A return to travel

What sticks out about the last six months is a return to personal travel. In the same ways journalism expands my world and ways of thinking, travel feels almost necessary after years of being stuck inside. At one point during the pandemic, the idea of leaving home, leaving everything, letting go, even for just a week, felt nearly impossible. I’m grateful that period is over — while recognizing it’s still ongoing for others.

I was lucky enough to go to Europe twice recently. The first trip came on the heels of a weeks-long recovery from COVID, a long-talked-about trip to Scotland and England with my friends Laura and Sarah. I didn’t have my big camera out a lot of the time, but did make some images during a couple hikes in the highlands, which actually felt quite like home, like a treeless Vermont.

In December, Adron and I found some really cheap tickets to Iceland, so we went back. The weather was kind to us — we were able to see the sun every day, for most of its five hours above the horizon. The intensity of the light made up for its shortness with long-lasting, rainbow-colored sunrises and sunsets.

Apart from a reservation at the Blue Lagoon (my fourth trip to Iceland and my first time finally doing this!), we kinda just wandered where we wanted for three days. This mostly meant driving through moonscapes toward snow-covered peaks in southern-central part of the country, smelling the sulphur coming from geothermal steam vents and hunting for the aurora borealis. It was a brief and beautiful trip.

Back at home, I’ve continued to play around with self-portraiture. The times I feel most compelled to make them are when I’m outside, which is where I feel most myself.

At work, I continue to practice making audio stories — like this one about how no state agency tracks on-farm housing complaints. I also squeak in some photojournalism: Over the summer, a colleague spoke with four women who wanted to share their abortion stories, and I had the privilege of meeting them and making their portraits.

I’ll end this post with a really lovely moment of serendipity, a brief moment of sun on a peak-foliage day with some very photogenic organic dairy cows just down the road from where I live. I needed an image for this story about organic dairy, and sometimes, things just come together.

Another year

My annual check-in. I’ve spent the last twelve-ish months trying to learn how to become an audio reporter, which means I’ve been holding a microphone much more than my camera.

But as I get better at recording and using sound for stories, I’m hankering to revive the visuals part, too. And whenever I’ve felt this way in the past, it’s usually been helpful to take a look back.

Some of my recent favorite images had nothing to do with work. I’ve begun making self-portraits — so much has happened these past few years, and making images is a part of making sense of it all. I’m starting to collect them here on my website.

The stories I’ve done for VPR and Vermont PBS (the two nonprofits have merged) over the past year is reflective of the beats I’m trying to build. They’re focused mostly on the changing dairy industry and equity in agriculture, i.e., challenging systemic exclusion of Black, Indigenous and other people of color, as well as those who are low-income, linguistically-isolated, non-citizens and LGBTQIA+. Among those stories: how Vermont vaccinated it’s immigrant farmworkers during the pandemic.

I think my favorite piece, though, is a story about a woman who started dunking in the icy, winter waters of Lake Champlain while grieving the loss of her husband. Gisela Veve was so generous with her story, and the group she joined, the Red Hot Chilly Dippers, so fun to spend time with. (A version of this piece ended up on NPR, which was pretty cool, too!).

I took away so much from this reporting experience that I adopted the practice, chilly dipping 2-3 days a week through the rest of the winter.

Until next year, I suppose!

It's been a long time

I’m not going to try and sum up the last 11 months other than to say they were really hard and also included brief glimpses of beauty/good/peace. Some of those I memorialized in images or words, most of them I did not.

I’ve said this before, but posting here continues to feel important for accountability, for building a body of work, and for reminding myself of where I’ve been and where I want to be going. It is in no way comprehensive (because who actually wants to go through the past year again?)

Generally, though, COVID sort of took over a lot of my free time/brain space/creativity. I did have the privilege of witnessing one of the state’s first vaccine clinics for the general public, way back in January.

About a month before, I tagged along with about 10 people wearing inflatable costumes and cried a lot of happy/sad tears as they danced for residents and staff inside a long-term care facility undergoing a COVID-19 outbreak. I originally went just for the photos/video, but ended up turning the experience into my first narrated audio story for VPR. I think my favorite part about this story was how much my mom loved it — she told me over and over again how proud it made her. I’m so glad she got to hear it before we lost her in March.

