Long, careful writing about how we talk to each other.
Welcome to Utterby, an independent magazine about how people talk, listen, argue, and make things right, written slowly and edited with care. Pull up a chair: our essays are meant to be read the way a good conversation is had, without hurry and with your full attention.
Every first Friday, a hall in northern Minnesota serves 300 plates of hotdish. The dinner pays for equipment, but the real work is what happens in the line.
Between debt, obligation, and gratitude lies a set of words English has never quite settled. On money, favors, and why owing someone feels so uncomfortable.
Between debt, obligation, and gratitude lies a set of words English has never quite settled. On money, favors, and why owing someone feels so uncomfortable.
Northern winters gave English a quiet vocabulary of glare, crust, and thaw. A field guide to the words that only make sense once you have stood on a frozen lake.
Advice about salary negotiation tends to stay vague at the moment it matters. We collected the exact words that worked, and the ones that quietly failed.
Declining a request well is a skill most of us never learn. A reported look at the people who have made a craft of it, and what their refusals have in common.
In bilingual homes the language changes with the topic, the mood, and who has just walked in. A portrait of one family's shifting grammar of belonging.
Every first Friday, a hall in northern Minnesota serves 300 plates of hotdish. The dinner pays for equipment, but the real work is what happens in the line.
In a Vermont-style annual meeting held in a Minnesota school fieldhouse, neighbors still vote by voice and by raised hand. What happens to a place when the ritual ends.
We have become afraid of the two-second silence. A defense of the gap between question and answer, with help from a court reporter and a hospice nurse.
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Sunday mornings
The Sunday Utterby
One essay, three good sentences we found during the week, and a short note from the editor, delivered before the coffee is cold. It runs about 900 words and is meant to be read slowly, ideally out loud to someone at the table.