I heard on VPR this morning that Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.

When I first read Vonnegut’s novels in my college English classes, I wondered how I had gotten that far along in my life as a reader without having read them. There was just something so fresh, and funny and brave about his writing. One of my irreverent professors assigned his books in a couple of my classes. She called him “a vulgar sentimentalist,” but she liked him, too.

I go back to  Slaughterhouse-Five often, and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. Whenever I think about writing a novel, I wonder how I could make it more Kilgore Trout-ish . Because he’s the opposite of literary pretension. And I once started working on a project I called “The Secret Dreams of Montana Wildhack.” But I never got very far.

I haven’t picked up a Vonnegut book in awhile, but I was reminded of him last week, when a DJ on 104.7 The Point made a crack about becoming unstuck in time, and mentioned Billy Pilgrim. I almost called up the station to say thanks for the unexpected literary allusion, but I was in the car and didn’t have the station number on me.

I forgot about it by the time I got home. So it goes.

Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at Seven Days as a freelance writer in 2001 and still has the Rolodex to prove it. As the paper’s first online editor, she launched Seven Days email newsletters and started the paper’s first social media accounts. Cathy has overseen Kids VT, Vermont’s...