Dreaming up worlds that are full of magic and free of screens

CORNWALL — It isn’t always easy to find books you’d like to read to your children. Cornwall native Hope Bentley wanted to produce books that “illuminate from within.” To do so, she started her own publishing company, Golden Light Factory, in Vermont, where she now lives with her husband and children (although she still returns to the Northwest Corner to visit with her father, Hugh Cheney).  

In her mission statement, Bentley says, “I had the kind of childhood that generally does not create great art since it was almost cartoon-ishly happy. My brothers and I had doting parents, wonderful friends and the run of an idyllic little village in Connecticut. 

“Most of my writing is a sort of wish fulfillment: What if there really was magic in the world? What if we had to go back to the pioneer days? What if we could bring back the souls of people we love? I started Golden Light Factory because I love igniting curiosity in young people, and I believe that books have the power to do that.”

Bentley, a graduate of Cornwall Consolidated School, The Hotchkiss School and Colorado College, was back in town in March and spoke to The Lakeville Journal about her new venture. 

After graduating from college with a degree in English, Bentley traveled and had various jobs around the country including baking, construction clean-up and landscaping she also “WWOOF-ed” (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) her way around Italy, until she settled into teaching English in Tennessee. There, she met, fell in love with and married James Bentley.  

After getting a Master’s Degree in journalism from The University of Colorado she wrote for magazines and had a newspaper column for several years until  then she and her husband moved to East Burke, Vt., where they both taught high school English until she took time off to have three children. 

When her twins were 3 years old and went off to pre-school, she finally had two hours a day of uninterrupted time to write. In addition to writing two young adult books and a middle-grade book, the devoted J.K. Rowling fan also writes Harry Potter “fan fiction,” which can be found on her website at www.goldenlightfactory.com.

She has also written a guide for parents to read to young children about the different ways babies can be brought in to a family, that she has published through Golden Light Factory. 

In “Where Else Do Babies Come From? A Family Guide To Assisted Reproduction,” written by Bentley and illustrated by Kate Renner,  all of the ways a baby can enter a family’s life are examined in a way that a young child can understand. 

“It has a flexible narrative that fits various family structures,” Bentley said. 

The book is humorous and tender, giving equal value to a baby that is desired by a man and a woman, two men or two women; whatever their family structure is, they all need “a healthy egg from a woman, a healthy sperm from a man, a woman’s healthy uterus, and mystery.” 

The book, with its colorful, humorous and reassuring illustrations shows a family of two men who want a child. “This family has sperm but they need an egg and a uterus.”  An infertile couple has “eggs, sperm and a uterus but they can’t find the mystery” and so on. 

Golden Light Factory, founded in 2018 in Bentley’s kitchen with several like-minded authors and illustrators in her Vermont community, was the result of Bentley’s desire to produce “provocative books for clever readers.” 

The worlds she describes in her young adult titles are free of technology and full of magic and nature. 

In “The Blackout,” the U.S. has suffered a national power outage due to an invasive computer virus and a family whose members are scattered across the country find their way back to each other. 

Witchcraft and magic infuse the tale she tells in “The Phoenix Cave;”“The Haunted” is the story of “a boarding school that is known for churning out geniuses. Its alumni write theorems and poems for presidential inaugurations. They discover cures and galaxies.” In Bentley’s fictional world there’s not an iPhone in sight.