The clouds put on a show at the intersection just before 8 a.m. last Monday, despite the unseasonable cold: roiling and backlit toward the lake, steel gray and flat from the vantage where Christine Tyler Hill usually stands on her morning shifts as a Burlington crossing guard.
Hill, 36, is an artist and illustrator from Bedford, Mass., who landed in Burlington in 2007 to attend the University of Vermont. She moved to her little house in the Old North End four years ago and since 2023 has worked as a crossing guard, which she thought would be a good way to learn about her neighbors.
“I wanted more older friends and more younger friends,” she said as we hung out at the corner of Park and North streets last week. Our conversation was often interrupted by Hill venturing onto the pavement, stop sign held high, to shepherd kids, parents and dog walkers through the busy morning traffic.
Though few of her youngest charges linger to chitchat, a much wider community has gotten to know Hill from her illustrated on-the-job thoughts and observations, which she sends to subscribers in a monthly zine called “The Cloud Report.”
Each 4-by-5.5-inch, eight-page booklet opens with views of the sky and the date, time and temperature noted below each image. They don’t look like photos, exactly, as the zines are produced on a Risograph printer, a technology that an insert in the February issue describes as “a hybrid of screen printing and a photocopier.” The Risograph makes the clouds and other two-color illustrations — blue and black in the first three issues, blue and red in the fourth, which was mailed out this week — seem soft and inviting, like the visual equivalent of worn denim.
“The Cloud Report” has a laid-back, observational vibe. There’s a section on “Dogs of the Intersection”; a Kurt Vonnegut quote to cut out and keep; and a celebration of “Trash of the Month,” including an empty Intervale compost bag that, through research, Hill calculated is “at least 18 years old.” The natural world plays a strong recurring role, as do plastic trash and recycling barrels, which, Hill writes, have their own personalities: “I want to name them all.”
Standing at an intersection for 50 minutes a day is one of the most important yet thankless jobs in modern life. It’s typically neither creative nor lucrative, but Hill has unexpectedly made it both. She started taking photos and videos the first week she was on the job, she said. Later, she recounted her observations on social media, growing a following for her Instagram stories.
After learning to use the Risograph printer during a 2024 residency at Directangle Press in Bethlehem, N.H., Hill returned to make an artist’s book last fall. That’s when she got the idea of a monthly mailed Riso-printed newsletter.
Following a soft-launched December issue sent to family and friends, Hill announced “The Cloud Report” on social media and through her Substack newsletter in early January. People liked her dispatches on Instagram and had been asking for more; she thought she’d get at least 100 people to sign up. “I felt pretty confident about that,” she said.
On January 9, she posted a video about the project that went viral and now has 178,000 likes. “Within 24 hours, I had 1,000 subscribers.”
She’d printed January’s issue locally and trimmed and bound it herself, which wouldn’t be possible at scale, so Hill established a wait list while she shifted production to Directangle. Her contingent of subscribers has continued to grow, particularly after a March 3 article about her in the Wall Street Journal brought in a whole new audience. Though Hill was excited about the publicity, the headline, “The Crossing Guard Making $14,000 a Month Mailing Out Her Musings From the Job,” she said, “totally sucks.”
“As somebody who’s existed mostly in financial scarcity,” Hill said, she has “weird, guilty feelings about being successful financially,” though many people have responded positively to the radical notion of an artist making a good living from what she does.
For the April issue, Hill has just over 3,000 subscribers, from all 50 states and 39 different countries. At a rate of $8 monthly, with discounts for annual subscriptions and surcharges for international mailings, she’s now bringing in significantly more than the Wall Street Journal’s estimate. There’s no way of knowing how sustainable that is, Hill said, and it’s definitely not the norm for a zine maker: She likened her career’s suddenly viral trajectory to winning the lottery.
The publicity has also led to real connections with readers. Hill heard from Mr. Jimmy, an 82-year-old crossing guard in Richardson, Texas, who sent her seven pages of the dad jokes he tells kids on their way to school. A forester in Kingston, N.Y., wrote to offer encouraging corrections to the IDs she’d made in February’s “Trees of the Intersection,” which he checked against Google Street View and Burlington’s inventory of city trees. (She was zero for four on accuracy, she said, though to be fair, one was labeled “I Have No Idea.”) And Hill recently met a subscriber who also lives on Park Street in Burlington. “Getting to meet my actual neighbors because of this project is incredible,” she said.
Hill is grateful that her success will allow her to take fewer freelance jobs and create more physical artwork, such as a series of stop signs she made for last year’s Plex Arts Festival with slogans like “It’s a Miracle We’re Here at All.” It will also give her the time to report on the intersection’s pressing issues. She foresees an exposé of the five different types of “beg buttons” that activate pedestrian crossings; a profile of the people who program the city’s traffic signals; and a summer update on those boulevard trees. She may even issue a “Cloud Report Report” about the publication itself.
The Wall Street Journal attributed the zine’s success to people’s love of physical media in an age of the social kind. That’s partially true, but “The Cloud Report” also stands out for its spirit of empathy, patience and care for a hyperlocal environment and community. The handcrafted medium reinforces the sensibility of its content. Compared with the “empty calories” of creating an Instagram story that disappears after a day, Hill said, making the zine using analog methods “feels nourishing.”
Many years of working for nonprofits inform Hill’s career as an artist, so forming personal connections that provoke change seems to be part of her practice as much as drawing or printing. “Is this performance art?” she asked rhetorically while folding pamphlets in her studio to mail out. The term is too precious and conceptual for what Hill does, which is just the work artists — and, for that matter, crossing guards — have always done.
“The whole thing is about noticing,” she said. “I’m just out there, noticing all the time.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Head in the Clouds | Burlington crossing guard Christine Tyler Hill’s little zine goes big”
This article appears in April 22 • 2026.
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