Print Town        “By words we learn thoughts,        and by thoughts we learn life.”                                    — JEAN BAPTISTE GIRARD   There’s something about this place, the way word makers and word workers have always come here — they came for the waters, to be cured of their ills, they came summoned by the drums that echoed far down the Connecticut. Come, come to this place where the West goes missing, tell the truth, put it to words and put the words on paper, Whetstone paper — this is where the water flows, where the ink flows, where the stories can be drawn from a box of letters and signs and sounds, poems and prose, where the rock inside the river still talks. Come to this newspaper town, this book town, this hot-type town, this print town, this word town.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont February 2020