True Grit | Inside Yankee

In seeing Yankee’s pages come together, there are times when I think I cannot wait for this issue to leave our office, get bound at the printers, and then be on its way to readers, wherever they are. This is one of those times.

Inside, you will discover how a couple turned a Vermont hillside into their homemade ski playground [“The Barnebakken,” p. 16]. You’ll learn about a Maine family who design and build masonry stoves that can heat a house all day on an armload of wood [“In from the Cold,” p. 32]. Massachusetts native Alana Chernila will lead you to unexpected places in the region where she’s lived much of her life [“The Berkshires: An Insider’s Guide,” p. 82]. And, just in time for the nation’s first presidential primary, you can dive into a primer on what America should know about Yankee’s idiosyncratic home state [“Finding New Hampshire,” p. 102].

I want to linger here, though, on the stories of three women. I doubt they’ve ever met, but if they did—as different as they are, as varied as their upbringing may have been—they would recognize each other as kindred spirits. Each has needed uncommon resilience and endurance, and each knows the power of believing in your dream, no matter how improbable it might seem to others. Their three stories lie at the heart of the magazine you hold now.

Despite her Harvard math credentials, Joanne Chang knew early on that her heart lay elsewhere. In senior food editor Amy Traverso’s profile [“Winter Baking with Joanne Chang,” p. 44], we first meet Chang baking hundreds of holiday cookies for her fellow office workers late at night in her tiny Boston apartment. She would not be deterred from the path she needed to follow, and today she is one of the most honored bakers in the country.

In “Becoming Mikaela” [p. 94], freelance writer Meg Lukens Noonan remembers the fierce tenacity of an 8-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin, who once skied with Noonan’s own kids at New Hampshire’s Ford Sayre ski club. There was the sense, Noonan says, “that we might be witnessing something much bigger than our homegrown club, something so lightning-in-a-bottle special that conventional wisdom was off the table.” Now, at age 24, Mikaela Shiffrin is on her way to becoming the greatest American ski racer ever.

“The Road to Hadestown” [p. 74] follows Anaïs Mitchell’s improbable journey from a Vermont farm to the brightest lights of Broadway, where her musical, Hadestown, earned eight Tony Awards. The work consumed her for more than a dozen years, and though sometimes she doubted she would ever finish, she kept going, always believing—like Orpheus, the mythical hero of Hadestown—in the power of art to inspire and transform.

Read these stories, and you will understand why I could not wait for you to have them.

Mel Alleneditor@yankeemagazine.com