Dec 29, 2021 – Jan 11, 2022
Seven Days Writers Reveal What it Took to Report the News in Year Two of a Pandemic; Remembering Vermonters We Lost in 2021; Food Writers Share Their Favorite Bites and Sips of the Year
Clean: ‘Alone in the Darkness’ (1/10/22)
Frosty vapor clouds formed in front of my face as I let out a long and pensive exhale. I was three years sober, and the…
Obituary: R. Allan Paul, 1931-2022
A lawyer and active community member was the Vermont Chamber of Commerce’s Citizen of the Year in 2006
Burlington Food and Beverage Company Invests in Stowe’s Idletyme Brewing
Third Place, the company behind American Flatbread Burlington Hearth, has taken an ownership stake in Stowe’s Idletyme Brewing, said Third Place co-founder Paul Sayler. The…
Obituary: Kristin Ann Johnson, 1946-2021
Enthusiastic educator spent more than 40 years teaching students with reading difficulties
Obituary: Holly Valach Hanley, 1961-2022
South Burlington woman had a contagious smile and her greatest achievement was raising her children
Promotions: Welcome, Peter Dysart
Welcome, Peter Dysart! The law firm of Primmer Piper Eggleston and Cramer (PPEC) is pleased to welcome attorney Peter Dysart. Peter will work with our…
Clean: ‘Back to My Roots’ (1/3/21)
Muddy water splashed on my shoes as I stepped over the roots of a tall maple tree. I was three years sober, and I was…
Obituary: Jennifer Lynn (Mathews) Fredette, 1972-2021
Vermont Legal Aid employee was committed to helping others find justice
Obituary: Micheline Hogue Junas, 1933-2022
From an “epic love story” to travel and volunteering, Shelburne woman “lived a very good and full life”
Obituary: Mona Wheatley, 1934-2021
Middlebury College graduate went on to direct the school’s bicentennial celebration
Backstory: Best Hunch
In April, I was assigned to cover a press conference in Barre. The event was meant to drum up interest in the case of Ralph Jean-Marie, a 38-year-old Black man who vanished from the Hollow Inn & Motel a year earlier. (As of this writing, he remains missing.)
Backstory: Most Satisfying Quest
Years ago, when I was a new reporter at the Associated Press, I liked visiting obscure nooks of Vermont to find stories that nobody else was writing. Every AP story started with a dateline — the town name in all caps that indicates where the story was reported. The AP bureau is in Montpelier, but I…
From the Publisher: Hope Scrolling
Every night, between 8 and 9 p.m., I receive a flood of emails. They’re notifications of recurring Super Reader donations to Seven Days. Depending on…
Backstory: Closest Call
When the black bear bolted from a cornfield in front of our pickup shortly after dawn, my initial reaction was relief. Photographer Jeb Wallace-Brodeur and I had gotten up before 4 a.m. to drive to Newbury to catch a bear hunt in action, and it now seemed like our efforts would not be in vain.
Backstory: Most Reluctant Sources
There are two sides to every story, as the saying goes. But time after time in 2021, the subjects of my reporting found ways to avoid telling me theirs. At first, this was frustrating: I want to include all perspectives in my reporting, and an interview is often the only way to fully represent an…
Backstory: Saddest Epilogue
I never met Anne Saxelby, who opened Saxelby Cheesemongers in New York City in 2006, but I interviewed her via email and phone probably half a dozen times. Anne was a staunch, vocal supporter of the American artisan cheese movement before many people took it as seriously as the centuries-old European cheesemaking tradition. And she…
Backstory: Best Bromance
“Tom Messner is the same guy on screen as he is off it.” That’s the refrain I heard over and over again while reporting an October cover story on the retirements of the NBC5 meteorologist and his counterpart at WCAX, Sharon Meyer. And it’s true. I know from my own interactions with him over the…
Backstory: Best Little Story in My Back Pocket
I didn’t want to leave the food table at the outdoor, all-you-can-eat seafood fest at 18 Elm in Waterbury, onto which chef Eric Warnstedt was dumping steaming pots of shrimp, mussels, clams, corn on the cob, sausage and potatoes. But I needed a quote from someone in the crowd, so I scanned the attendees. My…
Backstory: Story That Most Changed my Perspective
It took me a while to psych myself into going to the Sears Lane homeless encampment on a cold October day. The City of Burlington was in the process of evicting the 40-some campers following arrests related to guns and drugs. According to the city, it wasn’t safe at the site; one official told me…
Backstory: Most Evasive Subject
I pulled my car into Winooski’s O’Brien Community Center parking lot and braced for disappointment. To my right: a plastic briefcase containing an expensive sound monitor I barely knew how to use, despite a two-hour lesson from the person who’d lent it to me. To my left: a window cracked just enough to hear my…
The 2021 Art Shows We Liked Best, and Why
In this newspaper we commonly make lists of seven, rather than the more typical 10. Admittedly, the smaller number makes it harder to winnow out…
Backstory: Biggest Rookie Mistake
I’d never been to Thunder Road before I was sent there on assignment in July, and I assumed, based on no evidence, that there would be food. I also assumed that at least one vendor would accept credit cards, and, if not, that there would be an ATM machine on the premises. I believed these…
Will Gebhard Explores Shape and Color in “So It Goes” at Soapbox Arts
Will Gebhard knows what catches the eye. At his first gallery show — “So It Goes,” at Soapbox Arts in Burlington — overlapping curvy and…
Remembering Vermonters Who Died in 2021
On December 15, the Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina published the obituary of a Texas woman named Renay Mandel Corren. I promise you, it’s unlike…
Backstory: Most Ridiculous Border Crossing
I had considered the possibility that my passport might have expired, but I didn’t bother to check before my partner and I set off for the Eastern Townships of Québec to do some high-stakes reporting on the local sauna scene. You might call that bad planning, but I prefer to think of it as self-preservation.…
Backstory: Most Intriguing Drive-By
