Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This episode of Something Worth Saving Asheville Stories of Resilience is brought to you by. Explore Asheville. Asheville, North Carolina is the kind of place where you can spend the morning on a trail with views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and then be back in town for a mind blowing dinner that is an adventure all its own. The food, the art, the music, it's all got this creative energy that just pulls you in.
And honestly, being there feels good. It's the kind of trip where you come back lighter and more inspired.
If you're looking for a getaway that blends the outdoors with culture and flavor, you need to visit Asheville.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Highland started with my father's unquenchable thirst to build, to connect, to see possibility.
Our thirst for good feels sets us apart. Good times flow as freely as our beer. Grand milestones and intimate moments become unforgettable memories and first visits become lifelong traditions.
This is Highland Brewing's thirst for good. Good flavor, a good future, and of course, all the good feels.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: I'm Jonathan Mayo.
[00:01:08] Speaker C: And I am Sarah Stock Mayo.
The moment we arrived in Asheville, we found its particular magic working its way into our souls.
Maybe it's something about the mountain air, maybe it was something in the water. But we couldn't get enough of this Appalachian town. A young waitress, also a musician. Because everyone in Asheville is some type of artist described living there as being tucked in by the mountains.
We would go a step further and say that much like the city is embraced by the Appalachians, we were enveloped with Hudson. From everyone we interviewed.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: We are recording.
[00:01:50] Speaker D: All right, we're recording now. Kyle samples Lazum Tours in Asheville, North Carolina.
My name is Mickey Pomer.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: My name is Susan Collard.
[00:01:58] Speaker D: Max Peterbot.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Joanna Patrice Haggerty.
[00:02:00] Speaker E: Well, my name is David Cody.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Jennifer Pickering.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Dorland Winkler.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Mary Green.
[00:02:04] Speaker D: I'm Russ Towers. Tony Farlow. Brian Dewine. I'm John Russell.
[00:02:07] Speaker F: Alexandria Monq.
[00:02:09] Speaker D: Wayne B. Love Barton.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Jen Murphy.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: I'm Julia Hunt.
[00:02:12] Speaker G: So my name is Blake Butwell.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Julie Bell.
[00:02:14] Speaker D: Mike Floyd is River Gagarian. Marco Rosenbrook.
[00:02:17] Speaker C: Angelique Tis.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Cistro Heron.
[00:02:19] Speaker D: I'm Alan Muska.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: I'm Leah Wong Ashburn. No hyphen.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: After a week of conversations for a book project we're working on, we decided to stay for another week and tell more of the stories we felt called to tell in this particular moment.
[00:02:33] Speaker D: I'm a percussionist, a musician.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: I'm Julie Bell. We are at Highland Real.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: These stories of Asheville were gathered seven months after Hurricane Helene. So what stories Started out as an idea to talk to people about how they built community in small cities.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: The building is not reopening.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: So we were took on another life as people began to share their stories with us.
And through these conversations, something worth saving Asheville Stories of Resilience was born.
So who are we? And why did we come to Asheville in the first place?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: I'm Jonathan Mayo, and I am a senior writer for Major League Baseball, covering the minor leagues. I've been sharing untold stories of the future stars of the game I love for more than two decades, often introducing unknown players to the public.
[00:03:31] Speaker C: And I am Sarah Stock Mayo, a singer, poet and community builder. Honestly, I've had so many different careers that when people ask my daughter what I do, she just says yes. But what really drew us to working on a project together is that we both love talking to people and hearing their stories and just have the belief that ordinary people often do extraordinary things.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Oh, and we're married, in case you were wondering.
[00:04:00] Speaker C: For 27 years and counting and with two grown children after more than a.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Quarter century together, we wanted to combine our passions, particularly baseball and the arts, while exploring what makes smaller cities around this country special.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: So everyone we told our big idea to was asking, how are you going to connect minor league baseball and the arts? And our response is that it's always been about three place.
