Life Story: Jay Stevens Loved ‘Being a Good Ancestor’

This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2025.

The summer before his junior year at the University of Vermont, Jay Stevens shared beers with a carny at the Last Chance Saloon in downtown Burlington. A farm boy from Weathersfield with a ravenous curiosity, Jay was fascinated by the nomadic lifestyle the carnival worker described to him. By last call, he’d made a decision: He would put college on hold and quite literally run away to join the circus. To his parents’ horror, that’s exactly what he did.

That mercurial spontaneity would come to define Jay, who, following his yearlong circus stint, became a celebrated writer, journalist, poet and all-around Renaissance man. He’s perhaps best known for writing what is likely the defining book on acid, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, as well as books on drumming and rhythm with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Jay was a kind of modern-day shaman with a slick Italian wardrobe and sick sense of humor.

At his heart, the self-described “warrior scholar” was also a good ol’-fashioned Vermonter. He traveled far and wide and lived a big life, but his ancestral family farm in Weathersfield Bow was forever his North Star, always guiding him home.

Jay died on February 19 at age 71 from a heart attack, after years of living with Lyme disease and diabetes. At his funeral, friends and family read poems he had written for them, played songs he had composed and traded notes on the specifics of his infamous shaggy-dog stories. A gifted and prolific storyteller, Jay was notorious for adding details to his yarns over the years — and not everyone got the same version.

There was the tale Jay loved to tell about the old Weathersfield police chief, a former Golden Gloves boxer who refused to call for backup in hopes that he’d get to fistfight some perps. Sometimes the brawling cop kept a pet bear in his backyard that he’d wrestle on occasion, but sometimes the bear wasn’t in the story. If anyone pointed out the inconsistency, Jay would reply with pure, deadpan humor: “Oh, I didn’t mention the bear? The bear’s the best part.”

“Dad was obsessed with strange characters,” said Jay’s son, Zach Stevens. “He loved weird people, in the best sense of that word.

“I think that’s honestly what got him into journalism and writing books,” Zach continued. “The idea that he could entrench himself in someone’s life and spend years hanging out with these weirdos he loved so much, it intrigued him on a seriously deep level.”

Jay’s first passions were typical of a young boy raised on a farm. Born in 1953 to Karl and Patsy Stevens, Jay grew up hunting, riding horses, shooting, skiing and playing sports. A long line of taciturn Yankees and New England mystics, the Stevenses have been farming their land in “the Bow,” as they call it, since the beginning of the 19th century.

Jay didn’t care much for farming himself — with the exception of making maple syrup, a family tradition he considered to be an ancient and alchemical process. By the time he headed off to attend UVM in the early 1970s, his world had opened up to politics, Taoism and philosophy. Those interests ignited a burning curiosity and wanderlust that wouldn’t be contained by his home state for much longer.

He met his future wife, Sara DeGennaro, in a UVM philosophy class when, in that most Vermont of traditions, he gently ribbed the flatlander on her choice of winter clothing.

“I was a Connecticut girl, so I was wearing a down jacket,” Sara recalled of their first encounter. “He was in a blue jean jacket with a vest — very Vermont, like the kids at bus stops in February wearing shorts — and he took one look at my fancy coat and said, ‘Well, you must be from out of state.’”

“A writer studies people. That’s why they have crazy résumés with odd jobs.”
Jay Stevens

After college, Jay fully indulged his desire to roam. He traveled with Sara to Mexico and South America, hanging with poets and Marxist guerrillas while working odd jobs and freelance writing.

In an interview from the ’90s with musician and fellow Windsor County resident Davey Davis on the public-access television show “Far and Wide,” Jay spoke of this time in his life as a period of great research.

“A writer studies people,” he said. “That’s why they have crazy résumés with odd jobs.”

In the video of the show, Jay muses about his craft and career with the effortless cool of a bohemian intellectual, reclining in an Adirondack chair and sipping wine, black sunglasses obscuring his eyes. Even as he’s being interviewed, his storytelling talent is evident. Between little smirks and jokes, he dazzles and educates with his answers, which feel like spells cast by a woodland philosopher-wizard.

Like any good conjuror, Jay spent years studying his grimoire, extensively researching the world of lysergic acid diethylamide — more commonly known as LSD, the drug that supercharged the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He focused his keen intellect on the subject and published Storming Heaven in 1987. Newsweek called it “the most compelling account yet of how these hallucinogenic, or psychedelic, drugs became an explosive force in postwar American history.”

