Author: Michelle
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Body Mechanic
My friend Nancy Crooks is a genius. No, seriously. She is a really gifted body mechanic who has devoted her life to learning all kinds of healing touch methods. A while back, she asked me to do a video for her that would explain her work with Mechanical Link, a really rather esoteric and obscure…
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Sacred Rivers: Tashlikh on the Hudson
The Yadkin River partners — Christine, Phoebe and I — spent Rosh Hashanah on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I’ll never forget it. We set out early that morning on foot in search of people going to the banks of the Hudson River, in Riverside Park, to perform the ritual of Tashlikh. It’s such…
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Elizabeth’s Story
For the last several months, Journal reporter Laura Graff pieced together the story of Elizabeth Lentz, Ms. Wheelchair North Carolina 2011. It’s a remarkable and moving piece of serial journalism that gives readers an intimate look at the life-shattering experience of traumatic injury and the personal courage it takes to rebuild a life. A spinal…
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Dedicated
My colleague Lisa O’Donnell wrote this top-notch, and way overdue, story about guitarist Lowman “Pete” Pauling and the 5 Royales, a legendary R&B group from Winston-Salem that never got the kind of mainstream respect they deserved. Lisa is a heckuva writer, and the story couldn’t possibly have been in better hands. Check out the first…
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Podcast Redux
The relish.com podcast has been evolving over the last few months, and I gotta say that I’m pleasantly surprised by how much fun it’s become to produce. YouTube and our vast photo archive make for a entertaining treasure hunt each week, but the latest addition is our $6 green screen. A few weeks ago, our…
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A Pig Tale
As an online editor, I don’t get to write much for the daily paper anymore, but I haven’t lost my capacity for attracting stories wherever I go. So the other day, when my friend Jeanne started telling me about the piglet who got loose in Old Salem, providing terrible distraction on the day before a…
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Not for the faint of heart
When I started fiddling around in digital media, there was one thing I swore I’d never do: get in front of the camera. For one thing, I have a wardrobe made for radio. I mean, look up ‘the rumpled look’ in the dictionary, and you’ll probably find a picture of me. I’m usually too busy…
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On Turtle Island
Yesterday I escaped the newsroom and the self-imposed prison of my computer and drove up the mountain to do a tape sync for the Radio Netherlands show “Earthbeat.” I love doing tape syncs for radio shows, because I generally get to meet really cool people and get paid to eavesdrop on thoughtful conversations. My assignment…
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The life and death of Zahra Baker
When my friends at the Hickory Daily Record asked me a couple of months ago to help them with a video project about the Zahra Baker case, I said an enthusiastic “yes” right away, despite the fact that a) I’d never really worked on a documentary video script before and b) it was a tragic…
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The fabric of story
I love this. Joan M.E. Gaither, a Maryland-based documentary fabric artist and retired educator, spent two years documenting the National Black Theatre Festival in quilt form. It has sweep and exquisite attention to detail. Spread on a king-size bed, its edges would spill to the floor. We talked with her a few days ago at…
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The ghosts of urban renewal
“Most Forsyth County residents don’t know it,” wrote Journal reporter Annette Fuller in today’s front-page story, “but when they travel Business 40 at U.S. 52 — the county’s busiest intersection by far — they are driving right on top of the old Belews Street neighborhood.” Before Mr. Eisenhower’s audacious interstate system came to town, Belews…
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A Labor of Love
As an editor, I’ve learned to love living vicariously. Other people, reporters and photographers, go out and collect material and then they bring it back to my desk and say, “Here, can you do something with this?” Photographer David Rolfe is a born storyteller, and he’s one of the few journalists I know who’s…
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The Poems Department
It’s pretty unusual these days to get a hand-addressed envelope delivered to the newsroom. (And much of the time, such letters are what we call “jail mail”, long entreaties from inmates who have nothing but time on their hands to write rambling letters about their cases.) But this is certainly the first letter I’ve seen…
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Metamovie
Every year around this time, our little tobacco town puts on the RiverRun International Film Festival. It’s a big deal, and it’s one of the best things about living in Winston-Salem, but I never seem to have enough time to see all the movies I want to see. My own plight inspired me to make…