Yvonne Daley talked about her book “Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks and Radicals Moved to Vermont” and shared her experience about the 1960s counterculture movement in Vermont at the University of Massachusetts in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library on Thursday.

“Going Up the Country” is part of an oral history referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont and how the young immigrants that moved to Vermont were largely from the suburbs of New York and Massachusetts.

Daley is the founder and director of the Green Mountain Writers Conference and has lived in Vermont since 1967.

Daley started off by sharing a collection of photos in the books, depicting people’s lives in Vermont.

She then gave an interpretation of the counterculture. Daley quoted her book, “First definition: counterculture. A way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm. And the example given in the dictionary: the idealists of the sixties counterculture.”

Daley went on to share the reason why she wrote this book. About six years ago, her friend sent a book to her about the communal culture and experience in Mexico, which included violence and shootings.

“As someone reading it, the seed has been planted,” Daley said, “I am just reflecting on my own experience in Vermont which is so different.”

She also questioned why young kids, many of them from suburbs and colleges, would be willing to go to the country to live.

Catherine Moineau, a freshman English and Japanese language double major. explained she came to this event because she wanted to learn about the author’s experience 40 years ago.

Moineau said, “I am fascinated in authors and writings… she was kind of a celebrity to me, and I want to learn, you know, through her experience.”

Jingwen Zhang, a visiting researcher at UMass, talked about how she was interested in the contemporary field of this book and attended “because literature is [her] field.”

Dennis Bromery, 64, works in the UMass information technology department. He said he attended because of an email about the lecture.

“It was great, and I learned a lot,” Bromery said, “You know I grew up in a commune, things like that.”

The Author Talks series held by the library, celebrates authors and books with Five College Connections. This lecture contained 18 audience members on the library’s 25th floor in the Special Collections Seminar Room.

Ying Hua can be reached at [email protected].