Up through the sidewalk

After nearly a hundred years of serving children, an opportunity to weave, in fresh colors, the story of the Crossnore School.

2011-07-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

Two booklets: one aimed at parents and educational consultants, the other at individuals who can change the trajectory of a child's life by offering scholarship funds for a girl or boy in need. The Crossnore School began in 1913, primarily as a result of Eustace and Mary Martin Sloop, both doctors, taking a dedicated interest in mountain children bettering their lives through education. Marching through bouts with moonshiners, wars, depressions, floods, fires and myriad tragedies, the school has persevered to become one of the finest of its kind, a resilient beacon of hope and healing. Writer/art director: Jay Fields/Connie Aridas. Inspiration: Dr. Phyllis Crain, executive director.

A lively site for the Crossnore School.

2011-06-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

An in-progress glimpse at a refreshed web site for the school with completion set for mid-August. Many thanks for the enthusiastic support of Executive Director Phyllis Crain, Melynda Pepple's ongoing resourcefulness (especially with photography, past and present), and the affirming helpfulness of everyone on campus. Shown here: the home page template. It's been, and continues to be, a tremendous honor to work with a school with so much compassion at its heart. Page design: Connie Aridas. Mapping and coding and web work: Heidi Lusk.

A sweeping resource for caregivers.

2011-06-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

This not-for-profit foundation, called "APPEL" (or Avery Partnership for People at the End of Life), weaves a support system for caregivers, including grants for hospice care when other means of support aren't available. Part of its mission, too, is helping the caregiving community with spot-on information about services that can help medically, financially, legally and spiritually. This web site encompasses those resources and sets up a platform for sharing stories and ideas within a community that is often overwhelmed with too many duties and too little time.

We interviewed leaders in key caregiver organizations, helped structure the site, wrote and gathered the content. Partner Connie Aridas, working with board member Ann Baker, shaped the logo, based on an Avery County apple tree, and designed the site's templates which she handed off to web master Steffi Rausch. I am grateful to Ann, to Coy Franklin and to all the members of the APPEL board for pitching in and making this project sing with good information. As a WordPress site, content management will shift to the APPEL team with the launch of appelnetwork.org.

Studio portrait of a Kenilworth neighbor.

2011-03-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

Colin Richmond, fashioner of over 60 breeds of porcelain sheep, plus an occasional lion, llama, donkey, alpaca, Highland Coo and Belted Galloway.

The swimming pool as sustainable architecture.

2011-03-16T12:44:00.001-07:00

A creative assignment from Mark Bastin of JDM Strategies: How do we tell parallel stories of graceful design, detailed engineering and sustainability? Here's the result--a journalistic-style ad for a magazine read by homeowners and architects. Jay Fields, writer; Michael Ashmore, art director.

An economic development folder for the geologically ripped little town of Chimney Rock.

2011-03-05T05:02:00.000-08:00

It's a joy to write about a place I've often visited and always loved. At one time or another, I've watched my daughters rock-jumping the Rocky Broad and painted the river across a large canvas where I threw down watercolors in great splashes of color. I like the opening to this lovely piece, worked out by Bryan Hughes, following Sharon Harms' original design template: No bigger than a minute, the town of Chimney Rock nevertheless presides over a timeless scene--of falling water, sheer rock face and evergreen forest. Even the names of its neighboring towns—Bat Cave and Lake Lure—suggest the inherent fairy tale quality of this place, a gravitational draw for naturalists and sightseers for well over a century.

An enjoyable project for friends at HandMade and in Chimney Rock.

For the University of Tennessee: Imagine a better future, then do something about it.

2011-02-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Early creative for a campaign now underway based on the line, Imagine a better future, then do something about it. I love this direction, fitting hand-in-glove with the many intellectual and social initiatives at the school.

An ad for this historic school's first summer day camp--reaching out to families in the mountains.

2011-02-15T09:36:00.000-08:00

Nice to work on such a beautifully bound new idea for this almost 100 year old school--an esteemed academic community for children in need. Many, many thanks to Phyllis Crain, executive director for the close-knit and creative relationship, and to Connie Aridas, my design partner, who conjured such a great visual approach. These brochures will blanket the High Country in four directions from the small towns of Linville and Crossnore.

A good year

2010-12-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

Rounded out with an art show in my Kenilworth neighborhood. Not much sold, but a lot of gifts poured out of the effort, nonetheless.

Mail series for a bank's female clientele

2010-12-26T04:51:00.000-08:00

One of a string of mailers--this one falling at Thanksgiving--that reminds women customers that Carolina Alliance Bank holds them in "high consciousness" and wants, sincerely, to maintain both rapport and dialogue. Thanks to partner Connie Aridas for bringing me into this ongoing project.

A new site for a Knoxville fulfillment house that, among other things, handled over a hundred million sweepstakes entries this year alone.

2010-12-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

Chosen as writer for the project, I very much appreciate the chance to work with Mark Bastin of JDM Strategies (Asheville) and Wade Ewers, president of Ritway (Knoxville). It's a rare opportunity to work on a site this complex (about 40 main sections) and with a group of people of such genuine integrity, good spirit and warmth.

The Crossnore School: Weaving a tale of lives changed and miracles in the offing.

2010-12-25T17:50:00.000-08:00

A wonderful opportunity to re-position this historical and profoundly successful place as both an esteemed boarding school and a healing, caring environment for children in need. I am in deep gratitude to Dr. Phyllis Crain for the amazing chance to tell this story well and my very aware, very conscious partner, Connie Aridas, who brings a sensitive hand to the design of pieces aimed at donors and stakeholders as well as parents and educational consultants.

An illustrated history of HandMade in America's artfully collaborative Small Town Program

2010-12-25T17:19:00.000-08:00

A composite of 15 years of impassioned work, often triggered and inspired by HandMade leadership, brought to life by countless volunteers in some of Western North Carolina's smallest places. An essay (falling across twenty pages) that practically unfolds on its own because of the tremendous energy and devotion of participants, many of whom I interviewed over a two-month period to form the nucleus of this textured story. Connie Aridas orchestrated the design, as she said, "keeping the flavor of small towns" visually throughout, and Judi Jetson at HandMade provided the initiative and support. Many thanks to everyone who read this piece, spoke with me in person or by phone, and helped render a process and a history that I believe can and will be helpful to small towns basically anywhere in the world.

A new mark for Western North Carolina Alliance, the grand pere of conservancy organizations in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains

2010-12-25T16:55:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Julie Mayfield, executive director, for the opportunity, and to partner Connie Aridas for her great perseverance over the nine months it took to give birth. There is an official birthing document, a stylebook, which we put together to help the organization in spot color applications and in usage contexts from newsletters to web postings to signage to stationery.

In-process design: First in a series of posters.

2010-10-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

Each drawing attention to a program of employee recognition requiring the nomination of peers. Thanks to Robin Easter for a wonderful chance to collaborate.

Helping crew a petite art tour in Kenilworth.

2010-10-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

With gratitude to Connie Aridas, my design partner, who poured her time and talent into this at no charge. Also thanks to Michael Robinson, Kathie Kline, Christine Riley and Diana Gillispie for suggestions on mapping the tour.

For UNCA, a world of orchids, blow guns, and jaguars.

2010-10-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Debbie Griffith and Jill Yarnall for pulling me into the jungles of Guyana with Dr. Clarke and the Amerindians. Still recovering from drinking cassava with the Wai Wais.

Full blown portraits of very small places

2010-10-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

For HandMade in America, illustrated narratives of Crossnore and Hayesville revitalization work, prototypes for a series of pieces on small town initiatives in western North Carolina. So thin in population they don't qualify for
Main Street funding, these small places have, nevertheless, succeeded in pulling off remarkable physical and cultural changes, accomplished through persistence, good will, and the generous spirits of many folks. Thanks to Judi Jetson of HandMade for her trust and determination and to Sharon Harms, designer, who rode these to the ground and brought a lot to the party. Also many thanks to Rob Tiger of Hayesville and Ann Baker of Crossnore for their great help with content and alterations.

Reflections on Pack Square Park

2010-09-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Written for Laurel Magazine, October, 2010 Edition

It’s almost 7 p.m.

Issuing forth from the microphone at the front of the Lunsford stage in Pack Square Park, as the evening sun rakes the county and city buildings in yellow gold: “All humans in the trees—please come down.”

And, with this pronouncement, and with the passing of day into night and summer into early fall, all the hopes and dreams, squabbles and resolves, landscape reshapings and art installations—all the everything that has gone into five years of creating a central park for Asheville—all of it suddenly pours and crystallizes into a timeless moment.

By way of a pops concert, four or five thousand of us are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. More than that, we are part of an official salute to Pack Square Park, acknowledging the sheer august pleasure of it--maybe for the first time.

“It took me a while,” says park designer Fred Bonci, speaking from his office in Pittsburgh, “but I really felt like we were there, like we really had it, when someone told me after the second Shindig performance that the people in charge completely loved their new space.”

“For Pack Square Park, just like for Central Park, there are principles that Frederick Law Olmsted brought to life that hold sway. A park should be democratic. It should be for everyone. It should be diverse. It should have wide open fields and intimate, small spaces. It should be sunlit and shaded. It should have a certain quality of design, a quality that engenders pride. It should connect man with nature and nature with man.

“Well, there you are,” Fred says, “there you are with the mountains and the sky that come down to greet you. So we created these very definite borders so no matter what happens with the buildings around the park, you have this beautiful, defined space. And it will just get better as the trees grow—the rows of London planes, for example. It will mature. And it will always be this central place—this central park—for everyone to enjoy.”

It’s almost 8.

Sitting here in this natural amphitheater in front of the two courthouses as Daniel Meyer conducts Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and the stars pop out, it seems crazy that this lush 6.5 acre lawn with its water features, garden areas, new trees and public art was once a “spaghetti bowl” of streets so confusing it was hard to negotiate even on foot.

Even crazier is the will and the outpouring of ideas and energy—some 27 public charettes—that helped shape the space, bring form and native design to it, and, against all odds, birth something inter-generational, timeless and consequential.

“It was easy to take the plunge into a park of national significance,” Fred says. “Why? Because the people behind it, the people of Asheville, had a vision in the very beginning and they wouldn’t let go of it. They wanted a great park. Nothing short of that would do.”

Asheville, a short history and bird's eye view, as written for a colleague's web site

2010-07-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

A storied history.

There are bigger cities. But there are few places that knit together so beautifully the life and culture of a city of the world with the freshening wildness of nearby national parks, preserves, rivers and forests.

And whether you call it Asheville, “Land of the Sky,” “Paris of the South,” or “Sante Fe of the East,” one thing’s clear: it’s been a destination of the heart for a long, long time now.

Thomas Wolfe wrote about the the city in Look Homeward Angel, forging a new kind of modernist literature that changed the dimensions of fiction. And, during the same time his mother ran her boarding house on Spruce Street, a young man from New York came here to create an estate that would change the dimensions of a lot of other things: architecture, forestry, the art of the planned landscape and the self-sufficient farm. His name was George Vanderbilt and his artistic sensibilities, his longing for the exquisitely planned and well-made, still directly influences the way in which people from Asheville regard art, architecture, music, dance, theater, even conversation. These are parts of life, especially in this sacred and beautiful country, to honor, celebrate, embrace and savor.

The fanciful architecture of Wolfe’s time in Asheville, characterized by Douglas Ellington’s City Building and E.W. Grove’s Grove Arcade and Grove Park Inn actually benefited from a particularly bitter Depression in the mountains in which the great building stock of Asheville literally went into a deep freeze, only to thaw out, years later, into the stunning city scape of an art deco city. Asheville honored its debts from the Roosevelt years, paying them off in 1976, and setting the stage for infrastructure growth and city planning that heralded a renaissance of city life that’s still unfolding--in coffee shops, in sidewalk cafés, in jazz and music clubs, in galleries and studios, and across performance stages, both petite and grand.

In its lush and varied neighborhoods, where conversations from front porches once drifted into the streets in places like Montford and Kenilworth during Wolfe’s time, what you’ll find today is an eclectic residential architecture from well-preserved original arts and crafts cottages to Asheville’s own brand of contemporary mountain style home--beautiful, accommodating and energy efficient. “Rooms with a view” is a descriptor that practically goes without saying, with Mount Pisgah a point of reckoning for pilots, residents and visitors alike, proof that you are once again in the lap of the French Broad River Valley and home.

A Global City of the Arts

In 1980, Asheville’s downtown and river front studios and galleries were tougher to find than ceramic hen’s teeth. In 2010, it’s hard to go a city block without feeling, from a gallery window, the beckoning call of painting, sculpture or piece of high craft; maybe it’s a teapot that looks like Mae West, fabric art that dazzles with texture or blown glass so rich in color it makes your head swim.

There are studio strolls in the spring, summer and fall, farmers’ markets with artful, local produce on Saturdays, and a continuous run of festivals and events that leave no weekend unclothed and no week day without choices of sublime and ridiculous proportions.

It is totally within reason to suggest that, within a few weeks, you could go to a film debut, witness an originally choreographed dance performance staged for the first time, see a Jazz Hall of Fame recording artist at Diana Wortham, knock out three plays at three venues, drop into the Orange Peel for an evening of folk, rock or rap, catch a symphony, sit on the grounds of Biltmore Estate as the moon rises for an exquisite concert by an international talent. In the end, you may be a bit wrung out but you’d have entered a realm of happiness few have known.

Festival-wise, to mention only a handful: Bele Chere, the largest free outdoor street festival in the Southeast (July 23-25, 2010); the Asheville Film Festival (late May); Goombay! An African-Caribbean street festival with plenty of dance and good food (August 27-29, 2010); WordFest, four days of poetry readings, slams and live performances (early May of each year); the Asheville FringeArts Festival, serving up avant garde work that might otherwise not have a venue (January of each year); and the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF), with diverse world music, poetry and great relaxation at a graceful setting near Asheville (in spring and fall).