And there are a lot of little in-between moments from the pandemic that I was able to photograph. Like the time Barre large animal vet Tom Stuwe let me tag along for some calls. In the photo below, he gets a kiss from Billy the horse while examining an abscess in Don the draft horse, who is held by Doug Giles at Gilestead Farm in Randolph on January 6th, 2021. Stuwe told me he’s been treating large animals for 46 years.

The one other full story I was able to report and write I actually began nearly three years ago now, when I got curious about Bennington’s Mennonite community. I spent a good six months as a freelancer visiting with different families and at church services, speaking mostly to women about living outside of convention. I struggled to find a good hook for a story until this past fall, when I started thinking about this small group isolating from one another when they were already culturally and often physically separate from their neighbors. VPR published the story in October. The photos below are from 2018.

I continue to be grateful for the portraiture I am able to practice. Most recently I photographed a badass 16-year-old activist named Minelle Sarfo-Adu, who’s researching and speaking on racial disparities in Vermont housing. It was really fun coming up with different poses together.

I’ll end this post with some underwater photos, because they’re some of my favorite to make. The first is from VPR story about Hyde Park’s Green River Reservoir last fall, and I was so excited to get the water level just right to see both above and below (if there’s a better metaphor for getting through this past year, I don’t know what it is). And the second is from today, a self-portrait in Lake Champlain during full immersion, which makes me feel better more than almost anything else.

Brief pause

Life has slowed down from a gazillion miles an hour for like a minute, so here’s some work from the past four and a half months.

VPR has continued to provide opportunities to improve my portrait-taking skills, including some through-the-window ones that have become so popular these days. The first is of TJ Maynard, his partner Fallon and their daughter Ophelia, who my coworker Liam Elder-Connors interviewed about not receiving unemployment benefits for weeks following getting laid off. The family was very patient as I figured out the window glare amid some uncooperative clouds and sunshine.

This next portrait is of childhood friends Famma Abukar, left, and Riziki Kassim, right, who launched a grassroots fundraiser this spring with many other Somali Bantu women to supply food to refugee families living in Kakuma, Kenya during Ramadan. Photographing these two was so much fun — while they both have kids and busy lives and don’t see much of each other now, Famma and Riziki seemed to revert to their younger selves when they got together for this portrait. They giggled and reminisced on the steps of Burlington’s City Hall, where they used to hang out as teenagers.

That portrait was one of several I got to take for my colleague Abagael Giles’ series on multilingual/multicultural communities providing information and resources to Vermonters during the beginning of the pandemic. One thing we learned: The state had been failing to reach out to residents who spoke languages other than English. Officials have since acknowledged this and connected with community leaders.

At the same time, Vermont, like everywhere else, has seen a surge in anti-racism activism after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May. During one of the initial protests, a crowd confronted Burlington Police in its parking lot, and both the interim chief and deputy chief listened as organizer Harmony Edosomwan and a chorus of other Black men and women enumerated allegations of police brutality and demanded apologies.

For anyone who is interested in following continuing anti-racism actions in Vermont, I highly recommend Anthony Marques’ newsletter “Our Insight.”

In response to these demonstrations, some Vermonters have committed racist acts. The below mural, on a rural road in Jericho, Vermont, was defaced a few days after I took this. Along similar lines, I recently rode along with my colleague Emily Corwin as she set out to answer a question submitted and voted on by audience members for the people-powered podcast Brave Little State: Why do some Vermonters display the Confederate flag (and what does it mean to them?)

Earlier this spring, I met several Vermonters who shared the ways in which the Muslim holiday Ramadan had to change to accommodate the pandemic. Instead of the usual “30 nights of Thanksgiving” as one imam put it, people had to stay out of the mosque and break their fasts alone at home. According to Middlebury College associate chaplain and Muslim advisor Saifa Hussain, the loss of communal activities presented both a sadness as well as a kind of focus for the sacred month.

“So much of our work is around spirituality and retreat,” Saifa told me. “Now we are really forced to establish retreat in our homes.”

I have a whole photo essay up on VPR’s website, but one of my favorite images is of Saifa, below, praying with her two cats nearby. This was on a warm evening in May, and after spending a couple hours letting me photograph them, Saifa and her husband Matthew Casey generously shared a to-go plate of chicken, rice and veggies from their evening meal. I accepted it, despite COVID stuff. And after a couple of months isolating and feeling like the world was falling apart, I don’t know — it meant a lot (and tasted really, really good).