In Storming Heaven, Jay merged his talent as a social historian with his gift for storytelling. Weaving his research into a breathtaking narrative, he used what he called the “curious molecule” discovered by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann as a framing device to document a country roiling with sociopolitical changes and evolving perspectives, especially around drug use. A literary high-wire act, the book darts from early acid advocates such as Brave New World author Aldous Huxley and actor Cary Grant to cultural figureheads such as serial killer Charles Manson and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

Jay was sure his book could never be made into a film, as America was in the throes of the so-called “War on Drugs” and the subject matter was too controversial. “But God, think of the soundtrack!” he claimed a Paramount executive once said to him of adapting Storming Heaven to the big screen.

The book caught the attention of Grateful Dead drummer Hart, who hired Jay to cowrite 1990’s Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion with Fredric Lieberman. Jay also worked on the following year’s Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm, which Hart coauthored with Lieberman.

Following Jay’s death, Hart posted a tribute online. “He was a fearless investigator who was brilliant beyond belief,” Hart wrote, and “singular in the pursuit of knowledge, from the big bang to stem cells.”

Jay and Sara were married and living in New York City when he got his first book contracts. As advantageous as it was for an up-and-coming writer to live in the city, the Bow was calling him home.

“Jay always used to like to tell everyone it was my idea,” Sara said. “And I was a little sick of the cities; we’d lived in LA and New York. But I think he was ready to do it, too.”

In 1985, he and Sara moved into a farmhouse on the family land, across from his childhood home, where his parents still lived. While returning home made sense for starting a family, the move came with trade-offs.

“Coming back to Vermont kind of killed his career,” said Zach, who was born not long after his parents relocated. His sister, Alexandra (Ali for short), followed a few years later. “He never talked about it implicitly or seemed to really care, but eventually we all understood what he had sacrificed to come home.”

After working with Hart and contributing to a 1996 anthology called The Sixties, Jay never published a book again. But he never stopped writing, and he worked as a freelance journalist. Boxes and boxes of his poetry, prose and unfinished novels remain for Zach and the family to go through, once their grief has eased. Zach feels certain they’ll attempt to publish some of Jay’s work posthumously.

Back on the farm, Jay enjoyed sugaring with his father and passing down the tradition to Zach and Ali. He collected books, maintaining a personal library of more than 10,000, by Zach’s estimation. With Davis and other friends he called his “Orphics,” Jay recorded albums — spoken-word poetry over beats, synths and ambient guitars. He founded a media and marketing company called Applied Orphics and established a pet project called Rap Lab, a program that paired at-risk youths with poets and musicians. And for reasons no one quite understands, he was a magnet for cats, both at home on the farm and, according to family lore, on a visit to the Oracle of Delphi in Greece, where he was mobbed by felines.

Jay’s previous life as the world’s preeminent LSD scholar would sometimes intrude on his kids’ classic Vermont upbringing. Zach remembers an infant Ali vomiting on Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s chest, as well as visits to the farm from philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, an advocate for the use of natural hallucinogens.

Jay himself was an active researcher who had certainly sampled LSD and loved a good storytelling session while smoking a joint with friends. But he eventually grew tired of the association with drugs. Fans of Storming Heaven would often approach and ask if he had any acid on him.

For Jay, returning to Vermont was a chance to reconnect with the land. He took a page from one of his favorite beat poets, Gary Snyder, who wrote, “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”

Zach’s wife, Lauren Ballard, remembered her father-in-law’s love of the land, as well as his deep knowledge of its denizens.

“He knew about all of the animals living there, the woodchucks and the coyotes and the foxes,” Lauren said. “He once spent a stormy evening telling me about his three near-death-by-cow experiences, and it was like being inside of a Poe story.”

In 2015, Jay was diagnosed with Lyme disease, following years of mysterious joint swelling and failed attempts to understand what caused it. Combined with a subsequent diagnosis of diabetes, he finally started to slow down. But he still relished in telling tales and spitballing ideas for novels he’d never write.

After Jay’s death, his friend and fellow writer Matthew Ingram found solace reading Drumming at the Edge of Magic for the first time. Ingram was struck by a section of the book about West African drummers. “I was looking out for signs of my friend and his elegant turns of phrase,” Ingram wrote on his blog, and he found a line that made him think of Jay. It reads: “The Yoruba say that anyone who does something so great that he or she can never be forgotten has become an Orisha.”

“He loved the idea of being a good ancestor,” Zach said. He, Lauren and their two daughters are planning to leave Chittenden County and move back to the Bow to continue the Stevenses’ long connection to their homeland.

Zach said he knows it’s what his father would have wanted — “to pass on a legacy to the warrior scholars we’re raising and to the land he himself had inherited. ”

This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.