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bluethepaladin · 7 years ago

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This is probably a really weird ask but, do you have any book recommendations?

ooooOOOOOOoooo boy, oh buddy oh pal, this is the best ask I’ve ever gotten. Little do any of you know, I am an extreme book geek, I haunt all the book festivals, I regularly maintain my relationships with the publishing houses, and I frequent author’s conferences and writer’s workshops. Partly because I’m prepping my own manuscript and partly because I love books so much.

I real a lot, like 200 books a year on a bad year, so if you’re looking for something more specific, you just have to say so!

Here are some top ones that I think are great reads that I recommend from a variety of genres in no particular order.

And I Darken by Kiersten White

No one expects a princess to be brutal. And Lada Dragwlya likes it that way. Ever since she and her gentle younger brother, Radu, were wrenched from their homeland of Wallachia and abandoned by their father to be raised in the Ottoman courts, Lada has known that being ruthless is the key to survival. She and Radu are doomed to act as pawns in a vicious game, an unseen sword hovering over their every move. For the lineage that makes them special also makes them targets.Lada despises the Ottomans and bides her time, planning her vengeance for the day when she can return to Wallachia and claim her birthright. Radu longs only for a place where he feels safe. And when they meet Mehmed, the defiant and lonely son of the sultan, Radu feels that he’s made a true friend—and Lada wonders if she’s finally found someone worthy of her passion.But Mehmed is heir to the very empire that Lada has sworn to fight against—and that Radu now considers home. Together, Lada, Radu, and Mehmed form a toxic triangle that strains the bonds of love and loyalty to the breaking point.

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

In the final days of a falling Saigon, The Lotus Eaters unfolds the story of three remarkable photographers brought together under the impossible umbrella of war: Helen Adams, a once-naïve ingénue whose ambition conflicts with her desire over the course of the fighting; Linh, the mysterious Vietnamese man who loves her, but is torn between conflicting loyalties to his homeland and his heart; and Sam Darrow, a man addicted to the narcotic of violence, to his intoxicating affair with Helen and to the ever-increasing danger of his job. All three become transformed by the conflict they have risked everything to record.

In this much-heralded debut, Tatjana Soli creates a searing portrait of three souls trapped by their impossible passions, contrasting the wrenching horror of combat and the treachery of obsession with the redemptive power of love.

The Host by Stephanie Meyer

Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of human hosts while leaving their bodies intact. Wanderer, the invading “soul” who has been given Melanie’s body, didn’t expect to find its former tenant refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.As Melanie fills Wanderer’s thoughts with visions of Jared, a human who still lives in hiding, Wanderer begins to yearn for a man she’s never met. Reluctant allies, Wanderer and Melanie set off to search for the man they both love.

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Magic, adventure, mystery, and romance combine in this epic debut in which a young princess must reclaim her dead mother’s throne, learn to be a ruler—and defeat the Red Queen, a powerful and malevolent sorceress determined to destroy her.On her nineteenth birthday, Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn, raised in exile, sets out on a perilous journey back to the castle of her birth to ascend her rightful throne. Plain and serious, a girl who loves books and learning, Kelsea bears little resemblance to her mother, the vain and frivolous Queen Elyssa. But though she may be inexperienced and sheltered, Kelsea is not defenseless: Around her neck hangs the Tearling sapphire, a jewel of immense magical power; and accompanying her is the Queen’s Guard, a cadre of brave knights led by the enigmatic and dedicated Lazarus. Kelsea will need them all to survive a cabal of enemies who will use every weapon—from crimson-caped assassins to the darkest blood magic—to prevent her from wearing the crown.Despite her royal blood, Kelsea feels like nothing so much as an insecure girl, a child called upon to lead a people and a kingdom about which she knows almost nothing. But what she discovers in the capital will change everything, confronting her with horrors she never imagined. An act of singular daring will throw Kelsea’s kingdom into tumult, unleashing the vengeance of the tyrannical ruler of neighboring Mortmesne: the Red Queen, a sorceress possessed of the darkest magic. Now Kelsea will begin to discover whom among the servants, aristocracy, and her own guard she can trust.But the quest to save her kingdom and meet her destiny has only just begun—a wondrous journey of self-discovery and a trial by fire that will make her a legend … if she can survive.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive — and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first.

But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Valentine Michael Smith is a human being raised on Mars, newly returned to Earth. Among his people for the first time, he struggles to understand the social mores and prejudices of human nature that are so alien to him, while teaching them his own fundamental beliefs in grokking, watersharing, and love.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Allire Saenz

Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship—the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Oct. 11th, 1943-A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it’s barely begun.When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she’s sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage, failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy? A Michael L. Printz Award Honor book that was called “a fiendishly-plotted mind game of a novel” in The New York Times, Code Name Verity is a visceral read of danger, resolve, and survival that shows just how far true friends will go to save each other.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Achilles, “the best of all the Greeks,” son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods’ wrath.They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Andrew “Ender” Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military’s purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine’s abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth-an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman

Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead and his dæmon, Asta, live with his parents at the Trout Inn near Oxford. Across the River Thames (which Malcolm navigates often using his beloved canoe, a boat by the name of La Belle Sauvage) is the Godstow Priory where the nuns live. Malcolm learns they have a guest with them, a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua …

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

A searing and profound Southern odyssey.In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.

Artemis by Andy Weir

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved—its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.But some can never stop searching for answers.Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of the relic. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history’s most perplexing discovery—and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?An inventive debut in the tradition of World War Z and The Martian, told in interviews, journal entries, transcripts, and news articles, Sleeping Giants is a thriller fueled by a quest for truth—and a fight for control of earthshaking power.

American War by Omar El Akkad

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war – part of the Miraculous Generation – now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past, his family’s role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson

The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist.What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an “all-American boy.” But far away from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind.Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It’s the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away–and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.This powerful debut is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee

Henry “Monty” Montague was born and bred to be a gentleman, but he was never one to be tamed. The finest boarding schools in England and the constant disapproval of his father haven’t been able to curb any of his roguish passions—not for gambling halls, late nights spent with a bottle of spirits, or waking up in the arms of women or men.But as Monty embarks on his Grand Tour of Europe, his quest for a life filled with pleasure and vice is in danger of coming to an end. Not only does his father expect him to take over the family’s estate upon his return, but Monty is also nursing an impossible crush on his best friend and traveling companion, Percy.Still it isn’t in Monty’s nature to give up. Even with his younger sister, Felicity, in tow, he vows to make this yearlong escapade one last hedonistic hurrah and flirt with Percy from Paris to Rome. But when one of Monty’s reckless decisions turns their trip abroad into a harrowing manhunt that spans across Europe, it calls into question everything he knows, including his relationship with the boy he adores.

These are just some good ones that I’ve read or reread recently! Let me know if you need more, or are looking for something from a more specific genre! Chances are I can find you something good to read!

#book recommendations #book rec #to read #Anonymous

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thelostcatpodcast · 5 years ago

Text

THE LOST CAT PODCAST, SPECIAL EPISODE: THE MAN WHO WALKED IN TO THE SEA

Episode released 19th May 2018

http://thelostcat.libsyn.com/special-episode-the-man-who-walked-in-to-the-sea

He stood with the sea lapping at his ankles as he looked out from the shore towards the edge of the world. He took another step in and the sea lapped above his knees.

He had walked away after last fire and had left his clothes on a tree. He had made fresh prints on the damp sand that traced a straight enough line from the tree-line to the shore. Two prints lay together a stride away from the water where he had stood for a time, thinking, watching, just waiting. And the lapping tide was already melting the prints back in to the beach. And so he took another step out.

And with that step he could feel the tug and tarry of the water around him and he let himself sway on his feet. He dropped his hands down and kept them still, letting the water move between his fingers. There were the sounds of insects from the trees and the sounds of sand being moved by the tide and the sounds of water itself; small low lollops of water dropping onto water; huge high shrulls of foam far away. It was then he had noticed the ocean had risen above his waist for the top half of his body was cold.

So he dropped to a crouch and his head went beneath the surface. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes and pushed away, launching out and swimming hard. At the end of it he stopped kicking and let his body slowly drop to the upright.

All the sounds of the world disappeared with a rush of bubbles. He moved down into the water and the water all around him was massively, silently, dark. He twisted on himself and looked up at the rippling surface and as it moved it formed accidental prisms shooting the moonlight in shafts down into the water. The shafts formed endless architecture that swayed and changed with the movements of the sea. He became still and watched cities collide.

And then he swam deeper. He swam between the shafts of light and through them, sweeping water away above him ever harder, whenever he felt his body tugged upwards.

He swam in to the massive silence of the sea, following the shafts of weakening light down in to the swallowing dark. For he saw, at some specific place in the sea not far from him, some things were returning the light.

And they hung peacefully there, vague in the distance and the dark. They gave their light out in pink and yellow. The motes and algae moved away and towards and around these lights. He swam in closer to meet them.

There were many of these things, in a cloud, hanging simply between the bottom and the top of the sea. They tapered in their lower halves with frilly tendrils that were happy to sway with the movements of the water, and they moved the light with them, making it throb. At their necks they had dresses and looked like mushrooms, covering their complicated centres with coyly rippling glimpses. They made no sound the man heard.

And he was among them now.

The tendrils reached out like puppets on strings and where they touched him he was warm. They were about him then, all the mushrooms and the ribbons and they were draped over him like a half-opened present. All his body was warm and then it was hot and the dresses squeaked as they rubbed against his face. Then everything was sharp and the air in his lungs was pushed out in bubbles that lifted the dresses of those creatures and then all the detail inside was pressed onto his face.

And when the man was still, They let him go and he drifted down out of their light, down to the seabed, very far away.

“I’ve found his shirt!” said Clara, out in the sun of the beach.

“Where are you? Clara? Come back here!” came a voices from the trees.

“On the South Shore!”

“Come back from there! Right now! Clara!”

Clara hoiked her skirt and ran back to the paths. “It’s hanging on the tree. He must have taken it off.”

“Don’t go running off,” said Magdelene appearing around a bend. “Come here. Do as you are told”

Clara ran into her arms and hugged the woman’s leg. “You stay with me, Clara. These aren’t games.”

“OK!”

The others rounded the bend then, keeping pace with an old woman with clinking necklaces.

And at that sound the little girl hugged the woman’s leg a little tighter.

“Where’d you say i’was?” the old woman grumbled. Clara peaked out through the skirts.

“She said she found something on the trees by the South Shore,” Magdelene replied.

“The little’un, eh?” she said, giving a squinty eye at the girl, who buried herself even deeper in to Magdalene’s skirts.

“Heh,” she said, then re-arranged herself to look up at the goldening sky “Robert, help me.”

The man gave his beating stick to his companions as the old lady took his arm and they left the path.

“So that’s where he went, right?” squeaked Clara, watching the old woman waddle determinedly off. “We can go find him now?”

“Let’s wait here, wait until Maura comes back, OK?”

“OK.”

The old woman stepped out onto the beach, sniffing the air, looking at the setting sun, scuffing at the sand still damp from the tide. The water had wiped the shore clean. She sighed. “Pick up ‘is clothes. Let’s get back.”

And Maura returned, grumbling on the uneven sand. She looked down at the uneven lump in the dresses to Magdalene’s side.

“Are yer doin’ as yer told, little’un?”

“Yes,” came a squeek from the dresses.

“Heh. Well, fair enough.”

They walked at the old lady’s pace back to the village as the sun set and found that the other parties had already returned. They had found nothing. The fires were lit and a meeting was begun. And They nodded as they heard where the clothes had been found. Maura spoke with her peers and said a search would be carried out. The fires were ordered damped and the meeting was over.

The next day Clara followed Maura as the old women went weeding, and the girl stood at the edge of the fields near a tree. Maura waddled along a row, inspecting plants and pulling up vegetables.

“Is you, Clara-girl,” she called out.

The girl shifted behind the tree.

“Best speak, or I might think yer a carrot.”

“They won’t let me near the South Shore, Maura.”

“As’right,” the old woman replied. She grunted as she poked at some roots, looked at the bottoms of leaves.

“But why?”

“No place for a girl.”

“But I want to help with the search, Maura.”

“No search today.”

“But Maura!”

“But Maura nuthin’,” the old woman snorted. “No searching til the moon’s waned. That’s another day’n night.”

“But why?”