I love reporting and writing stories but don’t do it very often these days; running this newspaper is more than a full-time job. Whenever I do get out, though, I talk to people, learn things and almost always return with a long list of potential story ideas to pursue. Although they’re hard to swing, these…
Six Stories That Shaped Vermont’s Arts and Culture Scenes In 2021
2021 was a year of two extremes. For the first six months, Vermonters remained hunkered down, bracing against the coronavirus as they had through most…
Backstory: Nastiest Blowback
“You are a dirtbag.” That was the entirety of the first email I received after a story I wrote about my visit to a new indoor shooting range in Waterbury, where I fired a 9mm pistol and a semiautomatic AR-15-style rifle. In the days and weeks that followed, gun lovers across the nation pumped round after…
Backstory: Best Memory Maker
This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news,…
Free Will Astrology (12/29/21)
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. It was later described as “the single greatest victory ever achieved over disease” —…
Soundbites: Local Musicians Pick the Best of 2021, New Year’s Eve Music
I’ve yelled at so many magazines in my life. Just flung them across the room, screaming obscenities so profane that I’d normally only utter them…
Backstory: Worst-Timed Vacations
In July 2019, I was lounging in a Maine hotel room when I took a break from my Jodi Picoult novel to check Twitter. There in my timeline, I saw that a colleague had written the story I’d been chasing for weeks: Developers of the long-stalled CityPlace Burlington project downtown had announced that the entire…
Backstory: Most Fortuitous Lapse in Judgment
The sausages were on the grill, and the small talk went where it always does when journalists gather: to work. In June, freshly vaccinated and feeling safe again, I joined some friends for an after-work barbecue at Burlington’s Oakledge Park. Most people there had some connection to journalism — a not-uncommon phenomenon, in my experience,…
Seven Days Writers Reveal What it Took to Report the News in Year 2 of a Pandemic
Once a year, Seven Days invites readers into our world. The backstories our reporters tell in this issue — the tales of how they got the news — offer glimpses of how we go about our work. You’ll learn how we were able to document monthslong wait times to see doctors at the University of…
Journal of Another Plague Year in Film
Over the summer, it seemed as if moviegoing might return to “normal.” With COVID-19 cases on the decline and state restrictions lifted, indoor theaters reopened…
Letters to the Editor (12/29/21)
Rush to Publish? I enjoyed Chris Farnsworth’s article on Memorial Auditorium [“Memorial Days,” December 1] and was excited to see in the notable events box…
Six Album Reviews We (Almost!) Missed in 2021
What a year for album submissions! In 2021, Vermont’s musicians were flinging records at Seven Days like a bunch of psychopaths with Frisbees. Your friendly…
Backstory: Most Fruitful Fact-Check
Kyle Dodson’s short tenure with the City of Burlington began and ended the same way: with a boatload of controversy. Mayor Miro Weinberger tapped Dodson, a Black man who serves as president and CEO of the Greater Burlington YMCA, to lead the city’s “police transformation” effort in September 2020. That month, protesters had occupied a city…
Backstory: Twistiest Route
I’m not surprised that a story about mealworms is my most memorable of 2021. Even if it had gone according to plan, I’d still tell all my friends about hanging out underneath the parlor of an old dairy barn, surrounded by 2.4 million wriggling insects. It really grosses them out.
Backstory: Coldest Stakeout
January 6 wasn’t circled on my calendar. COVID-19, not electoral politics, was my reporting focus, so I didn’t give much thought to president Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal rally planned outside the U.S. Capitol. My to-do list for the day included conducting interviews about Vermont’s vaccine campaign, chasing a story involving the Tiger King and…
My 19-Year-Old Son Got Married Without Telling Me
Dear Reverend, My 19-year-old son came home from college for the holidays. The first thing he told me was that he got married to one…
Backstory: Best Family History Lesson
Trying to get the story on a historic synagogue for sale in Burlington’s Old North End, I didn’t expect to learn something new about my own people — specifically, my husband, Jeff’s, paternal grandfather.
Backstory: Most Random Assignment
To explain how I ended up spending part of Easter weekend at a Bible reading in the Northeast Kingdom, it helps to understand how I was feeling at that time. It was early April, and I had spent most of the previous year toiling away at home, emerging from my dim bedroom-turned-office only to make…
Backstory: Best Crowdsourcing Effort
I was on the final day of a weeklong summer vacation when I made the mistake of checking my inbox. That morning, I had been copied on an avalanche of emails from our publisher, Paula Routly. They were responses to a piece that she had written in the previous week’s paper about a very scary…
Obituary: Patricia McClure, 1948-2021
Warmhearted and generous woman delighted in spending time with her four grandchildren
Obituary: Meg Brazill, 1952-2021
Woodstock woman brought her creativity to a long career in the New England arts scene
Obituary: Mark Eldridge, 1943-2021
Former Burlington director of planning and zoning was a champion for climate change solutions
Obituary: Harold Harvey, 1941-2021
Avid snowmobiler compiled the first map of snowmobile trails for the state of Vermont
‘Seven Days’ Food Writers Share Their Favorite Bites and Sips of 2021
If 2020 was a roller coaster for Vermont’s food scene, 2021 brought the resulting whiplash. As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout continued in the spring, the…
The Magnificent 14: Must See, Must Do, December 29 to January 11
As we enter the new year, there’s no shortage of ways for Vermonters to connect, learn and have a good time. We’ve compiled fourteen must-do events, including New Queers Eve, the annual LGBTQ+ celebratory extravaganza at Higher Ground Ballroom in South Burlington.