Outside of work, I’ve been finding special solace in getting out for a run or walk most days. As a kind of practice, I guess you could call it a form of prayer, I go through the act of searching for a photo every day of something beautiful or interesting or funny or whatever. Just something I’m grateful for. I post those on my Instagram account.

Pandemic posting

Taking things one day at a time, and today, I wanted to record the work I’ve done the last few months.

I got to work on what felt like a very special assignment for a story about two Vermont mothers who both lost their adult children, and who connected through a pocket dial. Reported by Nina Keck in January, these two women shared a connection through grief. It feels particularly relevant now. Read/hear/see it by clicking here.

In February, I worked with VPR reporters on two stories about women and politics. In the first, reporter Peter Hirschfeld asked why the portrait collection in Vermont’s Statehouse consists nearly entirely of older white men. The image below is of Sen. Ruth Hardy, who introduced legislation to create a task force to diversify the art in the “People’s house.” She’s standing with a painted portrait of former Gov. Madeleine Kunin, the only female governor in Vermont’s history and one of just three women in the official Statehouse collection.

Right around the same time, I had the chance to photograph the real-life Madeleine Kunin for an episode of Brave Little State, about why Vermont is the only state in the nation to never send a woman to U.S. Congress.

Then March arrived, which is when all this COVID-19 stuff got real. The first few weeks, the news and my digital editing duties went on pretty much non-stop. While it hasn’t slowed down a whole lot, this past week I’ve found the time/brain-space/desire to make photos again.

This week, VPR’s Peter Hirschfeld wrote about the risks home health nurses are taking to care for their patients, some of whom have tested positive for COVID-19. Joe Haller, seen below, had just attended to a Burlington patient who had tested positive and had returned from the hospital just a couple days before.

On Thursday, I had the best morning I’ve had in a while at the ECHO center, which is currently closed and which surprised me by welcoming me inside (with a mask on, and at a distance from others) to photograph staff members caring for the animals. Watching the enormous sturgeon getting hand fed was definitely my favorite part, though the baby turtles came in a close second.

Stay safe, everyone.

THE CAT SHOW (!) And other things.

I haven’t written an update-y thing in a while (and I haven’t even come close to writing a year-end/decade-end reflection) but all of that doesn’t matter because on Sunday, Adron andI attended our first-ever, and certainly not last-ever, CAT SHOW. It fulfilled all of our wildest dreams and so much more.

In other non-feline news, I’m into my seventh month at Vermont Public Radio and, looking back, grateful for the assignments I’ve worked on. These include a story I reported down in Bennington, Vermont about Queer Connect, a new LGBTQ group that put on the town’s first-ever Pride parade last summer. I asked a lot of people about the idea of visibility, what that means and how it could be increased in a place where, despite living there for 28 years, Queer Connect president Lisa Carton knew only a few other LGBTQ people. I was especially happy to chat and go on a walk with Arik Gilbert, a brave, mature and extremely articulate 14-year-old (see second photo).

With a lot of help from my coworkers, I’ve also produced some of my first audio work! We recently published a project about Vermonters who became U.S. citizens in 2019.

In between, I’ve had a blast taking photographs for my colleagues. VPR’s John Dillon wrote an amazing story about agricultural runoff polluting Lake Champlain and the tensions between lakeshore residents and nearby farmers:

I had about two minutes to make this portrait for Liam Elder-Connor’s sensitively reported story about affordability in Vermont and was blessed with a generous family and incredible living room light:

And most recently, I got to hang around the Vermont Statehouse on the opening day of the 2020 session, which was extremely fun and extremely tiring. Among the more notable moments: the House chamber’s devotional exercise was led by Abenaki people for the first time.

Many, many portraits

I’ve been feeling a little low on inspiration lately, and going back through old work always seems to help a) remind me I am indeed capable of creating things and 2) give me a sense of how I can build on the work that already exists.

Five months in at Vermont Public Radio, I can say that I have made A LOT of portraits. I’ve enjoyed practicing finding light and working with the portraitee to find what’s natural and what evokes honest emotion.

Among my favorite assignments: documenting Vermont artists for a series titled Young At Art. Katie Runde, a realist painter, saxophonist, part-time preacher and all-around Renaissance woman, was so patient and game for her portrait with the wings of Icarus she built:

Covering the Sept. 20 climate strike was also extremely cool. I asked kids when they first started thinking about climate change and why they were striking. Their lack of self-consciousness made my job a blast:

My job at VPR is a jack-of-all-trades kind of thing - web editing, social media, a little reporting, a lot of photojournalism - but what remains pretty consistent is collaborating with my colleagues on stories. It’s a departure from my one-woman-band role in the past, and honestly, it’s lovely to share the work.