“Heh. Don’t know much for sumn’ ask so many questions, eh girl?”

Clara said nothing, but waited for the old woman to explain. The old woman straightened.

“Not safe to go near the South Shore when the moon is full. Everyone know that.”

“But why?”

“Bad things bound to happen.”

“But what?”

Maura sniffed. “Don’t know. We lost the story. All my elders gave me was the warning that came with it, an’ now I’m giving i’you. Guess’ll find out what it’s for in time. Come on, come here, Help me catch some ‘pillars.”

They took boats out on the third day, dragging the bed with rakes and taking nets out into the waters. They turned the water muddy but caught nothing.

Back at the village it was decided the man had swum out and drowned. A man would have to be mad to swim out on the South Shore in a full moon so death was given as madness. His body could have been a hundred miles away by that time.

They burnt his clothes and Mortim, a man even older than Maura, said some words:

“Simon Bartram, taken by madness and taken by the sea. Let us hope it has taken him where he has needed to go. He is not welcome here anymore.”

“So i’goes,” mumbled Maura.

Clara learnt to ride a pony. Clara helped Magdelene knit; Magdelene saying she liked how the stitches were smaller just there. Cauliflowers were planted. Paul Bastel was punished for thievery. Maura caught a cold. And a month passed in this way.

And then the fish started to change. Morten Dowagers started shoaling off the East Banks. Their numbers were so great in the shallows that children could bring back armfuls of the purple-finned fish, cutting their fingers on the belly-ridges. Marasin the elder went to inspect the fish; clambering over the rocks with the help of two grown men; telling the children to take only one at a time; none below two feet nor longer than five; and none with yellow eye markings as these were female and most likely pregnant.

Frokenwallows washed up all around the island, which were quickly burnt as even the dead ones can be poisonous; as a result the Hollows were opened up for swimming and Prittenmags returned.

The air was full of Jack-Darrows and Flotsam-Hawks, attracted by the boon in the sea. Dusk was the noisiest part of the day and trees exploded if you shook the right ones.

Two lovers on the western reaches swore they saw Nibbing-Whales hoom and spray fifty yards from shore one night; a dozen or more humps rising and blooming; the noise brought apples down. Mortim dismissed the claim which ended with the whales leaving north, against the currents.

Clara had a tree house built, mostly by Gordon and the Dunstun Brothers, but entirely planned by her.

Maura, once she heard of it, demanded access.

“While I still can,” she huffed as she climbed the ladder.

“I don’t let anyone up here,” Clara demanded.

“Heh,” Maura replied.

The tree house had a view looking south east, to the right of the Corn Acres, over the plains with the Mount in the distance and the glint of the sea just visible beyond the Grays Forest.

Maura sat in the chair.

“So who was he?” asked Clara.

“Who was who?”

“The man that downded off the South Shore.” The girl pointed as she said this.

Maura shifted position and swigged at her tea flask. “What’s got’do with anything?”

“Coz things have been happening. You know; changing.”

“Be-Cause. Clara. You’n say it right. “Beee cooorze.” The old woman was scowling at the girl as she said this. The girl hugged a branch.

“Heh,” said Maura. “anyways: No-one else asking that.”

“I don’t know,” said Clara. “I don’t know.”

“Smar’ or stupid,” said Maura, tapping the girl’s head. “Don’t know which yet. He was Simon Bartram. Worked on the plains there. Sheep.”

“Was he nice?”

“He did his part. He didn’ ask so many questions as you.”

“Was he happy?”

At that moment a bell started ringing in the village.

“Happy? He played at the dances. I believe he wooed Florence year ago now. Didn’t want to be a fisherman. That answer anything?”

“Don’t know,” said Clara.

“Guess I shouldn’t be asking you questions yet, eh?”

Figures were running out of the forest towards the village. They were all too far away to tell who they were. Robert came to the bottom of the tree.

“Maura! A thing’s been washed up. We’re dragging it up now.”

“Oh yeh? Washed up where?”

“South Shore, Maura.”

“Yeh.” Maura said, and she was sharing a look with Clara as she did.

“Do you need help getting down, Maura?” asked Robert.

“No I don’t! I’ve jus’ sat down and I’m gonna stay a while.” She threw the flask over her shoulder. “Get me some more tea, what you can do.”

The men took a cart down the paths and brought back the remains of a small boat. They brought it to the square and lit fires around it, ready for inspection. Mortim and Narduke took sticks and poked at it. They found the bones of two men and a small, iron-bound chest. Both the chest and the skulls were intact.

They opened the chest and the gathered folk gasped when the water drained away, for inside were various coins, two silver cups, a pearl necklace and a golden centre-piece, fashioned into the shape of two leaping fish with open shells as candle-holders.

“The hall treasures!”

“Are they real?”

“Did anyone actually see them before they were lost?”

Narduke, who was very, very old indeed, said, “I did. They are real.”

It was the teeth of the skulls that told the story. There were many missing, and some were fixed with a dull, grainy metal that crumbled upon inspection. It was a technique not used on the island, as their diet did not tend to sugary foods. The thieves had come from abroad.

“So,” said Mortim. “The story is at last complete. Foreigners came as thieves for the treasure but were lost before they reached their home. The sea did not think it fair they succeed.”

“No kids’ll be digging holes I’ ground anymore, anyway,” said Maura, holding onto Clara’s shoulder.

“They’ll have to do something useful now, eh?” said Mortim.

“Fill ‘em in mebbe,” Maura answered.

A week passed. The Morten Dowagers left the East Bank. The crew of a fishing boat, out south-west of the island, were tipped out of their boat as something dragged on their net. When they recovered the netting they found it had been torn along the middle; roughly, and almost in two. They put their faces under the water, but they saw nothing. Two of them complained of itching around the eyes the next day.

The sea changed colour all along the Eastern Reaches, from the Hollows to the Needles; from a low green to a dull grey, even in the sun.

“I’ve lost my dog! I can’t find her!” Fina yelped all through the village. “Help!”

“I’m sure it’s just chasing rabbits.”

“I was in the forest. I kept the paths. I did!”

The dog did not come back.

“What do you think happened with Fina’s dog?” asked Clara, sipping at the tea with a pained squint. Maura had come to visit the tree house again, and Clara was intent on proving she could do everything the old woman could do.

The old woman watched with some amusement.

“Island’s plenty big to lose a dog,” Maura replied. “We lost a horse once. Found i’only when it started a’smell.”

“I’m going to be Snowfall in the dance,” said Clara.

“If I’ve got to watch it,” said Maura. “At least make it a surprise.”

Another week passed. There were so many birds, Magdelene was teaching Clara to make omelettes. Shoaling-Crows appeared, bobbing on the sea-surface like blankets. One evening the sea erupted into spuming foam as the birds fought over something. By the morning they had re-formed, slightly down-shore.

Those young, or old, enough to take to walking alone along the Further Shores spoke of seeing a shadow stalking them in the water, such that it made them run or scream, or to throw what was to hand in fits of bravery.

Such things could not happen to such an island without stories brewing like leaves in the autumn. And like leaves they made their own cluttering noise as they jostled with each other and the ground.

There were stories of disaster and glory, either returned or rising; stories of gods, spirits, Father-Trees and Mother-Earths, Natterjacks, Branty-Hamfers and all manner of winds and currents, natural and unnatural.

Someone had lost their pearl in the forest, the world was tipping, the sea was draining, The islands were being eaten one by one. All the old stories were swirled around to see if these new things were their conclusion. But no-one mentioned Simon Bartram.

“I met him,” said Clara.

“You wot?”

“I was down on the South Shore.”

“You ain’t supposed to…oh never mind. You met ‘im? Who?”

“I went down to the South Shore and just a bit out from the shore there was a man sitting on the seabed. He was sitting cross legged so the water was just above his head. His hair was all wavy.”

“What was ‘e doin’?”

“He was sitting.”

“Sittin’?”

“Yes, Maura. Like he was looking. And he saw me. All his hair moved. I waved at him.”

“Waved at ‘im? At the man sitting in the water? What’d ‘e do?”

“He waved back or, at least, I think he did.”

“Uou couldn’t tell?”

“No. And he held his arm funny.”

“Wot, like crooked?”

“No, like loose. The water moved it. You could tell coz…”

“Be-Cause.”

“Maura. Bee-Corze the rest of him was so still. I said ‘hello’ but he didn’t do anything. So I went up to the water…”

“Clara!”

“Well I’m here aren’t I?”

“Well tha’s fair ‘nuff ‘spose.”

“And I shouted at him ‘are you Simon Bartram?’. I could see him move his mouth but I didn’t hear anything. So I threw a pebble at him”

“Bit violent wunt it?”

“All the speed went out of it when it hit the water. He caught it and he wouldn’t throw it back.”

“Yeh?”

“So I took a deep breath and I put my face in the water and I yelled ‘Oi! Man in the sea! Give me back my pebble!’.”

“All that Jus’ for a pebble?”

“It was a nice shape.”

“Why’d you throw i’then?”

“And then the man reached out with his good arm and touched my face.”

“You wot? Come ‘ere!”

Maura grabbed the girl and held her head between her hands, turning it back and forth. The old woman squinted at the girl. The girl was wide eyed and limp. “Where?”

“Just on my cheek,” Clara said with a very small voice.

“Hmm, looks all righ’.” Maura said, rubbing at some puffiness on the girl’s cheek

“It was cold. I got scared and I jumped out and he jumped back too. When I looked again he was walking away, under the water.”

“That’s it? You ain’t holdin’ back?”

“He left the pebble.” The girl held it up. “I got it and ran back.”

“Tha’s it?”

“Yes, Maura. I promise.”

The old woman looked hard at the girl. The girl did not move at all. “Well don’t go back there again.”

“So I went there this morning.”

“Clara!”

“But he wasn’t there! He wasn’t there!”

“Don’ go there again, Clara, or I’ll fin’ I’m too old to come climbing up this ladder, you ‘ear?”

“But Maura…”

“Ah!”

In the third week off the month, traders came in, and the first thing they said as they stepped from the boat was: “what’s with the stink?”.

Because it had happened so slowly no-one had noticed; the island had changed its smell.

The traders got drunk that night, dancing with and being politely refused by some of the younger ladies of the island. With the bottle empty and the ladies escorted back, one of the traders went swimming. He did not come back to the boat. His colleague called the alarm the next morning and the missing trader was soon found. His body had been washed up amongst weeds near the harbour.

When they lifted him he gurgled and wobbled so much they dropped him. His skin tore and dirty, pink water poured from the tear. They let him drain out and, when they tapped his rib-cage, he sounded like a drum.

They opened him up and found a great hollow at the centre of him. They found his lungs shrivelled and tiny up near his neck; they crumbled like pine-cones to the touch.

The elders spoke quietly with the dead man’s companion, then buried the corpse quickly and officially. The companion left with good money for his wares, a boat full of Morten-Dowagers and the best certificate the island had declaring a death by drunk and by drowning.

The grey-colour was spreading along the shores in both directions and the harbour was now clogging with wraseweeds.

By a small inlet near to the Mount and surrounded by the densest forest, there was found a small pile of corpses; dogs, cats, a seal and some birds, all water-logged with their lungs small and crumbling. Also discovered was the little finger of a man, pale and peeling. It crumbled as they touched it and only just managed to get it back to the village. Mortim found that, if put in saltwater, what was left of the finger took back some of the lustre of life, though it was too utterly destroyed to ever be called healthy again.

The next morning a fishing boat sprang a leak while out beyond the Mount-Shadow. One of the fisher-men dived in to check the damage underneath the boat while the others waited for the regular calling-knocks on the hull. Three knocks came, then a scratch, then nothing. They sailed back to shore and the diver washed up just before dusk. The discoverers turned the body over and water flowed from his mouth along with his lungs, as small and as hard as stones.

All boats were called back to harbour then, everyone was accounted for and all were forbidden to enter the water. The fishermen drank more and slept late; the doctor was kept busy tending to the outcomes of fights.

The smell fell over the whole island. The animals were skittish, prone to panic and to run; a few had been lost to ditches and the cliffs. Once it had been mentioned, no-one could ignore it. The smell was of the sea after an electrical storm; sharp and with an undertone of rotting.

Fires burnt in many houses all day long, to keep the smell out, so smoke blew across the island in clouds.

The birds left the trees with the smoke, and fish left the waters as the grey-coloured water spread along the banks. Traders kept away from the island and stocks grew low.

