It took some arm-twisting to convince Montpelier postal carrier Craig Montgomery to let a video journalist document his last day delivering mail in Montpelier. After 31 years on the job, he knew it would be emotional — even though he was pleased to be passing the mailbag to his son, Angus. That Craig’s father and grandfather were both postal carriers on the same route would make Angus the fourth generation of Montgomery to serve this downtown neighborhood for the U.S. Postal Service.
Craig wasn’t crazy about the idea of sharing the occasion with a camera — until the woman behind it, Seven Days senior multimedia producer Eva Sollberger, won him over with her powers of persuasion. The resulting episode of her “Stuck in Vermont” video series is one of the most moving she’s filmed. Told through encounters with grateful customers and dogs, and dotted with late-summer black-eyed Susans and other Montpelier scenery, the video is titled “Mail Bonding.”
My favorite image, to which Eva returns throughout the nine-minute episode, is of father and son striding side by side, in P.O.-issued shorts. Despite their difference in age, the two men have the same gait and similar leg tattoos.
Both funny and poignant, Eva’s piece is a picture of succession, community, mortality, love and service. And, like almost every episode of “Stuck in Vermont,” it brought me to tears.
When Eva started working at Seven Days in 2007, she produced a video story every week. Just editing each one could take her 40 hours; she’d work all night, sometimes two, to meet her deadline. Since 2011, she’s made a shorter version of each video to air on the WCAX-TV newscast and social media. It wasn’t until the end of 2019 that she switched to a biweekly schedule.
That adds up to a lot of videos — 699, to be exact. She gives the behind-the-scenes details of each episode in print; find the latest, about Colchester screen-printing shop New Duds, here. Over the years, Eva has trained her lens on Vermont artists, farmers, snowplow drivers — even her own family, which includes YA novelist and Seven Days associate editor Margot Harrison. Episode No. 700 will be about their mom, Sophie Quest, who will soon turn 90. Eva’s got a lot of editing to do before the milestone video drops on October 19.
Every episode of “Stuck in Vermont” is available on YouTube and archived on the Seven Days website. It’s an enormous oeuvre that would take more than 100 hours to watch. But click play on any individual episode — ice fishing for smelt, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, the Wayside Restaurant, a miniature horse that paints — for a dose of Vermont that is real and, almost always, sweet. Eva’s eye doesn’t miss a detail, and her ear is just as keen. She knows how to get people to talk. And the music she selects, often from local bands, sounds like it was made for the episode.
Eva has won dozens of first-place plaques from national and regional press associations; her work blows the competition away. Closer to home, last month the Vermont Arts Council recognized her with its version of a lifetime achievement award. Specifically, she won the 2023 Margaret L. Kannenstine Award for Arts Advocacy, one of several the group has presented annually since 1967. She was in good company with fellow Governor’s Arts Award winners sculptor Leslie Fry, former Vermont International Film Festival director Orly Yadin, Jeh Kulu artistic director Sidiki Sylla, and Vermont Arts Exchange cofounder and executive director Matthew Perry. Not surprisingly, she’d made “Stucks” about three of them.
Introducing Eva at the event was Seven Days cofounder Pamela Polston, the 2021 winner of the arts council’s Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. “What do Eva’s visual stories have to do with arts advocacy?” she asked the audience at Burlington’s Main Street Landing. “I would suggest that her work advocates for the power of art to affect our lives; she shows us our humanity, our sense of community and the essence of this state.”
In her acceptance speech, Eva reminded the crowd that she grew up in Vermont but left as a young adult. When “I moved back 20 years ago … I didn’t know anyone,” she said.
Seven hundred videos later, she joked, “Now I know everyone!”
After thanking the Vermont Arts Council for the recognition, she praised the group’s efforts to cultivate the arts in the state.
Speaking for so many of us, she said, “It’s why I want to be stuck here.”
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This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2023.
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