MIDDLEBURY — When Addison County writer Julia Alvarez was translating for Spanish-speaking migrant farmhands and their families a decade ago, she saw how locals and Latinos struggled to understand each other.

“Everyone was befuddled,” she said upon publication of her resulting 2009 novel “Return to Sender.” “That’s where a storyteller says, ‘We need a story.'”

But when Alvarez subsequently experienced the deaths of her parents and sister, the recently retired Middlebury College writer-in-residence found “I didn’t want to be reading or writing.” Instead, all she could do was wonder about a query whispering in her mind.

Read the article at the Brattleboro Reformer