And children fell in the streets. As they were helped to their feet they were ill over themselves and their helpers, with eyelids so low you could not tell if they were awake or asleep. They were all brought to the doctors house in the main village.

“A poison,” came the story.

“A curse,” came another.

“Or just different,” said Clara. The meeting, which had been called to discuss this new calamity came to silence, and Maura peered down at the girl

“Wha’s that now, little’un?”

“Well the food’s not been the same since… since it happened. Something in it’s different. It felt a bit strange so I kept to fruit and things just from the island and i’ve been fine.”

“And how did you come to think that, young Clara?” Asked Mortim.

“Well, Maura always said ‘the belly is smarter than the head, and the head best pay attention’. So I did.”

“Well then,” said Maura, with something like a smile on her lips.

The children were given a diet of fruit and water, which took up the last of the fruit stocks. Many of the adults refused the fish caught off the South Shore and the herds had to be corralled and guarded.

And piece by piece, little by little, the island shrunk in size as the places it was safe to be became less and less. Weeks passed slowly in this way, but news travels fast, and bad news fastest of all.

A priest from a Western Isle came to the island and stood on the quay-side holding up a staff in one hand, a heavy book in the other and looked out through the feathers and stones that adorned his hat.

“I have been called,” he declared. “From far away to the aid of a cursed brother-island. I shall wash the curse from these waters and in return you shall allow us to build a small church here in the square of your largest village. Come!”

The priest with his party, followed by many of the fishermen and ladies in the harbour, processed through the village to the paths that led to the South Shore. Mortim and Maura watched them go, passing a pipe between them and then grabbing a couple of the men from the procession as they passed to help them aerate the compost heaps.

Some thirty people gathered on the South Shore as the priest walked into the water so his robes floated up about him on the surface, leaving his legs bare underneath.

“Hear me!” he cried and shook his staff. And he slammed it down on the sea bed.

Then he slipped straight down and underneath the surface.

The thirty or so gathered waited or him to rise again but he did not. Some say they saw a shape in the water, just before the priest slipped, others said it was just the shadow of a cloud. Twenty yards out they saw his robes bobbing on the waves. The party he came with ran back to their ship and left.

Back in the village, Maura and Mortim watched them as they fled.

“Looks like they’ve gone and lost their holy man,” said Mortim.

“This isn’t good,” Said Maura, in reply.

Great anger rose up in the crowd. They ran back to the fields and took up hay forks, clubs, spears and machetes, then gathered once more at the South Shore with a lamb the herders had been powerless to keep. Fires were lit. Shouts rang out. By the time the elders had managed to reach the South Shore the crowd had built enough courage to enter the water.

“Stay out!” Mortim cried.

“Outta the bloody water!” yelled Maura.

The men were yards out; up to their waists and hearing nothing. The sea was a white froth around them as they thrashed at the water.

The men were not fools; they stood in a tight circle and threw bits of the lamb before them, then slashed the water to pieces as they slowly spread out. The bodies of Scatter-Knacks and Peppipilots bobbed to the surface and the sea grew cloudy with dirt and blood.

One man stumbled when his machete hit something heavy.

“Quick!”

The other men rushed to him as he struggled to lift his embedded weapon. The water around them had turned a deep red. They levelled their blades and forks at the water and he pulled his catch to the surface. The naked body of the priest emerged from the gunk, hinged at the rib-cage where the machete had struck and his shrivelled lungs bobbed where the water found its level in the hollow of his chest.

“Get out!” Mortim was calling.

“Its got me!” cried one of the men, looking with horror at his fellows before slipping under the surface. The rest of the men struck down into the sea, turning the water once more to chaos. More men went down. Screams rang out. Bits of men floated away from the scrum.

Callum Hearney was lost, Michael Duncan was without the fingers of his left hand, Thomas Duke had a fork through his right calf, most of the others complained of cold bands running around their legs and bellies. They did not recover the body of the priest.

“This is a bad turn.” said Mortim.

Maura was staring out at the blood in the water.

“Ay, this won’t get better.”

And the crowd left the south shore then, turning their backs on the bruised grey of the sea, and they went to hide in their homes at the centre of the island, closing their doors against the stink that raised itself up from the deeps to smother the whole of the land.

And after that the port received no boats, and after that the roads grew dusty from lack of use, and the nights were heavy and silent on the island, lost in smoke.

And in this way, the island disappeared.

And Maura, in her own way, was changing too. She took to spending nights out alone on the South Shore, avoiding the villagers, the elders, even Clara. She hunched down in her skirts on the beach clanking her jewellery and mumbling to herself.

“Lemme alone.” she said to Clara’s repeated offer of help. “I got nuthin to say.”

And Maura stayed out there alone on the South Shore.

Clara returned to her treehouse, and sipped tea, looking out of the window. In time she stopped, and went to join the village

Now, as was traditional in a time of crisis, a meeting was called. The elders sat around the central fire and spoke in loud, slow voices so that everyone could hear.

Maura sat at the edge of this, brushing out sand from her dresses, fiddling with her necklaces and staring out at the start of the trees, her lips all tight.

And most of the village, including Clara, hiding at the back, stood around the edges of the fire circle, trying to catch a glimpse.

They told stories, as was the custom, and Narduke spoke first:

“A moon-fish ate a maiden one night as she sang by the shore and, as she lay in its belly, it made her tell stories of where she had came from. The maiden, so sad at what she had lost, spoke of her home island as such a paradise that the moon-fish desired more than anything to go there. When it had swallowed her completely the moon-fish went up onto that island and grew legs and arms and long brown hair until it looked just as the maiden had. And the moon-fish walked with the people of the island. They were pleased to see the maiden back and told her but the moon-fish could only gargle in reply. So the moon fish ran to the maiden’s house where her mother hugged it but its skin was still wet and slippery and she pushed it away. Men came with torches and surrounded the moon-fish that tried to sing like the maiden had sung but its gills got caught in its long brown hair. They burnt the moon-fish up completely and when they had swept the ashes away there was the maiden, back with them at last, ready for burial.”

“What should this teach us?”

“That there is an order, breaking it will only lead to bad ends.”

“That we should always be true to our true being, for denying it will never bring happiness.”

“That you ent what you et,” mumbled Maura.

This got some giggles from around the edges of the circle.

“Thank you, Maura. Who else?”

Marasin the elder rose: “A man was drowned at the bottom of the sea. Years later a freak wave brought him close to his home island. And he explroed it, but he found only his grave, and when he looked in that, he found that his clothes had been filled with straw and stones, and buried them in his place. His place on the island was in that coffin, but that was filled with stones and straw so he could not go back to the island at all. He grew so mad that he turned the island all upside down so it could come to him.”

“What should this tell us?”

“That the living should not lie about the dead, so that the dead should not trouble the living.”

“That change must come, that all things come again, that nothing is unique.”

“Only bury thems that’s dead,” grumbled Maura.

“Do you really think that helpful, Maura?”

“If it’s helping you want, you’ll need more than the old stories.”

“Fine. A man caught a fish. Only after it was did did he realise it was pregnant with eggs. He sliced open its belly and let the eggs tumble in to the water and then he returned home and cooked the fish for his dinner. And after that, every time he caught a fish it would look at him and say ‘you killed my mother!’ ‘you killed my mother!’, and he would have to throw it back. And the man died of hunger.”

“Know what you kill, and respect what gives of itself to give you life.” said Narduke.

“Finish what you start,” said Mortim.

But Maura, now, said nothing, only fiddled with her necklaces.

“And you, Maura?”

“I don’t know.” she mumbled.

“It is time for you to tell a story now, Maura.”

“Got no dusty story for yer.”

“You must share a story.”

“Well FINE. You want a story? Well did you hear about bestest tree there ever was? It was the best ever a growin and it grew and grew. Grew so well nothing else around it could grow coz it took up all the growin for itself. But best tree died too in its time and when it did there were nothing on the land but a dead tree.”

“And what does this mean, Maura?”

And Maura said nothing, but chankled her necklaces across her knuckles.

“Maura?”

“It don’t mean nuthin’!”

“How can you say that?”

“It means we got no dusty story for this. There ain’t nuthin’ goes backwards.”

“Now what does that mean?”

“Means we need a new one.”

And she looked around the circle, and an expression passed her face that Clara recognised from when she climbed up the ladder to the treehouse, or when she went out weeding on a cold morning: it was determined.

The old woman stood up, a decision obviously having been made.

Right

Well what do you intend to do?

Well, sumthin’s out there, and it’s hungry. Either we feed it, or we kill it.”

“We could breed some more dogs?”

“I don’t think its got a taste for dogs.”

“Then kill it we must”

“Heh! Kill it? Conquer it. Control it. You don’ even know what it is.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“What I intend to do,” she said, hufting up her breasts. “Is go an’ have a talk wi’it.”

And with that she stormed out of the meeting, passing by the cowering Clara.

“Well?” she said, to everyone behind her. “Yer comin’?”

He had opened his eyes floating a yard above the bed of the ocean, some endless time since he had met with the creatures, one foot dragging up dust in slow clouds as it touched the bottom. He did nothing for a very long while, assuming that he was dead. Then a change came to the sea and in feeling it he knew that he was not. It brought heat from somewhere far away smelling of rock. Cold from nearby that smelled of sulphur. It brought huge slow pulses, and mammoth curtains of thundering movement. And it swallowed him and crushed him and it filled his ears and he could not understand a thing of it.

Then the tide turned and brought him news from the island. The hollow knocks of wood in water, the rippling shushes of scratching sand, the sigh of wind over the shallow water, the back-washes of paddle-wheels and the rhythms of kicking feet.

He had raced towards the shore, scattering the Mievels, hoping to get back before last fire. He coiled his legs and leapt up hard, kicking, arms up-stretched towards the air, kicking, his left arm finally breaking out on to the surface. And then burning pain ripped through his body as his arm dried out and its skin flaked off. He curled up around his arm and drifted down, leaving a small cloud of his skin, chimneying up towards that bright surface, until he reached the bed once more where he stayed quite still for a long time.

And the group, led by Maura, lit torches from the fires and walked slowly down the paths towards the South Shore.

Clara hurried up to Maura and took her hand, and Maura held it tight.

“Well, maybe it is Simon Bartram,” said Clara, tugging at her skirts.

“No girl,” said Maura. “That man’s dead.”

The water near the shore was violent and painful to him, it was fickle like the air above it, lurching hot and cold, rushing and turbulent, and the sun cut through the shallows and burnt him so everywhere he left a cloud of himself in his wake.

But he could not leave.

For weeks he sat in the shallows around the island, watching, cradling his destroyed arm. And, in this way, the waters began to change around him.

And, late at night, after watching the figures dancing around the last fires, and when he could take no more of the longing, he would head far out in to the deeps, where the water was slow and cool, and the songs of fish and whales filled him with rest now that he had learnt them.

He thought that perhaps, if he travelled far enough, he would not hear the sound of the island. He thought that perhaps somewhere far out in to the ocean, there was a place where the air became so much like the sea that he could pass between them, and make his way slowly back. He thought that perhaps there was a point at the centre of the ocean where he could, if he stood upon it, have the waters of the entire world move around him.

But the deep water only became dark and slow and huge and it swallowed him up until he was nothing, and so he turned back to the heat and the light and the pain of the island where he could turn the shoals to his will and the people on the island would see his work and know him.

And in this way he would be home.

He kept the close waters free of the predators – the stingers and all the shrill ungrateful sounds of the killers. He brought the island fish, and other things he had found – gifts and lost treasures. He protected the island from strangers – their smells and their dirty, dirty boats.

But when the people on the island saw him they ran, or threw things or shouted, and their voices were just mumbled garbles through the water and meant nothing to him.

And he had sat amongst the fishing beds and flinched as the hulls cut triangles in the light-shafts from the surface and raged as the fizzing nets cut into the orbits of the shoals. He felt the scatter-pulses and needle-sharp pulses of birds diving in from the surface, making boiling stalactites as they grabbed at fish and thrashed their way back to the surface, leaving hissing foam in their wake. They all felt like knives to him, and they made his skin cold and thin, so he pushed up to the surface and waited, still among the Peppipilots, waiting for the next to dive.

And, as the next the next bird crashed down, he caught it and held it close to his chest where he felt it struggle all fast and jittering and then the struggle stopped, and the wings opened out and began fanning with the movement of the water and he dropped it and it fell deeper down towards the bed.