How where we live matters and informs who we are. Our sense was that people in smaller cities would have stronger ties to the land and the unique culture of a place, and that it was easier to find more spaces where people intentionally came together.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Community how shared experiences are important for connectivity and human thriving, whether it's coming together at a ballpark, theater, brewery, or your favorite local coffee shop.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: Interconnectedness. How crucial human relationships of interdependence are forged and relied upon in good times and bad.
We wanted to meet as many people as we could to discuss why coming together in an age of isolation and separateness matters now more than ever.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: And in Asheville, a fourth theme began to emerge. Resilience. How people in a community can come together and not just survive a crisis, but learn to thrive in its aftermath. From the outset, we believed if you really want to learn what a place was about, is about, or should be about, you need to hear the voices of the people who have lived it, are living it, and are going to live it in the future. That's what we are setting out to do with this series.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Byron Ballard, and I'm the senior priestess here. We are sitting in the mother Grove Goddess Temple.
[00:06:03] Speaker C: I'll just say, as someone coming from the outside, this area right away feels very magical. So I can imagine that there's something in these mountains and in the air and the water here that kind of helps your cause even before you begin.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: They are among the oldest mountains in the world.
The Appalachian mountains are. They're older than the rings of Saturn.
Isn't that amazing? They're older than bones.
It's older than the Cherokee. I mean, it's older than all of us culturally. And so people feel that. Who are sensitive. They feel what it feels like here, but also the energy here is such that if you come here and this is not the place for you, you leave.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: So we're in the south, obviously.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: It's interesting because I do identify as a southerner, because I in North Carolina. But there's something about the Appalachian region that is also not Southern. Right. And it's a matter of immigration patterns. It's a matter of. In Appalachia, we were separated out from the mainstream of the culture for so long.
And so it's a different feel. I mean, we've been talking about feeling and energy. It's a different feel, but the culture is different here.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: And, you know, when you speak of the culture of a place, you kind of need to hear about it from multiple perspectives.
Jennifer Pickering, a native of the Black Mountain area who runs Leaf Global Arts, has deep connections to this land and its history.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: And this place has an extraordinary history. Originally, it was a place that first nations resided in. And I didn't really feel that at the level, understanding, until a couple of years ago. At Leaf, we had an NEA grant that focused on First Nations. First Nations. And I really started understanding the land and some of the history in a whole different depth. Over the beginning of the 19th century, the black Mountain College group came from across the valley, from Blue Ridge assembly over here to Lake Eden and established Black Mountain College here. And two of the things that I'm incredibly inspired by that happened here. It was one of the first racially integrated, openly gay learning institutions in the south and alongside so many of the artists coming from the Bauhaus movement, fleeing Nazi Germany, ending up here.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: As we journeyed deeper into the importance of place, we spoke with Joanna Patrice Haggerty, who describes herself as a serial entrepreneur who mainly works with artists as they build their businesses.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: For me, the idea of placemaking, especially when it pertains to Asheville, just, I think, goes back to earliest days here.
[00:08:50] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Like, there's beautiful mountains, there's natural wonders. People have always been coming here to heal, to connect, to generate. And that concept of being able to come together, to have the hard conversations, to share in the pain and the joy of everything that we experience as human is quite frankly, I think what we have.
[00:09:10] Speaker C: Right. What do you think makes Asheville such a special place?
[00:09:14] Speaker B: I think again having kind of ancient ties and family roots here. For me I think that there is this eternal calling that people have when they come here. Whether you've lived here your whole life, whether you've had family from here, whether you just come for one day, you sense that there's something deeper. And I think that that deeper is this sense of longing and creativity and nature.
[00:09:36] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: I think honestly the beauty physically around us is what sets a lot of that up. But I think it's always brought the creative entrepreneurs, the idea makers and so that synergy coming together has always produced a lot of really beautiful things.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: Synergy is a perfect word to describe how we felt in Astron for the two weeks we were there.
[00:09:56] Speaker C: Yeah, it's as if everything was unfolding in a way it was meant to and we just leaned into that.
I think our conversation with River Gagarian, who is a world renowned drummer with his band Free Planet Radio, he's a teacher and an extremely spiritual individual, spoke to the mystical nature of the mountains and the void vortexes that lay beneath as playing an essential role in shaping the whole vibe of Asheville.
