Category: Archived (Page 7 of 8)

This piece was originally published on Medium on 26 August 2017.

Working in any media field is a little bit like being bludgeoned with worst case scenarios 24/7 and then some lately. If its not worrying about being discarded in a “pivot to video” it’s being bombarded by the never-ending news cycle, trying to keep pace with everything that seems to be falling apart. And if it is not that, there is the expectation from some employers that you work on call at whatever their hours are, and then the eternal struggle of wondering, will they actually pay me? When it comes to my writing, I constantly feel like I am always behind and spinning my wheels in the sands of writer’s block. It is where I am actually writing this from tonight while trying to finish a couple pieces for the local weekly I write for. I’m frustratingly drained, I’m anxious, I have too many loose ends to wrap up before a big life change coming in the next few months. I’m short on time and temper. Exhaustion and stress have hit my immune system hard all summer. I cover three towns; many of the people in them have my personal cell phone number and don’t hesitate to use it. And I swing between feeling like I’m pulling teeth on stories to having too much to juggle, all the time. As frustrating as this all is, while I’m staring blankly at 15 tabs worth of town commission minutes, I know that in a week, I’m going to feel absolutely lost. Because as bad as a place as I keep teetering on the edge of right now, I know that this is the thing that is helping me keep away the doom and gloom in the face of an ineffably crueler world than I want to believe in.

I joke that I work in Stars Hollow – and a part of me still demands a t-shirt reading #stillabetterjournalistthanRoryGilmore.

Though this is far from the whole picture, I have been lucky to work for a year in three towns where the good, the hope, and the dedication to community far outweigh anything else. I never meant to be a journalist, it is something I fell into and found that, parts of it at least, I truly enjoy. For about 20 hours a week (usually more) I get to ignore the national scene, ignore the international scene, disengage with the proverbial garbage fire that seems to be spreading in every direction, and dig in to a place where even when they disagree on how it should be taken care of, there is pride in citizenship and celebration of a place by the people who live within it, and in many ways strive to take care of each other.

I have learned to be invested in local politics at a level I’ve never engaged with before; I see the dedication it takes to keep small New England towns running and now believe more than ever that politics needs to be a service to others, not a platform for an individual. I’ve met so many people, learned about their pasts and their passions, their roots and the directions they want to grow in. I’ve talked to scouts about their service projects, middle schoolers who want to ban neonicotinoids, veterans who are reaching out to provide a lifeline to others struggling with the same mental battles they faced with no help post-Vietnam. I’ve learned why community theatre is important especially in small communities, why fife and drum endures and should continue to do so, the challenges of keeping people in these communities, and why people can’t help but return when they do leave. I get to watch small partnerships be woven together, and residents who see what is happening outside of what feels like a haven, and choose to take a stand though the ugliness doesn’t touch them. I meet people who dedicate their lives to not only preserving local histories, but uncovering the darker sides of the stories that haven’t been told. I get to listen to all the ways that people try to bring the global context into the local word, and I get to hear about how our local shines outwards into the global from international exchange students. Yes, there are budget troubles and anxieties. Yes, there are very real problems to be faced and there have been and will be moments when this community will have to make very real choices about who they are, who is welcome, and who they want to become. And yes, there could always be more people at the regular town meetings and commission meetings and all the other little things that fill a town government calendar. But even with the problems, even with a voicemail that is never empty and emails that become distracting and questions that I can’t answer because, no, I cannot investigate why your neighbor seems weird and whistles in his backyard all the time, I cover these towns, and I get the chance to breathe.

I don’t have many chances to breathe in my life. The more it feels like I can’t catch up and the closer my life crawls to a major life change, the more I am grateful for those moments where I can dig my way into stories that will never be a blip on a national, or even a regional level, but for the people I have grown to care about and the communities I have grown to love, they are defining stories. And I am grateful for the people I work with; writers and editors who know that sometimes the local soccer game is more important than the world cup, and the importance of digging into the minutiae of town governance – and they take both equally seriously, because both, in some way, will impact the lives of the people who read the local paper. At a certain level, though it might have been my job to be interested in them and invest in what happens at the hyperlocal level, not a single one of them ever needed to become invested in me. And yet they did. If I stayed plugged into only my own life, only national and international news, I would have a much darker view on the world. But watching the level of investment of people who genuinely care about local life, who want to do their jobs well and take care of other people and their community to the best of their ability in whatever role they work in, helps bring some light back to my world.

So now, it is too early on a Saturday morning. I have too many countdown clocks running towards change, I’m behind deadline, and I’m writing through my writer’s block because in the face of the last few days, I can’t thing of anything else to do. But I’m staring at meeting minutes about a new restaurant, and notes about a miniature horse demonstration, and somehow, everything is going to be okay, because these moments are part of the record of life just as much as the storms hitting the national news cycle right now. And I’m the lucky one who gets to write these down, and remind people that there is still something positive in the world, still things being made and not destroyed, just like the people who are doing these things remind me every day and through every interview.

This piece was originally published on Medium on 14 October 2017.

Coming to Cambridge for my PhD has been a slightly harder transition than when I left for Edinburgh for my Masters four years ago. When I left for Scotland I was experiencing a sense of intellectual wanderlust; I loved where I had grown up but I also felt that I had outgrown it. This time, however, I’ve left my home for a longer time after learning to grow into the gifts that my community had to offer. It’s one thing to grow up knowing abstractly that you come from a good place, it is quite another to see that place for what it is, to understand it’s intricacies and the care and time that individuals give to make it what it is; not flawless, but striving. Not perfect, but genuinely caring. Not a simple idyllic, but with depths to plumb and more to offer than can be scratched from the surface of a postcard-picturesque sunset. Suddenly, when you not only know what you’ve left behind, but understand why it is so much a part of you, it becomes hard to remember why you left no matter what the bright opportunity you are meant to be running towards might be.