But the lightness of the beating of its wings stayed on his skin though, as something glorious and warm. And when the next bird dived down he caught that too and held it closer, squeezing it. He put the bird’s head in his mouth and sucked it.

He coughed up feathers and bird spit and the dead bird dropped down in to the water past the bucking figure.

He was revolted. He felt dizzy. His veins were full of tiny bird-bones. But, he was fast again. The water clogged at him and held him down. He was fast again if only for a moment – the frantic dim energy of the bird faded so quickly.

And then he felt the frantic kicks of children swimming in The Shallows, and all his senses opened up and the water brought him a different kind of music.

And at that point, Maura let go of Clara’s hand and determinedly waddled off on ahead.

“Well, maybe I can help you, Maura?” Clara called out

And Maura said, suddenly sharply, “No girl, you have to stay back on the beach and leave this to me.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“You do as yer told.”

“I want to stay.”

“You do as yer told!”

“OK.”

“You go with Madelline.”

“OK.”

“And you go back to the village.”

“OK.”

“...you disobeyin’ me?”

“No.”

“But yer still here…”

But Clara said nothing and kept walking, head lowered to hide her tears. And with her head lowered she could not see the proud look that passed across the old woman’s face.

And he watched the people of the island run and burn their land until the air was as thick and dark as the water around him. And he looked at the smoke above the water and smiled a wide, toothy smile.

At Maura’s behest, the men put torches on long poles and drove them into the sand of the shallows so as to light up the water so as to light up the South Shore, and they made a circle around four yards out from the shore. Then Maura shooed them back and walked out in to the centre of the circle and banged her stick upon the bed.

And oh the angry clumsy drunkards wasting their breath! And oh the unguarded thrashing of beasts and the young! The stupid priest shaking through his robe! All of them moved for him like the water around him. But the beautiful noise of their energy never lasted long enough in his veins and the limp dumb weight of their bodies muddied the waters where they hung.

And he sat, impatiently, and angrily, in amongst the murk and the clag, waiting for sunlight and the chance of some fresh gift from the island.

And then he heard something new – a steady thumping rhythm that calm and clear in the waters of the South Shore.

Maura was banging on the bed with a stick.

“Well? Where are yer?”

And Clara watched the old woman from the shore, her old body thigh-deep in the water, hunched over so far the necklaces bobbed, and the water ballooning her skirts. And with splashes all over her face, the lady stamped her stick on the bed steadily.

“Come on then. Let’s get it done.”

A figure appeared in the circle of torchlight. It was flat on the bed and scurried sideways like a crab on long, disjointed limbs, all except one which seemed strangely limp. Its oval head craned on its neck, twitching as it let water through its nose and mouth. Its huge, unblinking eyes strained against the close light of the fire. Its entire body was pale white and its bones were visible through its skin.

“What is it?” the villagers cried from the shore. “Is there anything there? Is there anything we can do?”

“Wha’ you can do is shu’ up!” Maura called back, not taking her eyes from the figure. “Heh, mebbe pass me a bigger stick.”

Maura sighed, and then thumped her stick off the creature’s head.

“Shoo,” she said, and she thumped it again. “Shoo yer bugger.”

The creature flicked up its good arm and grabbed a hold of the stick. It’s grasp was soft, but Maura could not wrench the stick back.

And so Maura let it go, and the creature took it into the water and laid it down beside him, and then he looked back up at the old woman with its huge, dark eyes, head slightly to one side.

“So who are yer, then, eh?” and she dug around in her bunches and pulled out necklaces and drawings and belts, saved from Simon Bartram’s house, and from burning.

She dropped them down in to the water. The creature watched them drift slowly down, wafting in the currents. And when they came to a rest on the bed, it looked back to Maura again, with his head to his side, as before.

“Righ’,” said Maura. “Like that, is it?”

And so she pulled a short knife from her dresses, and showed it to the creature. And she cut her hand and let the blood drop in to the water where it fanned out above the creature’s head.

And the creature sniffed at the blood, letting it into his nose, and then it convulsed and sneezed it out, scurrying back from the light and turning the water all to smoke.

Maura tutted, and scrunched her face all up on one side, and waited.

The creature then scurried hesitantly back in to the circle of light. It scratched at the sand with the claw of its good hand and showed Maura its teeth aggressively. But she saw the nervousness in its body language.

“Oh, what do yer want from me, poor one? What do yer want from this place?”And she sat down in the water, cross-legged so she was up to her chin, and she held her good hand out to it. “Do yer even know?”

The creature scuttled forwards, sniffing at the old woman sitting still in the water.

“Yer doin’ us no good. Yer know that, righ’?”

And the two looked at each other for a while in the circle of light, in the darkness, with the crowd of people standing on the shore. And it was quiet but for the lapping of waves, the buzzing of insects, and all their breathing.

And Clara was out before them, with Magdelene holding her.

“You stay back here, Clara.”

“No.”

“Clara.”

“No.”

Maura shuffled round in the water so she could see back to the shore, her hand still out to the creature. She saw the girl out ahead of the crowd. “You’ve not gone back yet, gel?” She called out from the water.

“No.”

She smiled, turned her back on the shore and said, “Good gel,” quietly, and mostly to herself. She turned back to the creature and its huge eyes and touched its head. She said, “OK. Now, you’n stay there a moment. I’m not done with you. I’ll not be long.”

Then Maura turned back to the island, standing up and tall despite the weight of the water rushing slowly from her skirts.

To herself she said: “get this done, old gel.”

And to the shore she said: “This is Maura speakin’ ‘ere! This is Maura of The Mount and the Southern Shore and I say that we will not have any more trouble from this one, and he will not come back. I ‘ave said this, and you ‘ave ‘erd it.”

“Aye,” came the reply from the elders on the shore.

And Clara refused to blink as she stared out at the old woman in the sea and, as a result, her lips were tight and there were tears in her eyes.

“Good! Well, tha’s it. Tha’s all.”

And with that, she swept her shawl around the torches so they all went out in a circle. And in that darkness there was a splashing sound and a whumping sound and then the high, sharp tinkle of popping foam.

And then the people were all alone on the beach. Maura was gone, and so was the creature.

And eventually the water calmed down in to its quiet, regular lapping.

And the creature never came back either, true to Maura’s word, and the ocean around the island returned to normal within a week. The island took longer, but the rhythms returned with the change in the season.

Clara had wept in to Magdelene’s dress all that night, and was quiet the whole of the next day as the rising Sun taught her how the world carried on.

And that night they lit a fire for Maura, and told stories, and Clara had snuck in to Mortim’s tent while they were doing this, and had taken Simon’s finger from the jar before sneaking back to the circle.

Mortim had asked her to tell a story and Clara told the story of the ants in the tree-house and how Maura had solved the invasion by leaving honey by the door.

And she threw the finger in to the fire and the next day recovered the bones that she made into a necklace that she still wears to this day.

And the rattled as she waddled down to the South Shore, whacking at weeds with a stick, huffing at the distance. For little Gretchen had told her the boys were out there swimming. And the girl had done this while standing half in the door, still very young, and still far too scared to speak above a whisper.

And so she had left her tea, excused herself from the women, and called for her stick and her shawl.

And it took her a long time to reach the South Shore these days, as it did everywhere, and she made sure everyone knew about it.

“Oi! You! Bobby and Fearney and Simon Halloway! I see you!”

The boys were out yards in to the sea, splashing at each other. “And we could hear you from the trees, Clara!” they called back.

“That’s so you can’t say I didn’t you you fair warning, eh? Get out of the sea, the lot of you, and get out now!”

“But why?”

“Bee-corze! I said so!”

And they climbed out on to the shore, their legs suddenly heavy.

“But why, Clara? Come on!”

“Bee-corze… a man once walked in to the sea without knowing where he was going, and he almost took the whole island with him.”

And the boys were intrigued.

“What happened?”

“The sea exploded, and there was a great burning cloud over the whole land.”

“Were there deaths?”

And Clara narrowed her eyes. “Nasty deaths, and lots of ‘em. Piled high they were.”

“Clara, come on. Tell us. Come on, tell us!”

“Help me up, and take me back boys.”

And they hauled her up, and she gave out and angry moan, half at her joints and half as a warning. And she took one boy on each arm, had Simon Halloway beat the path ahead of them.

“Clara! The story!”

and she laughed, and rattled as she did so, and then she told them the story of the man who walked in to the sea.

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.

Links

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facebook.com/lostcatpodcast

soundcloud.com/a-p-clarke/sets/the-lost-cat-podcast

apclarke.bandcamp.com/releases

#cat #lost cat #lost cat podcast #the lost cat podcast #audiodrama #audio fiction #podcast #transcript #horror #fairy tale #vampire #sort of #sea

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yeskhanzadame11 · 5 years ago

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And Yet It Moves

The information that the South Korean scientist Twang Woo-such has been fired from his prestigious seat with Seoul National University brought about surprise waves inside the medical global and past. His claims, going back over several years, to have cloned the primary human embryos and to have extracted stem cells from them, grew to become out to were false. Six other professors running with Twang have also been disciplined.

His studies had raised hopes of finding therapies for various afflictions, which include Parkinson's sickness, and Alzheimer's. The disgraced professor has apologized for generating faked outcomes, however remains satisfied that he changed into heading within the right direction, and that finally a person else might make the step forward.

Not least of the outcomes of Twang's faker is the damage executed to the public belief of science. We tend to put scientists on a pedestal, and it comes as a surprise while one in all them is stuck along with his hand within the cookie jar. What took place at Seoul is grist to the mill of the anti-technological know-how lobby, which would claim it proves that technological know-how is unreliable and that scientists can't be depended on.

In my opinion this argument misses the point. The integrity of scientists may be trusted exactly due to the fact falsification can't be hidden, at the least no longer completely. The easy reality is that not anything in science is given credence unless it may be examined and demonstrated independently by using different scientists Galileo test . That is what continues technological know-how honest.

In 1925 technology become, in effect, put on trial when a younger biology trainer from Dayton, Tennessee called John Scopes, become arrested for coaching evolution in violation of state regulation. The Monkey Trial, as it have become acknowledged, changed into absolutely a display trial and Scopes was a inclined guinea pig, used to check a brand new law which banned 'any theory that denies the tale and divine introduction of man as taught in the Bible'

Clarence Darrow, America's predominant attorney at the time, supplied to protect Scopes with out a price, and the prosecution became headed by way of a former presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Darrow seemingly had the pleasant of it. The contentious H Mencken was one of the journalists on the trial, and described how Darrow goaded his opponent; "His face flushed underneath Mr. Darrow's looking words, and he writhed to be able to maintain himself from making heated replies. His eyes glared at his lounging opponent, who stood contrary him, glowering beneath his bulging brow, speculatively tapping his arm along with his spectacles". In the cease, John Scopes turned into located guilty via the jury and fined $a hundred. Both aspects claimed a victory.

Probably the fine known case of deception within the 20th century turned into that of 'Meltdown man'. Meltdown was an archaeological site near Hastings, East Sussex, where fossil remains were located in 1913, which have been notion to be the 'lacking hyperlink' between men and apes. In 1953 it changed into located that the skull became of a current human and the jawbone belonged to an ape. The discovery precipitated tremendous embarrassment in scientific circles, mainly in view of the quantity of time which had elapsed because the unique excavation. To some, this became proof fantastic of the fallibility of clinical outcomes, but in reality scientists had been denied get right of entry to to the remains for many years, and had to be content material with plaster fashions.

It is stating the apparent to mention that in the 90 years or so that have elapsed since the Meltdown discovery, technology has improved beyond some thing dreamy of in the ones days. There are actually many ways of checking out and inspecting fossil remains, and brought collectively, they do away with most of the guesswork from the dating manner. In the end, the fraud perpetrated at the clinical network via a few unknown person all the ones years ago, turned into uncovered by using scientists, which surely demonstrates that technological know-how is capable of accurate its own mistakes.

Whoever installation the Meltdown fraud turned into truelove bent on mischief, however within the case of Paul Hammerer and the Midwife toads the scientist concerned acted from the equal muddled true intentions as Twang Woo-such. Paul Hammerer changed into an Austrian biologist, running in the early part of the 20th century. He had what we might name celeb repute, and except being a renowned scientist, he changed into a musician and composer, blending with the Viennese intellectuals, artists and musicians of the time, together with Gustav Mahler and the conductor Bruno Walter.

