People doing cool things
Check out the first installment of my new monthly column for Her Nashville – a profile of Christie Andrews, who started a Nashville nonprofit dedicated to advocating for kids with learning disabilities, regardless of their families’ income. Learning Matters, Inc. helps kids who are falling behind in school (and their families) navigate the educational system and…
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’ve given in to the workout DVD craze. On Saturday, the “Insanity: Max Interval Training” 60-day fitness program arrived in the mail, and on Monday, I took a deep, terrified breath and got started. “Get ready to dig deeper than you ever have in your life,” says Shaun T.,…
I met an articulate and vivacious high school teacher named Cindy at Art Crawl last fall. We hit it off. She’s a writer and a lover of classic literature, so we had lots to talk about. And then I noticed what she had for sale: T-shirts for book geeks. I fell in love with…
Just in time for Hal’s and my 9th anniversary (which we believe to be this Friday), and also for Valentine’s Day (which Hal insists is “Amateur Night”), here is the story of how Hal and I met and how I asked him to marry me on a rudimentary slip ‘n’ slide. Apparently, plenty of…
Vali Forrister takes her Act Like a Girl creative writing camp into prison…and the results are startling.
Following up on last week’s post on people with big vision and even bigger energy, here’s an essay I wrote called “For the Grrrls” for HER Nashville magazine about my friend Vali Forrister’s autobiographical writing camp for teen girls. The fabulous program Vali created is called “Act Like a Grrrl,” and it’s been my great…
Seven or eight years ago, I was thinking about my friends Manuel and Aida Terán, a wonderful couple from the indigenous Quichua region of Ecuador who travel to Nashville most winters to sell their handmade alpaca sweaters and scarves. They work very hard when they are here, standing outside for sometimes 10 to…
The Greenery 