So much of journalism is about the now and the what’s to come that we often race to the next story without stopping to honor the minor miracles and quiet heroics that produced the last one. But if you sift through a year of storytelling at Seven Days, it’s not hard to come up with a brimming trove of such narrative leftovers, glistening remnants from the jeweler’s worktable.
Each year, we gather up these lively bits and bundle them as “Backstories,” behind-the-scenes accounts of our published articles — the odd origins, sudden twists, mid-reporting freak-outs and affecting epilogues. Rummaging in the margins yields outtakes that are personal, self-effacing and often funny. They are also as revealing about our profession as the published stories themselves.
This year’s collection makes clear how far Seven Days writers will go to get the best story. Reporter Kevin McCallum ventured to New York City to visit a safe-injection site, as Vermont officials debated overdose-prevention strategies. Culture writer Hannah Feuer was pressed into service as a costumed extra when she arrived to cover the filming of a Christmas movie. Derek Brouwer showed an instinct for the unsung when he veered from the crowds at Burlington’s main eclipse-watching party to share totality with a traffic flagger. And there should be a separate category for food editor Melissa Pasanen, who found an inventive way to extend her interview session with a 100-year-old activist and former baker: by joining him in a nap — in a separate room, of course.
If angst is more your thing, Mary Ann Lickteig conjures the jolts of panic produced by recording glitches and a fiercely protective publicist as she pursued a cover piece about Shaina Taub, the Vermont-girl-makes-good-on-Broadway creator of Suffs. Colin Flanders fought sleeplessness before publication on behalf of a former Afghan fighter he was profiling for a package of stories about recent Afghan evacuees in Vermont. Music editor Chris Farnsworth was vexed by a different problem: how to report a cover story on Noah Kahan when the über-popular folk singer wouldn’t be available to talk to him.
It’s not all stress and strain, however. Read along as veteran writer Ken Picard gamely accepted a freshly rolled fatty while he talked on the air with the host of a cannabis podcast he was writing about. Ken does not mention a nap.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Backstories 2024 | Seven Days writers show their work from a year of local storytelling”
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This article appears in Dec 25, 2024 – Jan 7, 2025.
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