‘A sense of excitement and imagination and what can be possible …’ That energy, for me, is at the heart journalism. It’s the way stories can shape the community, in ideas and in action, and make real change in places that matter.
READ MORELocal stories reimagined? Take a look at what’s going on out here in the hills of Western Massachusetts — come out with me, and we’ll get under the surface, close enough to know what an artist feels or an event feels like. I have loved this place and written about it for more than 20 years, and here I am creating the kind of experience, writer’s view, digital magazine and hub for Berkshire arts and events unique in Western Massachusetts.
• BTW is a hub for local stories — created and curated by a local journalist and oral historian and storyteller
• Real people are writing these stories ourselves — no AI ‘writers’
• We write them on the ground, within the community
• They come from *talking with people* and from direct experience
• We keep trust with readers and sources
• And that means people are not paying me to write about them
BTW brings together diverse local storytellers to create a wide web of stories — a source for local news and community, and a portal into a creative world close enough to touch.
Local voices — local relationships
Across the U.S., journalism has lost local ground — in the past 20 years the country has lost almost a third of its newspapers and almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists (according to Northwestern’s Local News Initiative).
To regrow those roots, readers need to know where stories are coming from. You need to know who we are as writers and where the perspectives, facts, experiences and dreams here — all come from. And sources, narrators, people who share their stories with us — you need to know that we will share your stories honestly and clearly.
BTW has no ‘native advertising,’ no ads that look like stories, no AI-generated stories, no press releases made to look like stories or stories written by an organization about themselves.
What you will find here
You’ll find art and music and theater and dance here, in stories and a Berkshire arts and events calendar — you’ll find hiking trails and canoe trips and restaurants linked to local farms. Most of all, you’ll find conversations. You’ll find people coming out to meet you and share the world we live in.
And you’ll find a creative community here which has been growing for years. Over time, diverse and wide-minded people are talking with BTW, writing for BTW, sharing stories and gathering stories.
Weaving local knowledge
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.
We get to know the hills on the ground. We talk with people while they’re planting seeds and rehearsing plays and making tacos and throwing pots, up to their elbows in clay.
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.
This site was designed and coded by Kate Krolicki.
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.)
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.
Where are the Berkshires?
The Berkshires are hills on the Western edge of Massachusetts. They run along the border with New York state from Connecticut north to Vermont, 50 miles from end to end.
I live in a high green country with a vivid creative life. It is a rare place. In some ways it’s an in-between place, across the state from Boston and up the Hudson River from New York, and as a cultural area and as a geographic one, it spills over the state line.
So who’s writing these stories?
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. Let us introduce ourselves …
Mount Greylock / Photo by Kate Abbott
Hikers at the summit of Mount Greylock look out over the town of Adams.
Where does the name ‘BTW Berkshires’ come from?
I’ve been writing as By the Way since 2008. I moved back to the Berkshires that winter to take a job as editor of Berkshires Week in the Berkshire Eagle, the local daily paper, and my editors invited me to write a weekly column.
When I was looking for a name for the column, I pulled out Henry David Thoreau’s essay about climbing Mount Greylock and read about him picking raspberries By the Way — so I called it that, and I wrote my first column about it.
In 2015 I went freelance, and I launched the first version of this website. People in the Berkshires knew me by my column, so I brought the name here. I liked the feel of casual, friendly storytelling, the sense of sitting down together over coffee or ambling along a back road just to see where it goes. And as Kate Krolicki began working with me to create this website, in the winter of 2018, we kept the name to carry that feeling on.
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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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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