I Can't Stop Thinking About...The View Between Villages (Extended Version)

One of the first things I learned in college was I’d likely start my career in local news. People tend to cancel subscriptions to national publications, my Journalism 101 professor explained. They can get that news on any site. Local news, they can’t get anywhere else.

My professor was right about one thing (though sadly not the viability of local news). Four years after he shared those pearls of wisdom in my 8 a.m., I started my first journalism job covering a town of 22,000 for Hearst Newspapers’ tiniest property, The Darien News. They had just bought the paper and created a local news fellowship as a way to bring in fresh blood to do the unglamorous work of covering a tight-knit suburb.

I was all too eager to be that person. It was my goal to work for Hearst magazines and had been since around the time I took that Journalism 101 course. I wanted to write long-form features exploring national issues, and publish stories that made people feel seen and heard. If I could get my start at the company’s tiniest publication, I’d do it.

A few months after I started, I broke a story about a drug bust. This led to my first investigative piece on how the opioid epidemic was impacting Darien and then another feature about a young man in recovery who lost his life to an overdose. It wasn’t a feature in Cosmo, but when I started getting emails from people thanking me for writing about this issue, I realized my work—written for a tiny audience and a tiny paper—could still impact people. I was writing about one place, but I was also telling stories many people could and did relate to.

The elation I got from this kept me at Hearst for five years, far longer than I intended. My reporting prompted a school to be shut down, fueled parental outrage about mold, and kept a few police departments on their toes. I wasn’t writing about national issues, but my hyperlocal news was reaching people in ways that mattered.

Then the company’s direction changed. My job shifted from covering city council meetings to interviewing local officials about national issues because those types of stories performed better. Around the same time, Covid-19 hit. The Massachusetts border closed which meant I couldn’t see my family without quarantining for two weeks. I decided it was time to go home. I got a job with writing about Boston and moved with my boyfriend and our cat to a little blue house in my home city.

Meanwhile, several hundred miles north in Strafford, Vermont, a musician named Noah Kahan had also moved home because of the pandemic and was writing his way through the emotions that brought up. This writing would eventually turn into an album known as Stick Season.

I first heard Kahan’s name from my brother who was a fan of his earlier albums of pop music with lyrics painted in broad strokes to appeal to a wider audience. In Stick Season, Kahan gave up attempts at universal appeal in exchange for folksy tracks that convey a powerful sense of place and a message about how home can be both the best and worst place.

It conveyed how I felt. I found Boston a much different place than I left it. My friends and I were no longer the carefree college students who could get together at the drop of a hat. I didn’t see them nearly enough. Some members of my family had moved away, My grandparents were aging and needed more care, a strange shift in our dynamic. And I kept running into people from high school. Yet, when I walked around Harvard Square or saw the Boston skyline, I never wanted to leave again.

I fell in love with Stick Season the same way the darkness of winter sets in. The sun creeps down earlier and earlier until you look up from your work computer and realize it’s getting dark at 4 p.m. now. The album grew on me bit by bit.

Stick Season is purely about Kahan. The product he made is a scrapbook, a hodgepodge of fictional storylines and his own experiences. Like my local news stories, he clearly writes about one place. But his work leaves space for people to fit his own experience into theirs. The song “Orange Juice,” about a pair of friends torn apart by different reactions to the trauma of a drunk driving accident, was the first song off Stick Season to get caught in my head for days. But the more I listened, I realized it spoke to how I felt coming home and realizing so many of my views of the world have changed (a byproduct of what I saw at my old job), creating a disconnect in some of my relationships.

Another track, “The View Between Villages,” is clearly about Strafford. There’s lyrics about the curves of the valley and road names and even audio with people talking about Strafford in the extended version. But for me, it’s about driving through my hometown the night I said goodbye to my grandfather—past my elementary school and my best friend’s childhood home—and knowing the next time I would be there would be for his funeral. In every sense, it’s about wanting so badly to go home for all the nostalgia it holds while knowing home will never be the same as you remember it and as you want it to be.

I got to see Noah this past weekend in Mansfield. Listening to 20 thousand people (literally more than I could see) sing the lyrics made me think back to my time in local news. It’s possible for something written for a small audience and about a small place can resonate on a larger scale. It’s even possible for it to grow to the point where tens of thousands of people flock to suburban Massachusetts because they know every lyric. In fact, we need more of it: More local news, more focus on what’s around us, and more personal work that isn’t meant to appeal to thousands, but maybe eventually does because it makes us realize our common ground.

It gives me hope for my own work. I recently pivoted out of local news because sadly, many people don’t see the value of thinking small. But I’m hopeful if I follow Kahan’s footsteps elsewhere—writing in honest detail and about things only I can say—that maybe others will see themselves in my experiences too.

I also can’t stop thinking about…

• This profile my friend wrote about Noah where she actually got to interview him and which is far more articulate than anything I could write about him.

• “Reign on Me,” a podcast by Dana Schwartz and Korama Donquah which recaps my latest trash period TV obsession, “Reign.” It’s a Patreon exclusive and sadly on hold due to the writers’ strike, but it’s worth a listen if you’ve ever enjoyed this hot mess of a show.

• Minka Kelly’s “Tell Me Everything.” Celebrity memoirs are so hit or miss, but hers is less about her rise to fame as Lyla Garrity in “Friday Night Lights” and more about her traumatic childhood and how she’s overcome it. I listened to the audiobook and highly recommend that version.