Cindy Ellen Hill’s new novel, “Leeds Point,” will be released on June 26.

By Emily Rodin, for the Community News Service

BURLINGTON — Middlebury-based poet Cindy Ellen Hill is set to release her first novel, “Leeds Point,” at the end of the month. 

Written in sonnet verse, the gothic horror novel is set in 1702 and follows Esther Water, a young English woman abandoned by her husband in the coastal salt marshes off of New Jersey.

The novel arrives as the U.S. approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding. It explores themes of feminism, ecopolitics and white privilege during the colonial era.

The gothic horror genre, which often portrays protagonists becoming the monster they fear, helped Hill highlight those themes.  

“It’s a story about that time, (the 1700s), and I think she accurately portrays the evilness of it,” said Buffy Aakaash, a Vermont author and poet who wrote an early acclaim for the novel. 

Hill holds a master’s of fine arts in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published four poetry collections. She currently serves as president of the Poetry Society of Vermont.

Hill grew up on Long Island and spent summers in New Jersey with her grandparents, taking boats through the marshes that now serve as a setting for her novel.

Shortly after her parents died, Hill returned to the marshes to distribute their ashes. 

“That time in my grief, sitting alone in those marshes, also developed a lot of things that happened in the story,” she said. 

For example, Hill recalled watching an osprey nest during that period. One of the novel’s key characters is an osprey who befriends Esther during her grief-stricken isolation.

Along with Esther, who narrates the story in first person, several animals also have narrative voices in the novel. Hill said the relationship between humans and the natural world was a theme she deliberately sought to explore. 

In “Leeds Point,” Hill incorporates Italian, English and other sonnet forms with varying rhyme schemes. Shakespearean sonnets, for instance, consist of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter with the last two lines being a rhymed couplet. Other key elements include strong use of metaphor and a tightly focused theme. 

“The pace of the sonnets just pulls you through along with the narrative arc,” Hill said. “If it was in prose it would be slower; it would be harder to get that pacing.” 

Although he studied theater and is well-versed in Shakespeare, Aakaash said he was initially hesitant to read a novel written in verse. But to his surprise, Aakaash said he found the structure to enhance his reading experience. 

“I really felt like I could read several pages fairly quickly and still have a full sense of what is going on,” he said. 

Brattleboro-based author Peter Gould, who runs a Shakespeare-themed camp and has directed numerous youth productions of the bard’s plays, acknowledged the challenge of writing a novel in verse. The form’s intricate structure has the potential to draw attention to itself, distracting readers from the story, he said. 

“Because the sonnet form is so demanding, so restricting and so challenging, any word in any line has to earn its place and has to pass examination to justify itself as to why it’s in the line,” Gould said. 

A relatively unique form, novels in verse have been written for centuries. Two classics include Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” published in 1833, and the 1986 novel it inspired, “The Golden Gate” by Vikram Seth. The form has experienced a resurgence in young adult fiction and, more recently, adult fiction, Hill said, citing Sarah Crossan’s “Here is the Beehive,” published in 2020, as an example.  

Hill said she aimed to create something unique at a time when writers are leaning on artificial intelligence.

“I want people to think of it as something that’s so different and that obviously only a human could have written,” Hill said. “I want to give them a lot to think about. I want them to be left with a sense of wonder at the oddness of the book structure itself and then also have lots of food for thought about both the work and the characters and the bigger political questions it asks.”

The novel will be available for purchase on Friday, June 26. Hugo’s Bar and Grill in Montpelier will host a launch party for the book on July 28. 

Emily Rodin is an intern for UVM’s Community News Service through Report for America’s Local News Internship Program.