[00:10:28] Speaker D: Underneath a lot of these mountaintops are crystals. They say some of them are like these 5 ton crystals that are just underneath the surface. And I, and a lot of people think that's what brings the, the, the people here there it's like wow, your spirit just, just feels like it soars. And one day you just move three, four, five steps ahead. But then like two days later you can feel like you've moved to the left or backwards two or three steps here it's like everything's a little slower. You move your foot out of the earth, you move forward, then you put, you put a foot down but then like you don't go back and then the next you just moving up and it might take a month, you move your foot back and then just go and then you move. See if you're in touch with the biorhythms here, it's really powerful. It doesn't move as fast as other places. I've seen lots of people, specifically artists come here at or business people. Realtors aren't going to make Asheville the next big place is going to be this and that. And these mountains are like, you don't need you. And just. It just. It ruins their development. It just spits them out like it doesn't need them. You really need people who are successful here. What I've noticed are community intent. Your intention has to be the community. If you're, if you're all about me, me, me, it's not going to work.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: If you had told me even five years ago that I would be talking about vortexes, crystals and energies without rolling my eyes, I probably would have laughed. I mean, as a baseball writer, I'm not always having metaphysical conversations with my.
[00:11:48] Speaker C: Introducers, but I think that you and I both felt that this deeper understanding of how some larger force was at play in Asheville, even you had to admit to feeling that inherent slowing down, that depth of every conversation we had. When we spoke to Mickey Pondl from Explore Asheville, he talked about the way that the arts in particular have always had a place in creating the uniqueness of Asheville. There are so many things passed down here that exist as pure American traditional art forms, and specifically, something uniquely southern Appalachian.
[00:12:22] Speaker D: There's also a really amazing creative spirit in Asheville that cuts across all different disciplines. It's painting and visual arts. It's traditional crafts like woodworking and glassblowing. It's the performing arts, just creative people you encounter on the street, like busking.
[00:12:43] Speaker C: So it does make it kind of unique between the topography, the history, the rich art scene. And I kind of like what you were saying earlier about sort of the real craftsmanship, which, you know, we know that these, these craftsman type of situations aren't exactly as plentiful as they once were. But there are regions where this kind of craft work is really celebrated.
[00:13:07] Speaker D: It's all around the city. And it's partly from Appalachia's history of being very isolated by its geography. And so, you know, well into the industrial revolution, well into the 20th century, people were still making their own spoons and utensils and clothing and things like that.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: Visit downtown Asheville on any Friday night and pause for a moment with your hand to your ear and you'll hear something unmistakable.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yep, it's strums.
[00:13:41] Speaker C: It's the beat of the city's iconic drum circle.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: One of the best ways the spirit of Asheville is shown is during the Friday evening community drum circle, where people young and old come out to have an epic jam session.
[00:13:58] Speaker D: So the drum circle has been going on 20 plus years. Anyone can show up. You bring your own drum and people dance, and it gets Massive. It spills out of the park far afield from the original kind of Appalachian folk singing. But it's that exact same tradition of just people getting around and playing for each other to pass the time, to share stories, to share their history, and to build community.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: We're using the term community a lot, and that means different things to different people.
There's no one way to define community.
But when we spoke with Mushroom Forager and founder of no Taste Like Home, Alan Muskett, he took us way back to how humans lived in community before industrialization, back to when we were wild.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Wise men say that rushing is violence and so is your silence when it's rooted in compliance. To stand firm, in loving defiance. Make Archer alliance give voice to the fire.
Move people to the beat of the wind. Gather yourself and begin.
[00:15:11] Speaker D: I teach how to be wild.
Yeah, to be wild is to rewild. To go back before civilization, to winter. We lived in community.
True community isn't just like cooperation. It's a difference in how you see yourself. You don't see yourself as an individual. The further back you go, the less even the concept of an individual exists.
[00:15:35] Speaker C: It's like saying.
