Why I’m Writing: On Hudson, Memory, and Community

How this weird little city keeps daring me to care.

I’m a dozen posts into All My Dead and Living Things. I started this writing project when I realized that I had a lot to say about Hudson and no real place to say it. I was born and raised here, the oldest daughter of five generations of oldest daughters, which I think explains a lot about who I am. I moved away for twelve years, tried other cities and communities, but came back here eight years ago. Hudson is still the only place I’ve ever felt like my feet are on solid ground.

Four generations of eldest daughters at the Plaza Diner last week.

Since moving back, I’ve gotten to know a new version of Hudson, one that looks vastly different from the little city of my childhood. And I find myself asking the same questions:

How can we remember what Hudson was?
How can we make room for what Hudson could become?
How can we make this little city work for everyone?

Hudson is a microcosm. The challenges we face here – rising housing costs, political distrust, displacement, infrastructure issues – mirror those playing out across the country. What’s happening in Hudson is not unique, but it is ours. And that makes it worth writing about.

For a few years after moving back, I watched from the wings. Then somewhere along the way I became obsessed with our local government. During the pandemic, I started tuning into Common Council meetings on Zoom – one earbud in while I made dinner, the family playing in the other room. What I heard in those meetings was exactly what I felt when I was out in the community myself: tension, contradiction, and a city coming to a crossroads.

One meeting sticks with me. It was about short-term rental legislation. A group of teenagers called in to the Common Council. They were on the brink of losing their housing, some already amongst Hudson’s “hidden homeless”, couch surfing with friends or extended family after being evicted. Later in the meeting, a woman Zoomed in from Brooklyn. She objected to the legislation, saying converting her property from a short-term to a long-term rental would impact her child’s “nest egg”. She held up her happily housed infant in their Brooklyn brownstone for effect. The disconnect was staggering.

How could one small city serve both of these realities? Should we even try?

That meeting lit a fire under me. I wanted to do something — and the most natural place to begin was the public library.

Libraries are palaces for the people. One of the only places you can be without having to buy anything. Everyone’s welcome. Everyone belongs. And while you’re there, the playing field is level. I grew up in the Hudson Area Library when it was on State Street, and one of the first things I did when we moved back was get a library card. My daughter, then a toddler, thought the children’s section was her own personal wonderland. And for me, it was a way back into a community that I loved but no longer recognized.

My daughter, Poppy, in the children’s section at the Hudson Area Library in 2021.

I joined the Hudson Area Library board in 2020, shortly after the short-term rental meeting, and became the president the following year. What I found there gave me hope. Everyone loved the library. People with more give freely. People with less use its services like a lifeline. And somehow, across class and politics and difference, we find ways to learn and build something together.

If Hudson is a microcosm of a bigger city, then the library is a glimpse of what we could be.

In 2023, I stepped into a new role as director of The Spark of Hudson — an organization founded to test new models for community, innovation, and civic life. The founders aren’t from here, but they love Hudson. And like me, they see it as a testing ground: if we can make something work here, maybe it can work elsewhere too. I stepped down from the library in 2024 as The Spark Building opened its doors — just a few blocks away, and trying to answer many of the same questions and meet similar community needs.

And throughout it all, I did my best to stay engaged with city government. But it wasn’t easy. It’s draining to sit through meetings where people talk past each other, where good ideas are mocked, where basic needs – like housing, food, transportation – don’t seem to land with the urgency that they deserve. I saw our elected officials trying, but Hudson was changing too fast. The rate of newcomers moving in during the pandemic was higher than almost anywhere in the country and it was clear: our systems were struggling to keep up.

Eventually, I started speaking up at Common Council meetings. The angle I took was memory.

At one meeting, during a discussion about the future of Bliss Towers, I reminded folks how Bliss came to be: built during Urban Renewal, after a neighborhood of low-income housing was demolished. Most of the residents displaced were renters on a fixed income – and were largely Black or elderly. Many were moved into Bliss. The owners of those demolished homes had more housing opportunity, many landing in other wards in Hudson or out in Greenport. My family followed this same pattern. My grandparents, whose house at 2 Warren Street was torn down, bought a house in Greenport. My great aunt and uncle – renters in the same building – ended up in the Terrace.

A portion of a 1923 map of Hudson. My family’s home at 2 Warren Street, circled in yellow, was demolished during Urban Renewal.

When I shared this in the Common Council meeting, I wasn’t trying to give a history lesson for its own sake. I wanted people to see the parallel between then and now — to recognize that once again, we were on the edge of a decision that could shape our community for generations.

A few Council members reached out afterward. But mostly, it felt like my words disappeared into the noise. The Bliss issue was just one of many on the agenda that night. The room had maybe twenty people in it. And for me, participating came at a cost. I spent significant time writing that public comment. I missed dinner with my kids. I left my husband to manage bedtime solo. It wasn’t sustainable, but I didn’t know another way to contribute.

And then this year came talks of charter change in Hudson.

A city charter is like a constitution. It outlines who has power, how decisions get made, and what kind of government we have. Hudson’s charter is incredibly outdated – it hasn't been comprehensively evaluated and amended in decades, since before most of us were born. No governing body has taken it on, and honestly, I get why. It’s a massive undertaking: assembling a diverse commission, studying a 600 plus page document line by line, and proposing changes that then have to go to a public vote. With everything else needing tending in Hudson, it hasn’t been prioritized.

There are a few ways to change a city charter. One is through a mayor-appointed commission. Another is for private citizens to draft amendments themselves, collect signatures, and get them on the ballot for a referendum. That’s what happened this year.

