New food market coming to Millerton on June 20

The TriCorner F.E.E.D. Market will have a sliding-scale pricing model.
Photo by Aly morrissey
The TriCorner F.E.E.D. Market will have a sliding-scale pricing model.
MILLERTON — This summer, Millerton will welcome a bold new experiment in community-driven food access and farmer sustainability: TriCorner F.E.E.D. Market, a nonprofit store located at 56 S. Center St., designed to serve everyone in the tri-county area — Dutchess, Litchfield, and Columbia — regardless of income.
Founded by Linda Quella, a former finance executive turned farmer, and Blake Myers, Director of Food Programs and Midwest farm kid turned food justice advocate, the TriCorner F.E.E.D. Market is the result of years of listening, learning and reimagining how a food system can serve both the people who grow food and the people who need it.
“Food is a basic human right,” said Myers at a recent “Gather,” a monthly event hosted by Troutbeck in Amenia highlighting the work of local entrepreneurs, where the new market’s vision was met with many questions and much excitement. “And 40% of people in our region are having to make difficult tradeoffs every month — between food, rent, medicine,” Myers said.
At its core, the market operates on a sliding scale pricing model. Customers will select from three levels: full retail, 30% off, or 60% off. Through conversation, tiers will be determined based on families’ individual circumstances. “It’s not like you have to show your tax returns,” laughed Quella. “It’s about trust and relationships.”
The business model is designed to ensure that farmers always get paid the price they set. “This is not our store,” said Quella. “It’s the farmers’ store. We’re just building the infrastructure around it.”
The inspiration came from models like Hudson’s Rolling Grocer and Michigan’s Argus Farm Stop. Quella and Myers conducted surveys with local farmers, identifying barriers like inconsistent markets, high labor costs, and the elitism often associated with traditional farmers markets.
“We asked farmers what they needed,” Myers said. “They told us: regular, direct sales to consumers. And they want to stay on their farms, not drive to the city three days a week.”
Quella knows that grind firsthand. After years of running Q Farms and schlepping meat to city markets before dawn, she saw a broken system. “We were doing regenerative, intensive grazing, but only really privileged customers could afford it,” she said. “It wasn’t sustainable — financially or spiritually.”
The pilot version of the market ran last summer outside the Northeast Community Center in Millerton, offering local goods on a sliding scale. The team learned as they went, from signage readability to the necessity of a Spanish-speaking staff member.
When a storefront across the street from the NECC became available, Quella and Myers jumped. “It was destiny,” Myers said. “We had been staring at that empty space every week from our pop-up tent.”
The location will include a commercial kitchen, allowing farmers to create value-added products like bone broth on-site. It also opens the door to job training for NECC teens and opportunities to reduce food waste by turning unsold goods into frozen meals for local pantries and NECC’s food sovereignty program.
Quella and Myers are equally focused on creating a welcoming community space. “This isn’t just about food,” said Myers. “It’s about relationships. It’s hard to make connections in rural areas. We want this to be a place where everyone feels they belong.”
To keep prices accessible, the store will rely on philanthropy and full-price shoppers. “Every full-price shopper subsidizes a 60% discount,” Quella said. “That’s how we balance the margins.”
But this isn’t charity. It’s solidarity. “30% of every full-price dollar goes to ensuring someone else can eat the same food,” Myers said. “The same eggs, the same produce, the same dignity.”
Quella and Myers said they hope their model inspires other communities. “We’re trying to change broken systems,” Quella said. “This is social change through private initiative. If we can do it here, others can too.”
The TriCorner F.E.E.D. Market is scheduled to open June 20. Check its website for updates, more information or to get involved at tricornerfeed.org.
Author and cartoonist Peter Steiner signed books at Sharon Summer Book Signing last summer.
The 27th annual Sharon Summer Book Signing at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon will be held Friday, Aug. 1, from 4:45 to 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 2, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; and Sunday, Aug. 3, at noon.
Friday’s festivities will honor libraries and the power of the written word. In attendance will be 29 locally and nationally recognized authors whose books will be for sale. With a wide array of genres including historical fiction, satire, thrillers, young adult and non-fiction, there will be something for every reader.
The event will include a selection of hors d’oeuvres and drinks, followed by eight festive author dinners where writers will read and discuss their work one-on-one with attendees.
Saturday will feature a new Page to Plate program that merges the literary and culinary worlds. Just as writing is a practice of patience and love, so too is the art of cooking. Cookbooks and food writing make cooking teachable to those excited to learn and celebrate the art of a perfect meal.
Through a combination of demonstrations and conversations, acclaimed cookbook authors and chefs will cover a variety of delicious topics. Highlights include a discussion with Chris Morocco, food director of “Bon Appetit” magazine and “Epicurious.” Sharon resident and chef Jessie Sheehan will demonstrate recipes from her cookbook “Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes: 100 Easy-Peasy, Savory Recipes for 24/7 Deliciousness.”
With the combination of vetted recipes and thorough discussion from food experts, attendees are sure to leave knowing how to cultivate the ultimate act of service: the gift of a full stomach.
Sunday will be brunch at a private Sharon residence hosted by Graham Klemm and Cody O’Kelly to celebrate author Carolyn Klemm and her cookbook “Culinary Collection: Favorite Country Recipes.”
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit hotchkisslibraryofsharon.org
All proceeds support the programs at The Hotchkiss Library of Sharon.
Ukraine Emergency Fundraiser at The Stissing Center in 2022 raised over $120,000 for Sunflower of Peace.
The spirit of Ukraine will be on display at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains on Sunday, July 27. Beginning at 5 p.m., the “Words to America from Ukraine” fundraiser is set to showcase the simultaneous beauty of Ukrainian culture and the war-time turmoil it faces, all the while fundraising in support of Ukrainian freedom.
