Your author is using this space to discuss both his life in the world of libraries and academia as well as his home life among cloth diapers and two young children. The setting is small town Vermont (which is redundant, granted) but the backstory takes place mostly in Chicago with a brief interlude in Portland, OR.
And the title? Credit the phrase to novelist Jay McInerney, from a remembrance of author Raymond Carver published in the NY Times under the title “Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice” on August 6, 1989