[00:15:36] Speaker D: It's like as if your right arm and this. I take this from Thich Nhat Hanh, like, thought it was an individual. So you're hamming, hammering a nail, let's say, and you hit your finger on the other hand.
Well, the other hand doesn't grab the hammer and hit the other arm because it's matte, you see? And yet we do that. That's what we're doing.
We do that all the time because we don't understand that we're one.
Does that make sense?
[00:16:05] Speaker C: Makes perfect sense to me.
So part of our exploration is about how we have shifted away from a sense of communal oneness and the idea of how each of us as individuals, are part of a larger whole.
And the more we talked to the artists in the River Arts District, even just seven months after the flood of the French Broad river, there was this palpable sense of something akin to family.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Before the storm, before the pandemic, before all of that, there was already a really connected art scene. And I think that's what that community is what's gotten people through both of those really challenging times. It's hard to sell art when the studio is closed, whether it's for health or storms or whatever. And so it's a really tightly bonded community. Oh, it's just so motivating as an artist because there's so many people Doing so many different things. Artists naturally, when they get together, are talking about big things in life that matter to them. And so it's not like a fake community. Hi, how are you? Hope you're doing okay. This is a community that's okay.
We've been through so much together.
To have your entire livelihood shut down for a pandemic for months and then even after that, people, you know, not wanting to travel and.
And now we're going through it all over again, only like worse.
And you know, so people, they share what's, what's valuable to them.
An art is an expression of a person's soul.
When they are creating it, some part of their being is in that piece. We try to go to each other's openings and we, you know, hang out together and go to meetings together to hear what everyone else is up to and what the area has planned. And we always knew there were more artists than there were who joined the organization. But to learn it was close to 700 artists in a square mile.
[00:18:35] Speaker E: Took us all by surprise as we watched the water rise Hurt so much to look around at what used to be our town shook us to our very core.
Lives were changed forevermore.
How could anyone sustain so much loss and this much pain?
Could it be Jesus?
Is the answer?
1, 2, 3.
[00:19:35] Speaker C: Asheville has been in a perpetual state of reinventing itself for many reasons.
We learned a lot about how the black community of Asheville has been forced to re envision itself as a over and over again from Alexandra Ravenel of the Noir Collective. A space for black creatives to find new opportunities to showcase their work in a place with deeply rooted communal connections.
[00:20:01] Speaker F: Noir Collective is situated inside of Waimei Cultural center, which is about 18,000 square feet of a black cultural center. It's the oldest African American cultural center that is still operating in the United States States. And it served as the hub for the black community.
And so everywhere you looked in this community, there was nothing but black owned businesses. This is, there was a jazz band here, there was a swimming pool and a mortuary. And people used to say anything you needed, you could from birth to death you can get in this area.
And so this street, South Market street that we're on, and the cross street, Eagle street, this is considered the block and, and it's a part of East End Valley street, which was the first established black neighborhood here in Asheville.
So Noir Collective is a hub for community.
We're the place for lost souls, if you will. People come to Asheville and they're looking for Black folks, they're looking for culture, looking for diversity. They come here. If they find their way here, people recommend them. Well. Right. Well, we're really intentional. So, first of all, everything you see in the space is made by black hands. And that felt really important to us to not have any exceptions to that, because we wanted, folks, when you come in, to not have to question anything. You don't have to work here. There's no fee to be a part of it. We will take care of it. Just bring. Bring us your wares. And it's really. It's. It's just. Yes. It's bringing community together. And it's such an important thing. It's like we're the. The third space for people.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: One of the places we felt that strongest sense of creative community was at the Peace Gardens and Market.
It's an incredible outdoor. Well, let's let Jen Murphy and founder Duane Barton describe it. We met Jen as part of the Street Creature Puppet Collective, who is participating in the Garden Spring Fling. And Dwayne Barton. Well, we had to run around after him during the majority of our interview because he is a guy who is just everywhere with eyes on everything.