Hammerer desired to resurrect the earlier theories of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, which postulated an opportunity view of evolution to that of Charles Darwin. Lamarck advised that physical traits (and by way of inference, mental ones), received at some stage in the lifetime of an organism, can be surpassed on to its offspring. Lamarck ism had lengthy on account that been deserted by means of medical notion, but Hammerer believed he ought to set off difficult pads on the forelimbs of Midwife toads that may then be surpassed directly to the next era, and so show Lamarck's idea of the inherit ability of traits.

Unfortunately for him, at the peak of his repute, an American scientist by way of the name of GK Noble, on inspecting one in all Hammerer's specimens, determined Indian ink within the pads. This became the quit for Hammerer. His twenty-six years of careful studies had been compromised, and shortly after, he took his life.

The word 'science' comes from the Latin 'scientist' and really method 'information'. Probably the primary guy who notion like a modern-day scientist become Leonardo Vince. Aside from being a remarkable painter and a satisfactory lute player he had an insatiable curiosity about the world. He produced a tremendous series of notebooks with observations on anatomy, cloud formations, plans for cities, navy inventions, tanks, flying machines and submarines. He become additionally interested in habitual styles in nature.

Leonardo's stressed and tremendous mind not often allowed him to complete anything. It turned into left to 3 terrific astronomer/mathematicians; Copernicus, who changed into his present day, and a touch later, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galileo to lay the foundations of present day technology.

Copernicus re-observed what a number of the Ancient Greeks had regarded; that the solar changed into on the center of the solar gadget, and that the earth revolved around it. Heracles and later Aristarchus proposed this concept over two thousand years in the past. At that time, however, most scholars followed Ptolemy and Aristotle in believing that the earth became the center of the whole thing, a superbly herbal and realistic factor of view, given the available proof.

Unlike Galileo, who followed him, Copernicus become a careful and rather timid guy, and did now not publish his findings until very late in his lifestyles. In reality, it's far stated that he noticed his paintings in print for the first time while he became loss of life. He never absolutely resolved the hassle of the motions of the stars and planets. This changed into because In common with all astronomers of his day he nevertheless observed the ancient traditions, in assuming that planetary orbits have been circular, and this skewed all his calculations quite.

It turned into the Polish astronomer Johannes Kepler who inside the subsequent century realized that during reality planetary orbits had been elliptical. This changed into an exceptional idea at the time. He had to assume that there has been a force stopping the planets from flying off into space, and it turned into simplest whilst Isaac Newton proven the existence of gravity in 1687 that his concept was confirmed.

Kepler changed into a excellent astronomer and mathematician, and it him greatly that, like Copernicus, he could not quite make his calculations in shape his observations. There is an fascinating story touching on how he finally finished the breakthrough. It seems he went to mattress one night with the trouble on his mind and had a dream in which a spirit grasped him by the shoulders and repeatedly slammed him from the floor to the ceiling, shouting, "The orbits are elliptical, they may be elliptical!" Next day he entered the elliptical orbit into his calculations and everything fell into vicinity. The orbits have been explained.

Galileo changed into the first to apply current scientific techniques based on test and testable observations. In 1608 a few spectacle makers from Flanders got here to the Republic of Venice, wherein Galileo became staying, with their new invention, a spyglass for figuring out ships properly earlier than they entered a harbor. Galileo heard approximately it and right away set approximately figuring out how it worked. He not most effective succeeded in constructing his personal spyglass, however went on to construct a 2 one with the magnification stepped up with the aid of eight, and sooner or later thirty times.

When he grew to become the telescope at the night time sky, he discovered sunspots, the phases of Venus, the craters of the moon and the four massive moons of Jupiter, now referred to as the Galilean satellites. Galileo turned into now able, together with his own observations, to returned Kepler's assertion that not anything in nature is 'perfect'

It was inevitable that Galileo test's ideals might come to the eye of the Pope. Mafioso Barbering, Urban 3rd, changed into in fact an intellectual and patron of the arts, and might have preferred to let the matter drop, with a bit co-operation at the a part of Galileo. But Galileo become now not sturdy on tact and diplomacy. Possibly he notion his role and intelligence might keep him, however it became now not to be. In April 1633 he changed into arrested and brought before the Inquisition.

He become shown the devices of torture that might be used on him, and invited to recant his heresy. Galileo become well conscious that during 1600 the truth seeker Jordanian Bruno had been burnt on the stake, along with his tongue tied to prevent him speaking. His crime were to champion the lessons of Copernicus and to advocate loose speech in general. Galileo become an antique man and knew he couldn't fight the Catholic church. He was invited to kneel and deny that the earth orbited the solar, which he did. As he stood up he is supposed to have muttered, "Upper chi move!" (And but it actions!).

If I needed to look back to find the place to begin of our current international, I think I would have to choose the solar-targeted principle of Copernicus. As the exceptional German poet, novelist and herbal truth seeker Goethe wrote within the 18th century, "Of all discoveries and reviews, none may additionally have exerted a greater impact on the human spirit than the doctrines of Copernicus. The world had scarcely end up known as spherical and whole in itself when it changed into requested to waive the terrific privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, possibly, become a extra call for made on mankind - for by way of this admission such a lot of matters vanished in mist and smoke! What have become of our Eden, our global of innocence, piety and poetry; our testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic-spiritual religion? No marvel his contemporaries did now not want to permit all this pass and provided each feasible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts accredited and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of concept up to now unknown, indeed no longer ever dreamed of".

Today, of route, science touches each thing of our lives. Our world couldn't exist with out it. Perhaps it never should, for actually Galileo test whilst we commenced to apply hearth, stone equipment and agriculture we took our first steps along the route of technology. If technology is a tool, it works spectacularly nicely, but like every device, it is able to be misused. The query is not whether we can agree with technological know-how, but whether or not we will trust ourselves. Watch this area.

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businessthreesixfive-blog · 6 years ago

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Individuals Provide 2018

If one theme binds the 21 Washingtonians in City Paper’s 2018 People Issue, it’s that each of them is sure about their purpose in life. Some of them discovered what their life’s work would be as children. Others made an enduring commitment to finding their purpose, even as they waded through personal setbacks and faced obstacles beyond their control.

Neal Henderson, who was born in 1937 on the island of St. Croix, fell in love with ice hockey during a childhood trip to Canada. Pamela Ferrell has spent four decades braiding, caring for, and comprehending hair—specifically “circle hair”—becoming a force in policy-making and art alike. “I want to heal the world using hair,” she says. “Everything else I’ve done has led me to this.”

The People Issue is an annual exercise at City Paper. Every fall we generate a list of people who have something important to say about this moment in D.C. A few of them are in the process of making their mark on the city right now. Robin Bell is one of those. He casts critical images and texts onto the facades of buildings nearly every night of the week. Some have found themselves in the center of the news. Indira Henard has been advocating for survivors of sexual violence for two decades, but this year, she did so under the spotlight of the #MeToo movement. Still others are local institutions, people who could lead our People Issue any year, for years on end. Kojo Nnamdi is one of those.

We hope that in these pages someone’s life experience—their joys, mistakes, and efforts to comprehend the world—will inform your own. —Alexa Mills

Darrow Montgomery

The Voice

Kojo Nnamdi is celebrating his 20th year as host of the popular Kojo Nnamdi Show, airing weekdays at noon on WAMU. Kojo is a native of Guyana who emigrated in 1967 to attend college. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he began his career in 1973 at Howard University’s WHUR-FM radio and later hosted Evening Exchange, a public affairs program that aired on Howard’s WHUT-TV. —Tom Sherwood

You have such a cool name. Can you tell us how you got it?

Rex Orville Montague Paul was never seen as a very cool name, and that is my real name. I took the name Kojo Nnamdi when I entered professional radio because, one, it was a time when a lot of black people were seeking to reclaim our African heritage and, two, in those days quite a few people in broadcasting used to choose pseudonyms. I picked Kojo, which means “born on Monday,” and Nnamdi I picked because I was a great admirer of Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first [president] of independent Nigeria. Nnamdi is not usually used as a surname in Nigeria, it usually is used as a first name, a Christian name, but not being intimately familiar in those days with how these things were done, I chose it as a last name and it stuck ever since then.

Is that name [Kojo] on your passport?

Nope. As we used to call it back in the day, my slave name is on my passport. My parents got a little carried away.

You are in your 20th year at WAMU. The media world has fractured with social media. But you consistently have an audience. Do you have any idea why?

Terrestrial radio had a certain longevity and stability that people respect, but even that is slowly fading away. But I think what our show does and what I have come to present is a sense of place. It was fortunate for me two years ago that the station decided the show should no longer cover national and international affairs but focus on local affairs because the media that had been suffering the most is local media. Our show is able to give people in this region, whether they live in Maryland, Virginia, or the District, a sense of place and I think that is what is responsible for my own staying power.

You have a distinctive voice and manner.

I don’t know where the voice came from. Before I ever left my native country [in 1967] I applied for a job at the local radio station. I was roundly rejected in the first round. I wasn’t even considered. I think the voice has to do more with my longevity than its timbre. There’s something about voice that still captures the imagination [of listeners]. You invariably never look like what they expect you to look like. There’s that level of intrigue that people find fascinating.

A mutual friend said that you are seen as a wise, thoughtful person … but your youth “was a little bit different,” more radical.

That’s true. I first got involved in radio not as a professional but as an amateur because I was a radical activist. In those days, from the late 1960s to early 1970s, I went from being a Black Nationalist, to being a Pan-Africanist, to studying Marxism and considered myself an activist, [part of] the Baby Boom generation that wanted to change the world. [When] … I was able to get my first professional job at Howard University, I began to realize that even as an activist, one would have more credibility if one were perceived to be fair. I realized more and more that being able to leave my personal opinions at the door … would gain credibility for me … and that has stuck with me to this day.

You will be 74 in January. Do you have a sense of how long you want to do this?

The ironic part is that under normal circumstances I should be considering retiring at this point. But for reasons that I cannot explain, the popularity of the show, and my own, seem to be higher than it’s ever been. And I must admit, that is a motivating factor to keep on doing it.

Darrow Montgomery

The Hair Fixer

Pamela Ferrell has spent the better part of 40 years staring at other people’s heads. Her long career in hair began with the founding of her D.C. hair braiding company Cornrows & Co. in 1980. After being slapped with fines for operating without a cosmetology license, even though there was no instruction on natural hair braiding included in cosmetology curricula, she and her husband Taalib-Din Uqdah fought the city. In 1992, D.C. created a separate license for braiders. Ferrell has remained active in the politics of hair, filing EEOC claims and lawsuits against businesses that discriminate against women with certain natural hair styles, and even convinced the U.S. Navy to change its hair policy in 1993. The majority of her business today centers on designing custom hairpieces for women experiencing hair loss. An exhibit about her work is currently on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. —Laura Hayes

You’ve transitioned from hair stylist to hair activist to hair scientist. What is your latest project?

The Grow Hair Project is about teaching women how to use their hair and scalp as a tool for keeping track of their health status. Strands of hair give us a three-month imprint of what your health status is. It tells us what your mineral content is, like iron, sodium, and potassium. It will also tell us what toxic minerals you have, like lead and mercury. I’ve developed this way of looking at the scalp, and based on patterns of hair loss, I can determine what health problems someone has. For example, the top crown of the head is your blood circulation and cardiovascular system. I’ve followed women for 30, 40 years. I have files of photographs of them over the years. I even keep my files of deceased clients. Many of them had crown hair loss and died of heart attacks, young women. I want to heal the world using hair. That will be my lasting impact. Everything else I’ve done has led me to this.

You began your TED talk by asking the audience what would happen if blonde, redhead, and straight hairstyles were banned in the workplace. How are you still fighting the battle to convince employers to stop discriminating against workers based on their hair?

Circle hair and straight hair have different characteristics. One grows up, one grows down. If it rains and your hair gets wet, your hair is going to hang down, mine is going to expand up. I’ve used these characteristics to fight hair discrimination in the workplace. The most recent case I did was with the U.S. Army. In 2014, I got a call from one of my clients. She’s in a panic because she had been wearing her natural hair twisted for years. The Army had just changed the grooming policy saying you could not wear twists or locks. I had already done this with the Navy. I had a letter I sent to the Secretary of the Army in May 2014. They called me back in. I put together a presentation in four days that I gave to 24 senior officials. I just talked about hair shape. I didn’t talk about black people, white people, skin color, none of that because at the end of the day, that gets old. They totally got it. They changed the policy. This was in May. They were honoring me at the Pentagon in September. They said a policy had never been changed that quickly.

