Former Rhode Islander-turned-chicken farmer pens a memoir about her sometimes bumpy transition to off-the-grid living in New Hampshire

Award-winning author Tory McCagg has written a memoir that will hook local readers with all the Rhode Island references.

Although she now calls Jaffrey, New Hampshire, home — and getting comfortable with that home is part of her story — McCagg lived on Angell Street in Providence and then in the Edgewood section of Cranston, near Roger Williams Park, for more than 30 years.

And, no small connection, her husband, Carl Querfurth, was a trombonist with one of Rhode Island’s claims to musical fame, Roomful of Blues. They married in 1990 during his second stint with Roomful, from 1988-98.

McCagg’s book is “At Crossroads with Chickens: A ‘What If It Works?’ Adventure in Off-Grid Living and Quest for Home.” As the lengthy title suggests, McCagg covers a lot of ground in just under 200 pages.

She addresses topics of broad concern, including the environment and the challenges of trying to live an environmentally responsible life. Her strong suit, however, is in personal confessions and reflections, things like coming to terms with her own foibles and insecurities, relationships with her parents, and an opposites-attract marriage.

She writes about a friend’s observation that Carl’s personality is like “an open book” while she is a “wetsuit,” with an extra layer of skin to protect her. Finally, as the title states, the memoir is about finding where and what “home” really is.

The chickens are major characters in this tale and in every sense of the word. Deciding to raise them lovingly in order to produce “happy eggs,” naming them despite warnings not to do so, and discovering their distinct personalities is an ongoing thread throughout the memoir. In an interview, McCagg said taking care of the birds became integral to her life and the anchor to her New Hampshire home.

Reading her story is like getting to know an interesting new individual. The memoir begins with McCagg’s childhood in Lansing, Michigan, where her father taught at Michigan State University and her mother was an artist. Both sets of McCagg’s grandparents, however, were from Connecticut, and McCagg touches on summers by the ocean in Stonington and her boarding-school experiences at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington.

After graduating from Connecticut College in 1984, where she studied Eastern European history and the flute, McCagg was contemplating law school, which brought her to Rhode Island. Law school didn’t materialize, but McCagg’s eventual path to a MFA in creative writing at Emerson College included offshoots: a job at the College Hill Bookstore in Providence, a very brief stint in New York City, and work with Common Cause Rhode Island.

That work, and her co-workers, are some of what she misses most about Rhode Island. “Phil West was such a wonderful teacher,” she says of H. Philip West Jr., who was Common Cause’s executive director at the time.

She also tended bar at the Hot Club in Providence, where she met Carl. His roots are in New Hampshire, and in 2006, they bought 193 acres near Mount Monadnock, putting most of it into a conservation easement. Six years later, they had built what was to be a second home. They named it Darwin’s View, a reference, she writes, to “evolution, effort over the long haul, and survival.” Since 2018, it has been their only home.

Their goal was to live as far off the grid as possible, and chickens, as a source of eggs, were part of the plan. So were accoutrements like solar panels.

“The problem with solar panels is how to store energy,” she says. Although they’ve since discovered salt-water batteries, they initially relied on lead-acid batteries. Moreover, on cold winter nights they switched to a propane-fueled heating system. Both seemed like environmental compromises.

McCagg hasn’t written a how-to guide but points out these and other paradoxes encountered in her broader effort to “be part of the healing of the planet.”

Environmental healing parallels the internal healing McCagg explores in the memoir. Her book is prefaced with a childhood experience she had during the year her family lived in Hungary while her father did research for a book. She remembers going for a walk in unfamiliar surroundings with an unfamiliar young girl, becoming scared and getting lost until a farmer brought her back to her parents.

She writes how the feelings she associates with that incident have manifested themselves throughout her life, and while McCagg’s introspection is personal, her insight could apply widely to anyone dealing with life’s ups and downs.

Her ruminations bring her to the crossroads moments — personal and environmental — referenced in the book’s title. She writes, “In my own mind, if nowhere else, Darwin’s View began to represent what I knew had to happen in the world writ large: the discomfort zone of transition from the past to the future.”

In light of current events, from coping with the coronavirus to confronting racial injustice, that idea of a crossroads takes on expanded relevance.

In her memoir, however, the transition includes McCagg’s and Querfurth’s move to embrace life on the land, and to keep the environment up front in their decision-making to sell their Cranston home and live full-time at Darwin’s View. Initially, “I would have gone back home to Rhode Island in a minute,” she admits, acknowledging that she missed Providence, “such a livable city.”

“But I’m very different from the person I was in 2012,” the year of the first, brutally snowy winter they spent in New Hampshire. At a crossroads, “Back is not the answer,” she says. “We need to go forward. Now Darwin’s View is home.”

“At Crossroads with Chickens: A ‘What If It Works?’ Adventure in Off-Grid Living and Quest for Home,” $23, was released Friday by Bauhan Publishing, an independent publisher in Peterborough, New Hampshire, that focuses on New England regional books, including books “that explore sustainability of both the earth and the spirit,” according to the website.