[00:22:01] Speaker D: Yeah, this is to be the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. And we wanted to make the neighborhood safe. And what can we do in our own backyard? So that's why we named it the Peace Gardens.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: It's a community backyard, basically, like a couple of big lots. It's full of art and gardens, food gardens, flower gardens, all kinds of community program. There's a little library here. Many wonderful programs for the youth in this neighborhood. This is an historically black neighborhood that's been hit by all kinds of redlining, and they built the highway right through the middle of it about 25 years ago. And it's a very vital community. Sort of the heart of it is.
[00:22:37] Speaker D: This space here because we wanted peace in the world. We wanted peace in our neighborhood and on earth. You know what I mean?
[00:22:47] Speaker C: So did you. You said. We started telling me who you started this with.
[00:22:51] Speaker D: My wife. The neighborhood is. I can't tell you. I mean, people helped make this happen. It was like a lot of people, over time, my wife. A lot of people.
A lot of people helped make this happen.
[00:23:17] Speaker C: Well, you were talking earlier about how having metaphysical conversations was new to you. And I felt the same way about being immersed in minor league baseball and deepening my understanding of how it serves as a nexus for communal life.
[00:23:32] Speaker D: The Asheville tourists are going to the playoffs.
[00:23:36] Speaker C: From young to old, from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, there is accessibility there that doesn't translate in the same way in the major leagues. In the minors. There's something for everyone and it really has its own unique character. Talking to Brian DeWine, owner of the Asheville Tourists helped cement that concept for me.
[00:23:55] Speaker D: Family wanted to invest in a baseball team because we really believed what they did for communities. Minor league baseball is an outlet for the community where they can gather at the ballpark for good times and bad times. You know, you can celebrate your son's birthday, you can, you know, go on first dates. But also, if there's been a tragic event in the community, you can come together at the ballpark. One of the stories that I hear over and over again is people talking about taking their 15 year old to the ballpark and they'll tell me it's the first time that they set their phone down and actually talk to me. I remember last year, the first day the team got off the bus, one of the returning players was telling one of the newer players how awesome Asheville was because the fans got into the game, they actually knew what was going on and, you know, they cheered at the right time. And it was just great to be somewhere where the fans love the game and the environment.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: North Carolina is cleaning up from the worst flooding ever on record for the state. More than 100 people are dead from Helene, a number that's still expected to rise. Hundreds more are missing, and roughly 2.1 million customers are without power across the region. The city's now isolated after roads leading there flooded and cell towers were knocked down. One emergency official calls it biblical devastation.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Asheville wasn't the first city we visited to gather interviews, but we found that this city of about 100,000 people had a uniquely indomitable spirit.
And in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Ashvillians had to rely on that resolve more than ever. And we wanted to honor that resilience by sharing their stories.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: Most of our conversations inevitably led to the deeply felt impact of the hurricane, which led us to narrow in on resilience as a central theme for our podcast.
Marco Rosenbruck, a Dutch born tulip farmer, brought quite a bit of media attention to the small town of Swannanoa, about 20 minutes outside of Asheville, when he managed to get 10,000 tulip bulbs donated from the Netherlands to make the town beautiful again. But one of the really inspiring things about Marco's story is how a small unincorporated town built a leadership team on the ground when no help could get to them.
[00:26:14] Speaker D: Saturday morning, early, I woke up looking to my wife. We need to Organize ourselves. I understand there was. There was nothing.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: You're very cut off here.
[00:26:23] Speaker D: It's not like there was no electricity. There was no water. There was no.
No help from outside. And I was astonished how many people came up.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:33] Speaker D: And that was on Saturday morning. That was here.
And what we did, we. We make two groups. One group of people that needed. We make five tables. Medical help, problems in their house, water. A group. What is needed was there. And what is volunteers that we can use. That was tables there. I had a table where people can volunteer for chainsaw work. There was a table who.
People who could do other things like getting water. We organized really, really quickly. It runs really automatically from that moment on. This was the center where everything was organized. We organized for Sunday morning a big cookout because everybody. Freezer was working and we have a lot of chefs here in the area.
[00:27:22] Speaker C: Oh, really?
[00:27:23] Speaker D: So, yeah, yeah, at least there were chefs and the.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: Just to try to use up the food.
