacture locally and sustainably.”

In January, Remains, which began its life in 1996 in a Chelsea loft, consolidated its production, design, and manufacturing operations to this 25,000-square-foot factory. The new space gives the company room to begin manufacturing more of the specialized parts for its own designs, and it also allows Alix and David to realize their personal ambition–to do their work in a more environmentally conscious way.
The Brooklyn factory is now in the process of getting LEED certified. While LEED (Leader in Energy and Environmental Design) may not yet be a household term, it’s a shortcut to saying that the building has undergone a stringent process monitored by the U.S. Green Building Council and that it meets certain standards in efficiency and pollution control. “Most of what the LEED process requires,” Alix says, “are things we wanted to do anyway—the solar, the green roof, the water-efficiency control.”

It’s immediately apparent that this is a different kind of factory. In the areas where the building is not lit from tall windows, lights are mounted on sensors that detect both the need for light and the presence of activity, and all water sources are operated by foot pedal. They’ve insulated the roof and plan to install retractable awnings for further heat and light control. Remains gets all of its power from renewable sources, and, just this May, installed its own solar panels on the roof. “We expect the meters to be spinning backwards on weekends,” Alix says.

While they use scrap metals and recycled materials whenever possible, a business that works with chemical finishes has a particular challenge when it comes to water. So Remains invested in state-of-the-art filtration for rinse waters and developed a “closed-loop” system for all of its plating. This way, none of the chemicals used in meticulous finishing processes find their way back into the municipal water.

“Having the plant in a high-density neighborhood like this, a place where people actually live and work, is important to us,” Alix says. The happy consequence is that of the 40 employees who work in the Brooklyn factory, seven cycle to work year-round, and most others are close enough to either walk or take the subway.

Alix and David had been planning this expansion for about a year before they moved. The timing wasn’t great, Alix admits, referring to the collapse in the economy. It may slow down their ability to hire—they have about 25 manufacturing jobs now, but they’d like to increase that over the next few years. “Of course everything depends on the sales.” Right now things are holding steady, and they’re excited about a couple of new high-tech machines on the main floor. This is where rods, or strips of brass or nickel, are shaped into minutely detailed finials, frame lengths, and other components.

“A lot of lighting is made in China and India,” Alix says, “but we acquire most of the parts we don’t make from the East Coast, and the rest from domestic sources whenever we can.” To make a high-quality piece from metals and glass requires a lot of skill, skills that are disappearing in the U.S. and that Alix and David hope to help keep alive. A list of some of the artisanal and industrial services they require includes glassbenders, metal spinners, brazers, glass blowers, shade-makers, wire-formers, and chain-makers—not your standard curriculum at tech schools these days.

Motivated by his respect for the craft and informed by years of work in antique restoration, David starting designing original pieces for Remains in 1998. His “permanent collection” now consists of hundreds of different wall lights, pendants, sconces, and lanterns. The company also does custom work anchored in David’s knowledge of antiques and on adaptations of the company’s own designs. Most of the pieces are characterized by simple elegance, but there are also some flamboyant show stoppers—such as the gilded chandelier hanging in the 59th Street showroom, four feet tall and decorated with caryatids and hermai.

Los Angeles designer Madeline Stuart says, “I can’t think of another company anywhere in the country that offers so many unique and beautiful fixtures. They’re absolutely exquisite.”

David, who founded the company and is in charge of acquisitions and design, has a deep knowledge of all things lighting. Of Alix, he says, “She has turned our business from a one-man antique shop into a thoroughly organized international organization. She’s able to see patterns in seeming chaos, to then create systems of management and communicate her distilled, organized vision to our staff.”

A history major with a concentration in studio art, Alix learned early on how to make complex connections and handle a lot of data while developing an appreciation for tactile beauty. At Middlebury, her senior thesis focused on civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and she had a memorable summer job working on a vegetable farm in Starksboro. But it is printmaking teacher David Bumbeck who continues to inspire her. “He was an expert in all techniques,” she says. “He didn’t adhere to a rigid style or method or philosophy in his teaching. He adapted to his students, was very generous in that way.”

The influence of this teaching style can be seen now in the way Alix works with employees. “We really value people’s different contributions to the business, and we want their input. And while the business grows, people’s jobs evolve to better suit their talents. There’s a lot of room for collaboration.”