Looking back at your career what was your proudest moment?

Being called by Diana Ross to do the hair for the movie Out of Darkness. Of course, it was in California. The producers thought, “Why don’t we get someone here? It’ll be less expensive.” Diana was like “Well, I want her. I want to interview her.” I went out and interviewed and when I came back she told me I got the job. I was on location for two months. Then I worked with her for four years after that. I toured with her.

Darrow Montgomery

The Artist by Night

Almost nightly, video artist Robin Bell uses a projector to cast critical images and texts onto the facades of buildings. The D.C. native first earned headlines in 2015 for projecting poop emojis onto the side of a new Subway in his Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Since his shitposting days, Bell has set his sights on the Trump administration, and specifically the Trump International Hotel. From reviving a D.C. protest from the Reagan era (“Experts Agree! Ed Meese Is a Pig”) to broadcasting blunt objections (“Brett Kavanaugh Is a Sexual Predator”), Bell is working at the intersection of text art and the op-ed page. —Kriston Capps

Where are you projecting tonight?

I’m not exactly sure. I might be doing the Trump Hotel again and a few other spots around town. I’m working with a few people on an idea at the moment. We did similar projections last night on immigration.

How responsive are you to the news cycle?

Right now, I’m waiting to see what the day’s like by 4:00 and then I’m going to start fine-tuning some things. Some projections, we spend months working on just a simple sentence or two. Other times, we’re figuring out something insanely last minute.

Who are your partners in this?

Two or three years ago, I could do it with one or two people, maybe helping move the equipment. Now I have a team of people who work with me on everything from film to photo to documentation. Sometimes, depending on the projection, I might work with an advocacy group. Or I’ll work with either another artist or filmmakers. Two and a half weeks ago, I did a gig with Assia Boundaoui, who did a movie called The Feeling of Being Watched. She had figured out that her family home and her community had been under FBI surveillance for over 20 years without any convictions. She went through the process of getting [Freedom of Information Act requests] to talk about the surveillance program. She wanted to project images from the FOIAs and her home videos from that time period on the FBI Building. To flip the imagery and research back on the building where that went on.

What buildings have you projected on in D.C.?

I should have a list. The Trump Hotel. We’ve done the Department of Justice, the FBI. We’ve projected on the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the EPA, Department of Energy—not that one yet, actually, we might do that tonight. I’m saving that for something special. It’s a really big wall. Department of Interior, World Bank, IMF, Supreme Court, the Jamaican Embassy—

That was another one working with a photographer, about a UNESCO World Heritage site in Jamaica being turned into a shipping port for Chinese shippers.

There are 15 that I use. I won’t give away my fonts. Forever, I felt like every single activist poster used Impact. Fucking Impact, everywhere. It’s such a great font, but I try not to use that one.

Do you have any copycats?

I’m not the first or hopefully the last projection artist. There’s a group that’s very like-minded that I work with in New York called The Illuminator. We work with each other from time to time, but then we also challenge each other with getting better at projections and locations. This technology, it’s been there. Jenny Holzer did it. Barbara Kruger did it. Krzysztof Wodiczko, he’s a legend at what he does.

Do you draw inspiration from memes? Do you think of your work in the context of memes?

I definitely don’t think, “I’m going to create a meme,” and that’s the inspiration for a projection. We’ve played around with memes. We did the Left Shark once. We animated the Left Shark and made the Left Shark dance on the Trump Hotel. That was when Stormy Daniels said that Donald Trump was scared of sharks.

Will you keep doing this under, say, a Liz Warren administration?

Oh yeah. We were doing the same projections under Obama. We were doing projections on the EPA. That was the first time I did an EPA projection, over the Keystone pipeline. We do more now—you can’t make up this news. What used to happen in a month happens in a day or two.

Darrow Montgomery

The Culinary Historian

Michael Twitty grew up in D.C., had internships at the Smithsonian Institution, and has gone on to make a career of studying culinary traditions and what they mean. His narrative cookbook, The Cooking Gene, won two James Beard Awards this year, and he has no plans of slowing down. —Stephanie Rudig

You were born and raised in D.C. What food memories do you have from growing up?

I’ll start with my mom. When she came from Cincinnati, one of the things she noticed was the prevalence of seafood. They had never had so much crab. And of course the half smoke, nobody had a half smoke in the Midwest. The food was much closer to the food of the South, where her parents had come from. For my father, who was born and raised in the city, he has a long memory of what it was like to be in these communities of people who had come up from the South who were still living under segregation, and formed their own restaurants and communities in Washington that spoke to where they came from. Everybody had a garden. People ate out of those gardens. Growing up in the city, during the summertime people had barbecues and cookouts. You could literally go from household to household and just pick up a plate and be kind of full.

For your research for The Cooking Gene, you actually went and worked in fields and produced food the way enslaved people did, the way that people did historically. What was it like to spend so many years of your life doing that?

It was my way out of a rut. I taught 14 years of Hebrew school in this area, and I had a routine, and I hate routines. I felt as a historian that it’s kind of thrilling to place yourself in the history. It’s one thing to say, “Those people over there, this is what happened to them.” But when you know your own story is actually tied up in the history that you teach and write about, it’s incredibly personal. It’s almost as if you never learned anything.

Was there anything that particularly surprised you during this process?

The number of white people who I was related to. It’s happened to me so often. The other night I was in Norfolk, Virginia. The family who the lecture series was named after, his son gets up and says, “I have to call you cousin, because I did some research and you and my mother shared an ancestor.” This happens to me all the time.

A lot of people first came to know you through your open letter to Paula Deen after her racist comments. You invited her to come cook with you. She never responded, but does that offer stand?

It does, but until she does, I’m like Mariah Carey: “I don’t know her.” I was disappointed, but I was cool. Honestly, had she shown up to that dinner in North Carolina, we might not be talking right now. It would be a completely different narrative.

I hear that you want to do a book about Jewish culinary traditions, and also one about your experiences as a gay man working in kitchens.

Kosher Soul is in the process of being written now. Kosher Soul is about Jewish food and Jewish culture, but through the lens of African-American Jews and Jews of African descent. Jewish cookbooks are an extension of the way Jewish culture uniquely inculcates its culture. The next one doesn’t have a name yet. For gay men in the kitchen, and LGBT people period, the kitchen is both a sanctuary and a war ground. All these people in the food world, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, all these gay men who shaped the contours of American food as we know it. You have to ask yourself, what is it about men who sleep with men that makes them so profoundly central to the history of global gastronomy?

Where do you like to eat around here?

It’s going to get me killed. I will say this. Andy Shallal, if you’re listening, please reboot Eatonville slash Mulebone. It was really good, and I don’t like to eat Southern food and soul food out. They always mess it up.

Darrow Montgomery

The Bonsai Master

Just like his dad, Joe Gutierrez went into medicine. He’s a surgeon and has practiced at several regional hospitals, including Doctors Hospital, Georgetown, and Sibley, with his longest stint at the now-shuttered Columbia Hospital for Women. But as a hobby, he started cultivating bonsai trees decades ago and is a long-serving volunteer at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. —Stephanie Rudig

How did you get involved in bonsai?

My uncle was a photographer, that was his hobby. He liked to photograph old buildings and old doors, and I liked to photograph trees. I liked trees that were crooked with a lot of movement to them. Then we came to the states from the Philippines, and we stopped in Japan, and that’s when I saw my first bonsai. That kind of sat at the back burner of the brain. I was up late one night in the recovery room waiting for a patient to wake up. We had a nurse who had a book on chrysanthemums. The first half of the book was how to take care of chrysanthemums, and the second half was how to make bonsai out of chrysanthemums. I thought I’d give it a try.

I can’t tell you how many chrysanthemums I killed. I didn’t have the patience, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I bought every book I could for bonsai and had a little bit of success. Brooklyn Botanic Garden had a Japanese master there, so every month I’d pack up my tools and go to Brooklyn and spend a day there. Usually I’d go on Friday, then I’d have the rest of the weekend to play with the trees.

It’s interesting that you say you didn’t have the patience, because you’ve now stuck with it for several decades.

When I first went into practice, my dad said, “All you need is some patients.” He was playing with the term. You really need patience in bonsai, you can’t do everything all at once. There’s times when you should prune, and times when you shouldn’t prune.

I’ve heard that you use surgical tools in your bonsai practice.

I have some old tools. Tools wear out, so I have tools that were discarded, beyond repair. They’re stainless steel, so they don’t rust.

Are there other similarities between the two interests?

I like to work with my hands, and I like to do meticulous work. It takes meticulous work to wire all the little different branches and make the wiring look neat. It’s the same way when you do surgery. People don’t really see what your suture technique looks like, but if you take pride in what you do, it’s gotta look nice.

You’ve earned the nickname “The Magician” [from the Northern Virginia Bonsai Society].

You bend branches and make them bend a different way, people think it’s magic, but it’s not magic. You have to know exactly where the breaking point is. You bend the branch until you think it might break if you move it a quarter inch, then you stop.

What’s the oldest tree you’ve trained? Have any survived from your early days?

My oldest trees are collected trees. I have some trees that are 15, 20, 30 years old. If you start with a nursery plant, that’s pretty old. I have trees that are a couple hundred years old, but those are trees I dug up in Colorado.

How long have you been volunteering at the museum?

Twelve or 13 years. Since shortly after I retired. When the Japanese pavilion opened in 1976, I was there.

How has it changed over the years?

Some of the trees look better now.

They’re that much older, so there’s a lot more foliage. They get good care here. We photograph the trees so we can see that they really do look better. Some of them have died. Every curator says “I don’t want any trees to die on my watch.” But it’s just like patients. They have a life expectancy.

Darrow Montgomery

The Self-Care Purveyor

Alisha Ramos started her career in tech, working at Vox Media and as a design lead on healthcare.gov. Now, she helms Girls’ Night In, which publishes a weekly newsletter on self-care to over 100,000 subscribers, and hosts live book club events in nine cities. —Stephanie Rudig

What prompted you to quit your career in the tech sector and launch Girls’ Night In?

I actually think Girls’ Night In is very much in line with technology. I built our website from scratch, and designed and coded it. From figuring out how to grow the newsletter to publishing content to harnessing our community, a lot of it is very technology driven. I launched the Girls’ Night In newsletter in the middle of all this political upheaval and amid a very overwhelming news cycle. I wanted to create something that was fun and gives you a chance to take a breather. The decision to quit didn’t come until six months after launching the newsletter. I put 100 percent of myself into everything I do, and at that point I was one foot in, one foot out, and I decided I wanted to be 100 percent in.

Self-care is very big right now, but you’ve managed to gain a really huge following. What sets you apart from other people who are covering the same thing?

When we first launched, self-care wasn’t really a force like it is now. I made a point to not use the phrase “self-care,” because I felt that it could be co-opted. But now we embrace it, because it is a simple encapsulation of what we stand for, which is to help women relax, recharge, and build more meaningful community. I wanted to capture the sense that I get whenever I host my friends for a night in. It’s really the time for me to connect on a deeper level with my friends and deepen those relationships. We are trying to put a deeper focus on a sense of mental wellness, emotional wellness, and social wellness. Those are all a part of how we live our lives as humans.

I keep hearing that millennials crave “experiences,” but it kind of seems like that’s just another thing that’s burning people out. How can staying in be its own experience?

The really fun thing about Girls’ Night In is a lot of people will tag us on Instagram while they’re staying in alone on a Friday or Saturday night. We’ll usually repost those, and we’ve gotten messages from people who say, “Even though I’m staying in, I still feel like I’m part of something, and I feel less alone.” Another favorite part for me is our monthly book club gatherings we have offline. We created those to balance the need to stay in and the need to go out and experience the world. There’s usually around 20 or 25 women. It’s a really great way to meet other people in a not overwhelming way.

Can we expect to see more events from Girls’ Night In?

You can expect to see us expanding into different types of event formats. In New York we’re hosting an expanded version of our book club. There are more social elements involved, so we’re having a book swap, teaching people how to press flowers in their books, we have fun icebreakers. We look to our community for everything. Even the book club came organically from our community from people saying “I love reading the newsletter, but I want a book club, because when I stay in, I read books.”