[00:27:30] Speaker D: This was all the tables around it with. With food the cooks were preparing. And it was one big line here from a lot of people. That area needed. Need to have food and good food. Food from restaurants that was really, really, really good food.
[00:27:59] Speaker E: Shattered lives, shuttered dreams.
Rivers rose from tiny streams.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Another Swannanoa resident, musician David Cody, had a lot to say about bringing people together as well.
[00:28:19] Speaker E: I'll tell you, since the storm, I've seen the best in people, the absolute best. And I've seen the absolute worst. It's brought out the good and it's brought out the bad, too, some of it.
And it is. It is what it is. Everybody's affected differently. Nobody. Nobody feels the same. Everybody has their own thoughts and their own feelings about it.
As for me, I'm just grateful.
I have a.
I have a huge degree of gratefulness that I'm still here, my family's still here, we're safe, Everything's going to be okay. We all went to work and we helped each other. We cleaned up each other's houses, and we got it back to semi normal. I do have 48 inches of sand in my backyard. It used to be grass that I mowed, and I got to somehow get that four foot of sand out of there.
But I told my wife, I'm not worried about that. We'll deal with it later. Yeah, we'll deal with that whenever.
[00:29:15] Speaker C: You know, when I was talking to Jennifer the other day, she mentioned that you had sung a song for her that you had written about the storm.
[00:29:23] Speaker E: Well, I got back from South Carolina.
I left my wife down there. And I came back by myself.
And coming back in, I'm looking around and I'm seeing all these places that I used to hang out, out at all the places that I loved growing up, and they're gone, they're destroyed. And I'm seeing all these people, and they're just.
They're. They're devastated.
And so I went home and I'm sitting there by myself and I got my guitar and I was thinking about my Swannanoa town.
And so I wrote the first of what would end up eventually being 14 songs about the storm.
And I wrote the first song, our Swanoa town, and I was just basically just writing what I felt. So she recorded the song on the radio, on her phone, and she put it up on Facebook.
Our Swanna Noah town.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: And it.
[00:30:16] Speaker E: And five days later, it had gotten 50,000 views.
[00:30:21] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:30:22] Speaker E: I hadn't. I would have been thrilled with 500, you know, people. 50,000 people. And my wife looked at me and she said, you struck a heartstring.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:30:32] Speaker E: She said, you do not get 50,000 people to listen to a video in five days.
Something's going on.
Well, it kind of inspired me. So I wrote. I wrote another song, and then it just took off from there.
[00:30:52] Speaker C: Oh, your love is a temporary bridge your love is a temporary bridge.
[00:31:06] Speaker E: Shattered lives shuttered dreams rivers rose from tiny.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: Streams.
[00:31:21] Speaker C: This idea of keeping the music going is one that really spoke to me. People do need something that gives them an injection of what's possible or that it's okay to celebrate again, that it's okay to be happy again. Laura Williams, the director of the Asheville Beer Choir.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Yep. No, you heard that right. Of course. Asheville has a beer choir.
[00:31:42] Speaker C: Laura talked a lot about how music became both a respite and a community builder in the aftermath of Helene.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: This is the Asheville Beer Choir, and we're here to sing some Asheville inspired tunes for you. The first one up, man of constant sorrow from O brother, where art thou?
[00:32:07] Speaker D: I am a man.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: Sorrow I've seen.
[00:32:15] Speaker E: Trouble.
[00:32:17] Speaker D: On my day I've been far away Hell, Kentucky, the place where I was born and raised.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Suddenly, if you haven't met your neighbors yet, you have now and you're so, so grateful. And you see the. That importance and the connection of that shared experience that you really have to lean on each other. My neighborhood all got together and made a meal because somebody still had a generator and their oven could still work, you know. So with beer choir, it was just, oh, my gosh, we've built this Neighbor, you know, community of neighbors almost.
And you know, we're fortunate to never have to really lean on each other like that. But it was so amazing to suddenly have 50 people that were to check in on you, I'm checking, you know, on each other.