It’s sometimes hard to hear on the factory floor, but the atmosphere is cordial and focused. There are designers, mainly mechanical engineers working on computers, and finishers concentrating on the polishing wheels and chemical rinses. The shipping department—one man at a desk—is right near the front door, where a massive, gleaming, 18-arm chandelier, “a custom piece,” Alix notes, awaits a photo shoot before being shipped to its final destination.

The price tag for these items? Yes, it’s pretty steep. As Madeline Stuart says, “The quality of the fabrication makes them almost like pieces of jewelry.” But what makes them valuable is something added to their decorative flair, it’s the values embodied in their production.

It’s a soaking wet morning in Seattle. Coaxed outward by the rain, the ’shrooms will tomorrow be popping from the forest duff and sprouting sideways from decaying tree trunks. Langdon Cook ’89 will be out there, trekking nimbly down forest trails, surveying the secret caches of matsutake and morels that dot his mental map. But today he’s in the city, huddled with me outside the entranceway of the crowded brunch spot where we’ve just eaten cheesy egg scrambles and buttermilk biscuits the size of our hands. Between us I am cradling, like a bird’s nest, a paper towel that holds a pile of wild fungi: eight golden chanterelles and a pudgy white porcino sliced in half lengthwise.

Cook has brought me these mushrooms, a sample from his most recent haul, as a gift. As raindrops pelt our jeans, he gives me careful instructions on how to cook them into a pasta sauce flavored with sage and dry vermouth. “Now, I don’t know how you feel about cream sauces,” he begins, an impish smile gathering at the corner of his mouth. He casts his light-blue eyes on a pinhead-sized wormhole in the porcino. Holding up the bolete, his close-cut fingernails edged with woodsy debris, he shows me how to cut out the hole. The mushroom’s meat is white and otherwise without blemish. I feel very good about cream sauces, I assure him.

In the prologue to his new book, Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (Skipstone, 2009), Langdon Cook writes: “In four years of college in rural Vermont, I’d cracked open the great books of literature but never cracked an egg.” After Middlebury, he learned to feed himself, but it wasn’t until his year as an MFA student at the University of Washington that he was properly introduced to foraging. Hiking along the Pacific Coast with his future wife, Martha Silano—a bird-watching poet whose outdoorsiness attracted him from the outset—Cook was astonished to see her grow excited over a cluster of Frisbee-like mushrooms sprouting out of a hemlock tree. They cooked the fungi that night in a stir-fry, and Cook was hooked. He soon became a voracious gatherer of the Pacific Northwest’s wild edibles, scratching the sand for clams at low tide, memorizing the choicest spots along mountain slopes for plucking huckleberries from their bushes, cultivating—to his neighbors’ dismay—a wild dandelion patch in his front yard. A longtime fisherman, he learned to free dive for Dungeness crabs in the frigid waters of Puget Sound and jostle for squid-jigging spots along its waterfront on cold winter nights, pulling up Pacific squid with a boisterous crew of first-generation immigrants as they schooled him on the proper techniques.

It wasn’t always such a wild life. Cook grew up along the crowded I-95 corridor in Connecticut. In high school he shipped off to Philips Exeter Academy, where, he says, “I didn’t thrive.” Middlebury proved a better match: his love of literature sizzled under the tutelage of Jay Parini, and he found friends of the lifelong variety, some of whom appear as characters in Fat of the Land. (“Can’t we just buy some crab at the market like normal people?” one Midd alum asks memorably in an essay called “Crab Feed” after escaping from a too-small wetsuit that Cook wants him to rent for a free dive.) Then came grad school and, in 1997, a job as a books editor at fledgling startup Amazon.com. It was fun, at first. Cook’s colleagues in editorial were literary types—veterans of publishing houses and newsrooms—and an egalitarian spirit ruled. Cook recalls company-wide e-mails where employees openly debated policies with CEO Jeff Bezos. “That didn’t last,” he says. When Amazon went public, things changed. Friends were fired without warning, priorities shifted towards the bottom line. It wasn’t fun any more.

In 2004, he quit. He and Martha packed up their three-year-old son and left Seattle to become caretakers of an off-the-grid homestead in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon. Propane powered their refrigerator and small stove, and the nearest neighbors lived 10 miles down the river. To no one’s surprise, Cook loved it. In Fat of the Land, he describes days spent chopping wood, fly-fishing steelhead in the Rogue, and crouching around the grounds picking mushrooms that he’d identify with a guidebook at night until it was too dark to see. He hoped to stay through the winter, but when Martha became pregnant with their second child, the risk outweighed the adventure. They went back on the grid.