Betwixt and between, anyone is welcome at the Asheville Drummer’s Circle, from 7 to 10 p.m. when the weather’s good Fridays in Pritchard Park, and at Shindig on the Green, a long-standing traditional gathering of mountain music pickers, singers and dancers, now on Roger McGuire Green every Saturday night from early July to early September.

It’s a staggering mix of creative work and creative expression and it would have never happened were it not for so many inspired people and organizations pitching in, wrangling ideas and funds, networking, bringing good planning and good strategy to the city’s calendar.

For example, hundreds of citizens were involved in shaping the city’s 2010 plan, written in 1985, which outlined where the cultural neighborhoods would be best established and gardened. There were hundreds of creators, too, of HandMade in America, a grassroots non-profit in support of those who make original crafts and one-of-a-kind furnishings. And dozens of other organizations, all intricately involved, overlapping, authors of a new city, built, in large part, around the simple idea of artfulness.

A Landscape of Wonder

From most anywhere in Asheville, in about ten minutes, you can drive to an entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, then thread through forests and mountains for mile after mile in either direction. It’s called “America’s favorite drive” and its very existence has caused people to move here, to be close by it, to use it for motoring, for cycling, for photography, for getting to a trail head.

Going north, you will climb to Craggy Gardens, so named for catawba rhododendron that come into bloom there in June, and further into the highest mountains in the East. At Mount Mitchell, named for Elisha Mitchell, a professor who died during his explorations of the peak, you can see the great Roan Massif and look across the Blacks to Grandfather Mountain and Hawksbill. You can breathe in the air at over 6,500 feet and realize what a blessing this region is, around Asheville, where you can see and experience the roll and pitch of protected lands, mountains and high meadows.

And if you think it’s a major deal to gear up and find time to be at one with the environment, here are some indicators of true travel time:

• In about 15 minutes from town, you can be hiking the trails of the North Carolina Arboretum, curling up Hardtimes Trail and back across Owl Ridge, for a lush and beautiful hour’s stroll that finishes along the banks of Bent Creek.

• In about 20 minutes from town, you can off-load your kayak in the French Broad River and, when the river’s up, run the gates just off Ledges Park.

• There’s also class-act mountain biking in the Bent Creek area and beautiful stretches to cycle along the Parkway.

• And, all within an hour of the city: horseback riding, rock climbing, waterfall hunting, skiing on groomed winter slopes, fishing for native trout, hiking mile after mile of inspirational trails and discovering some of the best places in the world to stop, to rest, and to enjoy the view.

No stranger to the region, naturalist John Muir once wrote, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energies, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

In the high places around Asheville, it’s easy to wonder why something seemed so pressing, so important, before you got there and came fully to your senses.

Many thanks to Bob Boettcher and Carolyn Knight who commissioned this project as part of the rollout of their new firm, Diamond Real Estate Group.

Asheville On Bikes: A story and sketch for The Laurel Magazine

2010-07-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

A child of the fifties, I grew up on the back of a three-speed “racing” Schwinn I’d often rifle between two trees, touching bark with both hands. In my thirties and forties, I mostly ran; but once fifty, I started riding the big bumps of the Parkway and the back trails of Bent Creek. Then, the streets and bike paths of Carrboro and Charleston; small towns in Colorado and Florida. Around here, I love the river road out to Marshall, but navigating a path from A to B in Asheville has always been a challenge at best, a conundrum at worst. How do you avoid Hendersonville Highway, for example, or Tunnel or West Patton? Better to snake through quiet neighborhoods, along a natural valley or through a park, even if an enclosed climb feels like Stage Five of the Tour “day” France.

Regardless, getting there on a bike has always been way more than half the fun; it is, after all, a conversation with the world at large. You feel the place up through your feet, you smell the air, you blend into the moment, you hail someone or stop to jawbone. One ride is never like any other—and especially in Asheville, when the wind boots up, mists settle in, or slanting light brushes in golds and blacks at the beginnings and ends of days. Sorry, not nearly as available in a car.

As a teacher at Evergreen Community Charter School, Mike Sule doesn’t own a car. Rather, he owns a bike, which he uses to travel to his job in Haw Creek from his home in the center of town. Years ago, he sold his car and used the savings from not owning it (which he figures amounted to $10,000 a year) to buy a city-centric condo.

“I absolutely love the commute,” he says. “I love the experience of traveling on a bike, even in the dead of winter. Plus, it just feels like a responsible thing to do. My students ask me, ‘How can you do this in February with snow on the ground?’ I just say, ‘Same reason you guys go snowboarding.’ It’s fun.”

People who use bicycles as their primary means of getting around tend to boost the economy of their surrounding neighborhoods—it’s just easier and more convenient to “buy local.” In towns where parking spaces have been taken up for bike racks, merchants generally move from apoplexy to happiness: the number of people (and potential shoppers) represented by that space drastically multiplies. Morover, a recent economic impact study in the Outer Banks shows that a public funds investment of $6.7 million for bike paths and paved shoulders has directly contributed to bicycling activity that yields $60 million in annual economic benefits.

All of which begs the question: Where will we be in five years as a bike friendly community? Claudia Nix, very active at both state and city levels as a bike path and local transportation advocate, won’t go so far as to say we will be like a city in Holland, as much as I’ve tried to draw that conclusion out of her.

“We’ll be a lot more connected,” she says, meaning that the 181 mile network of bicycle lanes and paths and shared roadways and greenway routes outlined in the city’s 2008 Comprehensive Bicycle Plan will be a lot closer to being real and part of city life.

In the meantime, at a recent “Downtown after 5” on North Lexington, 130 people dropped by riding a bike, and stayed to enjoy the evening. And, chances are, somewhere on their ride back home, they took a street with a “Sharrow” painted on it, passed a sign that says “Share the Road” or climbed a hill inscribed with a bike lane.

And getting there, coming or going, was way more than half the fun.

For more information on the city’s plan and biking, in general: ashevilleonbikes.com

Asheville, June, Friday After Five, A Stroll With Camera, Smile and Gracefully Sinking Sun

2010-07-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

A story about two jewelers (and two long-time friends of the writer) for pages of The Laurel

2010-07-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

Divergent in styles, equally focused on beauty, and savvy about the "individualistic" compunctions of their customer base. A lot of fun to write and photograph. Many thanks to Michele and Bill and to Paul Howie, editor at The Laurel, who chose to run the article.

Rhododendron as mark: Choosing a natural form for a fresh logo for Blowing Rock Country Club

2010-05-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm especially grateful for the collaboration of Ralph Patterson, of Little Rock and Blowing Rock, and for the persistent explorations of designer Connie Aridas. It was a pleasure working with this team over the four months of development to arrive at this mark.

A name change as the doorway to positioning this small company in a breathtakingly tough market

2010-05-04T07:11:00.001-07:00

John Thorsland may be the most meticulous foundations man in the world of poured concrete. No rounded corners or uneven rebarb; his work is geometric, Pythagorean, by the numbers. And it's a good thing to lay out there for friends, builders, architects and other contractors as he changes his company name from "Specialty Foundations" to "Thorsland Concrete + Construction."

Many thanks to Connie Aridas for John's new logo design and direction of this piece.

Early sketches for the Western North Carolina Alliance. The re-imagining of an identity for this well-rooted grassroots environmental group.

2010-03-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

First thumbs: A storied golf club in Blowing Rock

2010-03-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

A collection of sheets that would describe the different amenities of the club and the delights of enjoying them among friends and family.

Collene Karcher: (Somewhat) alone in the garden of her delight.

2010-02-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

Now and then, full of good stories and good humor, Collene Karcher can describe herself not only as an artist but as a reclusive artist—off to herself, chisel in hand, absorbed in detail.

There’s truth to it, for sure, but it’s also fair to say that this stone carver, letter cutter and sculptor plays host to an extraordinary procession of friends and visitors who are constantly ducking in and out of her world or who charmingly emerge at the tips of her own fingers.

For the record, Collene lives and works in a fit of hardwoods on a curving ridge north of Bakersville where she and her husband John recently finished both a new home and a studio, each designed and hand-built by the two of them, piece by piece, board by board.

Living in a tent for months while they raised their house brought them in touch with a stream of area inhabitants, including a building inspector who gave them both codes and encouragements, and some hyper-curious neighbors who felt comfortable showing up most any time of the day or night.

“The racoons just mosied right in,” Collene says, “and birds came down to visit. One black-hooded warbler sat at the dinner table with us or hitched a ride on John’s head. At night, the lunas showed up—bigger than your hand—making shadows on the tent.”

And there are other visitors, too, sometimes lots of them.

“It can be corny and romantic how people find me sometimes,” Collene says. “But it’s always great when they come to the studio. It’s very tactile here. I say, sure, everything is meant to be touched. And I learn so much from one-on-one conversations that you can’t have when your work is off in a gallery and you’re some place else. Here I can talk about how I saw something or made something. What happened along the way. Why I used a certain technique or a certain quarry. All in person. And people who visit educate me about what they do.

“I just believe it makes for a better experience to sell work directly out of the studio. I get to spend more time working. And people enjoy being here. In times gone by, book clubs have met in my garden and families have held get-togethers. This is art that’s meant to be lived with.”

In Collene’s artistic vernacular, her pieces oftentimes combine classical sculpture of the human form using marble, limestone or alabaster with Trajan or Roman letter cutting. Practically a lost art in this country, the hand painting, then chiseling of letters on slate blocks and shards has a look and a feel to it—a soulfulness—that sand-blasted letters can never achieve.

Collene’s hand-cut letters, phrases and expressions often turn up as part of her work for the garden, whether as part of a bench or outdoor stone sink or classical torso ingeniously married to a birdhouse. Or they could just as easily flavor an environment where Collene’s frogs, luna moths, bees, roosters and mythological sirens hang out, whimsically and gorgeously entrapped in medallions, triangles and other shapes, awaiting the first sprigs of spring.

“The medium takes time,” says Collene. “It can take me a month to do a single lettered piece.”

And a lifetime of being a happy, cordial, inspired, and socially astute reclusive artist.

Excerpted from the first edition of The Toe River Journal, to appear on regional newsstands in April.

Poster • Local ADDYs

2009-12-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

Thanks to partner Connie Aridas, colorizing artist Lynne Harty and the Asheville ADDY committee for the opportunity.

Prototype cover: The Toe River Journal

2009-12-08T11:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks Ben Keys for the great photograph and thanks Ron Zisman for the great design.

One of Ben Keys' elegantly-seen images

2009-12-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

In progress for the Baker Center at the University of Tennessee

2009-11-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

In 2001, Congress authorized the University of Tennessee to receive a grant creating an endowment to establish the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.

As a U.S. senator, Reagan chief of staff, ambassador to Japan and one-time presidential contender, Howard H. Baker Jr. is remembered as “the great conciliator,” a politician whose intelligence, ethics and demeanor defied partisan politics and, instead, bridged support from all sides.

This same open-minded perspective continues to shape the Baker Center’s very own and very unique window on the world.

The center provides access to an extensive collection of distinguished political archives (including Senator Baker’s own papers), a 15-room interactive museum, white paper research and publications (engaging the scholarship of university students), a wide variety of inspiring public programs, and an outreach to students of all ages, using podcasts, videos and other web-based avenues of communication.

Year to year, the center gives rise to a sequence of rare experiences for students of government—the chance to participate in running dialogues between those whose policies and opinions currently shape our world and those who represent the next generation of regional and national leadership.

(Thanks to Katherine Key, Dennis McCarthy, and Carl Pierce, all of the university, for the chance to craft this overview piece and get involved with communications strategy for the Baker Center.)

The need for a new magazine

2009-11-05T08:17:00.001-08:00

The Toe River Valley, years after the exodus of furniture and textile mills and other lynchpins of an earlier economy, is re-inventing itself. The new face of recovery for the region is more likely reflected in the renaissance of small towns, a revitalized tourism, imaginative entrepreneurial ideas and small businesses, creative developments for first and second homes, unmoored web-based workers finding solutions on backporches, the re-discovery of wild waters and wilderness areas, artists and tradespeople who love the high mountains and bring that energy into their work.

It’s a region that’s shaking off its cove and fence mentality, coming together and deciding how to best merge growth and preservation in one of the most precious geographies in the East. There is simply no town like Bakersville, no mountains like Roan or Mitchell, no craft school like Penland, no community college like Mayland, no small college like Lees McCrae, no high apple meadow like Altapass, no rhododendron festival or Wooly Worm race or Toe River crafts trail or theatre quite like Burnsville’s anywhere else in the world. And in DT’s Restaurant in Spruce Pine, the conversation is about fiber optics, linking libraries and campuses and sharing ideas that will reposition the Valley as a great destination and as a rebounding economy.

There’s work to be done, for sure. Per capita income in the three counties is roughly three-quarters of the North Carolina average. Unemployment exceeds 10 percent. There are less than 1,500 non-farm establishments with paid employees across the region.

But the potential for coming together is real and the cross-fertilization of ideas in hospitality, manufacturing, high craft, agriculture, retail, recreation and healthcare is bringing about a new sense of history, place, and possibility.

For second home buyers, real estate can be stunningly beautiful, relatively affordable and part of a comfortable and safe community—all within an easy drive of metropolitan areas like Charlotte. Building a home in the mountains—and bringing a family home to the mountains—creates jobs in construction, in the building trades, in schools and in service industries. It fuels a new economy.

Taking the wide view, timing is excellent for a deeper interpretation of the region in the form of a magazine edited for those who want to get away, get outside, visit often, live here, write their own story, take part in creating a new landscape of appreciation and change.

No other publication or news source serves the Toe River Valley in that way or has that particular intention. So the need is here. And the best role emerges as one of collaboration, creativity and imagination.

First glimpse: Early sketches for a new magazine serving the Toe River Valley

2009-10-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Life and times of Tryon's Daily Bulletin

2009-10-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Jeff Byrd, publisher, for his support of our work for him, and Ron Zisman, my long-time design partner.