But what has made the transition easier – both times actually – is finding an integral part of my community elsewhere, through Rotarians in both Scotland and England. When you are moving somewhere new, it is nice to know that there are people there with a genuine interest in taking care of you – and that it isn’t lip service either. Even before I landed, my host club, the Rotary Club of Cambridge-South had gone above and beyond to help me navigate the university’s convoluted bureaucracy and make sure that I would actually have a place to live when I arrived. And after months of hearing, “this is not our problem” from other places, it was such a relief, though certainly not a surprise. My home club, the Rotary Club of Madison, CT and my home District, RI District 7980, have shown me time and again that people are willing to do whatever it takes to someone, not because of what they will receive, but because of what they can do for someone else, simply because they can. I am so grateful to have been made a part of this community, twice now, and know first-hand how my life has been shaped because someone in Rotary thought I was worth supporting. And if it feels rare to be so embraced and so supported by a community when you are a stranger and an outsider, I hope that whatever little I do in this world, I can share that feeling of being accepted and worth helping, when I have to the chance to do so, for someone else. Helping is one of the most genuine forms of showing care that there is; how lucky am I to be so cared for.

A global community dedicated to service in this world seems like an abstract dream. Can people genuinely just want to help others to the best of their abilities anymore? In my experience, yes. And the Scholars Welcome Dinner held by Rotary International District 1080 served to confirm that experience, across generations. Eleven scholars from five countries, all working on different topics but with the same goal in mind were able to come together and further show that diverse people with diverse experiences can learn from each other to push towards a common end. I am very excited to see what this cohort can do — even from just preliminary plans to coordinate Rotary Peace Project training locally, and take those skills back to our own communities. It doesn’t take a lot to make it happen either. Just a little bit of time, a little bit of connecting the threads. It is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle with no key in some respects. Not a single one of us has the answer, or even a full grasp of the picture. But we can each do a part, and benefit from the others’ perspectives.

This piece was originally published on Medium on 13 September 2017.

I leave my home of over twenty years in less than two weeks to start a new adventure. Or continue the old adventure. I’m not sure which is correct yet. But between the logistics of planning a three year move for an intensive degree and saying goodbye to a place I have only grown to love more in the last year, I also have the chance to see something I worked on for months at the newspaper come to fruition in a way I didn’t think possible.

Back in May, while working on a historical piece, I noticed that there were glaring holes in the narrative small-town Connecticut tells about its history. Despite the fact that their names cover the landscape, indigenous people are often absent from the colonial narrative. Despite the fact that trade based on their use in industry across the globe is what made New England financially strong during the colonial period, slaves, too, are notably absent. So I started working on a piece using local experts on the history of slavery in Connecticut, and why it is important to look at this history to better understand some of what we face, socially, today. It was finally finished, and published, at the end of August.

Digging into this topic turned up far more questions than answers and easily about ten times the information than I could write about in that article — local papers only have so much room. But while I ponder what to do with the rest of it, and where to go from there, I get to host a panel discussion with my sources at a local museum before I leave. As a journalist, it is a wonderful way to end a chapter. But as I frame what this event will be, and what will be discussed, it is forcing me to interrogate what and why I write, and why story and history are so important to me.

History is a collection of facts that continues to grow, that we weave into a story to help us explain who we are and where we are from. What we choose to remember helps us decide, as individuals and as a larger society, who we will become. And that is something that we are grappling with on many levels right now — who are our towns, our states? What does it mean to be an American, or even, human — and who gets to call themselves either of these things without someone else thinking that they have the right to question its validity.

When we cut out parts of our history, whether it is intentional or not, we erase people. We refuse to see them as part of that fabric of the past, and so it becomes easier to tell ourselves that they are not us, but something other. They are not us, and so they are not ours to protect and respect, to treat as part of the country we inhabit today. We give ourselves permission to ignore the events that lead to social disenfranchisement in the present, and to make excuses for our complicity.

Acknowledging complicity has been a major underlying thread of this narrative. Something I learned as a facilitator is that we cannot start to have conversations about how to solve problems without first considering the ways in which we ourselves might be compounding or contributing to the problems. If I’m playing a game to facilitate leadership training, and I’m not listening to what my peers are saying — or not saying––then I am part of the problem. I cannot reasonably be angry that a) things are not working or b) that the problem seems to only get worse. This remains applicable when dealing with larger problems as well. Part of what we are seeing right now is different groups of people who are disenfranchised in different ways by the way our society is constructed, saying “help, you are hurting me,” and getting all sorts of reasons why they are wrong or why someone else, who doesn’t live those experiences, doesn’t think that their pain is valid. It is a form of silencing, and in the context of all the ways we have silenced people through history, it is no small, excusable thing.

The tides of the world change, and so too must the stories we tell about ourselves. So too must the ways in which we look at our history, or else we will never grow. A more comprehensive view of history, with more voices represented only helps us, though there are those who are working very hard to convince people otherwise, that the bubble should not be burst because it would ruin the idyllic vision that has persisted. And this is what really drove me to pursue that story from May to August, to want to continue to find ways to interrogate the history I grew up learning; the bubble has to burst. Whether as a journalist or an academic, or something in between part of my job is to interrogate these things, and put it on the record. An article, a panel, these are small things, but it is the way I can stand witness.

So maybe this panel, this piece of closure will be nothing, and maybe no one will show up. Or maybe there are enough questions about why we are doing this at all that people will want to come and learn more. But there are things that have to start to be said in the most idyllic communities, and this is one place to start. So, if you are around the CT River Museum on Sept. 18 at 5:30 p.m., I hope you’ll join us. And otherwise, I’m sure I will be checking back in here as the adventure continues.