While the digital revolution, well, evolved, Norwich resident Nora Jacobson still preferred to show her movies to – and to attend other filmmakers’ works with – a bunch of other people in a theater.

Shoulder to shoulder.

Knee to knee.

Face to face.

“People don’t watch as carefully, I think, if they’re watching on a device, by themselves, especially at home,” Jacobson says. “They’re distracted by the phone or texts. You don’t get that same sense of people zeroing in on your film, especially if you make films that are complex, like I do.”

Jacobson’s complicated fictional tales range from 1998’s My Mother’s Early Lovers and 2004’s Nothing Like Dreaming to 2016’s The Hanji Box (look up these titles on www.imdb.com),… Read More

Long before white settlers came to live in the Upper Valley in the mid-1700s, the Native American Chief Mascommah hunted and fished all along the Connecticut River Valley eventually settling in Northfield, Massachusetts. The name ‘Mascoma’ appears in many places throughout the Upper Valley, so it must have been a logical choice for the founders when Mascoma Bank was established 122 years ago in 1899 as a mutually-owned bank.

How has this Upper Valley institution maintained its community and local-first banking principals amidst so many technology, economic, and social changes over more than 100 years? According to current President and CEO (and former Norwich resident) Clay Adams, Mascoma Bank was intentionally designed to be locally owned and to support community philanthropy, and the bank has simply stayed true to its original mission.… Read More

If this keeps up, the world will know Norwich as much for the creative young entrepreneurs that it grows (or should we say entrepreneurial young creatives?) as for the Olympic athletes it cultivates. Most visibly these days, 22-year-old Jake Laser is building a big following on YouTube for his videos of the inventions he’s been churning out since early adolescence. “I always had the passion for building stuff,” says the 2015 graduate of Hanover High School. “This is what it’s manifested into so far. I don’t think this is the final step.”

Under the guidance of budding music producer and fellow college undergraduate Phin Choukas, Hans Williams is taking the first tentative steps toward a career in music, already reaching thousands of listeners on platforms like Spotify for the songs he’s writing and singing and recording.… Read More

You say you want a Revels solution for Christmas? In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic? This season, thanks to some creative scrambling on the part of the leaders and the rank-and-file performers of Revels North – many of them from Norwich – you’ll find it online or on your TV screen.

In place of what would have been the Upper Valley’s 45th consecutive live yuletide pageant celebrating the Winter Solstice in song and dance, Revels North last spring commissioned All Shall Be Well Again – a 17-minute animated film that Norwich resident and Revels executive director Brian Cook describes as “just lovely to behold … very, very true to the Revels spirit, with a respect for the traditional style.”… Read More

The wave of Black Lives Matter protests sweeping across and beyond the US has forced white Americans to open their eyes to racial abuse and injustices that are centuries old. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and more recently the shooting of Jacob Blake, have sparked a series of protests, demonstrations, and campaigns across all sectors of society. The music industry shut down for #blackoutfriday. Books about Blackness, Whiteness, and antiracism have shot to the top of bestseller lists as non-Black people strive to learn more about an issue that we have had the privilege to ignore for too long.… Read More

Global pandemics are nothing new. From prehistoric times to today, man has faced devastating diseases that have changed the course of history or, worse, ended civilizations altogether. What is novel, however, as local resident and historian Sarah Rooker discovered recently, is the telltale stories that accompany them. “Hanover High School rising senior Lauren Pidgeon and I had been researching the 1918 influenza epidemic in Norwich and realized there was very little information,” said Rooker, director of the Norwich Historical Society (NHS). “All we really had were newspaper clippings. Diaries and letters from the time casually mentioned it, but there weren’t enough to really gain insights into the community’s experiences.”… Read More

Publisher’ Note: I don’t typically publish profiles of people after they’ve passed for a number of reasons: that we’re only quarterly; that I like to ‘introduce’ people to the community in hopes of facilitating real-time connections; that we try to capture a person’s heart and soul in the moment.

I am making an exception for Ruth.

Ruth Sylvester, herself, was exceptional in every way. I can safely say that the Norwich Times would not be the time-honored publication it continues to be were it not for the articles she wrote for just about every issue since the very first one in September 1997.… Read More

Willing Hands’ new headquarters is on Church Street in Norwich. However, its impact reaches far and wide as it picks up nutritious food otherwise thrown away, and donates it to organizations and people in need across the Upper Valley.

Willing Hand’s history starts in 2004 with founder Peter Phippen. Phippen worked in the produce department of the Hanover Co-op and noticed that there was an inordinate amount of nutritious food going to waste. He resigned from his job and founded Willing Hands in order to be able to redistribute quality food into the community which would have otherwise gone into the landfill.… Read More

In the 1943 movie, Lassie came home to Roddy McDowell. In the 1996 song that won Shawn Colvin the Grammy, Sonny came home with a mission… and a vengeance. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, Phin Choukas and Noah Kahan came home to the Upper Valley with time on their hands and with music on their minds.

So why – with Choukas’ sophomore year at Middlebury College and with Kahan’s rising career as a touring musician and on hold for the foreseeable future – did the childhood friends limit themselves to a single week of mud season to record Cape Elizabeth, an EP of five acoustic-folk songs?… Read More

The road to becoming a Vermont gubernatorial candidate began a long time ago for Norwich resident Rebecca Holcombe whose childhood in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Fiji Islands, and Sudan had a direct impact not only on how she has perceived the world but how she has navigated through it. Even though her family “had the bad fortune of arriving in ountries just as political trouble was beginning,” Holcombe learned quickly from her mother that, in comparison with many global native inhabitants, she had a privileged upbringing. “In my own family, particularly on my mother’s side, access to public schooling gave her many opportunities,” said Holcombe.… Read More