Along the banks of the Arno, 2006

2009-10-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

Early sketch: Some initial thinking about a trades directory for Mitchell County

2009-10-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

Something intimate and lasting.

(A fictional introduction to following pages.)

For Page McKinney, bark siding brings something both intimate and lasting to the idea of forest living. For Wade Saunders, stacked-stone border walls are a matter of shape, color and intuition. For landscaper Betsy Winters, it’s not simply what looks good together; it’s what creates a world of comfort and beauty ten years from now.

These entrepreneurs, and many others who work in construction, landscaping and décor in Mitchell County influence the look, comfort and “big joy” of living in these mountains. They know the land, they hand pick the materials they use, they treat every client like a neighbor (which is exactly what many of their clients are).

So when you have an artful, important project you want to imagine or create from a simple idea, ask a Mitchell County landscaper, builder or artisan to take a look at it. Chances are nobody will care more, bring more to the job, or create something more essential, useful or beautiful.

The Building Trades of Mitchell County.
Creating a legacy of beauty and function.

For a Directory of Services: Telephone • Website Address

Dreamscapes from down under: The imagination of healing

2009-10-02T11:20:00.000-07:00

Scribbles for Heidi Hayes, surrealist artist.

Beaver Lake in the ice age

2009-10-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Happenings thirty years ago recede now, not only into another time but into another era, an era that’s “back there,” on the other side of the frontal edge of a warming earth.

In 1978, Beaver Lake froze over, not a light freeze, but a freeze so long and robust that people in Volkswagons drove out onto the surface and spun around in 360’s. Neighbors, especially people from northern states, rummaged their dark cedar closets for ice skates and, overnight, whole hockey courts appeared, defined by branches, shoes and soda cans. At night, you could hear conversations on the ice that would ricochet around, between old houses and ancient border trees.

One night the police showed up in dark uniforms and shouted out to a group of boys, “Get off the ice. Stop foolin’ around. Get off the ice.” The boys yelled back, “Come out here and get us,” and they yelled and screamed with laughter, full of night air and the clearness of stars over a frozen lake well south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Beaver Lake will probably never freeze solid again in my lifetime, in the lifetime of my girls or in the lifetimes of their children. The very notion of it is a phenomenon to be captured, in these days of evaporating ice caps, only by memory.

Poem from a week on the Buffalo River in Arkansas, summer of 2008

2009-10-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

Two kingfishers

Half a dozen brim

Two blue gill

Nineteen spiders

Two water snakes

10,000 sycamores

562 bluffs

Three thunderstorms

Six black-eyed susans

One tent wasp

40 x 11 no-see-ums

62 short rapids

Five camp fires

Nine hanging gardens of maiden hair ferns

One “Little Niagara”

Three tents

49 Great Blue Heron

Three canoes

6 x 12 stories

One beginning, in a glass of blueberry wine.

The Baker Center, University of Tennessee

2009-10-01T11:48:00.001-07:00

On a scouting trip for planning.

On the road to Tryon

2009-10-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

A single outdoor board, part of an integrated campaign for new subscribers of the paper and its online version.

School choice in Illinois, a pro bono project

2009-10-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

A thinly-staffed non-profit in Chicago needed an overview report of its first two years of service with the mission of opening up school options for all families in the state. Ron Zisman, my art director partner, responded to the call and we carved out a piece we feel good about.

Journalist, Terregona, Spain, 1972

2009-10-01T10:01:00.001-07:00

Remembrance: New Orleans after the storm

2009-09-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

Pulling the insides out of a flooded, post-Katrina house in New Orleans has one huge saving grace: It helps someone free themselves from the mire of an ocean bed and move on. It helps them breathe again.

Our group of nine had driven down to the city from Asheville, a motley collection of men and women, young and old, many of us drawn to New Orleans because of some prior connection or distant memory.

At our first house project, in Chef Menteur, we waded into a home that hadn’t been touched since the storm--a daughter’s bedroom of gritty stuffed animals, warped cassette tapes and fused vinyls, a corroded trumpet and academic books about music; a father’s study of do-it-yourself manuals, records and files, a band saw, rusted handguns, chairs and desk lamps—in other words, everything in exactly the same place it was in the day before the water rose.

I couldn’t help but imagine the kind of people who lived there, their loves and ambitions; how they were with each other; what it was like to be in the house from dozens of loose photographs; the tides of conversation that ebbed and flowed there.

We separated out all the interesting, salvageable pieces, things that could live through a flood, and a brother of the owner came by with his wife and sorted the stack wearing rubber gloves, as if on an Egyptian dig. He poured over documents and memorabilia--army medals, plaques and certificates and old, typed letters, and at one point shrugged, “My God—they never threw out anything.”

We knew that some of the pieces we were saving out of the grunge would wind up in the hands of family. So, from that perspective, we felt like we were wresting treasures from a sea bottom, combined with a kind of last rites for all the stuff that had laid around in the soup too long, not only physically but in the psyches of those who knew it was in there.

We never, by the way, found a wedding band we were told was left behind, somewhere in the acrid coffers of all things Katrina.

On another day, in Lakeview, the owner of a second project house stopped in to buy us lunch. Stuttering with emotion, she talked about how she’d spent 39 summers teaching kids how to swim in her backyard.

We flushed out her pool water, dark like coffee, with a sump pump, watching fish (stocked by the city to cut down on mosquitos) rise in scatters to the surface. It was easy to envision the children who had also skittered across that same pool--all those lives in some way altered by the path of the storm, even if they’d long since left the street and moved to Portland or Little Rock or just to the other side of Lake Ponchartrain.

The owner, herself 83, had been staying with a sister in some far western sun state, apparently too long. For despite the gappy, unsteady state of New Orleans’ piecemeal neighborhoods, she could hardly wait to get back. “Everything was too perfect out there—I was bored out of my head,” she said. “And this—this was a happy house—ooh, such a happy house.”

On our last work day, in the Lower Ninth Ward, we pulled down ceilings and jerked out wall board, rolled up carpets and scooped out debris, tossed mattresses and headboards, curtains and clothes. The house to the immediate right leaned to the side; another had no front. The very fact that the cottage we were working in didn’t buckle or cave seemed like a small miracle in such a battered, storm-soaked neighborhood now dotted with white FEMA trailors. We found a few treasures in the rubble, but only a few; mostly albums with pictures of children growing up and smiling into the camera a long time ago, before the levees broke and everything changed.

I still see New Orleans from the eyes of a 14-year-old when I traveled down there from Tennessee to stay with my aunt and uncle and four kids for two weeks. Pete Fountain had his own club and Al Hirt was a god. At Preservation Hall, a fabulous black woman would play keyboard with her hands and bells with her toes.

I remember riding the trolley into Jackson Square and having my face sketched in charcoals. The streets were green and lush. The city moved in song. One day, I rounded a corner in the house and bumped into my aunt getting out of a shower. My whole life congealed on the spot: the music of New Orleans, the tropical beauty, the amazements of a full-grown naked woman.

And food. Food that seemed to have a crazy dignity about it. Jambalaya. Etouffée. Beignet. Muffaletta. The resident language of yum.

To come back, now, to such devastation made me look for existing portals to the place I knew.

I found them. I found them one night at St. Anna’s parish church, which has a mission of serving free food to New Orleans musicians, who are making half their former incomes. I found them in the music of the Jazz Vipers, a sextet playing free that evening, riffing on Cole Porter pieces and the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Irving Berlin.

I found them in a generosity of spirit: one day we went to pay for lunch at a corner sandwich shop only to find that someone had anonymously picked up our tab.

And I found even more. I found that there actually is a New Orleans underneath the flooded bedrooms and kitchens; behind the houses still marked with dates and patrol abbreviations and numbers for known bodies, behind the paperwork and postponements, behind the politics, absurdities and disappointments.

It’s down there, it’s cooking and it will be back.

Attracting readers to a small town newspaper

2009-09-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

The front of a direct mail postcard, one of a series and part of a diverse campaign to remind neighbors of the value of hometown journalism.

For ArtSpace Charter School: A work in progress

2009-09-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

At a charter school in which the standard course of study is re-imagined through the arts, Ron Zisman and I were asked to re-imagine an existing logo. The process of envisioning isn't over but this sketch suggests the great energy of an enthralled school where Shakespeare can be a second language even in the second grade.

Communicating your non-profit: Positioning, storytelling, going with the flow of new media

2009-09-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

For non-profits in Graham County, North Carolina, a three-hour workshop based on the art of storytelling, a vibrant (and totally ancient) way to build bridges with those you serve and with those who make possible your compassionate and visionary work. Rather than subverting the stories that make you who you are, social media can provide new stages and public forums for them--and create new generations of friends, collaborators, benefactors and clients. (I especially enjoyed the results of dividing the room into brainstorming groups which helped particular non-profits find new ways to talk about what they do.)

Ramps and other essential things: A piece for the Forest Service

2009-09-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Forest farming with non-timber forest products: Bringing science to a traditional practice

Farming the forest with understory herbaceous plants, rich in historical anecdote and tradition, represents a category of agroforestry that’s rapidly gaining ground in the Southeast and many parts of the world.

“Take ramps,” says Jim Chamberlain, forest products technologist with the SRS National Agroforestry Center. “Martha Stewart started cooking with ramps (wild onions) in the mid-1990s. It was just the kind of media attention that stirred up a new market. For example, about six years ago, the owner of a mid-western family farm delivered 1,800 pounds of ramps to Chicago restaurants. He made $15,000. Last year he made about $30,000 again harvesting ramps from his wood-lot.”

Ramps, of course, are only a small (though totally unforgettable) part of what the Forest Service calls non-timber forest products (NTFPs) which, in the United States include wild mushrooms, berries, ferns, tree boughs, cones, moss, maple syrup, honey and medicinal products like black cohosh, and ginseng. Even with little active management—a condition Chamberlain and others in the field are working to improve—the NTFP industry has been growing rapidly since the mid-1980s and annually contributes billions of dollars to the U.S. economy.

By managing forestland so that product diversity flourishes, an owner can increase his or her long-term forest value while, at the same time, furthering biodiversity conservation and sustainable forest management.

In 1998, a coalition of scientists, environmental organizations, botanical gardens, and museums reported that 29 percent of the nation’s 16,000 plant species were at risk of extinction (part of a report issued by the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union). Many medicinal plants, an important class of forest products, are in jeopardy from over-harvesting and loss of habitat.

Forest farming activities, on the other hand, support diverse species without interfering with landowner goals and practices related to water capture and filtering, soil erosion control, microclimate moderation and maintenance of habitat for wildlife.

Gathering information

In the South and elsewhere, forest farming is especially attractive on small tracts since it can be entered into on a modest scale with “sweat equity” scheduled to coincide with off-season work loads. SRS, in collaboration with the Virginia Tech Department of Wood Science and Forest Products and Top of the Ozarks Resource Conservation and Development in Missouri, developed one of the first web sites (www.sfp.forprod.vt.edu) devoted to sharing information on NTFP products and markets--information available for harvesters and growers, marketers, processors, and end-users.

There, under medicinal and herbal products, are fact sheets covering: black cohosh, catnip, echinacea, ginseng, goldenseal, slippery elm, St. John’s Wort, and sweet gum. Under decorative products: holiday greenery and vines for wreaths. And under edible products: black walnuts, honey, pecans, persimmon, and shitake mushrooms.

Each product is detailed, covering aspects of uses, cultivation, marketing, harvest, storage and processing. Within the black cohosh profile, for example, there’s a note under “conservation and management concerns” that reads: “To decrease the pressure on the natural habitat, black cohosh can be cultivated. . . . clumps of bugbane (i.e. cohosh) mature quickly and can be divided after only a few years.”

What’s possible to grow, of course, shifts according to region, climate and environment. For example, Florida is the world’s source for saw palmetto, used to treat enlarged prostate, and also as a tonic, antiseptic and expectorant. Regardless of place or plant, the fundamental issues remain the same.

“We manage forests for trees, for wildlife, for water, for endangered species,” says Chamberlain. “But when it comes to non-timber forest products like medicinal plants, we have a big job ahead of us to develop the science and move into managing the resources from which those products originate.

“We recently set up a forest farming network of about 12 landowners and have begun a series of replicated research trials to improve our understanding of the production potential of five native medicinal plants. We are looking at ginseng, goldenseal, black cohosh, false unicorn, and Virginia snakeroot and the feasibility of private landowners producing these as an alternative income source.. We selected these because they are all wild-harvested and have ready markets. Now we can track the production of these important medicinal plants and estimate volume projections. This will help landowners determine how much and when to harvest. Then a landownder can leave the trees and manage the understory productively.”

Diversifying the economics of the forest

Non-timber forest products can supplement or supplant timber cutting. Moreover, active management can maintain ecosystem complexity, restoring biodiversity and balance. Bringing to market a broader range of natural products also leads to economic diversity, a long-standing experience of countless earlier generations.

“Long before the technology existed to cut timber, people were gathering useful products from the woods,” Chamberlain says. “Early European settlers learned from native Americans about useful platns. One of the earliest exports from the New World was sassafras that was collected at Martha’s Vineyard. Ginseng as well as indigo were harvested from the forests and shipped back to the continent.”

Today, with lively markets in alternative medicines, organic foods and natural products and with more and more applied science available via web sites, extension agents and workshops, stewardship of non-timber forest products is likely to become more well-informed, more imaginative and more roundly successful.

“We’re talking about a natural resource that does not get sufficient management,” says Jim, “The SRS and NAC are working hard to figure out ways to manage these resources so that folks can continue this way of life, while ensuring the health of our forests.”

An 80-year-old patriarch of a community newspaper digs in.

2009-08-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

And, with its parallel web offering, stays as vital, as local, as dedicated and as successful as ever despite the rigors of the economic environment. This ad is part of a campaign, using direct mail and advertising, to draw attention to one of the best things about life in Polk County, North Carolina, and to boost subscription numbers related to both printed and website editions. I'm grateful for the imagination of Jeff Byrd, publisher, the collaboration of his staff, my designer friend Ron Zisman and the integrity of a journalistic icon which has called itself for decades "The world's smallest daily newspaper."

