About

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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 — it’s like an enchanted map made of ideas —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, we can feel the pulse of it.

I have loved this place and written about it for 20 years. And now I am creating the kind of exploration, experience, writer’s view and digital magazine 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.)

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.