Matthew Dickerson: A reflection on writing and place

When it comes to films and works of fiction, we often think in terms of character development. Did the main characters change? If so, how and why? We don’t always ask that of non-fiction. But we ought to.

It seemed Sam knew everybody. He was a visible presence on campus: a robust man physically, warm and expressive. He loved teaching, he loved coaching football, and above all, he loved working with students.

I sat on a wide chair atop a tall ladder, leaning against a pine tree with a mature oak growing around the back side of the tree, its brown and brittle leaves mingling with the green needles of the pine.

Next fall, a year from now, Middlebury Union High School will add a varsity sport and have a girls’ varsity volleyball team, not a club but a fully sanctioned team.

This was our seventh new Vermont state park of 2022 — far and away the most Vermont state parks to which we have made a first-time visit in a single year.

Every time I read a reference to “pickleball,” the next words are “the fastest growing sport in America.”

So what exactly is a salt chuck? That was one of the questions I had when I arrived at Ernest Gruening State Historic Park.

In 1972, Peter Gammons started writing baseball “notes” in the Sunday Boston Globe, a whole page of baseball news in which the baseball beat writer “empties out the notebook.” Over the years it has become a Globe staple, a must read. 

The history of the place was inspiring, and I soaked in as much as I could. But it was the surrounding scenery and landscape that moved me the most.

Paul Politano hardly played golf at all growing up in southern Vermont. “My dad never let me play,” he said in a conversation last week outside the golf shop at Middlebury’s Ralph Myhre Golf Course, where Paul has been the golf pro since 2017.

I’d only been out on the river once all month. So after dinner, when the river calls my name, I heed the call.

It could hardly have been more exciting: in the championship winner-take-all game at Centennial Field, the Vermont Lake Monsters, defending champs in the Future College Baseball League, were down by a run, 6-5, in the bottom of the ninth to the Nashua (N. … (read more)

William Clarence Matthews and I are very close, though he was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1877 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1928. My home is festooned with pictures of Matty, I have a vast collection of Matthewsiana, eBay treasures, displayed throughou … (read more)

A lone sockeye salmon sits in the stream in front of me under a low canopy of alder. The stream is wide, gravelly and shallow: only two to three inches deep and a few feet wide.

For five days and nights I resided in a shoreline cabin partway up the Wood River system in Alaska’s Wood-Tikchik State Park. Officially, I was serving as artist-in-residence for Alaska State Parks and had come to spend a week in the state’s largest park … (read more)