Display poster for Beaverdam Gallery

2009-07-10T02:39:00.000-07:00

This small gallery hinges on fresh work and a unique location accessible from the Parkway and Merrimon Avenue in North Asheville. Community relations has been a key to building traffic, a part of which stems from long-time media contacts, a part of which grows out of the work of everyone involved--especially owners Maggie Smith and Adelaide Key--to distribute flyers and bring friends to opening events. This in-gallery poster positions the people and the work as woven into the community and its ridge-and-cove environment. Designer Ron Zisman and I worked tightly with Maggie and Adelaide on all elements, including an artist-oriented web site at beaverdamgallery.com.

Fresh Art. Fresh Air.

2009-07-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

A new gallery for emerging artists

2009-06-24T03:28:00.000-07:00

After a car crashed into clay sculptor George Handy's former workshop and gallery, Adelaide Key and Maggie Smith wanted to bring together young and young-of-heart artists who live and work in the neighborhood by creating a new gallery space on the old site. George moved his business to the river, Adelaide and Maggie bought the building, and six artists came on board in this "arts incubator" effort. Logo design: my partner Ron Zisman of the Hudson River school of design.

Mountain Area Information Network: Quilting our mountain city with wireless broadband.

2009-05-16T04:25:00.000-07:00

A David v. Goliath project--wireless broadband v. dsl and cable--where MAIN's offering deserves, at the very least, equal consideration. Here, via a mini-site, we wanted to plainly present our case, describe rates and options, and involve the reader in the vital mission of building community. Art director: Benjamin Finch of Robin Easter Design.

Grief counseling for children at UT: "I'm looking for my friend."

2009-05-12T05:23:00.000-07:00

Tricia McClam tells the story of a fourth grader in East Knoxville who shows up early for an appointment in her school’s library.

When asked why she’s there, she says, “I’m looking for my friend.”

Her friend is a graduate student who meets with her each week, reads to her, plays with her and listens to her, as part of a grief outreach program begun in the fall of 2008 by the University of Tennessee.

The children in the program are dealing with major, usually stunning, instances of loss and grief. They face circumstances that involve divorce, abandonment, suicide, murder, custody battles or a parent who’s been taken off to prison.

“Incredibly tough issues,” says Dr. McClam, professor and associate head of Educational Psychology and Counseling at the university. “The referrals I get, from school counselors, from principals, from social workers, take my breath away. It might be an uncle who was stabbed, a family member with a terminal illness or a parent who died during the night.”

“Three of the four children I’ve met with,” says graduate student Ashton Fisher, “have fathers in jail. And when you have one or both parents missing, it can have a major, major impact on self-esteem. They want someone to trust. They want to know that whatever they say is okay; that it won’t get them into trouble.”

For 25 graduate students in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences engaged in grief counseling in the spring of 2009, signs of success may show up in “the little things,” says Dr. McClam.

“We all get together every Thursday morning and meet and talk about what’s going on for an hour and a half,” she says. “You might hear someone say that their client had started to talk, or ‘we had a great session,’ or ‘my client showed up yesterday.’ Little things.”

Little things that add up.

“The issues these children face have a major impact on performance in school and peer relationships,” Dr. McClam says. “We stay with them until they reach a point when they’re back on track academically and you can see behavioral changes in the classroom.”

“You cater to where they are,” says Ashton, “You give them the tools they need. Help them refocus on strengths. Then that ability gives them the control to move forward. It spills over into every other area of their lives.”

Grief Outreach from UT, what Dr. McClam calls “the most powerful kind of learning,” began as a simple, heart-stirring experience.

It began with a child named Aliyah at Sarah Moore Greene Elementary School where Dr. Bob Rider, dean of the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, had been reading with students every Wednesday for four years.

When Dr. Rider asked the first-grader to read a book about Mother’s Day aloud to him, she told him her mother had died on the previous Valentine’s Day. Because of her grief, she had been held back in school, not adjusting socially and academically.

“I was at a loss for words,” Dr. Rider says. “I was thinking, ‘We have wonderful counseling programs at the university and other support services.’ I wanted to know how we could help.”

On October 1, 2008, the program that Dr. Rider’s experience triggered began accepting referrals. Graduate students training to become school psychologists, mental health counselors, and school counselors immediately signed on. And they continue to sign on, as part of a cohesive team, taking an active role in choosing those clients they feel they can best help.

“Our students come into the experience committed,” says Dr. McClam. “They have to be. They know how important it is.”

“It’s a very individual thing, getting to know your client,” says Ashton. “You don’t know how resistant they might be to being with you, to talking. In the four cases I’ve had, there was no resistance. These kids were hurting and they needed an outlet.”

The artfulness in drawing out the thoughts and questions and hurt the children carry is taken up in listening and patience.

“We talk about things and we skirt some things,” says Angela Mounger, another graduate student who has worked with four children, “but if you listen, you can hear between the lines and ask a question and get something going.

“I was meeting with a boy who’d lost his father and he talked about a movie he didn’t like. I asked him about what it was about and he said it was about a boy who’d lost his dad. That opened things up. Behind the silent stretches, there can be intense sadness and anger. So you want to give them a vocabulary, a way to label what they’re feeling,” Angela says. “They’re mostly in a family where everyone is hurting over what happened, so they have no one to talk to. They can’t bring up anything at home. As a result, they’re looking for a safe place.”

The grief initiative has largely focused on a single area of high poverty, some 16 square miles in East Knoxville, designated an “Empowerment Zone” in 1998 under a Clinton administration urban rebuilding program. But Dr. McClam is also receiving referrals from other areas of Knox County, saying that the number of children dealing with grief and loss in our community “is much greater than we anticipated.”

As Angela Mounger puts it, “I was overwhelmed by the amount of need out there.”

Beneficiaries of the program are not only the children themselves and their families, but graduate students who pour in their skills and time, commitment and heart; who wait patiently for signs.

“There’s no time line. It’s a process. We go at our client’s pace. And, moving that way, we watch them grow,” says Angela. “It’s very rewarding.”

“They’re resilient,” Ashton says. “It’s also impossible not to love them.”

For information and referrals, Dr. McClam may be reached at 865-974-3845 or mcclam@utk.edu.

Bringing Physics to Fentress County: Because a mind so inclined is a terrible thing to waste.

2009-05-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

For Tammara Garrett, a high school senior in Fentress County, Tennessee, “doing a lot of electro-magnetic stuff and viewing the ultraviolet spectrum” became a welcome part of her day in this rural community where studying physics had previously been about as rare as spotting an ivory billed woodpecker.

Thanks to an innovative application of distance learning developed at the University of Tennessee, 30 college-bound science students in the county, along with their classroom teachers, were able to seize upon a jewel of a learning experience at a time when they really, really wanted it.

“For a serious student, this is great,” Tammara says, “I like the physical sciences and I saw this as an opportunity. I especially liked the hands-on work.”

Much of the course, taught as a block segment in the fall of 2008, did engage teachers and students in hands-on exercises illustrating the immutable laws of physics. But the basic teaching structure flowed out of interactive videoconferencing between the Nielsen Physics Building on the UT campus and a classroom in Fentress County where students from Clarkrange High School and the Alvin C. York Institute gathered up and took part in lectures and discussions.

The first inkling of an idea around this creative venture into distance learning emerged as Dr. Lynn Champion, director of Academic Outreach and Communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, considered the significant shortage of qualified physics teachers in the state.

“We had very capable and knowledgeable physics teachers here at UT Knoxville and interested Tennesse high school students without teachers,” she says. “The option that came to mind was distance education.”

According to Dr. Jon Levin of UT’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, a professor heavily involved in the project as both planner and instructor, there are fewer than 200 out of 300 public high schools in Tennessee that offered physics last year.

“Many rural schools in the state don’t have accredited teachers,” he says, “so we identified two we could target with distance education. The primary reason we’re doing this is to get teachers certified.”

Typically, teachers work toward accreditation by participating in a two-week class in the summer.

“The tact we’re taking in Fentress County,” Levin says, “has to do with teachers learning over a semester right along with their students. It fosters a deeper understanding than blitzkrieg types of courses. Plus there’s great leverage involved, since one certified teacher can teach physics to thousands of students over the course of his or her career.”

The program addresses, for both physics-teachers-in-training and students, a national and state priority to increase college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM disciplines.

“Physics is at the root, the most fundamental of the sciences,” Levin says and, as Tammara Garrett, whose long-range goal is to teach high school biology, recalls, “I took a lot of notes.”

Kelly Ramey, a certified chemistry and biology teacher at Alvin C. York and Tammara’s instructor, remembers, “I got super interested when UT called. We had 40 kids who wanted to take the course at York and enrolled 24. There were also six from Clarkrange, which is a much smaller school. I went to Clarkrange myself.”

“Science is coming back to the forefront,” she says, “and I’m learning with the kids. My ultimate goal is to be certified in physics so I wanted to get involved.”

Linda Jordon, a science consultant for the Tennessee State Department of Education, recommended Fentress County Schools for the pilot program mainly because of the school’s enthusiasm for the project. The College of Arts and Sciences at UT provided significant funding from private gift endowment earnings that support K-12 outreach projects. Other extrarodinarily important team members in the venture have been Physics Department Head Soren Sorensen, department teaching assistant Erica Johnson, and the Office of Information Technology at the university.

“Physics by distance” will most likely stream into a classroom from an over-sized television screen at York Institute in the fall of 2009. Students and instructors will again hold atmospheric conversations that touch on entropy, friction, impedence, repulsion, apogee, causality and centripedal force. In such a rural part of Tennessee, economically depressed, where close to 60% of all students qualify for free lunches, it seems particularly rewarding that the intellectual gifts of learning physics are not only accessible but also capable of kinetically influencing students toward note-worthy achievement in college, career and life in general.

“It’s not an easy subject,” says Dr. Levin. “It’s a grind to learn and you learn best by doing. But with these kids, we’ve been very pleased, and we so appreciate the connection.”

As Tammara Garrett succinctly puts it, “I got to learn a lot.”

Footnote: Kelly Ramey and her team of science students, including Tammara Garrett, recently won the state of Tennessee’s Envirothon competition, sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, which teaches students to view their environment as a dynamic, integrated system and encourages comprehensive systems management as a team.

The Clarence Brown High School Workshop: Permission to fall down, get up, find your own voice.

2009-05-12T05:15:00.000-07:00

High school students who participate in summer workshops at UT’s Clarence Brown Theater come into the program from a wide sea of circumstance. One painfully shy. Another adrift in grief from the loss of a parent. A third, street-smart and angry, and worried about acceptance.

But for each teenager who makes the commitment, something invariably happens to change things. By the end of two weeks of voice lessons and improvs and performances, there’s a shift. The heart lightens, the world offers a new slate of possibilities, there’s a willingness to take risks that wasn’t there before.

“To begin with, there’s a lot going when you’re in your mid-teens,” says Carol Mayo-Jenkins, UT resident artist and workshop coach. “You’re trying to figure out who you are, how you fit in. You’re discovering you’re different from your parents. You’re learning to use your own voice, maybe for the first time.

“Then we get into this work, nine to four every day. It’s a lot of physical work. There are exercises and games and technique development in the morning, scenes and musical numbers to run through in the afternoon,” she says. “We set up a very positive experience. We suspend judgement. We encourage a sense of daring. So everyone is more willing to take risks. And when someone falls down, everybody supports them. We dust them off and they get right back in the game, usually with a lot of laughter.”

The Clarence Brown Theatre High School Acting Workshop, founded in 2001, enrolls a total of thirty to forty high school students each summer in two separate intensive workshops. Past participants, from Tennessee and seven other states, have worked on skills that include basic acting, improvisation, voice, movement and musical theatre technique.

“There’s no audition,” says Terry Silver-Alford, UT Theater Department faculty member and director of the program, “just an interest in performance.

“Over the past few years,” he continues, “we’ve added in a musical theater component. Students are assigned duets from Broadway musicals, receive voice coaching, and learn one or two large ensemble numbers which require singing and dancing. All these pieces are presented in a final showcase, which includes acting scenes from major American plays.”

For each student, the theater at hand is a theater of change and growth.

“You meet your coaches—like Carol and David Alley—and they’re really accomplished actors with great careers and you realize, ‘You know, they’re people too. I can do this,’” says Rachel Winfrey, a workshop participant for four years and a recent UT theater graduate. “What’s going on opens you up emotionally. And, let me say, there is some awesome socializing. You’re part of a family.”

Rachel, who has assisted in the workshops, talks about students adapting to games, to improv situations, to different ways of thinking and doing things.

“You might jump rope while delivering lines from Shakespeare,” she says. “It’s amazing. And it’s amazing to see how much it can mean.”

In a stage exercise, one young man wrote a rap song to his father who he had never known. “It came out of a big group scene where the actors stepped forward with a monologue they had each written,” says Carol. “It was extraordinary. All the monologues were stunning.

“The most surprising experiences for me are those times when this sort of unrealized ability just comes out in one of the kids. I don’t really know what talent is but I do know when a student puts something of themselves forward that is amazing. Often it’s just for the moment—something they are able to reach inside themselves—something unforgettable.”

And, says Carol, “I think when it pops loose, when it comes up in a performance, yes, I think they recognize it too.”

“These are kids from across every spectrum,” Rachel says, “and they’re pushed at the same level. They grow, they learn, they come into a light heart.”

In addition to Carol Mayo-Jenkins and Terry Silver-Alford, David Alley, another honored professional actor and UT resident artist, takes a major role in workshop coaching, as well as Jimmy Brimer who has musically directed a raft of shows at the Clarence Brown over many years of service to the university and to its theater.

“In Tennessee,” says Terry Silver-Alford, whose own daughter is a recent participant, “there’s nothing quite like these workshops.”