What does an average night in look like for you?

Cooking is definitely one version of my self-care. I usually go through my favorite recipe sites. I’ll try to find one that’s a little complex or something I’ve never cooked before. It gives me a little bit of a challenge, which as a type-A person, I love. That’s my time to reflect and relax, and at the end of it I get a delicious meal. And the usual stuff that others probably do like watch Netflix.

Darrow Montgomery

The Fire Chief

Gregory Dean is the stoic face of D.C.’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services department, responsible for coordinating the District’s response to everything from house fires to the Women’s March. In 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser tapped the Seattle native to run FEMS, after a decade of helming Seattle’s fire department. In the past few months alone, a string of over 1,500 overdoses from synthetic cannabinoid K2, along with a major fire at a seniors’ apartment building called Arthur Capper tested the department’s organizational muscle. And five days after that fire began, a 74-year-old male resident was found (largely unharmed) in his apartment. Dean’s philosophy for each new event? “We’ll go back out and ask different questions, more penetrating questions.” —Morgan Baskin

Tell me a little bit about your career path, and how you ended up where you are.

I was in college, and I was getting ready to get drafted to go to Vietnam. They had a lottery system; my number was high, which means, I wasn’t going to Vietnam. So I took a part-time job at the Seattle fire department. I mean, I took a job, I just assumed it was part-time. And I was going to go back and finish up [school] and be a history teacher. But when I got there, I found out that I loved the adrenaline highs of never doing the same thing every day, the unexpected. So since then, that’s all I’ve done.

When I first started, we worked 10-hour days and 14-hour nights. And then in the ’80s we switched to 24-hour shifts. And then as an administrator you work seven days a week, eight hours a day, or so.

What kind of history did you want to teach?

It was just going to be high school—so just general history.

How is working at the department in D.C. different than working in Seattle?

We’re the nation’s capital. And there’s great pride in being the nation’s capital and being innovative and doing things—for example, the number of first amendment marches, and preparing for the inauguration, for being prepared for the host of things that go on in the District. 500,000 people show up and we’re expected to not only manage the day-to-day business [of FEMS], but all those [protestors] that come to the District at the same time.

You know, you take great pride in being able to take care of people. For the inauguration for the president ... at 2 in the morning we went home, at 7 in the morning we started the Women’s March. And just having all of your resources available and ready to go. The marches we’ve had, the things that go on—you know, it’s interesting.

What’s your planning strategy when you know big protests or demonstrations are coming down the pipeline?

With the inauguration, we took a year. We worked with all the different police agencies, we worked with the military, we worked with the Secret Service, a number of different fire departments—because, big events like that, you have to use your mutual aid, to be able to make sure you can cover all the different aspects. So each one is a little different, but based on the type of event and based on security, it determines how far out you have to prepare for these types of things.

On a personal level, how do you deal with public health crises like the K2 overdoses? Do you approach it clinically at this point?

So, I think everyone is always affected. We do better by training. Training allows us to actually manage the types of events that we deal with. But it’s not just one person—I think if it’s one person you feel totally responsible. We work as a team, and so we talk about events, and train for events—I always look at fire departments like football teams. You want to go out and utilize your skills so when events come in, it’s exciting times. We get to manage and see how well our training matches up with what we’re seeing. So we look forward to those type of events. And trying to manage all the different things that go on.

Darrow Montgomery

The Hockey Ambassador

Born July 9, 1937 on the island of St. Croix, Neal Henderson fell in love with hockey at a young age, when he visited his father in Canada. He moved around the United States before settling in D.C. in the 1960s, and in 1978, founded the Fort Dupont Ice Hockey Club to give local kids the opportunity to play organized ice hockey. It’s now the oldest minority hockey program in North America, according to the NHL, and Henderson remains actively involved four decades later. In May, the league announced that Henderson was one of the finalists for the Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award, which is “presented to the person who best utilizes hockey as a platform for participants to build character and develop important life skills for a more positive family experience.” —Kelyn Soong

Hockey is still a predominantly white sport, especially in the NHL. How did you get into the sport?

When I was a child, my dad was in the Merchant Marines, and his port of call was St. Catherines in Canada. At the time, I was an only child along with my mom, so I had the opportunity to travel to Canada during the Second World War, and I learned to do what the kids in the neighborhood did. I enjoyed the game. I enjoyed playing hockey, and it stuck with me from then on.

What did you enjoy about the sport? What drew you to it?

Well, the hypnotism of the stick and puck. You had a language different from any other sport to play. You don’t even have to speak but you understand the language of stick and puck.

What is the language of stick and puck?

The way you pass the puck to your partner. The way the puck sounds hitting the stick. The way the puck feels when it touches your stick. The way you control the puck and the different areas of the blade of the stick that touches the puck. [How it] feels in your hand.

What’s the mission of your youth hockey program?

It’s to teach people of all colors and ages to work together, to understand each other, to form a more perfect union of understanding each individual by means of communication through playing ice hockey.

What kind of impact has the Capitals winning the Stanley Cup had on your program?

It’s given us a greater feeling of importance, that even though it’s a game, it means so much as a part of life to strive for something, to want to be on top with something in mind. And that’s a part of life. You want to do what you can in life to be not only the best you can be, but to be able to do something that you can be admired for.

How do you think we can get more people of color in hockey and playing at a high level?

I think you have to express that by showing more people, letting more people see that. I think more commercials, more people being involved as far as conversation ... to enlighten people about this sport.

How important is it to have an ice rink in Southeast, where kids aren’t normally exposed to ice hockey?

I think it’s important because it’s another avenue to travel. You have the basketball courts, you have the football fields, you have the baseball fields. Why not have an ice rink?

What are you most proud of?

I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve helped so many kids go to college, become respectable, have positions in many different operations of our society that they can be happy and honored to be in. They’re good citizens for the country and they are well worth the strides that they have made to be where they are.

Darrow Montgomery

The Do-It-All Designer

Dian Holton is eternally hustling, whether dressing store windows at Gap in the wee hours, whipping up designs for her day job as an art director at AARP The Magazine, or planning big things with the D.C. chapter of American Institute of Graphic Arts. In everything she does, she gleans inspiration from her own world, whether she’s seeking input from her family members who have served in the military for a service-focused shoe collection, or building numbers out of all different kinds of materials and photographing them—her Daily Digits project. —Stephanie Rudig

You work at AARP, and people may have a preconceived notion of what that’s like, but your design is hip and young looking. A lot of people expect something different from AARP. How do you bring your design to the organization?

It’s a team, and I want to give credit to the entire team. We have people who have a wealth of experience and knowledge. I try to get outside of my 9 to 5 to glean inspiration so I can bring it back in and fuel those projects. I’ve got the keys to the car and I’m driving 100 miles an hour. I can hire whichever illustrators I want to hire. I like colors and patterns and textures, so I try evoke that energy in that content.

You work in fashion quite a bit, and recently did your first shoe collaboration with Nike. Tell me about that.

They reached out in January and they said, “You have like 11 days.” I was like, I can bitch and whine about the timeline, or I can just do it. You know, like Nike, right? This is really a promotion of the NIKEiD customization program. I wanted to tell a story. My brother had just come back from Syria the previous year, my dad is retired military, my cousins and uncles on my dad’s side, most of them have served, all branches. I know it’s materialist, but I thought this might be a good way to pay homage to them. I wanted it to be intergenerational and be appealing to people my dad’s age and people my brother’s age. The reception was amazing. I did not expect people to be as excited and to foster the conversations we had. People were reaching out from abroad. I donated proceeds to Veterans on the Rise, which is a nonprofit here in D.C. that supports homeless vets, and to Purple Heart Foundation.

How did you manage to consistently stick with your Daily Digits project?

It started in February 2015. I wanted something where I could control the medium, the time I post, if I just don’t want to do it anymore. I started with Rolos. It took off and became really easy. I did 30 days and it just kept going and going. HP reached out and asked, “Would you be interested in using that body of work to do a collaboration with us?” We did two small books, almost like coffee table books. They wanted me to highlight their new inks. The books are all printed with those inks. That was a fun project, and it turned into a commercial.

You’ve had a lot of clients and dabbled in a lot of areas. Do you have any dream projects?

There’s so many things. All the things. I’m looking to have an exhibit with [Daily Digits]. I would also like to make a book, like a bound book. So Random House, Chronicle, hello. Also I want to do a calendar. With that project I would love to see it in a tactile form, because it’s just digital. I’ve always had the goal of working corporate at a fashion company. One of the reasons I’ve stayed at the Gap is I want to do corporate store designs and campaigns. Beyond that, I don’t know. I’m content for the most part. I want to work on fun projects that are meaningful and impactful.

Darrow Montgomery

The District Fishwife

Fiona Lewis brings Aussie charm to Union Market, where she operates District Fishwife—a small and mighty fish market and made-to-order seafood stall. The Melbourne-born fishmonger studied chemical science at university before “going adventuring.” She visited, lived, and worked in various countries including Vietnam, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. She met her future husband, Ben Friedman, at an expat party in Kabul where she was helping to open a friend’s restaurant. She agreed to come back to the U.S. with him. That was nine years ago. —Laura Hayes

Why did you decide to open District Fishwife in 2014?

Coming from Kabul, I was so excited to come to D.C. and be an hour and a half from the ocean. Afghanistan is landlocked and a war zone. What was coming in, even to a couple of high-end restaurants, wasn’t amazing. I was so excited to come here and go to great fish markets and buy all this amazing fish. Then I got to D.C. and was like, “Huh?’” I felt the city was lacking in the quality of seafood that we enjoy everywhere in Australia.

How has the business evolved over the past five years? Your kitchen seems to crank out poke bowls and shrimp bánh mì sandwiches?

When we opened we didn’t have as much [prepared] food as we do now. When we signed the contract we were told [Union Market] would be a market, not a food hall, but that’s what it is. We sell a little more food than fish, but that’s not surprising. We do have a whole bunch of loyal, amazing supporters for our fish.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

Educating customers. A passion of mine is sustainability. How can we continue eating wild fish forever? Part of that is learning about, embracing, and understanding aquaculture [farmed fish]. There are good and bad practices. Customers will walk past my case seeing that some products are farm-raised, yet they’ll go to the butcher next door where almost everything is from a farm. I’m trying to change the perception in America that farmed is bad. Aquaculture is the thing of the future. With it we can support our wild fisheries, our fishermen, and our industry. Our Cape d’Or salmon is farmed in Nova Scotia in seawater. Hopefully in the next 40 years we’ll be eating fish raised in a tank somewhere, done exceptionally well. It’s only just starting. The technology is only 10 years old.

What makes a bad day a bad day in the fish world?

Hurricanes. That means no fishing. No fishing means no fish. This year there have been a huge amount of hurricanes and storms and crazy weather from the Gulf to the East Coast and we try to be as regional as possible.

You say your customers have come to trust that the seafood displayed in your case is sustainable. What fish should we be eating more of?

We don’t want to just eat cod, tuna, and salmon. It’s about broadening horizons and eating lesser-known fish. If you haven’t heard of a fish in our case, ask us about it and we’ll tell you how to cook it. Try the smaller fish. They reproduce faster from a wild perspective. The other thing to remember is that the shellfish we cook are filter feeders. Mussels, oysters, scallops, and clams. They’re not just sustainable, they’re restorative. They’re cleaning the ocean.

What do you think of the plastic straw ban craze? Are there other, even more impactful plastics we should do away with?

I don’t think we’re at a place yet where we can stop using all plastic, but we’re at a place where people can bring their own bags to grocery shop. All those boring, simple things. But more importantly the water [bottle] thing kills me. Sometimes you need a transportable thing of water, but think about it consciously every time before you do it so you’re using two bottles a week instead of 30.

Darrow Montgomery

The Team Builder

Local sports fans may remember Pops Mensah-Bonsu as the high-flying dunker on George Washington University’s men’s basketball team from 2002 until 2006. Since then, the 35-year-old north London native has lived and played basketball around the world. His nine-year professional career included stops in the NBA, high-level European leagues, and the NBA’s minor league, now known as the G League. After retiring from playing in 2015, Mensah-Bonsu worked for the National Basketball Players Association and as an advance pro scout for the San Antonio Spurs. Now he’s back in his “second home” as the general manager of the Wizards’ new G League affiliate, the Capital City Go-Go. —Kelyn Soong

Welcome back to D.C. How are you settling in?