A group of residents proposed sweeping changes to Hudson’s charter. Their version would make the elected mayor’s role largely ceremonial and replace it with a city manager – an unelected position. It would also shrink our Common Council from 11 members to just 5, concentrating power in the hands of a small group.

Despite being pretty plugged into Hudson politics, I didn’t hear about this charter change proposal until signatures were already being collected and the proposal couldn’t be changed. I asked around to people I know and trust – long-time residents and community leaders – and none of them had been consulted either.

When I read the full proposal, I felt a deep unease. It concentrated power in a way that felt opaque. The city manager would not only be shielded from removal – requiring three votes to appoint them but four to remove them – but would also have veto power over budget changes made by the Common Council, even those approved by a majority of elected officials. It was a fundamental shift in how power would operate in Hudson, and it had been developed without broad community input.

I attended the public pitch sessions hosted by the proposal’s authors — sessions held after any changes could be made. At the first session, I asked why it only took three votes to appoint a city manager, but four to remove one. No one had an answer. To me, it felt like a structural safeguard — not for the city, but for the person in power.

At the second session, I questioned the city manager’s budgetary veto power. But the person responding to my question would not acknowledge that what I was raising was even true.

Something in me snapped. Or maybe – something in me clicked. After a nudge from my friend Liz, I went home, wrote an essay for IMBY, hit publish, and hoped for the best.

That piece, which was about how Hudson is not a corporation and should not be run like one, got a lot more attention than I expected. People were sharing it, talking about it, emailing me about it. It felt like I had stepped into the public conversation.

One of the people from the charter change group wrote a public response and then reached out to me. We met for coffee. And to my surprise, we had a civil, generative conversation about Hudson and how it’s governed. We didn’t agree on everything, but we agreed on more than either of us expected.

That moment — being heard, taken seriously, responded to — gave me the guts to keep going. It made me believe I might actually have something to contribute.

But that piece also came with backlash. On a local online publication, my writing was mischaracterized. Anonymous commenters said I was secretly colluding with City Hall, that the organization I run was benefiting from my writing somehow. It was bizarre and confusing. The kind of thing that makes you want to crawl back into anonymity, to keep your head down and your thoughts to yourself.

But I don’t want to be anonymous in Hudson. This place shaped me, and I want to shape it back.

So I kept going. I started All My Dead and Living Things as a space to keep thinking out loud – with rigor and with heart too. Sometimes it’s about housing. Sometimes it’s about memory. Sometimes it’s about mothering. But so far it’s always been about Hudson. And it’s also been deeply personal.

The banner image on each post is one I made myself: a single poppy perched on the edge of a cliff — symbols tied to my children’s names. They’re two of the biggest reasons I care so fiercely about this city. And two of the clearest reasons I believe we can do better.

The All My Dead and Living Things banner image: a poppy and a cliff, after my children, Poppy and Cliffy.

Writing here has brought me more connection than I ever expected.

Sure, I get troll-y emails – the ones picking apart my words or saying I have a hidden agenda. I run into people on Warren Street who make passive-aggressive comments to me, assuming I’m motivated by some self-serving intention. But for every one of those moments, ten more keep me going.

Like the man I met in the cemetery, who had subscribed to my blog and shared how his family used to walk everywhere in Hudson in the ’70s — not because they wanted to, but because they didn’t have a car and they didn’t need one. He remembers a different Hudson too, and he thanked me for preserving memory.

Or the woman who had just moved to town with a newborn and told me my piece on raising kids in community made her feel less alone.

Or the lifelong Hudson resident at the grocery store who said she’d checked out of the Colarusso debate — but after reading my post, was rethinking what the waterfront could be.

Or the transplant at Supernatural who said she didn’t realize how vilified Colarusso had become over the years, long before she had arrived, and how complicated the whole issue really is.

These moments — they matter to me. They remind me that writing isn’t just about expression. It’s about connection. About memory. About belonging. And about staying in relationship with a place and its people, even when it’s messy and hard.

I love Hudson. I love the mix of old and new, of block parties and library programs, of little kids learning to swim at Oakdale and elders playing cards at the senior center. I love the mess of it. The beauty. The ways we fight and show up and try again. The way this city keeps daring me to care more, not less.

And for now, this is how I’m contributing. Politically and spiritually. In a way that fits in with my life and feels good to me too.

This is sometimes what getting these posts written looks like. Pulling over when my toddler falls asleep in the car and getting to it.

And you, reader, neighbor, fellow Hudson lover – you’re why I keep going. Knowing there are people out there reading, feeling, questioning, remembering alongside me — it’s absolutely surreal and humbling and grounding, all at once. It’s made me feel more in community than I ever have before.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. And thank you for making this weird, wonderful, deeply meaningful practice feel like part of something bigger. No one can do it alone, and the good news is: we don’t have to.

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P.S. If you live in Hudson, don’t forget to vote in the Democratic primary tomorrow — Tuesday, June 24. Polls are open from 6am to 9pm. at:

• Wards 1–3: St. Mary’s Academy, 301 Allen Street

• Ward 4: Columbia County Office Building, 401 State Street

• Ward 5: Hudson Central Fire Station, 77 N 7th Street

Also: I’m giving a talk at The Spark on Thursday, July 3 — an intro to gravestone preservation, with stories from Cedar Park Cemetery and tips for cleaning and care. If you’re into local history, want to care for graves, or just like wandering our beloved local cemeteries, come join me.