For further information, contact Terry via email at tsilvera@utk.edu or phone 865-974-6011. Student participants pay a fee for workshop attendance.

The UT School of Nursing: Providing essential care in worlds-away places

2009-05-12T05:09:00.000-07:00

When a small cadre of UT nursing professors and students arrived in New Orleans six months after Katrina, they met with scores of women residents who’d soldiered on--through mildew, muck and make-do living conditions.

“They’d stayed in the city, doing whatever they had to do to survive,” says Dr. Mary Kollar, family nurse practitioner and UT faculty member. “And by the time they came to see us, they’d stretched out their medicines as long as they could or just finally run out.”

Some days the line cued up at 4:00 in the morning.

Operating out of a temporary clinic set up in the peacock section of the New Orleans Zoo, the team from UT focused on women’s exams. “They were desperate for care,” says Karen Lasater, another School of Nursing faculty member. “It was a scene of shock but the attitude was ‘let’s face ahead and go forward.’ Everyone was so thankful. We conducted about 300 exams.

“We handed out blankets and many of the women told their stories,” she says. “I remember visiting with a distinguished-looking lady standing in line whose house had been devastated. She was truly grateful to be there.”

In addition to pelvic exams, pap smears, medications, and general medical aid, women at the unit could also take advantage of eye and dental exams, offered by volunteers from Remote Area Medical, a Knoxville-based non-profit and a partner with UT. Lab results, gathered in Tennessee, would later be sent back to the Health Department in New Orleans (and to the patients themselves) for follow-up.

“These women had been going along for months without any care at all,” Karen says. “We worked from dawn to dark, straight through.”

Mary Kollar recalls the improvisational nature of providing care. “Something unexpected can happen. For example, we ran out of some things and decided to pay for them ourselves. We were reimbursed, which is good, because I was running out of money,” she laughs.

This same improvisational attitude, doing the best you can with what you have, is a hallmark of nursing outreach from UT, from villages in Ghana to the tropical landscapes of Costa Rica and Dominican Republic, a 2009 destination for a clinical team from the school.

Ghana missions began in 2001, in concert with the University of Massachusettes at Amherst (Ghana Health Missions), and continued for four straight years, providing medical care to the coastal fishing villages of Sekondi and Takoradi.

For both students and faculty on those trips, says faculty leader Karen Lasater, the word of the day was “respect.”

“The idea is to lift up local providers, to break down barriers on both sides, to get to know each other, to learn there are other ways to get the job done,” she says. “You’re wanting to respect and promote the autonomy of the healthcare providers who are there. So that’s what we did—and we developed a great rapport.”

Much of the work in Ghana centered around immunizations, gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, tropical diseases, management of village hypertension clinics and setting up health education classes.

In the past five years, international service learning experiences, open to junior, senior and graduate level nursing students, have focused on Central America, with teams from UT assisting in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and Belize.

Working as a faculty leader on many of these missions, Karen Lasater recalls that the team spends a lot of time with local physicians, getting to know them and how they work and think. “In Belize,” she recalls, “we had the opportunity to work with a physician from Cuba, who was there volunteering like us, pitching in.”

The numbers speak of the texture of the experience. In 2006, for example, in Costa Rica and Panama, UT provided health services for over 400 patients (including free medications), immunized over 200 infants and children, provided dental care (extractions, flouride treatments and cleanings) to 75 people, and conducted health education classes on disease prevention, proper nutrition, and management of chronic illnesses.

From another perspective, the “world’s away” aspect of UT volunteer nursing services doesn’t have to translate to literally being a world away. At a homeless shelter in Knoxville, acute problems like colds and lice, along with conditions like allergies and asthma, require the same close attention as a medical issue in Ghana.

Mary Kollar has been instrumental in providing medical services at the People’s Clinic of the Volunteer Ministry Center on Jackson Street since 2000, generally working side-by-side with students, as she did in New Orleans.

The effect on providers, cross-town or across the world, is cut from the same global, inter-cultural, bridging-of-diversity cloth.

Brad Stansberry, a graduate nursing student who helped Mary Kollar at the Ministry Center as a part of his clinical rotation, succinctly summarizes:

“It’s nice to be able to help people. Sometimes this is the last place a person can go for help.”

The Domestic Violence Clinic at UT College of Law: Quietly going about changing lives on a daily basis

2009-05-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

There’s a split second of recognition, a flash of light, a dam bursting, a note that rockets to self.

It says: “Ohmygosh, I’m in good hands here.”

For victims of domestic violence who make connections with the Fourth Circuit Court in Knoxville to file for protective orders and meet with an assigned student lawyer from UT, this appears to be the emotional bridgework that happens in the first meeting.

“One of the first things we learn,” says Maryann Kassaee, a former UT Domestic Clinic student lawyer, “is to listen. You just have to be there, listen and stay clear.”

“I had a teenager filing for protection from the abuse of a boyfriend,” Maryann recalls. “I just kept listening. What came up was information that was really critical to her life, something I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Once she opened up, I could bring some other professionals into it.”

Knoxville attorney Donna Smith (UT College of Law ‘98), who supervises the program and teaches at the Law School, says these third year students are really stepping off into the art of lawyering when they agree to take on domestic violence cases in the Fourth Circuit Court.

“They learn how to collect evidence, where to get a police report, how to get a photograph they need, where to find criminal records of an alleged abuser,” Donna says. “And they learn to listen and to look for signs of domestic violence, like issues of power and control. Very often, we’re talking about economic abuse in addition to physical abuse. There’s just nowhere to go when the abuser controls the financial resources. So when a victim shows up and sits down with one of our assigned lawyers, they’re often telling their story for the first time.

“Our students are provisionally licensed,” she says. “They’re going up against seasoned lawyers so they know they have to work twice as hard. The client sees and feels how involved and how prepared their attorney is and their response has just been wonderful.”

For UT students (four per semester) who find themselves drawn to practicing domestic law while in school, getting deeply involved---listening, emotionally committing, presenting evidence and arguing a case--can bring up its own set of trials.

“To some degree or other, all students are afraid when they step up to address the court for the first time,” Donna says. “I tell them to view fear as a doorway. You’ve got to walk through it or you’ll never get to the other side. The good news is I’ve never had a student who died.”

The Fourth Circuit Court’s long-time presiding judge, Bill Swann (UT College of Law ’75), is a “huge proponent of the program,” Donna says.

“He never treated us as less than full-fledged lawyers,” Maryann recalls. “Everyone in the court is good to work with; all the clerks, courteous, friendly. They appreciated us.”

From the bench’s perspective, what these students are doing is “changing lives.”

“Their work is uniformly excellent,” says Judge Swann, “We’ve come to call them the ‘dream team’ because of the relationships they build with their clients, their thoroughness, and their caring attitude.”

The one advantage of students practicing law as it pertains to gaining and enforcing protective orders in domestic violence cases is the “compact nature of the law in this area,” according to Ben Barton, faculty member and head of the clinic at UT. “You can be up and running in two weeks,” he says, “and get right in there on the front line.”

“I had a good feeling that I knew what I was doing,” Maryann remembers. “In a hearing on an ex parte order of protection, there are certain things you can do and that’s it—it’s a narrow band of the law.”

Students who are enrolled in Family Law or Women and the Law can take the Domestic Violence Clinic as an additional class. The idea of a domestic violence clinic evolved informally in the 2000/2001 school year when several students approached UT professor Deseriee Kennedy about the prospect of assisting victims of domestic violence in securing orders of protection. Professor Kennedy, enthusiastic about the opportunity, recruited Donna Smith, a recent law school graduate with an established family law practice, to supervise the students. Those choosing to engage in the work are provisionally licensed and practice under the charter of the UT Legal Clinic.

“It’s a service to the community,” says Ben Barton, “and one that is very, very important. The students who pitch in have to have equal measures of sympathy and empathy when they’re digging into these cases. It’s a powerful experience.”

In addition to the assigned lawyer, there are many other agencies and programs that converge on the scene of domestic disputes and violence, not the least of which are support groups for any of the parties involved.

“It’s critical to know you’re not alone as a victim of domestic violence,” says Donna Smith, “and that holds regardless of a person’s age, regardless of whether it’s a husband-wife issue, a grandmother and a granddaughter, a woman or a man. We’ve represented the whole spectrum.”

UT Writer In Residence: From a small nook in the library, a world unfolds

2009-05-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

According to Brian Griffin, the first UT writer in residence, you’d have to go in the card catalogue and look under “American Chemical Society” to ferret your way to the remote but beautiful writer’s space he was given—a space set aside for the year’s resident writer.

“I wrote a lot of poetry there,” he says, “received a small honorarium, and had access to the collection. I got lots of support. I wanted to return the favor.”

The Writer in Residence program began in 1998 as a UT library-based initiative to support emerging authors. When first approached by Paula Kaufman, who was dean of UT Libraries at the time, Brian was teaching creative writing at the university and readily accepted the appointment.

“I had bumped into several grad student gatherings at the University of Virginia where original works were read and I thought we had a wonderful opportunity to do that here,” Brian recalls. “The English Department got right behind it. We went ahead on a shoestring, held the first readings in the faculty lounge, and left the doors wide open so anyone who was walking by would be drawn in.”

The idea exploded in its dimensions in subsequent years, with each resident writer working with the English Department and library to stage readings by student authors, local writers, and nationally known, award-winning poets and artists invited to take part in the series.

Called “Writers in the Library,” this now long-running string of literary events has featured national poet laureate Ted Kooser, poets Charles Wright and Yusef Komunyakaa, author and essayist Elizabeth Gilbert, and actor, poet and country rocker Steve Earle. Local authors reading in the series have included Linda Parsons and Jeff Daniel Marion, Marilyn Kallet, Michael Knight, Jack Renfro, and Kevin Bradley.

“I hosted Ted Kooser,” says Marilyn Kallet, author, English professor and devoted series advocate, “I also hosted Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa a few years ago. We filled the auditorium and lots of overflow rooms. Everyone was so excited about Yusef’s presence. He did an informal presentation that was the jewel in the crown.”

The Writer in Residence program will take a year’s hiatus in the 2009-2010 academic year with fall-offs in supporting endowments, according to JoAnne Deeken, director of technical services for UT Libraries, though the reading series will again set sail in the library’s auditorium, generally with readings each month.

“The program will continue,” says Marilyn Kallet. “All of us in the creative writing program will make sure that the widest possible diversity of speakers comes to campus, the highest quality of writing in diverse genres will flourish. Our students need the contact with major American and world writers, and they will find themselves in that excellent company in the months and years ahead.”

As an example, Marilyn says she’ll be hosting Prairie Schooner editor Hilda Raz in late October. Also scheduled to visit: Dorothy Allison, 1992 National Book Award finalist for her semi-autobiographical first novel, Bastard out of Carolina.

In the program’s history, fiction writer and playwright Pamela Schoenwaldt followed Brian Griffin, serving as writer in residence for the years 2001 through 2003. In that time frame, she helped double the number of readings in the auditorium series, focusing on local writers.

“One night we had a discussion on death, spinning a dialogue around faith and reason,” she says. “No matter the subject, it’s always a wonderful partnership with the library, a chance to meet local and regional writers, and, for students, a validation of their work.”

Poet and non-fiction writer Patricia Waters served as writer in residence for 2003-2004, followed by RB Morris, poet, editor, and musician, from 2004 to 2008, an individual described by Barbara Dewey, Dean of Libraries, “as our first, and only, Writers in the Library performer to be backed up by a double bass.” The current writer in residence is Kali Meister whose writing grows out of acting and directing in theatre, performance art, and film productions.

“During the time I was there we began archiving the readings,” says RB Morris. “That was probably my major contribution. That and the fact that I also included songwriters. The song lyric is a poetic voice that has enriched western culture and has been a major ambassador of the American arts to the rest of the world.

“Knoxville has a long and rich history in both literature and music. The Writers in the Library program is a great outreach program for connecting student and university writers with local and regional writers. And, of course, it's always a powerful and often pivotal connection for student writers to be exposed first hand to internationally renowned authors. The program consistently brought all these connections together.”

JoAnne Deeken who, along with Martha Rudolph, coordinates the library-side of the reading series, says the community of Knoxville hugely benefits. “Families of the students come; there’s a lot of dialogue after the readings. We have audiences, depending on the subject matter, that include every age.”

“The best thing for me,” she says, “is the interaction between audience and presenter. I remember someone asking a writer, ‘How can you keep writing?’ and the writer said, ‘I can’t not do it.’”

And, as Marilyn Kallet says, there’s something to be said for the place itself.

“Any space where poetry and fiction have been honored consistently over the years becomes sacred space, and the library auditorium is no exception,” she says. “We have learned to gather there, in that venue, and our expectations of hearing strong new work have been raised and met. So the venue is important. A lot of creative energy and skill have found a home there.”

Considering the warp and bent and impact of the entire series, Brian Griffin says good humoredly, “I don’t think Paula Kaufman would have envisioned all this.”

The Writer in Residence program was named in honor of former UT Chancellor Jack E. Reese in 2005. Reese, who died in May 2005, was an active supporter of the UT Libraries and the local writing community.

So what does vision have to do with advertising?

2009-03-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

(From a Jay Fields & Company web site sketch)

Given the rush of our times, it's easy enough to perceive the graphic arts--and everything to do with branding--as a steaming, frenetic, Mac-based, overnight kitchen works.

I'm reminded of the "Let's do an ad" New Yorker cartoon where four ad-types luminesce in delight.

I'm also thinking about Witold Rybczynski's recently published biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, and the grounded sense of practicality Olmsted brought to landscape architecture--along with his intuitive understanding of what something will look like and feel like twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years from now.

Much in the way of Olmsted, much in the way his great park designs--like Manhattan's Central Park, Montreal's Mount Royal or Boston's Back Bay Fens--were indeed public art, it would seem for a brand to last the creators of that brand would best have feet in two worlds; the one being the world of the New Yorker cartoon, the other being the world of "what can be," the world of imagination, the world of vision.