“Words to America from Ukraine” aims to remind and spread awareness for the suffering that often gets forgotten by those who live in comfortable worlds, explained Leevi Ernits, an organizer for the event. “We are trying to make an attempt to remind people that we are human, and we are connected with human values,” she said. “With very few words, poetry can express very deep values.”
Sponsored by the Town of Stanford, Friends of Ukraine, L.E. Design LLC, Bartelby & Sage, Oblong Books and Borshch of Art, the fundraiser will host the recitation of war-time Ukrainian poetry. Readings will include the works of Vasyl Sagaydak, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Serhiy Zhadan, Victoria Amelina, Marjana Savka, Ostap Slyvynsky, and Mariana Harahonych.
“Poems are fishhooks into our souls,” added Mark Lagus, another event organizer, explaining why poetry was chosen for the main event.
Guests will also enjoy a performance by Ukrainian Village Voices, a New York City- based band dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional Ukraining Folk music. The evening will also feature speakers Jed Sunden and Maria Genkin, along with a live auction. Food and drink will be provided by Bartelby & Sage, a sustainable, local and female-owned company.
All ticket proceeds, bids, and donations will go directly to Razom for Ukraine, a U.S.-based nonprofit. Razom, meaning “together” in Ukrainian, has the mission of “contributing to the establishment of a secure, prosperous and democratic Ukraine,” through “creating, inspiring, and collaborating on initiatives that motivate people to think, partner and do.”
Tickets, donation opportunities, and more information are all available by visiting www.wordsfromukraine.org
Celebrating its 45th year, the Grumbling Gryphons will perform at HVRHS Friday, Aug. 1, at 7 p.m.
The Grumbling Gryphons Traveling Children’s Theater is preparing to celebrate its 45th year — not with fanfare, but with feathers, fabric, myth, chant, and a gala finale bursting with young performers and seasoned artists alike.
The Gryphons’ 2025 Summer Theater Arts Camp begins July 28 and culminates in a one-night-only performance gala at Housatonic Valley Regional High School on Friday, Aug. 1 at 7 p.m. Founder, playwright, and artistic director, Leslie Elias has been weaving together the worlds of myth, movement and theater for decades.
“We’re a touring company that is participatory,” Elias said with her trademark storytelling cadence. “Even when there’s no pre-performance workshop, it’s still participatory. Always.”
Founded in 1980 “in a little basement apartment on the lower east side with co-founder Vanessa Roe,” said Elias,Grumbling Gryphons (recipients of the 2003 Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award) has long occupied a unique niche: part performance troupe, part educational outreach, part community ritual. Whether dramatizing Greek myths, Native American legends, or original tales about bees and bogs, the company’s ethos centers on inclusion, transformation, and hands-on engagement.
This summer’s camp offers children ages six and up five fast-paced days of storytelling, acting, mask-making, and rehearsal. The first three days will take place at Elias’s own home studio — a tucked-away space filled with costumes, puppets, and instruments — before moving into full performance prep mode.
“In the ideal world, we would have more time,” she laughed. “It’s a lot of pressure to be performing for the public after five days. But we’re going to do our best.”
The gala performance, she explained, is a kind of theatrical mosaic — scenes and excerpts from Grumbling Gryphons’ vast repertoire, some showcasing seasoned adult performers and others giving campers center stage. The cast will include returning campers, newcomers, and guest artists drawn from the Gryphons’ decades-spanning circle of collaborators including mask maker and artist Ellen Moon.
“We’re still figuring out exactly what we’ll do,” said Elias, “but it’s kind of like a smorgasbord… a celebration. And it’s open — if anybody wants to get their kids involved, or even volunteer, we welcome you.”
Photo provided
Elias’s own theater background winds through early improvisational schools, Viennese dance traditions, and experimental spaces like Henry Street Settlement. As a child on Long Island, she studied with jazz pianist Ivan Fiedel and dancer Rosalind Fiedel, eccentric mentors who nurtured her taste for the surreal and spontaneous.
“Mr. Fiedel was a character,” she recalled. “He would smoke a cigar… and take the cigar in his ear and the smoke would come out the other end. I don’t know how he did it.”
Elias built Grumbling Gryphons with this sense of magic — not as a traditional company, but as a living, evolving story in itself. Whether working with preschoolers or middle-schoolers, audiences in botanical gardens or historic town halls, the Gryphons invite kids to become creators — to chant, to improvise, to embody archetypes from ancient lore or environmental parables.
And that’s what this summer’s camp and gala are all about. “It’s more than theater,” Elias said. “It’s myth, poetry, movement — it’s about building self-esteem, imagination. It’s about transformation.”
For more information, to register a child for the 2025 Summer Theater Camp, or to inquire about volunteering, visit grumblinggryphons.org
Attendees practive brushstrokes led by calligraphy teacher Debby Reelitz.
Calligrapher Debby Reelitz came to the David M. Hunt Library to give a group of adults and children an introduction to modern calligraphy Thursday, July 17.
Reelitz said she was introduced to calligraphy as a youngster and has been a professional calligrapher and teacher for more than 25 years.
She said there is no age barrier to learning the basics. “Once children can hold a pen or pencil, they can do it.”
Reelitz said her 5th-grade teacher introduced her to the art.
Then her mother pressed her into service doing the lettering for “4-H certificates and gift cards.”
Reelitz handed out a sampler and blank sheets of paper and then turned to the easel for demonstration purposes.
She noted that the letters (I,T,H,L,E and F) on the top row of the sampler were not alphabetically arranged.
Rather, they comprised a “latter family” of similar shapes.
Soon enough the entire group of six adults and three children were concentrating and turning out decent versions of the letters
Reelitz alternately demonstrated and encouraged the novices.
“Remember, this is not an instant gratification skill.”