One highlight: snorkeling in Harvey’s Lake with reporter Amy Noyes, who wrote about the women researching aquatic ecology in the Vermont lake where Jacques Cousteau, according to local lore, made his first-ever dive as a kid at camp:

I also provided photo-support for reporter Nina Keck as she explored the legacy of a three-year-old debate about whether Rutland, Vt. should welcome 100 mostly Syrian refugees. Nina caught up with Hazar Mansour and Hussam Alhallak, one of the three Syrian families to move to Rutland before the Trump administration capped refugee admissions in the U.S. I spent an afternoon with Hazar, Hussam and their three kids and left completely enchanted by this kind, warm family. The resulting photo essay now lives on a page here.

While I keep pretty busy with this supportive role, I have had a chance to do some reporting (and made my radio debut!) with a silly but sneakily serious piece about what a local library fundraising with a calendar full of nude local authors says about the state of libraries in Vermont.

News (personal and otherwise)

What the last three months have looked like:

1. I finished my MFA program in early May (whew!)

2. I started as a digital producer at VPR in June and am excited to say I’ve already managed to cover a news story about a pig (huzzah!)

3. There are a few leftover freelance pieces that have come out in the last month I’m excited to share (journalism!)

So, the pig. It was actually a boar’s head. His name is Emmett, he belonged to a retiring Vermont Supreme Court Justice, and he had a parade in downtown Montpelier his honor as he made his way to his new home in the law offices of Michael Donofrio.

As for the last few freelance stories, I’ve written about a new literary magazine looking to elevate rural, queer and POC voices, the predicament that Vermont farmers find themselves in as the older generation retires and the younger one struggles to get on the land, and a woman who builds her own boats and goes searching for trash and existential wholeness.

My favorite story from this spring by far was following along Joseph Barese and his daughter, Sarah, as they trundled over boulders, mud and water with the rest of the Southern Vermont Off Road Association. Joe started the group for his daughter, who is autistic, because that’s her favorite way to spend time with her dad. I’ve put up the full photo essay on my site.

Maple stuff and more

I’ve lost any moxie I woke up with this morning after doing taxes (self-employment tax suckssssss), so here’s a quick run-down of some journalism things that have happened.

1. One of my favorite editors sent me an email titled “Maple Syrup and Haircuts” and obviously I said yes to whatever it contained. I hung out in a sugar shack on a boiling day in the backwoods of Pownal and did the same in a Bennington barber shop and both are portraits (and include actual photo-portraits, see below) of Vermont-y places.

2. I’ve been contributing somewhat more frequently to the Berkshire Eagle, including these two stories about last month’s Youth Climate Strike in Williamstown and a survey of new businesses in the county. My favorite photos, one of the strike’s organizers Karen McComish, left, and Cathy McPartland, right, helping third grader Max Holey use a megaphone, and another of Steam Noodle Cafe owner Phornpimon "Jem" Ezinga, are below.

3. Lastly, I’ve put up some new Finding America photos. Meet Sheri, the woman who painted her Stockbridge house pink and devoted it to the Sacred Heart:

Crows!

So many of them. I was driving home from a long day on assignment Friday when I saw hundreds of them congregating in the crowns of trees all around The Common in Pittsfield. They cawed and flapped against a colorful, cloudless evening sky. As a waxing crescent moon rose behind the darkening downtown, the crows roosted, slumber-party-style, and settled in for the night.

Mid-winter

I suppose we’re actually past mid-winter, but I set my expectations low…I haven’t forgotten the mid-April snow from last year.

My family, Adron and I made good use of the snow last week, however, and took a quick trip into the White Mountains of New Hampshire for some cross-country skiing. Things that happened: my dad dragged me and Adron over 12 miles of (mostly upward) trails; I was so tired and desperate to get back that I lost my fear of downhills; my mom and I went sunset hiking/sledding on the Artist’s Bluff trail; we met a very silly dog; and we enjoyed one of the most beautiful Airbnbs I’ve ever seen.

I’m in the final semester of my graduate writing program and, therefore, writing all the damn time, but I’ve managed to produce a few newspaper stories in 2019. These include: another installment of Finding America; a story for the Bennington Banner about the black Green Mountain Boy killed at the Battle of Bennington; and a feature for the Berkshire Eagle about new houses being built for the more intense weather associated with climate change.