The benefactors of visioning--whether it be Olmsted "seeing" Central Park and sparking the imagination of New York City commissioners in the mid-19th century or an agency presenting a long-range campaign--are not only the targets of the communication itself but everyone engaged in the process of "becoming" what the communication expresses or implies. Make no mistake: communications reflect intention, energy, grace and vision. Without consideration of "who are we" and "who we want to be," thoughtless, marginally strategic communications can actually bury a brand, or at the very least, do it serious bodily harm.

Along this line of thought, it's arguably reprehensible for a design group or agency to respond to a client who needs something yesterday without considering the effect on the brand and the total context within which such an emergency exists. Further, any designer who is new to a brand needs to understand where that brand has been so that, with new work, any reasonable foundations can be cherished and enhanced rather than automatically blown up or relabeled as lost civilization. For marketers and stakeholders of any stripe, the manual in the glove compartment says: respect the brand, respect where the brand has been; and, above all, respect what the brand can be.

The American Institute of Graphic Arts has recently studied and refined the language of process, drawn from case studies with many successful designers and from conversations with executives at IBM and Herman Miller and Hewlett-Packard and other companies (as reported in Communications Arts in May of '03).

AIGA articulates three phases in arriving at approach--defining the problem, innovating and, finally, generating value. Under the first, the team defines the problem it is trying to solve, then envisions the end state. As CA reports, "Knowing what victory is becomes vital as you embark on the journey of solving the problem." And, "If you've ever been part of a team that seemed lost, it's likely they skipped this step."

Talking about a step under the innovating phase, about enabling the team, the article explains, "When integral to the project, designers can help the team work as a team by helping them make choices, envisioning different outcomes, seeing the 'white space' between and connecting divergent views and approaches."

And, in a step under generating value, called "choosing the best solution," there's this: "(Designers) can often be the pivotal voice in this stage, helping to argue for the best overall solution. We can visualize the case, see different sides of the problem and lay out a path for making a commitment to a given solution."

Inherent in this model for creativity and decision-making is the notion of vision. It can pull up to the station as part of a brand discovery process, as part of long-range planning, as part of on-going conversation and dialogue between team members. But mostly, it has to show up--and the more articulate, the more inspired, the better.

Years ago, as part of a creative team positioning the City of Asheville, a long-term process that kept getting more and more refined, our communications began to fall into the elegant arena of a place that had the finely-hued sophistication of a true city fully surrounded by breathtaking wilderness--both environments a delight to the spirit. Our original campaign, in fact, used the line "It will lift your spirit," the topography borrowed from the cover of Harper's Magazine, the spokesperson George Plimpton, a great choice to represent the tone and voice we wanted to convey.

In its finest hour, a well-presented brand represents an appreciation for "what is;" it sustains the earth, makes a difference, engages customers in an experience that will bring them back 20 years from now or even 50 years from now.

Given that opportunity and that sort of perspective, well yeah, hey--let's do an ad.

The Sandy Schenck/Green River Story

2009-03-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

(Written for my friends at Green River Preserve)

The approach road reels and unspools through rhododendron and blanketing stands of hardwoods and pines until it swivels off to become an even narrower lane. Suddenly, you’re on the property of Green River Preserve. It’s a place of ponds, lakes, streams, waterfalls and open fields; of screened-in porches, cabins and lodge rooms; of boys and girls in the midst of discovering a different world, oftimes the one inside themselves.

Every summer this nature and science camp, south of Brevard, welcomes gifted and talented children into an atmosphere defined by respect for self, respect for others, and respect for all living things.

Its success flows from the initial inspiration and strategic decisions of naturalist Sandy Schenck who, upon settling on the perfect piece of ground, literally and figuratively, has gone about positively changing the lives of youth for more than two decades.

The Schenck family purchased the thirty-four hundred acres, now called Green River Preserve, in the early 1950s as a place to spend weekends and summers fishing, hiking and exploring the Green River Valley. As a child, Sandy learned how to track, hunt, milk cows, churn butter and cook on a woodstove from people whose families had lived in the valley for generations. Through their passed-down stories, he absorbed a reverence for the land and valley history.

Leaving behind the known world of camping

In 1987, Sandy left a career in business to fulfill his lifelong dream of starting a summer camp on the Preserve. After touring camps from Georgia to Maine, a conversation with a child psychologist about the needs of very bright children planted a seed that would later blosssom into Green River.

Sandy wondered: Why not offer “gifted and talented” children a piece of wild mountain geography where they can grow both as naturalists and individuals? In asking the question, a new kind of experience was born; a reinvention of what a summer camp can be and the beginnings of a “wilderness school for gifted children.”

For starters, Green River is a noncompetitive camp, perfectionism being an issue particularly relevant to gifted populations. Campers learn noncompetitive skills—like canoeing, rock climbing, pottery and fly-fishing—all alternatives to competitive team sports.

The focal point is experiential learning. Naturalists at the camp, called “mentors,” are men and women of exceptional character who love teaching and love the outdoors, among them foresters, geologists, biologists, musicians, and artists. Going with the flow of a single day’s activities, a camper could easily run under a waterfall, crawl into a cave, explore an archeological site, track wildlife, taste an edible plant, and stomp feet to the rhythms of Appalachian banjos and guitars.

Hiking into astonishment

A snake-like line of back-packed 12-year-olds rattles up a non-existent path moving over and under fallen trees, some four feet in diameter, across boulders and tumbling creeks.

The group’s mentor, Naomi, scarcely taller than her students, rounds everyone up to encircle an outcrop of wild ginseng. She talks about how this curative plant strengthens the body and about how rare “sang” is, these days, in the mountains.

The destination is Uncle’s Creek Falls, a crashing column of white water.

Once there, some of the middle schoolers, up from Charlotte, join the ranks of past Green River “Polar Bears” by standing under a long flume and repeating something about being frozen 10 times. Around to the side and up the shank of a hill, a boy climbs next to a lichen-covered rock and finds a salamander. He yells back to his partner, “Look at this! Look at this!”

These kinds of experiences richly reflect the camp’s mission: “to provide a challenging and nurturing learning experience and to inspire a profound appreciation of interconnectedness, ecological respect, and the joy of living.”

Staying consistent with that mission is particularly important with gifted populations, given the many sizes and shapes of giftedness. Children can be gifted academically, linguistically, artistically, musically, scientifically, or in many other ways. In that light, and to de-emphasize competition, the ending score of all games is “fun to fun.” There are no teachers, classes or super stressy races or tests, only naturalists and counselors and lots of activities.

Lives changed

In the end, Green River makes a difference in children’s lives, whether or not they have seen a wild turkey, a deer, a bear, and a venomous snake during their summer stay—the camp’s “Grand Slam” of sightings. And the GRP experience is never forgotten.

“More than anyone or anything else in the world I am who I am today because of Green River Preserve,” writes a South Carolina camper.

Sandy Schenck recalls another former camper and mentor, Chris Paul, who looked up from his work in the Peace Corps in Africa to discover an approaching figure wearing a red GRP bandanna—a small world, made smaller by the fundamental notion that man and nature are one, woven together, and that we are all potential leaders and stewards in watching over the Earth.

There are Woodcraft Laws at Green River, one of which has to do with Beauty. In part, it says: “Be a friend of all wildlife. Conserve land, forest and rivers.”

Recently retiring from direct management of the camp, Sandy Schenck continues to take on the evocation of this Woodcraft Law as a personal belief system and way of life. In recent years, he has settled parts of the Preserve into conservation easements, initiated the documentation of passed-down stories about the families of the valley (including a wonderful piece by cousin David Schenck about Joe Capps, who for years walked 28 miles each way to his mill job in Greenville, South Carolina), and inspired the creation of a public school program called “Muddy Sneakers.” In the fall of 2008, Muddy Sneakers provided a semester-long series of wilderness expeditions for roughly a thousand school kids in Western North Carolina.

All these experiences wend their way back to Green River Preserve and to the idea behind it, a place set aside from the crush and stress of daily life, a place that provides ballast for “nature deficit disorder.” Green River, in fact, is inclined to operate in sync with another of its Woodcraft Laws: “Be kind, do at least one act of unbargaining service each day. Be helpful, do your share of the work. Be joyful, seek the joy of being alive.”

A nice description, so far, of the life of Sandy Schenck.

(Sandy and his wife, Missy, remain executive directors of Green River Preserve, with the day-to-day direction of the camp now in the experienced hands of Paul and Beth Bockoven.)

Sidebar:

An ageless corridor, preserved.

The land occupied by Green River Preserve is bounded on one side by 10,000-acre DuPont State Forest, on another by vast lands under conservation easements established by John Ball. These protected parcels connect with YMCA Camp Greenville and Jones Gap State Park in South Carolina. All this wild acreage, which includes the Schenck family portion of some 2,800 acres, crosses the continental divide and forms a natural corridor for the movement of wildlife in upstate SC and WNC. Sandy Schenck has worked for years to keep this corridor open and unhampered by civilization. His dedication to keeping the mid-section of this natural area free from development speaks of a commitment to principles upon which the Preserve is founded. “We are guests of the land”, he says. “The plants and animals who live here are the real occupants.”

The Occasional Short Piece Dept.: A Night On Roan Mountain

2009-03-21T05:56:00.000-07:00

Going into Grassy Bald on Roan Mountain one day in May, I met a man and his two dogs coming out. Actually I first met the man's skiddish border collie, then I met his master and dog two. I stopped to pet dog two when the man asked me if I was staying over. I said I was and he said it was really beautiful where I was going. To which I said I hope it doesn't rain. He paused for what felt like a considerable time, looked out toward the sky, and said, 'Nah, I don't think so.'

With that prediction at hand, I continued walking toward my vision of a clear night on top of a mountain, a number of miles from any kind of civilized thing.

At first I set up my tent next to a thicket of rhododendron. Then I thought better of it and pulled all my stuff over to a level spot next to a stone fire site that was obviously used a lot. It was flat and open and, I reasoned, less vulnerable to attack by bears.

The opening to my tent faced north, so just before I pulled myself in for the evening, I sat in the long grass and made a sketch of sunlight finishing out the day on mountain ridges to the north and east, each becoming dimmer and lighter in blue until the last in line could be easily mistaken for a low bank of clouds.

It had been gusty since I arrived but as soon as I got settled in, my nylon tent began to ripple and breathe like some gelatinous being. The walls would cave forward or fly backwards and my head would bob around inside as the tent sides snapped, buckled, and kited this way and that. I grabbed some 10 pound stones from the fire place and tossed them into the corners of the tent. Still, the prospect of sleeping seemed distant.

I had resolved to stay put when, about 11 or so (I'm guessing since, whoops, I forgot to bring any kind of timepiece) I noticed the tent flickering as if a firefly had happened by. In a sudden panic, I realized it was not an insect, but a major electrical storm somewhere nearby. I thought: OK, I'm on a bald at about 6,000 feet, in the open, with the wind about to toss me in the air, in the path of a major electrical storm, meaning much lightning and rain. I'm a target, I thought. Do I pack up everything and try to get back to the car in the middle of a huge storm, across two open balds, with clouds sweeping the mountain, along dark footpaths that I didn't know too well?

In a sort of fit of 'well, do something!', I rampaged through everything in the tent, stuffing bananas, water color tin, oat meal bags, loose socks, camp stove, water bottles (I'd brought two), trail maps (for another mountain), sketch book, sardines, and extra glasses in my my pack. I shoved the pack on one shoulder, then grabbed the tent and hauled it across the long grass so that it came to rest snug against a room-size boulder with an alley underneath a man could crawl into. This tent site was far from flat and I shared one wall of the tent with the boulder, a fact that became oddly comforting.

I tossed my pack in and then myself, with everything sliding toward the rock on a fairly severe pitch. I figured if worse came to worse, I could get out of the tent and crawl under the boulder and last out the night there through the tempest that was on its way. I just remember thinking, 'Oh, Jeez, I've pitched my tent on the edge of a weather front on a mountain.'

Then, and only then, something dawned on me. Between occasional wisps of clouds floating by overhead, I could see stars. I flipped on my stomach and began watching the lightning storm. It was all happening beneath me. Up the valley, west to east, maybe 2,000 feet below, a war had broken out. First one side would fire a series of volleys. Huge cumulus clouds would light up in a sequence of illuminations. Then, to the east let's say, a series of answering volleys. Mega-explosions, sometimes eight, ten, a dozen in a row. The sky reverberated and the clouds danced with white light. It appeared very possible that the city of Elizabethton had gone to war with the town of Damascus.

And it wasn't a brief skirmish. On and on they fought, past midnight, past one a.m., and when I wasn't watching, I'd keep track of the parries and thrusts on the sides of my tent. Finally, at some point in the war, with my legs buckled against the boulder and my body sliding inexorably toward the depression at its base, I fell asleep. I remember a few raindrops hitting the tent, but I must have crashed at least for an hour or two before the next event.

There were times in all the whipping of the wind across the boulder and through my tent when everything would grow still and silent. One part of my brain had it figured out as the eye of a very rare mountain tornado. Another part took the viewpoint that maybe the wind was subsiding. At any rate, just in the middle of one of these odd silences, I un-scrunched my legs to full length and scooted my head outside the tent opening. Over top the blue nylon, the sky had become a spectacle. The handle of the Big Dipper did that sort of lazy pointing thing at what seemed to be several gobs of pinholes flaring out of the deep blackness. Every star, and there must have been hundreds, seemed like flakes of crystal up there, occasionally winking through a wisp of cloud passing over the bald. I was mesmerized. The war had apparently quit down below with no clear winner. Up here, above Grassy Bald, stars flickered messages from distances impossible to grasp. They were simply distances on the other side of the universe from this mountain--so far that my entire lifespan would be a wink in the voyage of light from even the nearest one.

The rest of the night I lay there, too lazy to change my tent site again, reveling in my charmed escape from armagedon. I tried to use my pack as a pillow with tiny successes, so tiny that I recall I was still working on the problem when I heard a distant bird cry and realized that the world was becoming a dull blue.

