This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2024.
My first interview with Mark Utter, who died on October 28 at age 59, was unquestionably the slowest one I’ve ever conducted in my 25 years as a journalist. Born with a form of nonverbal autism, Utter “spoke” using a communication method known as supported typing. His facilitator, Emily Anderson, would sit at his side and hold his elbow to focus his attention. Utter would then hunt and peck at a keyboard with one finger. His first sentence to me, “I am really happy to meet you,” took him five minutes to compose.
And yet, like those letters that Civil War soldiers penned to their loved ones back home, Utter’s slow and deliberate writing process could result in eloquent prose, the kind rarely found in most people’s mile-a-minute emails, texts and instant messages. Utter labored to produce his words, so he chose them carefully.
When I first met Utter, in 2012, he was largely unknown outside of Vermont’s disability community and was still getting accustomed to sharing his thoughts. Deemed “mentally retarded” as a child, Utter couldn’t communicate with others for the first three decades of his life. Though he understood everything people around him were saying, he existed mostly in his own mind — until supported typing freed him from his cage.
Once, I asked Utter, “You seem like such a happy person all the time, despite your disability. How do you stay so upbeat?”
“First, I don’t think of myself as disabled, which gives me a stronger foundation than those who have fallen into that trap,” he replied. “I am happy because, like Abraham Lincoln, I know ‘You are only as happy as you allow yourself to be.'”
Utter went on to write, produce and star in an award-winning 2013 movie called I Am in Here: A View of My Daily Life With Good Suggestions for Improvement by My Intelligent Mind.
While he was working on that project, I wrote an April 11, 2012, cover story about him headlined “Utterly Mark: A Vermonter With Autism Makes His Inner Voice Heard Through Film.” Utter was so delighted, he started a blog and called it “Utterly Mark.”
Because I’m friends with Anderson, his collaborator from 2006 to 2020, I maintained a connection with Utter over the years. I knew that when Anderson got engaged to Brian Merrill, Utter insisted he would officiate their wedding, announcing it on his blog before the couple OK’d it.
“I was going to be perpetually engaged,” Anderson recalled with bemusement. “That didn’t happen.”
Since Utter had never officiated a wedding before, I offered a blueprint to guide him: the script of a wedding ceremony I had written for friends a few years earlier. He tailored his remarks to the couple and had his words read aloud by Vermont actor Paul Schnabel.
Anderson and Merrill’s wedding in August 2018 was a stunning affair on a mountaintop in Barton, featuring kites, bubbles, and performers from Bread and Puppet Theater. And, in his own inimitable way, my former subject created a ceremony that was an Utter masterpiece.
Correction, January 2, 2025: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified how Mark Utter officiated the wedding of Emily Anderson and Brian Merrill. Mark’s words were read aloud by Vermont actor Paul Schnabel.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Most Eloquent Subject”
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Honoring Mark Utter: April 23, 2025
This article appears in Dec 25, 2024 – Jan 7, 2025.
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