“When we came back to Seattle, I went into a pretty deep funk,” Cook recalls. Whenever he could, he’d escape to the woods for mushrooms, wild greens, and berries. He nourished his yen for self-sufficiency by catching and cooking wild salmon for the family’s supper, drying porcini for the winter, stuffing zip-lock bags with huge stashes of protein-rich stinging nettles for soups. At first he cooked the same recipes he’d prepared on the homestead’s propane stove: grilled fish, wokked veggies, simple pastas. Then the culinary bug bit. Chanterelle stir-fry became beef bourguignon with porcini and chanterelles. He cooked Pacific squid in their own ink. Experimenting with recipes in the kitchen, converting his wild haul into haute cuisine, Langdon Cook discovered a sort of a peace with city life. Jars of thimbleberry jam and pickled seabeans lined kitchen shelves that once housed brightly packaged store-bought items. The Cook-Silvano household was eating well.

Meanwhile, he wrote. He worked for a year as the Web editor of an environmental Web site. He pitched—and sold—stories to magazines, local and national, and shopped around a book proposal about living off the grid. “Publishers told me: ‘Everyone wants to live off the grid,’” says Cook. “‘Give me something new.’” To gauge interest in wild edibles, he started a blog called Fat of the Land, where he posted recipes and tips. The world’s foragers came out of the woodwork. The interest was there. A Seattle press accepted his proposal and Cook started writing. “When you’re writing well,” says Cook, “you just want to go out and have a party. When you’re not, you want to curl up and die.” To Cook’s delight, he kept the party going for a full year, and in early September, Fat of the Land was released.

On the evening after our breakfast interview, the rain pelting the windows in the galley kitchen of my apartment, I toss diced squares of shallot into a pan of melting butter, the first step to creating Langdon Cook’s Creamy Mushroom Pasta. I chop up the chanterelles and my now wormhole-free porcino and add them to the mix. Within seconds a sweet woodsy smell wafts upward from the stovetop, filling my apartment with an aroma as appetizing as any I can remember. Suddenly, I’m ravenous. I add heavy cream and sage and give the mixture a stir. And then I stand there, staring at it, impatiently anticipating the moment when I’ll spear the browning porcini meat with my fork, when I’ll taste that first earthy bite of a wild thing.

Jessica Voelker ’00 is an editor at Seattle Metropolitan magazine.

Langdon Cook’s Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager is available in bookstores nationwide.

These days, no one’s too surprised to hear about parents who write a high school daughter’s college entrance essay, or even call a young adult son’s prospective boss to discuss the terms of a job offer. That’s parenting, 21st-century style. But as Wendy Mogel ’73—author of the perennial bestseller, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children—was gathering material for her forthcoming book, The Blessing of a B-, she heard a tale that pushed the limits even further. It was about parents who got a divorce but didn’t tell their kids, worrying that it might upset them. The explanation for Dad’s absence? He was on an extended business trip.

Such stories distress, but no longer surprise, Mogel. The clinical psychologist and author has spent much of the last decade traveling around the country talking to worried parents from all walks of life. Her primary objective is to help parents understand how important it is to let their children make—and learn from—their mistakes and to understand that shielding them from life’s lessons can be counterproductive.

Mogel lives in Hollywood and is married to the successful producer, screenwriter, and novelist Michael Tolkin ’74. She has found that parental anguish is particularly intense in the perfection-obsessed private schools and palatial homes of Los Angeles. These are the kind of parents she saw in her clinical practice and the kind she feared she was becoming when her children were little.

“I was a regular old clinical psychologist—and then I had little children and I found Judaism,” Mogel says, of the faith that changed her view of parenting. With a friend, she began attending services and found herself moved, and supported as a parent, by what she found there. Suspending her practice, she spent a year studying Judaism full time; her young family began celebrating the Sabbath at home. (Today, she and Tolkin belong to Temple Israel of Hollywood and have supported the Jewish community at Middlebury College for many years.)

