Photo by Rachel Liu. Fetus by me.
Welcome to 2024, readers! For my final deadline of the year, I finished baking an entire person in my body. If you are reading this on January 1, I am probably at YNHH attempting the only eviction I will ever be in support of. This month, the Arts Paper will start back up again with a limited publishing schedule, interim editor, and parental leave hire while I am out trying to sustain a human life. We will run like that through late March/early April, and then return to full capacity after 12 weeks.
It is the most ambitious co-byline that New Haven Independent Editor Tom Breen and I have ever embarked on. And it is scary, and sweet, and hard for me to be on the precipice of something so new. So I am extending my hands and inviting you to jump with me into the unknown.
When I moved to New Haven over a decade ago, I didn't think that I wanted to be a mother. I love moms, including and perhaps most of all my own, but it just seemed like too much of a racket. At the time, I was working for the Yale University Art Gallery, and thought that I had everything figured out. I would do a two-year museum fellowship, go back to school for a doctorate, become a professor or curator somewhere. I doubled down on research and helped with exhibitions. I met professors and helped them find art that fit into their classes. I spoke about negative printmaking processes and woodblocks and the birth of lithography so many times that I could have recited it in my sleep.
It all made sense for a while. I loved the mentorship aspect. And then I met a cute guy (spoiler: it was Tom) who loved hyper-local journalism and convinced me to start reading the New Haven Independent. In 2013, the outlet had just started its arts section (there was also a mayoral election, but you can see where this is going), and I realized that New Haven was so much bigger than I had realized. When I learned through reporter Allan Appel that any regular person could write for the publication, I reached out to founding editor Paul Bass and started to cover the arts as a freelancer, with nights that went into the wee hours of the morning and left me slack-jawed at the amount of heart and talent in this big little city.
It was like a puzzle piece falling into place. When you're a community reporter, a story is never one and done. You fall in love with people and their families. You hear the world with new ears because of the way indie artists perform. You build a whole personal geography of a city, aware of which intersections pulsed with protest in 2016, which old properties and former auto-body shops became arts sanctuaries in the right hands, which porches people invited you onto for a glass of cold water or lemonade (or wine, thank you Babz) and a story. When all is right in the world, you get to watch kids grow up, which is perhaps the greatest and most humbling honor a person can have in their career.
After two years of freelancing, I didn't want to go back to school for a degree. It felt far away from the world I was covering. Instead, I helped the New Haven Independent build WNHH-LP, a low-power, grassroots radio station that Harry Droz now runs with a technical precision I could never have dreamed of. I wrote articles on arts and housing and city politics and community management teams and elections. I fell in love with reporting in the city's schools, which I would do full-time if left to my own devices. When I had the chance to build something at the Arts Paper, you cheered us on and also called us in many times. Thank you.
My favorite people to report on had one thing in common. They were parents, and mostly they were mothers. I mean this in many, many senses: many had children of their own, but they were also community caretakers, fierce public school advocates, arts educators who defied gravity, bookspace angels who could be that safe place for kids who lived in the neighborhood.
I can't walk into Nikki Claxton's studio at BRAMS, or Arden Santana's basement classroom at ConnCORP, or TMo's corner at the New Haven Pride Center, and not think of how these people are shaping the next generation of New Haveners. The care they extended to other people, and especially to young people, taught me how to be a better human. It still is; that work is never done.
For a long time, I was worried that having a baby meant that I would fail New Haven as a reporter (and maybe I still will, but I'm going to try really hard not to!). I waited. I put it off. I told myself that this thing would turn my life upside down in ways that were totally unnecessary. And then last year, while reporting a story in Westville, I saw how a whole community could wrap itself around a family and try to keep them safe after an unbelievable loss.
I went home and told my partner—obviously, that cute guy, who married me on a porch in Newhallville in the depths of Covid-era depression—that we needed to have a baby. The rest was history.
When I found out I was pregnant in the middle of teaching our youth arts journalists, I was worried that people would get angry that my capacity was suddenly more limited. And some of you did, but this letter is not for you.
Instead, the most amazing thing happened. So, so many of you took care of me, sometimes when I wasn't taking the best care of myself. You nourished my spirit, but also you fed me when I forgot to eat, opened up your air-conditioned offices and front seats and car doors when it got hot, took interviews sitting on the floor and the Green and the Edgewood Park basketball courts when it became uncomfortable to stand. You accepted, without reservation or question, unreasonable amounts of crying during your school plays, symphony concerts, and arts festivals.
You reminded me that it wasn't a moral failing to slow down. You shared your birth stories, and sometimes stories of loss and grief and of struggling to parent that made me feel human. You gave me so much grace. I hope that you are giving yourselves that much grace. What a gift, if we can all learn to do that for each other all the time. For the last 41 weeks (and three days, but who is counting?), I have felt so lucky that this little human-to-be is surrounded by such love and light, often in a time when the world can feel very dark.
This week, the Arts Paper will return on a limited publishing basis, with weekly pieces from writer Kapp Singer and some of our beloved freelancers. From then through April 1, the talented and brilliant Markeshia Ricks will sit in the editor’s chair, working to make sure the arts coverage you read is in tip-top shape. And then in April, we’ll come back at full capacity—whatever that means in the moment. It might feel different. And for now, that’s okay, too.
A note about the next three months. It is my intention to be present with a new little human during this time, and also to protect Markeshia and Kapp from some of the exhaustion and burnout that I've faced in the last six years. This work is intensely joyful, but it can also be spiritually, mentally, and emotionally taxing. Please extend both of them oodles of grace as they navigate this transition.
If the Arts Paper isn't sending someone to your performance, press conference, exhibition, culinary extravaganza—I promise it is not for lack of trying. Please respect the guardrails that we together have put up to keep them level-headed and sane, and to make sure that both I and they are cared for at this time. Please give them the same grace you have given me.
Take care of yourselves, too. I can't wait to get back to reporting on you.
With love in abundance,
Lucy