Nothing screams Vermont quite like the job title “farmer-filmmaker.”
George Woodard, 72, has spent the past few decades balancing two passions: cows and movies. While working on his family farm in Waterbury Center, he wrote and directed the 2023 film The Farm Boy, a World War II-era love story based on Woodard’s parents, and The Summer of Walter Hacks, a coming-of-age Western, released in 2009. Both movies starred his son, Henry.
Now, Woodard can add “author” to his job description. In November, the farmer self-published his first children’s book, The Christmas Calf. The black-and-white picture book tells the story of a 9-year-old boy named Henry who lives on a dairy farm and witnesses some magic while helping a cow give birth on Christmas Eve.
Woodard began writing the book 12 years ago, based on a story he’d told his son. This past year, he finally completed it, waking up at 4 a.m. each day to draw at his kitchen table, first in pencil, then with pen and ink.
The book took so long to complete partly because Woodard had trouble with the ending. He said he wanted to avoid the moralistic tone of many children’s stories.
“I just wanted the adventure, not the lesson,” Woodard said.
The black-and-white illustrations may also seem unusual for a children’s book, but Woodard appreciates how the gray scale lets him experiment with shading and light.
The aesthetic mirrors the style of Woodard’s black-and-white films. Woodard said he thought about the book’s illustrations like cinematic frames, with establishing shots, reaction shots and pictures from the character’s point of view. The result is more than 60 drawings that together resemble a film storyboard, with multiple illustrations per page helping the tale unfold.
“The pictures actually came pretty easy,” Woodard said, “because it was sort of like, well, I’ve already made a couple of movies.”
No matter the medium, Woodard said he tends to write what he knows, which is farm life. Though Woodard stopped milking cows three years ago, he still raises beef cattle. The book features educational footnotes about cows, including that a heifer is a young female cow that hasn’t had a calf, and “Come, Boss!” is a traditional call used to herd cows in from the pasture.
Next, Woodard is working on a screenplay about Prohibition, which he hopes to film next summer. He also has ideas for three other children’s books, though he’s not sure when those will materialize.
“We’ll see,” Woodard said. “‘Cause I still got to go to the barn and take care of animals, too.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “George Woodard’s New Children’s Book Combines Cows and Christmas Cheer”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2024.
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