And that we realized how grateful we were to have had that. So space, physical space too, to make music in every week. Oh, this is a privilege. This is a privilege to spend time with people like this, make music with people like this and have this community.
So about a month later, we planned on, hey, let's just get together sometimes we, we, we call a rehearsal a sit and sing. So sometimes we just sit, we'll get together and just hang out and not have to worry about being interrupted to go rehearse. We're just there to hang out with each other like friends. So we met at Highland Brewery about a month later to check in on everybody. And so, yeah, I want to say maybe 20 of us were there off the top of my head. And it was actually so. It was so wonderful.
Every time a new member would come in the door, everyone would cheer. Just so excited to see everybody there. I'm sure we were like tearing up, you know, it was really, really cool.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: We've explored various threads that have helped the many tight knit communities survive and thrive after the storm. And Blake Butler from the new aptly named Resurrection Studios gave us a tour of this new art space.
[00:34:42] Speaker G: This is the former Moog building and it's right here in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Right on the edge of downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
And it's an iconic building because they created all the Moog synthesizers that were shipped out across the world for 25 plus years. The factory was located near the river before that, but when the flood occurred, you know, and everybody was out of sorts and where are artists in the River Arts District and all over the place. I got a call from the CEO's wife, Heidi Adams, and she said, Blake, you used to help Moog with marketing and public relations.
Would you be willing to help us figure out where the displaced artists are in western North Carolina and see if they'd be willing to meet in the vacant Moog building? So sure enough, we went on this discovery mission and people were in all sorts of different phases based on whether they lost their studio or they lost their studio and their art.
Some of them were able to get their art out in time, load it in their car. So my point being is the first meeting, we sat in a big circle in this room right over here that I'M pointing at and they just told us where they were. A lot of them didn't have the resources at this time to rent anything, so they might have exhibition only space here. So we started to feel, you know, that by listening to the artists we could truly build a collective. And that's why it's Resurrection Students Studios Collective to resurrect the spirit of the arts, you know, and we're all coming together and getting closer together now, but forming a collective and listening to the artists from these different places of what they need to be successful and go forward.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Who gets to determine what is needed to be successful to go forward? After an event such as a hurricane and a massive flood in this place.
[00:36:32] Speaker C: Where there is a vibrancy, an aliveness, it became more and more apparent that while the light may have temporarily dimmed, it was most definitely not snuffed out.
[00:36:44] Speaker A: And it was in Asheville that we began to get into a groove with our project.
I mean, we came intending to spend a week, but ended up spending two and returning again a few months later.
[00:36:54] Speaker C: We may have even looked a little bit at real estate.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: We may have even had a little too much craft beer.
[00:37:00] Speaker C: We may have had some of the best conversations with the best people we've ever talked to. And in the end, that's why we stayed longer. There were simply too many stories to tell.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: So we began to create this multi part podcast series just on the city of Asheville while we are working on our book.
[00:37:18] Speaker C: And this is only the beginning.
So stay tuned for our next episode of Stories of Resilience.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: Hallelujah, My mind, I fly away.
[00:37:45] Speaker C: This episode of Something Worth Asheville Stories of Resilience was written and produced by Jonathan Mayo and Sarah Stock Mayo. It was executive produced by Roz Guevara. Editing and engineering were handled by Cindy Guevara and Nina Jackson of RCG Digital Media. Our original music is by David Cody. Our cover art is by Kyra Bursky. Special thanks to Byron Ballard and the Mother Grove Goddess Temple, Mickey Pondle at Explore Asheville Highland Brewery, Jennifer Pickering and Leaf Global Arts, Blake Butler and Resurrection Studios, Julie Bell and Trackside Studios, the Asheville Drum Circle, Brian Dewine and the Asheville Tourists, Laura Williams and the Asheville Beer Choir, Alexandria Ravenel of the Noir Collective Duane Barton and the Asheville Peace Gardens and Market River Gagarian, Joanna Patrice Haggerty, Alan Muskett and no Taste Like Home, Jen Murphy and the Street Creature Puppet Collective and Marco Rosenbrock. Stay tuned for episode two of Something Worth Saving. Thanks for listening.