“When I began studying Judaism, one of the first things that struck me was how directly it spoke to the issue of parental pressure,” Mogel writes in Skinned Knee. “According to Jewish thought, parents should not expect their children to be anyone other than who they are. A Hasidic teaching says, ‘If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t tell him to be a doctor.’”

Skinned Knee, which grew out of the lectures Mogel developed for a Jewish parenting class, started out small. “They printed 5,000 copies of what they thought was a nice Jewish parenting book,” Mogel says. In spite of a rave review in Publishers Weekly, news of the book traveled mainly through word of mouth, from parent to parent, teacher to teacher, school to school. “Some independent schools give a copy to every new parent, others to every teacher. I’ve heard of acting classes using it, and it’s used in seminaries. So sales do remain brisk!”

Ten years after that first modest press run, there are some 300,000 copies of Skinned Knee in print, and the book has gone back on press 28 times. “The surprising thing is that it became an important book in the non-Jewish community, especially in the world of independent schools,” she says. “People overcame their prejudices about a parenting book that used religious thought as its foundation. They were willing to embrace traditional Jewish thought, and see it as universal, as something that is old and true—and that’s how I felt when I stumbled upon the Talmud.”

In Skinned Knee, Mogel writes that modern parents tend to be like “cruise ship directors who must get [our children] to their destination—adulthood—smoothly, without their feeling even the slightest bump or wave.” That overprotective approach means parents deprive children of essential experience: “Those bumps are part of God’s plan.”

Mogel’s bestseller counsels parents to let their children take risks and make their own mistakes. It also turns to traditional Jewish teaching to explore a series of “blessings” that enrich family life and create stability—including honoring parents, valuing work, embracing tradition, and experiencing gratitude.

Jewish tradition was not part of Mogel’s childhood in Manhattan. “I was not from a religious family at all,” she says. “Michael had a bar mitzvah and was confirmed, but neither of us had anything to do with religion until our first daughter, Susanna, was three.”

As interest in Skinned Knee grew, Mogel was asked to speak all over the country, at schools, synagogues, and gatherings of professional organizations. “I was surprised and very gratified—and I found out that my true calling was not being a therapist or even being a writer, but being a public speaker,” she says. “It’s my favorite thing to do. I am a circuit preacher.”

Mogel’s dance card for speaking engagements is sure to be even fuller when The Blessing of a B- is published in September. “The working subtitle is something like ‘raising resilient teenagers in a nervous world,’” she says. “I started this book five years ago, and my kids are now 18 and 22.” Older daughter Susanna is a Haverford graduate and teaches nursery school; younger daughter Emma, who enjoys playing bluegrass music and songwriting, is at the University of Chicago.

Stories about the girls abound in Skinned Knee, but for B- Mogel has drawn instead on the stories that administrators, teachers, and parents have told her as she travels the country. She is well aware of parents’ anxiety—indeed their terror—about their children’s futures.

“This was a much, much harder book to write because it’s a harder topic,” says Mogel. She sees teenagers today as both pressured and pampered—a poisonous recipe for raising confident, independent human beings. “We’re constantly taking their emotional temperatures. The reflex is to overprotect, overindulge, and overschedule.”

But being protected from reality makes kids much less able to cope with it. School administrators and teachers find that girls these days are anxious, boys emotionally shut down. “They call them ‘teacups’ and ‘crispies’ because they’re so fragile, dependent on their parents and burned out from APs and worries about burnishing their transcripts,” says Mogel. “But I want kids to be able to range free a bit and to be around knives, matches, divorce, cancer, death. I want teenagers to have to make choices about alcohol, drugs, and sex.”

Parents have to make tough choices, too—including ethical ones. “When someone calls from school and asks, ‘Is this late slip forged?’ you have to say yes, even if it gets your child in trouble,” Mogel says.

There are qualities in this generation of teenagers that give Mogel hope. “They’re so passionate. There is exuberant, tender, relaxed, collegial mutual support between the genders. They are worldly, and they’re not as prejudiced as we were. And when they’re not too stressed, their entitlement shows itself as energetic idealism and can lead to creative solutions to social problems.”

Mogel says that she again drew on Talmudic wisdom for the new book, but in a less prescriptive way. Rather, the religious framework of the book gives parents something to lean on themselves—the potential for pleasure in watching the circus of adolescence, a sense of the sturdiness of reality, and the power of human resilience. Says Mogel, “Jewish teachings are really about having faith in the future.”