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.