One last look back at 2018

I took my first, second and only photography classes in high school, and we were legit: I used my mom’s 35mm Canon AE-1 camera, fumbled around with my film in those pain-in-the-ass black cloth bags with arm holes to get it into the plastic developing tank, developed it, and then hung around in the darkroom under that creepy red light to make my own prints.

My developing days are way over, but once in awhile, but I do get a hankering to put down my digital stuff and pick up my mom’s old camera again. I started 2018 with six rolls of film, and I ended it with 200+ prints from Concord Photo Service. I spent today, the first day of 2019, sifting through the pile. Perhaps because I had to wait for months to see the results, perhaps because I could actually hold them, or perhaps because each roll only gives you 24 chances so you slow down, really focus and make sure you get it right - these photos weighed heavier in my hands. Like they really meant something. Like memory made just a little more tangible, reminders of what I should and can hold onto.

In no particular order: Maine with my friend Laura, home with Adron and Chowder, trips to Long Island, Lancaster, PA and NYC, visits in Vermont and New Hampshire, a hike up Mt. Kearsarge with my friend Danielle, a bike ride in Wolfeboro, N.H. with the family, apple picking in Adams, Mass., riding Kittery with my mom, northern New Hampshire with my MFA friends, and Thanksgiving in Minnesota.

Pulling everything together

I’m super grateful this Thanksgiving eve (or, I guess, at the time of this writing, technically Thanksgiving day) for every animal, plant, landscape, editor, coworker, friend, loved one and stranger who makes it possible for me to spend my days exploring this life in many different ways but mostly through writing and photographs. And it’s a gift not necessarily because those are more important activities than others but because those are the ways my narrow slice of the world widens like a big, fat, delicious piece of pie. Tonight, I’m savoring it as much as possible.

In that spirit, this is an official “re-launch” of my old website so all my stuff finally lives together in one spot. Here you can find my newspaper stories, my photojournalism portfolio, ongoing projects and blog posts like these. I will also include some of the work from my studies with the Mountainview MFA program, like this essay about the time I raised ducklings in an apartment and it went horribly wrong.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I’ll leave you with an older but favorite story from this time of year: a Mississquoi Abenaki woman once told me about her efforts to preserve indigenous food traditions in New Hampshire.

Last wave at summer

Today was a real crisp-smell-fiery-foliage-FALL-DAY, but before I fully embrace all its glory, I have a few photos from the sweatiest 24 hours of my life when I visited my freshman college roommate, Elkema, in New York City over the summer. She knows me well and took me out to “old New York,” to places still untouched by shiny new development. We took a long train ride out to the edge of Brooklyn and visited Fort Tilden, Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport and then Bushwick. It was one of the hottest, most humid weekends over the summer, but so, so worth it.

Back to Iceland

I desperately wanted to see this place one more time, when it was green, and when it was warm(er), and when I could share it with Adron. We camped out in windy rainy places for a week, saw whales and sheep, tromped up volcano craters and into hot springs, ate so many gas station hot dogs (wrapped in bacon!), and generally had the time of our lives.

On the beach

My friend Laura came from Washington, D.C. for a visit last week, so we booked it for the Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts coasts. Our visit consisted mostly of very cold ocean, roses, lobster rolls and hungry seagulls.

Cute kids and art

Here's just a few photos that I took for the Berkshire Eagle last month that ended up not being published, but that I liked anyway. It was the "Start with Art" program for kids at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. 

Iceland, Part Deux

My parents and I made the decision to spend 2.5 days in Iceland at the end of February. We hiked in volcano mud and got turned around at a snow-covered mountain pass, and everything was how I remembered it from the last time: relentless, invigorating, and so, so windy. Here's a little record of our first-ever real family vacation together. 

Up Monument Mountain

I have to admit I came across a photo on Instagram of the "Devil's Pulpit" up Monument Mountain in Great Barrington, Mass. and immediately wanted to hike this little mountain. So I did a couple Saturdays ago. It turns out the Devil's Pulpit is adequately named - there's a nice rock to look out from and, if you look down, you can see right over the sheer cliff falling hundreds of feet down. I got close to the edge...but not too close. 

A little bit of a COLD Christmas

Gotta keep making those photos. Family time with my parents in New Hampshire, then sledding adventures up Mt. Mansfield in Vermont.