Bauhan Publishing has announced the release of “Calmly on the Waters: Seasonal Essays from the Monadnock Region,” the first collected volume of essays by local author and former innkeeper Jarvis Coffin.
A book launch celebration, reading, and signing will be held Friday, June 26, at 5 p.m. at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. The event will take place in Bass Hall, and refreshments will be provided.
The collection gathers Coffin’s quiet, attentive, and occasionally humorous essays rooted in his life beside a pond in Hancock, New Hampshire. Organized by season, the book follows the natural rhythms of rural New England, exploring shared experiences like the weather, local wildlife, and neighbors.
“Winter is the sum of many small survival stories, while spring starts in the basement, where we wait in the damp for the earth to thaw,” Coffin said. “Summer means one thing — growing season — until, finally, fall gets the last word, possessed of a thick, forested landscape, and all the colors of the rainbow.”
The volume is enhanced with illustrations, sketches, and wood engravings by the late Nora S. Unwin (1907-1982), a noted artist who highlighted the Monadnock Region for much of her life. The Monadnock Center for History and Culture, which holds the majority of Unwin’s original artwork, granted permission for the images to be featured in the book.
Before writing full-time, Coffin spent three decades as a media and advertising sales executive. For more than 10 years, he and his wife owned New Hampshire’s oldest inn, The Hancock Inn (now The Inn at Hancock), where Coffin also served as chef. The essays in the collection originated from monthly pieces he wrote for the inn’s guest list.
The book has drawn praise from prominent regional authors, including Sy Montgomery, John Hanson Mitchell, and former “Yankee” magazine editor-in-chief Mel Allen, who compared Coffin’s work to that of the beloved late essayist Edie Clark.
“Calmly on the Waters” is distributed by Casemate Publishing Group and is available now.
Coffin lives with his wife and their dog, Huckleberry, in a cedar log cabin by a pond in southern New Hampshire. His short fiction has previously appeared in “Down in the Dirt” and “The Swannanoa Review.”
