Explore and experience the Berkshires with me — as a writer and a journalist, I get to know the hills on the ground. I talk with people while they’re planting seeds and rehearsing plays and making tacos and throwing pots, up to their elbows in clay.

We’re making a 21st-century story web — it’s like an enchanted map, a play of ideas, a landscape of many colors — a map of all the kinds of people and places you have to live here to know about. This is a rare place, and at its best it’s a place where open space and open minds meet. That energy is becoming known around the world, and we can feel the pulse of it.

I have loved this place and written about it for more than 20 years. And now I am creating the kind of exploration, experience, writer’s view, digital magazine and Berkshire arts and events calendar I have not seen anywhere else.

I want to find the places local people know — like the pub where a traveling theater company is performing live tonight, and the sugar shack that serves corn muffins with maple butter. That’s what I look for when I come to a new place. And that’s what I want to give you. Come with me and I’ll show you where I go on a weekend morning in the sun.

Land acknowledgement

With thankfulness and awe, I acknowledge that I work and live on the unceded homelands of the Mohican nation. They love these hills and river valleys and actively care for them now. They are the indigenous peoples of this land, who have lived here for hundreds of years, and they live here and return here today. And they hold beauty, in their understanding, their knowledge of plants and places, seeds and healing, their language, their music and dance, and their deeply rooted strength.

Despite their hardship in being forced from their homes, their community lives now in Wisconsin, and they are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee. I honor and respect their ancestors past and present as I commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all. (Some of the language here I have learned from them, and some I offer in thanks.)

A flat stone sits beside a bench, giving a place to rest beside a plaque holding the words of a contemporary Mohican poet at Thomas Palmer Brook Preserve in Great Barrington.
Photo by Kate Abbott

A flat stone sits beside a bench, giving a place to rest beside a plaque holding the words of a contemporary Mohican poet at Thomas Palmer Brook Preserve in Great Barrington.

Courtesy of H. Heron / Jacob's Pillow

BTW Berkshires

Wander the Berkshires with stories and local news and take a look at what’s going on here under the surface — close enough to show what an artist feels or an event feels like.

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Newsletter

By the Way Berkshires has a weekly By the Way newsletter with a roundup of events this week, and new stories and places we are discovering. It comes out in time for Thursday mornings.

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Photo by Kate Abbott

The Writers

By the Way Berkshires begins with a local writer and journalist, and it is growing. You will find voices here from many perspectives — Williams College students and young alums, a longtime Berkshire naturalist and freelance writers …

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