December 27 25 Newsletter | Take the Back Roads

 This newsletter was originally sent on December 27, 2025

Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road.

📬 Want these updates in your inbox? Subscribe here.

An empty road leading into the fading light, where the horizon meets the quiet promise of the journey ahead

Welcome, Friends, 

to News from the Back Roads!


Dear friends,

This is one of those weeks that doesn’t hold still.

The space between Christmas and the New Year is always strange — calendars pause, plans soften, and everything feels slightly unresolved. This year, that feeling is literal for me.

Rather than rush to fill space, I’m sharing one piece that matters deeply: my latest essay on the Berglund Center — the land beneath it, the communities displaced to build it, and why place still matters when decisions are made quietly. 

Some weeks are for abundance.
This one is for attention.

a.d. elliott

Art and Other Odd Adventures

Stories Found Along the Way

Sacred Ground and Civic Memory: The Berglund Center Site Explained

This week’s essay examines the Berglund Center not as a single building, but as the result of layered decisions — urban renewal, displacement, and the quiet reshaping of land once rooted in neighborhood life. 

By tracing what existed before the arena and how that history has been treated since, the piece asks a larger question: what obligations do cities have to the places — and people — they erase in the name of progress?

→ Read the full reflection on TakeTheBackRoads.com

From the Studio Wall

March Marguerite a.d. elliott, Take the Back Roads

Available in the shop! 

March Marguerite captures the small, stubborn beauty of early spring — a single yellow bloom holding its place against a darkened backdrop. It’s a study in restraint and resilience, a reminder that brightness doesn’t arrive all at once, but appears first in moments like this.


Photograph by 

a.d. elliott 

available at shop.takethebackroads.com

If any of these stories offered you a moment of reflection or a gentle breath this week, I hope you’ll share them with a fellow traveler — of roads, books, or life.


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