I had no idea what time it was and smiled when I got to the car and realized that I had made breakfast, cleared camp, packed up everything, and scrambled over the Appalachian Trail a mile or two, and it wasn't yet eight o'clock. Still, to be up then, with no one else on the path and the sun scraping across the ground, electrifying the green of the balds, vaporizing the ground fog, well, it is enough to know the earth has turned around another time and I am on it.

On my way down the mountain, I stopped at the little store, bought gas and a cup of coffee. The roads were puddled up and the gloss of rainwater hung on parts of the pavement. I asked the man at the store if it had rained down there.

He said, and this is a direct quote, 'I really don't know. I was in bed by 11.'

Anne Lamott on process

2009-02-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

I think this is a wonderful metaphor for the creative process from one of my favorite writers and favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird:

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't--and, in fact, you're not supposed to--know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture. In the last chapter, for instance, what had my attention were the contents of my lunch bag. But as the picture developed, I found I had a really clear image of the boy against the fence. Or maybe your Polaroid was supposed to be a picture of that boy against the fence, and you didn't notice until the last minute that a family was standing a few feet away from him. Now, maybe it's his family, or the family of one of the kids in his class, but at any rate these people are going to be in the photograph, too. Then the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer, and finally you see the husband and wife holding their baby with two children standing beside them. And at first it all seems very sweet, but then the shadows begin to appear, and then you start to see the animal tragedy, the baboons baring their teeth. And then you see a flash of bright red flowers in the bottom left quadrant that you didn't even know were in the picture when you took it, and these flowers evoke a time or a memory that moves you mysteriously. And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

The Occasional Short Piece Dept.: The Springs of Weeki Wachee

2009-02-11T05:19:00.000-08:00

In the winter, my mother would pile me and my sister into one of those huge, bulbous cars of the fifties and drive us from Tennessee to Florida. We’d sit in the back and count cows until one person got to 500 or the other person gave up.

Once in Florida, we’d pull into a parkway rest stop and get a free glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed. Tasting oj under palm trees opened me up to the idea that there were exotic pleasures in the world and maybe if I went far enough in a big enough car, I'd find them.

Sure enough, it happened. At Weeki Wachee Springs, north of Tampa, after miles of cows, I suddenly found myself in the presence of mermaids. They would gloriously flap around with fish and manatees and seemingly operate without air for whole stretches of time. I was completely stunned and mesmerized.

In Delray Beach, we’d stay in my grandparents house near the intra-coastal canal. I loved the thick, scented air of South Florida, the sail boats on the blue water, the porches covered up with flowering plants, the palm tree at the back of the house which ran along the ground so you could walk up its trunk.

My dad would come down, at some point, and explain something about the canal and how far it went up the coast and how you could sail down it.

I wandered the sides of the canal, dreaming about boarding a schooner and heading out into open sea. Maybe I would wind up in Africa, where snakes hung from trees among mysterious shrieks and mutterings. Maybe there were real mermaids out there, like the ones I had seen at Weeki Wachee, and they’d come up to young men and guide them up remote rivers.

I have almost no memory of the rest of my life back home. I don’t recall grade school teachers or what we studied. There was only the Lone Ranger at six o’clock, my hill, the field down by the creek which would later become a Little League Park, the girl next door who was two years older.

Without the amazing taste of fresh orange juice, the blue of the canal, the red of bougainvillea, the green of the mermaid tails, it’s entirely possible that my life would have never left the gray scale of the Eisenhower years in Tennessee.

On the other hand, who knows if I would have followed the tides of my curiosity about everything, if I would have fallen in love with mountains and forests and seas, had I never seen the mermaids of Wicki Wachee.

(Post Script: From time to time a threatened species, the Weeki Wachee swimmers still perform twice a day at the park’s underwater theater. The water temperature is 72 degrees.)

The Headwaters Gathering at Warren Wilson

2009-02-10T05:39:00.000-08:00

Southern Appalachia at the Crossroads

From Warren Wilson's release: Hosted by Warren Wilson, The Wilderness Society, and Orion Magazine, Headwaters Gathering will speak to the challenges climate change poses for life in Southern Appalachia and create a call for action. Keynote speaker Herman Daly, along with Majora Carter, Winona LaDuke, retired coal miner Chuck Nelson of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, David Orr, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center scientist and lead author on the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Dr. Thomas Peterson, Janisse Ray, The New York Times DOT EARTH's Andrew Revkin, and National Wildlife Federation President and CEO Larry Schweiger will engage us in working across divides, galvanizing our concerns, and strategizing for change. From a town meeting, convened by a panel of experts, to compelling whole-group sessions, and a writer's intensive, we will find our collective voice. Friday night's session is free and open to the public but pre-registration is required. Visit www.headwatersgathering.org soon for information and registration.

The story: Coming around full circle (again)

2009-02-08T16:08:00.000-08:00

From an earlier blog:

I started my career as a journalist, working for a daily newspaper that covered the coal counties of Southwest Virginia. A few weeks after I joined the paper, fresh from journalism school, I made a routine call to the sheriff's department in a mountainous county. A deputy there said, “Well, there is one thing that happened,” then proceeded to tell me about a fire in a remote valley in which three children burned to death. He referred me to a social worker who knew the family. Apparently a single mother had left her home to gather in water from a nearby well when the house erupted in flames from an over-turned kerosene lantern. It was a small frame cottage and it went up like dried moss. All the mother could do, the social worker said, was stand at the window and scream for her children.

The story means more to me today than it did when I wrote it. Then it was news and a pat on the back. Now there’s something unforgettable in its retelling.

I spent about three years as a journalist; some of that time writing about troop exercises on the Czech border and how to navigate the bahnhof as an Army writer in Germany.

Once back in the states, I took a job in advertising--as a copywriter--veering off from straight reporting.

I soon discovered that creative work, the craft of it, pretty much boiled down to beseeching the universe for a concept. Even so, it generally spun around the retelling of a human experience; around some form of story that triggered a response--wonder, maybe, or dismay, or curiosity. In other words, the best work, as I saw it, even in the micro-world of a :30 commercial, once again had to do with story.

When the nineties drew to a close, the world I knew began to shift. Less advertising, more work involving longer pieces; more web work, more brochures, more magazine development (in print and on-line), more portraits of causes and institutions.

Now I’m part of another sea change: blogging as a planetary phenomenon. As a communicator, I love the idea of it and I’m crazy about the form. Here’s why:

• It’s fast. You can get a blog out as quickly as an email; okay, it can be an email—to virtually any constituency you want to clump together in a working list-serve, whether for yourself, a social change organization, small business or non-profit.

• It’s flexible. You can totally tailor what you want to say to fit and resonate with anyone in the known world

• It has an inherent viral quality. And can be passed along willy-nilly or purposefully across vast social networks

• You can marry all the strategic, conceptual and visual impact of advertising with the intimacy of a diary and/or the news-worthy and linear qualities of good reporting

• And, finally, it’s a great medium for telling stories--long or short stories, rambling or to the point, epic or not, the stuff of good journalism, good advertising and good memory.

Looking back, I feel like I’ve come a long way from the nervous chat I had with a social worker in Ft. Blackmore, Virginia, thirty-five years ago. But I’ve also come all the way back around to that very starting place. Back to the importance of a critical piece of information, well-told, delivered in a timely manner, then retold and passed along (sometimes with great rapidity) person to person, story to story to story to story until it’s embedded in the social fabric and the history of our time, and a part of the human experience.

I'm so glad to find sanity

2009-02-08T15:38:00.000-08:00

Thank you Seth Godin (from a recent blog):

The Super Bowl hype is blissfully long gone, and lazy media outlets can no longer reprint press releases and dissect multi-million dollar wastes of time and money.

The lesson of these ads is simple. Putting on a show is expensive, time-consuming and quite fun. And it rarely works.

The Gatorade commercial, or the guy clipping his toenails or someone throwing a rock through a vending machine... it's all show biz, it's not marketing.

Marketing is telling a story that sticks, that spreads and that changes the way people act. The story you tell is far more important than the way you tell it. Don't worry so much about being cool, and worry a lot more about resonating your story with my worldview. If you don't have a story, then a great show isn't going to help much.

(And yes, every successful organization has a story, even if they've never considered running an ad, during the Super Bowl or anywhere else.)

Social media: Moving mountains to MySpace

2009-01-21T13:18:00.000-08:00

In its campaign to provide "reality" information to kids who smoke or are on the verge of getting into it, ad agencies Arnold/Crispin Porter + Bogusky decided to reach teens with Broadway-esque, spoofy, web-centered theater bannered "The Sunny Side of Truth"--with story-telling at the heart.

I love the media strategy, as described in Communication Arts:
"Today, The Sunny Side campaign is using the Web, social networking sites, iTunes, and mobile media to communicate its message. Instead of trying to tear teens away from their MySpace pages, The Sunny Side features pages on MySpace, Bebo and Hi5."

To be relevant, you have to live where they're living.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Foothills Equestrian Nature Center (FENCE)

2009-01-09T06:28:00.000-08:00

Working with colleague John Huie, I recently supported this long-time equestrian and nature preserve beautifully situated beneath the Saluda escarpment in its quest to establish an outdoor academy that recognizes "master ecologists."

Our strategies emerged after developing a full field curriculum which we were able to test with FENCE members. Based on email survey responses, we shaped the course offerings and the academy's organization, and uncovered an opportunity to link up with the South Carolina Master Naturalist Program, whose first chapter was born in the state's coastal lowlands.

Many thanks to: John Huie, and to Melissa LeRoy, Norm Powers, and Tom Jackson of FENCE.

Magazines, lately

2009-01-09T05:12:00.000-08:00

We're on hard scrabble roads in the magazine publishing world. For an established advertiser, a back cover could conceivably be offered for next to nothing. Rates for e-zines are more likely to hold, I'd imagine, but the times may offer up some opportunities.

Revenues being what they are, the great trick is to hold on to excellence of content. Beautifully written pieces offered by outside sources, well-researched and verified, drafted to fall within the context of a specific editorial framework, may be just the ticket for a particular business and of considerable help to a particular publisher. If the integrity of the piece holds, everyone benefits, and especially the reader.

Analytics, in perspective

2009-01-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

After a good bit of "white paper" research, I started to get this picture:

The beauty of converting printed pieces into web content has to do with the ground gained in being able to track the popularity of a particular on-line article, message, forum, viewpoint, sketch, image or idea.

There are no on-board metrics, so to speak, with a printed magazine.

On the other hand, given the same publication on-line, an editor can see how specific content is faring by monitoring page views, unique visitors, actions made per visit, subscriptions, logins, registrations, click-throughs to links, and cancellations--not to mention direct feedback from readers.

These tracked responses can set up the possibility of Stradivarius-like fine tunings.

Analytics serve the storyteller. By trying different sorts of content, you can evolve a tighter understanding of your audience, blend editing and measurement, give air to new ideas, get better at what you do.

In honor of 2008

2008-12-30T14:04:00.001-08:00

An image from a November trip to New Orleans to restore a double shotgun house in the Upper Ninth Ward owned by an 81 year old lady who weathered Katrina. Here's to everyone who miraculously weathered the amazingly heart-wrenching and heart-lifting events of 2008.

Mushrooms

2008-12-29T05:57:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the night,
I fell on my nose.

I had been using it to sniff out things,
To jump on chance.

Now I’m back to breathing in
The moorings, mournings and mushrooms of winter
And finding balance on a dark floor.

Chronicles of Appreciation: University of Tennessee College of Business Administration

2008-12-26T04:50:00.000-08:00

Cindy Raines at UT's College of Business Administration asked me to write the college's annual report, insightful profiles of teachers and descriptive pieces of particular MBA programs and school initiatives, like undergraduate trips to explore import-export companies in Australia or sabbaticals to universities in Italy or China.

I went into the assignment wondering how interesting I could make stories about the business school. I came out flying with good energy. The place is a hot house of opportunity.

Chronicles of Appreciation: CarePartners

2008-12-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

When design partner Jim Julien and I began collaborating with CarePartners, this well-established healthcare organization was better known for one of its parts--Thoms Rehab Hospital--than for the sum total of what it provided, which included a hospice unit and a visiting care contingent.

The challenge became one of creating a new identity for the whole of the organization and giving that whole a new voice and bearing.

We conceptualized mark and stanceline (Many Hands As One), and went about developing a quarterly magazine, for both patients and the medical community, that would present this diverse, human resource group for what it was--diverse and human.

Chronicles of Appreciation: The Rathbun Center

2008-12-25T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Lewis Rathbun Center is a hospitality house primarily serving the families of patients facing overnight and longer duration stays at Mission Hospital in Asheville.

Board and staff leadership there wanted a way to "seat" each visitor in the ethos of the place, to make each visitor comfortable-totally comfortable-with everything from kitchen appliances to washing machines to the completely voluntary nature of payment for accommodations.

The strategy became a "soft" booklet, down-sized, written in story form, that could be handed out, mailed, or placed on a nightstand or pillow.

The Rathbun Center continues to be one of the premier facilities of its kind, with a roster of former guests who live throughout the world, many of whom insist on keeping in touch and, if close by, stopping in to volunteer.

Many thanks to Adelaide Key and Kay Dossett.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Life After Cancer

2008-12-25T10:32:00.000-08:00

In the zeitgeist of this small non-profit, the simple idea of hope can rearrange the molecules of run-away cells.

Established way before this sort of thinking began to have widespread providence, Life After Cancer is living proof that a focused support group can make a world of difference.

In communications, we wanted to set out this attitude in clear fashion, backed by inclusive, open, substantive programs.

Great thanks to Mary Rich Hill.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Boman Financial

2008-12-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

The basic notion behind this small space campaign was to offer a gateway to planning resources for individuals with a life of their own but not necessarily the means to cause people at Merrill Lynch to vault over their desks.

