From 1997 to 2001, Dickerson published a biweekly column on fishing and the outdoors in the Addison Independent, a local newspaper.[7]
Since 2002, he has been the director of the New England Young Writers Conference,[8] an annual four-day conference for high school students in Bread Loaf, Vermont, that is associated with Middlebury College. He is also the founding director of the Vermont Conference on Christianity and the Arts.[8][9] He plays bass in a Vermont-based blues band, Deep Freyed.[10]
Tolkien scholarship
Dickerson is the author of six non-technical books, most of them about fantasy fiction. His 2003 book Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings,[11] a study of the moral and Christian values expressed by Tolkien's works, highlights the contrasts between moral and physical victories, and between heroism and violence; it points out the necessity of having free will in order to make moral choices.[12] It was shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Society's 2004 and 2005 Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards.[13] He has written a pair of books on Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and environmentalism, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien[14][15] and Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis.[16][17] Despite giving the first of these two books an overall negative review, reviewer Patrick Curry writes that it is "a major new contribution to the subject of Tolkien's work".[15]
Other books
His other books include The Finnsburg Encounter.[18] a work of historical fiction, translated into German as Licht uber Friesland,[19]Hammers and Nails: The Life and Music of Mark Heard,[20] a biography of musician Mark Heard,[21] and
From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy.[22][23]
^ abBiographyArchived 2010-06-11 at the Wayback Machine as a featured speaker at the Fall 2009 Houghton College Writing Festival. Retrieved 2009-11-18.
^ abReviews of ''Ents, Elves, and Eriador: Review by Patrick Curry (2007), Tolkien Studies4: 238–244, doi:10.1353/tks.2007.0010; Review by Susan Palwick (2008), Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment15 (1): 266–268, doi:10.1093/isle/15.1.266.