Category: New Media
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Meeting the Neighbors, Episode One: The Broomsman
Listen to this story. Seriously. It’s even better than reading. At the corner of 10th and Ritter, Jim Richter has a corner on his vanishing little corner of the market. He’s 77, and he learned to make brooms in high school, at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. In those days, blind…
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A love story in clay: Bill and Jayne Harris
Bill and Jayne Harris are high-school sweethearts who have carved their life’s work together, first in wood and now in clay. Bill, who is also the elected chief of the Catawba Indian nation, creates traditional Catawba pottery, carrying on the family legacy of his grandmother, Georgia Harris. Jayne sculpts clay, making beautifully expressive female characters…
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Rob Levin, artist in glass
An an art form, says Rob Levin, glass is “wonderful, mysterious, miraculous.” Levin has been living and working in the North Carolina mountains for nearly all of his 40-year career, and he’s known for his inspiring use of color and form. Christine Rucker and I met Rob last summer, as part of our work for…
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Listen to Your Elders, Part Two
“If you’re lucky enough to know love, hang onto it,” says Ellen “Lennie” Gerber, “because it’s truly a wonderful thing to have.” Amen, sister. Lennie and her partner, Pearl Berlin, got married this year at the synagogue in Greensboro, N.C., 47 years after they fell in love. I wish I’d met them long ago, but…
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Listen to Your Elders
In a 1965 sermon at Temple Israel in Hollywood, “Keep Moving From This Mountain,” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “The moral arc of the universe is long, and it bends toward justice.” My conversation a few months back with partners Frank Benedetti and Gary Trowbridge prompted me to think about King’s…
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The Wood Guys
Joel Hunnicutt and Brian Bortz, Artists in wood from Michelle Johnson on Vimeo. Christine and I have been criss-crossing the Piedmont and Western North Carolina for the last several months, dropping in on some of the most amazing, creative and inspiring folks we’ve ever met. I’m happy that you are able to meet them, too,…
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Ghree Lockard: A Fish in Water
Ghree’s story is the last of six pieces in a series called “Story of My Life,” produced with funding from the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute and exceptional cooperation from Group Homes of Forsyth. Ghree is one tough cookie, and she doesn’t let anything slow her down. She has cerebral palsy, so she has a…
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Crossing the Inner Sea
I know I keep saying it, but I’m one lucky woman. Some months ago now, I got to spend a couple of days with a group of young men involved with the College Success Foundation of the District of Columbia. They were in North Carolina at the tail end of an intensive summer academic program….
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Angels Talking: Cecilia’s Story
A car accident set the course of Cecilia Henry’s life when she was just six years old. The girl nearly died from a traumatic brain injury, and doctors told Cecilia’s mother that she would never again walk or talk. When it was time to discharge her from the hospital, the neurosurgeon announced that he had…
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“God Is So Good”
When Christine Rucker, Phoebe Zerwick and I started the “Story Of My Life” project a year or so ago, we did so with the words of the late Henri Nouwen sounding in our heads. Nouwen is a writer, scholar and priest who spent the later years of his life working with profoundly disabled people in…
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My Name is John
. How do you tell the story of your life without words? Meet John Linville, a resident of Group Homes of Forsyth and one of the subjects for our series “Story of My Life”. John is one of a set of triplets, born prematurely in a time when, as his sister says “it was incredible…
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Bending Toward Justice
On May 8, North Carolina became the 31st state to adopt a constitutional amendment banning same-sex couples from being legally married. Gay marriage is already illegal in the state, but voters overwhelmingly approved the amendment anyway. The amendment was opposed by a wide-ranging coalition of legal scholars, progressive religious leaders, CEOs of the state’s largest…
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Life Coach
My sister got all the athletic talent in our family, so I’ve never been on a ball diamond for more than a few tortured hours during compulsory school games (always relegated to right field, where I could do little harm). But you don’t have to be an athlete to understand this story. It’s an homage…
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Greg’s Story
Meet Greg Silvernail, the first of six group home residents we’ll be featuring in a new and improved “Story of My Life” project over the next few months. Christine Rucker and Phoebe Zerwick did most of the field work on this project, so I’m mainly just their most interested set of eyes and ears. Greg’s…
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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…