The campaign, which touched in on the nervous excitement of thinking freshly about the road ahead, created a good bit of respectful chatter and, importantly, the client felt it expressed her way of seeing things in a perfectly elegant way.

Great thanks to Beccah Bowman.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Jaan Ferree

2008-12-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

Interior designer Jaan Ferree, friend and client, wanted to create a portfolio system she could post on her site and present in consultative presentations.

Design partner Ron Zisman and I fell into a matrix of adjacent squares, each showing an aspect of the project.

The architecture fit Jaan's style of sharing exactly since she likes to point to a corner, nook, window treatment or entranceway and talk about the thinking that went into each of the choices she and her client have made.

Christmas, 2008

2008-12-25T02:46:00.000-08:00

Up early, I walk the hill behind my house,
watching the sky.
I'm hopeful for a gap
in time and space
large enough
for a miracle
to fit through.

Florence

2008-12-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

I ran in the mornings, in November especially,
along the banks of the water windings,
sometimes through an antique show in a park,
out the bus route to Fiesole,
stopping under an overpass to climb a bank
so I could walk back to our apartment
under yellowing sycamores.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Muddy Sneakers

2008-12-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

Fueled in part by the phenomenal instruction and success of Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods, Muddy Sneakers has been a passionate labor of love for all who have come in contact with it. The basic premise: expeditionary learning incorporated into the standard course of study for public school fifth graders.

Truly distinctive parts are frequency--up to 12 trips into nearby wilderness areas during each school year--and field instructor to student ratios, which are roughly 1 to 10.

This fall Muddy Sneakers served 11 schools in western North Carolina and close to 900 students.

From a communications perspective, the challenge has been to develop a brand and a brand personality inventive and large enough to work with principals, teachers, parents, kids and funders and to present all aspects of the initiative in super relevant and understandable ways.

Many thanks to Tripp Tuttle (http://www.quipcreative.com/) who teamed with me and others to congeal the look and feel of this non-profit, render a stage one web site (muddysneakers.org) and a steady stream of pieces for expositions and fund-raising events. If the kids' response to Muddy Sneakers is any indication, we have an excellent chance of modeling a good and proper, sure-fire remedy for nature deficit disorder.

I'm especially grateful to Sandy Schenck and John Huie who asked me to be a part.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Golf writing

2008-12-23T04:36:00.000-08:00

Golf has been a life-long love affair and, like most love affairs, embodies every human emotion known to man.

Because I feel so disproportionately drawn to the game, and because of the cosmic glitch that once allowed me to shoot 69 in qualifying for a tournament (hooking me forever to Shivas Irons and Bobby Jones), I have been asked on several occasions to author programs for important golf tournaments, write about golf equipment or (once) the history of a clubhouse.

For the U.S. Women’s Amateur at the Biltmore Forest Club in Asheville, I developed a hole-by-hole player’s notebook, informed by the strategic sketches of Curtis Cup player Brenda Corrie Kuehn. I also researched and wrote summary pieces on the history of tournament play at the club, touching in on the lives of Louise Suggs, Estelle Page, P.J. Boatwright, Ben Hogan, Ralph Gudahl, and Byron Nelson.

For the 2003 USGA Senior Amateur at the Virginian, I took a similar player’s approach to describing each hole, with the program itself focused primarily on the draws of the surrounding southwest Virginia region, in general.

Over the years, too, I’ve written about the golf architecture of Donald Ross, Pete Dye, Arthur Hills and Jack Nicklaus. The writing’s been great; nevertheless, I’ve still only broken 70 once.

Chronicles of Appreciation: The Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy

2008-12-22T13:36:00.000-08:00

I feel like saying: "From the folks who brought you Roan Mountain, here's a perspective on sustaining paradise." That's essentially the message of this "organically" beautiful book, created as the lead in a fund-raising campaign seeking $4 million to preserve vital watersheds and other significant properties in land trusts and conservancies.

Without 30 years of enormously dedicated work by the SAHC, Roan Mountain certainly would not be the magnificent wilderness area it currently is. The idea is to keep development from swarming its great flanks and to protect it and other wondrous places far into the future.

The strategy in this case held to a simple mission: To tell the conservancy's story with integrity and authority and to speak with reverence of the areas it protects.

Some of the language:

There is no place like Roan. Home to rare and endangered plants and animals that cannot survive elsewhere, it is one of the world's most important sanctuaries of biological diversity.

Its grassy balds, its thrown-down boulders, its firs and lilies and rhododendron, its stepping-stone mile-high mountains-Round Bald, Jane Bald, Grassy Ridge, Yellow Mountain, Little Hump and Hump Mountain-these precious notations on a map or in a walker's journal represent an ageless landscape crucial to save for future generations.

All in all, a passionate effort, a completely successful effort, and one that continues to work on me. In my life, Roan Mountain, which I've climbed, cleared and sketched, remains a sacred place like no other.

Many thanks to Jim Julien, designer, and Carolyn Novak, friend.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Asheville Tourism

2008-12-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

Running in the eighties, Asheville, it will lift your spirit was the first fully choreographed campaign after a room tax established the funding source for marketing the city to a traveling public.

In television commercials under the branding, writer George Plimpton spoke of a creative environment that attracted George Vanderbilt, George Gershwin, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and inexorably continues to inspire. Created at Price/McNabb where I worked as creative director, the campaign wrapped around the profoundly simple idea of a sophisticated and charming city within a fly-cast of deep and pristine nature.

The visitor upsurge this work triggered set off an up-building of accommodations of all kinds, from brocaded bed and breakfasts to Victorian inns to glassy hotels. More importantly, the outreach brought to our city travelers who felt at home here.

I believe we are still benefiting from the carefully articulated positioning that this campaign crystallized more than twenty years ago.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Asheville Transit Authority

2008-12-22T12:26:00.000-08:00

In the fall of 2006, riding the bus in Asheville, thanks to a three-month trial by city government, required only the willingness to show up. Fares were waived in an effort to improve passenger numbers and hold onto a percentage of the increases after the free period came to a stop.

Working with city council and the Asheville Transit Authority, Ron Zisman (http://www.ricochet.org) and I built our strategy around the notion of swelling the city's traditional rider base while going after environmentally-aware commuters who would typically drive to in-town destinations.

In both instances, communications had to read instantly. The goal became one of instantaneous visual and verbal understanding with media that included street posters, door hangers, newspaper advertising and emblematic decals that rode on the buses themselves. At the transit center, we strung banners, created flowering pots, swept up trash and catered lunch for passengers.

The trial became a major entry in the diary of the city and, in the end, a major success story when measured against original goals. Ridership has stayed up and life in Asheville remains good to great.

Chronicles of Appreciation: The University of Tennessee

2008-12-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

In the midst of a campaign to remind Tennessee residents of UT's presence in the life of the state, another need developed for a rich overview of the school--an orientation piece for visitors from other colleges and other countries.

Communication leaders (including my friend Katherine Key) wanted, at the very least, to balance UT's image as an NCAA powerhouse with other aspects of campus life, each holding out its own inherent drama and value.

The strategy became one of shuffling ten profiles into a single sketch book, lavishly illustrated and illuminated with historical time line and a clutch of effervescent sidebars on subjects like dance marathons and cosmochemistry. We also included a "Harper's Index" fact page and, in the end, brief descriptions of the nine colleges within the University. But the central theater of the piece rests in the ten profiles chosen, from Marco Institute medieval studies to campus internationalism to the court-side philosophies of Pat Summitt.

Published in the spring of 2007, the brochure (later imported to UT's web site) set off a storm of interest beyond its original purpose.

Writes Nancy McGlasson, director of undergraduate admissions: "Congratulations. . .for this magnificent piece! I would love to have lots of them for special. . .groups and let me know if we should work up a list of these sorts of things. Truly, this is the prettiest piece like this I have EVER SEEN and I see a lot of them. Get this, I cannot decide which spread is my favorite two pages."

Many thanks to Katherine Key for stewarding this project and to Alison Fields who co-drafted the profiles with me.

Chronicles of Appreciation: HandMade in America

2008-12-22T06:02:00.000-08:00

With partner Brad Campbell, I wrote the first edition of The Craft Heritage Trails of Western North Carolina and, years down the line, wrote two subsequent editions. This richly woven compendium of craft and art in the mountain counties of the state, commissioned and published by HandMade in America (an Asheville-based, but nationally celebrated non-profit), has inspired an active following—there are over 80,000 copies sold, presumably dog-eared, flagged and stuffed with scribbled reminders.

The book grew out of a strategy to build community between studios, galleries and visitors to the region and to make handmade work universally more accessible from an appreciative and experiential point of view. In short, it’s an outright celebration.

I sat in the original planning meetings for HandMade, led by Becky Anderson and Dan Ray, and feel extremely fortunate to have been involved in the unfolding of overall strategies and a ten year sequence of communications pieces.

Over that period, the handmade community has grown in leaps and bounds and the third edition of the trails book carries 200 fresh listings.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Biltmore Estate

2008-12-20T12:41:00.000-08:00

I began working on Biltmore Estate communications when admission was seven dollars and about 300,000 visitors dropped by each year. Some 15 years later, at the end of my creative journey with the Estate, guest numbers had risen to 750,000 and tickets to just under $30.

In the in-between years, I had the good fortune to design advertising programs and creative strategy for Biltmore around travel trends, gas prices, and a near continuous run of new openings, including the Downstairs, the Winery complex and Christmas (now the Estate’s most visitor-drenched time frame.)

We recast the Estate’s identity (as an “Estate” as opposed to a “House and Gardens”) and we positioned the property as a place of unfolding seasons and events, each celebrated in the grand manner of the Vanderbilt legacy with brand extensions into wines and furniture and other exquisite things.

Living close by, I often visit, and in 2003, wrote the Estate’s new visitor’s guide.

It’s great that we achieved such enormous successes over a short time frame but, truthfully, what I most cherish are the many years, at odd times of day, exploring, photographing and writing about this magnificent grande dame—infused as she is with such atrocious imagination. My daughters, I’m fairly certain, still consider Biltmore House their second childhood home.

Chronicles of Appreciation: Grandfather Mountain

2008-12-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

It's called Grandfather Mountain because, coming from Foscoe, it looks like the profile of a bearded man and because, geologically speaking, it’s older than most anything else on the planet. And about the experience of visiting—in the snowy cold, in whipping winds, in the time of flowering serviceberry or rhododendron, when blueberries and bagpipes arrive down on McCrae Meadows or when clouds cotton-stuff the valleys and leaves melt into reds and yellows and violets—in all those times, you’re in a zone of overwhelming gratitude. And you wonder: what could have possibly been so important to have pressed me down before I rose to the occasion of coming here?

In working with all this as a consultant to the mountain, our main challenge came down to discovering the most compelling reason for visits across seasons and to detailing enough of the experience—manmade and natural—to attract first-timers.

After focus groups led us to feelings and biases, we developed Nature on a whole different level and reworked all image materials, gate package and advertising, which later informed a comprehensive web site.

Looking back on the many years of connection with Grandfather, there are few experiences on Earth that can match crossing a “closed” summit parking lot behind Harris Prevost in a hundred-mile-an-hour gale. (As Catherine Morton says, “This is a serious mountain.”)

I am deeply appreciative of my friendship with the Morton family through years of connection with Grandfather and, as always, with Harris and Scottie Prevost.

The story: Coming around full circle

2008-12-17T18:29:00.000-08:00

I started my career as a journalist, working for a daily newspaper that covered the coal counties of Southwest Virginia. A few weeks after I joined the paper, fresh from journalism school, I made a routine call to the sheriff's department in a mountainous county. A deputy there said, “Well, there is one thing that happened,” then proceeded to tell me about a fire in a remote valley in which three children burned to death. He referred me to a social worker who knew the family. Apparently a single mother had left her home to gather in water from a nearby well when the house erupted in flames from an over-turned kerosene lantern. It was a small frame cottage and it went up like dried moss. All the mother could do, the social worker said, was stand at the window and scream for her children.

The story means more to me today than it did when I wrote it. Then it was news and a pat on the back. Now there’s something unforgettable in its retelling.

I spent about three years as a journalist; some of that time writing about troop exercises on the Czech border and how to navigate the bahnhof as an Army writer in Germany.

Once back in the states, I took a job in advertising--as a copywriter--veering off from straight reporting.

I soon discovered that creative work, the craft of it, pretty much boiled down to beseeching the universe for a concept. Even so, a lot of great work spun around the retelling of human experience; around some form of story that triggered a response--wonder, maybe, or dismay, or curiosity. In other words, the best work, as I saw it, even in the micro-world of a :30 commercial, once again had to do with story.

When the nineties drew to a close, the world I knew began to shift. Less advertising, more work involving longer pieces; more web work, more brochures, more magazine development (in print and on-line), more portraits of causes and institutions.

Now I’m part of another sea change: blogging as a world-wide phenomenon. As a communicator, I love the idea of it and I’m crazy about the form. Here’s why:

• It’s fast. You can get a blog out as quickly as an email; okay, it can be an email—to virtually any constituency you want to clump together in a working list-serve, whether for yourself, a social change organization, small business or non-profit.

• It’s flexible. You can totally tailor what you want to say to fit and resonate with anyone in the known world

• It has an inherent viral quality. And can be passed along willy-nilly or purposefully across vast social networks

• You can marry all the strategic, conceptual and visual impact of advertising with the intimacy of a diary and/or the news-worthy and linear qualities of good reporting

• And, finally, it’s a great medium for telling stories--long or short stories, rambling or to the point, epic or not, the stuff of good journalism, good advertising and good memory.

Looking back, I feel like I’ve come a long way from the nervous chat I had with a social worker in Ft. Blackmore, Virginia, thirty-five years ago. But I’ve also come all the way back around to that very starting place. Back to the importance of a critical piece of information, well-told, delivered in a timely manner, then retold and passed along (sometimes with great rapidity) person to person, story to story to story to story until it’s embedded in the social fabric and the history of our time, and a part of the human experience.