Not settling in for me. I’ve been in the D.C. area since I left GW. Since I’ve retired, I’ve worked remotely from D.C. It just feels good to be fully based here as far as my day-to-day operations in the heart of D.C. So I’m pretty excited about that kind of relocation.

You’ve played professionally across the country and all over the world. What’s it like playing all those places?

It’s interesting because journeymen are usually looked at in a negative light. For me, it just made me the man I am today and it allows me to do my job a little bit better. I’ve played in the NBA. I’ve played high level Europe. I’ve played in the G League, and I have experience and success at every level. All the experiences that I’ve had have better served, or allowed me to better serve these players in the managerial position that I’m in today.

Did you expect to become a general manager?

No. I was always one of the players who thought about life after basketball. I always thought about going to law school. I thought about going to get my MBA. I always had a fascination with hotels. I wanted to get into the hospitality industry. I still have a weird fascination for hotels. I think playing basketball, it takes you all over the world and you see a number of different hotel rooms. … Hotel rooms always excited me for some reason, but I think when I retired early, I realized that my impact on the game was probably going to be more off the court. That’s when I realized the front office was going to be my path.

What do you hope to accomplish with the team?

Development, across the board. We want to be able to develop the players on and off the court. We want to be able to develop our staff. We have an assistant coach. Hopefully we develop him into an NBA assistant coach, maybe one day a head coach. If we have a head coach, we want to help propel him into an NBA head coach one day. If we have anybody else in our front office, if it’s a basketball ops assistant, we want to develop them into someone higher up in the front office.

And the community. Ward 8, Congress Heights is one of the main reasons why we’re here and we want to make sure we embrace that community. Community development is a big thing for me. When I got the job I really wanted to make sure they felt a part of this and felt like this is a team they can call their own. We want to embody that Go-Go name and we’re not going to take that lightly.

What do you think of the team name?

I love it. I feel like we set the bar high with the name. Now we have to live it and we have to embody that name and make sure we embrace it. The players like to listen to music before practice starts or it gets going. Coach threw on some go-go and got the guys pretty excited, pretty hyped. Everybody out there who thinks it’s just a name, nah, we take it to an extreme when it comes to being the Go-Go. We even practice to the music, too.

Darrow Montgomery

The Government Watchdog

As the first director of D.C.’s Office of Open Government, Traci Hughes drew the blueprint for its mission. Some didn’t appreciate her effort to peel back the curtains on governmental operations, and earlier this year, the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability declined to appoint her to a second term. —Mitch Ryals

In your five years as director of the Office of Open Government, what violation of open government laws did you see most often?

The most common ones were that people were improperly closing meetings. We really had to work with the public bodies from the outset to make sure that everybody was properly trained.

We’re all human in these roles, so there was unfortunately a lot of push back. There were public bodies who felt they should be able to discuss certain things in a closed or private session that the law simply didn’t allow.

Are there any cases that stand out in your mind?

The first one being the United Medical Center opinion, in which I found that that public body wrongly entered into closed session and then voted to close the only maternity ward east of the river.

That has significant implications in many different areas, the least of which, in my opinion, was the violation of the Open Meetings Act. The response for that particular public body was “Well we’re going to sue the Office of Open Government.”

The second opinion I issued pertained to the Commission on the Selection and Tenure of Administrative Law Judges. That was also very unpopular with the executive because the opinion stated that not only were there numerous violations of the Open Meetings Act, but there was the potential that a couple of members were not properly seated when they took certain very high profile decisions. If you’ve got members of a public body who are not properly seated, and they take action, then potentially that action is null and void. I knew when it hit my desk: This is going to make me or break me. And this is a pivotal moment for me. Either I’m going to do my job and probably risk losing it, or sweep some stuff under the rug, where I’m not pointing out the violations of the law. I could not live with not treating that complaint the same way I would any other. I could not allow anyone else to fill the narrative or fill the gap on what happened.

In 2016, Mayor Bowser created the Mayor’s Open Government Office, which served a similar function to your office. Some saw that as a duplication of efforts.

Well, I think it is just what you said. I think it’s entirely redundant. The job description itself was an exact mirror of what I did. So the handwriting had been on the wall in terms of my fate for a year or two prior to my term ending.

Does anything with the Office of Open Government need to change?

I made this very clear to the Council: I think the Office of Open Government should be attached to its own public body to make sure the office maintains its independence. And we now see evidence of what could happen when it doesn’t have full independence. Any person who sits in the director’s seat will think, “Should I write this opinion? Should I not pursue this, because my job could potentially be in jeopardy?”

After you weren’t reappointed, you launched a campaign for D.C. Council, but got caught in the same signature-gathering controversy that disqualified other candidates.

Running for office was a great learning experience. I’m a very deliberate public servant; I was an accidental politician, but it’s not in my constitution to play dirty. So I don’t know that I’ll ever do that again. It’s a nice little footnote to my life 50 years from now.

Darrow Montgomery

The Concert Capturer

Ahmad Zaghal goes to a lot of concerts. In 2009, the year he won the 9:30 Club’s coveted raffle—in which one winner receives tickets to every concert in a calendar year—he attended 160 concerts, he estimates. In recent years, he’s made a name for himself through his concert photography, which is surprising considering he’s blind. What started out as a kind of joke—an Instagram account for a blind guy taking concert photos—has evolved into an artistic endeavor, he says, and his photos have been exhibited at the Phillips Collection. —Matt Cohen

How did you first get into music? What were the first concerts you attended?

I guess it was access to whatever was on TV and, like, HFS. It was a lot of local radio and things like that. There wasn’t much access, really at all, to the internet at the time, which is weird to think about now. Nowadays everybody has access to pretty much whatever—all the music that’s ever been recorded and widely released. You know, you see teenagers who have this crazy wealth of knowledge. [Back then] it was pretty much MTV and local radio stations for the most part. I think one of my first shows—if not my first show—was one of those HFStivals in the ’90s.

For years, I’ve seen you at, it seems like, almost every show I’ve gone to. How many shows a week would you say you attend?

I think I’ve cut down lately. I don’t know, maybe two to three. I feel like I was probably up to about four or five at some point … I really didn’t start going to them regularly until I was well into my 20s.

When did you start taking pictures?

The fall of 2013. It started as a joke between myself and Valerie Paschall. I mentioned to her, “What if I started an Instagram page and started posting pictures?” She thought it was a funny idea. I really didn’t expect it to be more than just me and her, maybe a few other people looking at it, having a laugh over it for a couple weeks. Kind of thought it would die. But then [Washington Post Style Editor] Dave Malitz somehow found out about it, and then mentioned it to [Post Pop Music Critic] Chris Richards. Or maybe it was the other way around. That led to Chris doing a piece in The Post. It kind of became a thing after that, I guess. People seem to be into it still.

What’s that process like for you? I’ve seen you take pictures during shows and you’re pointing your phone where you hear the sound coming from.

Yeah, that’s definitely part of it. Also I get a little bit of feedback from the phone, as to whether there are faces in the frame or something. I can’t really hear it while it’s happening, but I turn the phone way up, so that the voice is loud enough, so I can actually feel it coming through the speaker on the phone. That gives me an idea as to whether or not I’m aimed in the right direction.

Nowadays the facial recognition thing has gotten so good that the voice-over app on the phone will actually tell me if there are faces in the frame, after the fact.

As someone who’s been going to shows in D.C. for almost 20 years, how have you noticed the music scene evolve in that time?

I do think that the local scene is sort of at a peak right now. As opposed to five or 10 years ago, where I’d be going to see mostly touring bands, nowadays I’m mostly just going to see friends’ bands. I’m still out pretty regularly, and I would say, 80 to 90 percent of the bands I go see are bands from around here. I feel like there’s a lot more happening, local music-wise. There’s been a lot more attention from national outlets being paid towards what’s going on here, which is very cool to watch unfold.

Darrow Montgomery

The Social Justice Preacher

Rev. William H. Lamar IV has been the pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in the District of Columbia since 2014. And in that time, as pastor of the 179-year-old national cathedral of the 2.5 million-member AME denomination, Lamar has hosted nationally known speakers, presided over memorial services for people like former PBS anchor Gwen Ifill, and been at the vanguard of many social issues. Since President Donald Trump’s election, Lamar has been especially focused on social justice issues—taking part in numerous protests (he was even arrested for one of them), programs, and acts of civil disobedience. —Hamil R. Harris

You and your ministers have been involved in many protest and calls for social justice. Why has this been part of the mission of your church ?

We do what we do in Washington, D.C. and around the world because God is a God of abundance, beauty, justice, and peace. Where there is scarcity, human beings are hoarding God’s gifts and exploiting the vulnerable among us. Where there is ugliness, human beings are deciding who is worthy of human flourishing and who is not, based upon race, gender, language, religion, ethnicity or some other excuse to oppress and demonize. Where there is injustice, human beings have erected systems to economically and politically reward socio-historical mendacity and the commodification of human bodies and God’s good Earth.

Can you talk about some of the causes you have been involved in since the election of President Trump? During a White House protest led by the Bishops of your church, some said President Trump’s son-in-law [Jared Kushner] wanted to have a meeting with African-American church leaders, like Trump did with Kanye West. Is this dialogue possible?

We have been involved in the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, the Washington Interfaith Network, the Sanctuary Movement, and many other collaborative movements that follow and fight alongside God, as God bends the world toward justice. I will meet with anyone. My ancestors taught me to acknowledge the humanity of all people. What I will not do is allow myself to be propagandized in the interest of empire, white supremacy, or kleptocratic capitalism. No photo ops. Only discussion grounded in history, not hagiography, and real solutions.

In recent years we have witnessed an uptick of hatred turned into violence against houses of worship, from the killing of nine souls at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, to the shooting of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. What is your message to your members and all people of faith at this time?

My message is that America is literally grounded in the destruction of First Nation bodies, black bodies, and bodies that continue to be dehumanized under the white heat of the white gaze under demographic duress. Nothing has happened in this nation to interrupt the narrative that certain bodies are expendable and the Earth is to be exploited. Houses of worship are not exempt from this carnage because theology in America has supported this destruction of human bodies and God’s good Earth. America’s god of empire, commerce, hate, and war must die. Churches and synagogues and mosques who know of God’s justice and peace must preside at the funeral. There is hope, but only if we bury America’s god and live together under the banner of the God who loves all and lifts all.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a book years ago entitled Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? How would you answer that question?

Washington, D.C. has a choice. The United States has a choice. The world has a choice. Community is the result of shared resources, shared truth, and shared opportunities. Chaos is the result of greed, mendacity, and the hoarding of resources. You tell me what America seems to be choosing.

Darrow Montgomery

The Ancient Whale Whisperer

As a paleontologist, whale-chaser, and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History curator of fossil marine mammals, Nick Pyenson is something of a time traveling detective. This summer Penguin published his book, Spying on Whales, which is about his excursions across the oceans to learn more about whales—the biggest creatures on Earth. —Kayla Randall

What does paleontology entail?

We want to know about the history of life on Earth. What happened for most of the 3 billion years of life on this planet? Paleontologists have to be like detectives. You don’t get all the evidence; you’re trying to understand something you didn’t see and use tools of inference. More importantly, we are now agents of geological change on the planet. Our activities are directly influencing major Earth systems. We will see summers free of ice in the Arctic probably in the next 20 years, maybe 15 years, maybe sooner. Look at our carbon dioxide concentration: The last time it was 400 parts per million, which it is today, was 3 million years ago. So, to find examples of where the Earth is going in the future, we need to look to the past. It’s a very common thing for paleontologists to say, “Use the past to understand the present, and the present helps you understand the past.” That’s definitely super true now, more than any other time in human history.

What about your work with whales?

For whales, what’s cool is they have a fossil record. A lot of my job involves understanding the evolutionary past of whales. They have land ancestors. They once lived on land and they were the size of dogs. Some of them nowadays can weigh more than the largest dinosaurs and live in the ocean. That’s a pretty crazy amount of change. If you didn’t have the fossil record, you would not be able to understand how whales got to where they are.

You learn so much. How do you make sense of the information that you get?

There’s no place that’s not interesting to me on the planet. We kind of think that everything is known because we have smartphones and Google. But, the fact is, we really don’t know that much about the planet we live on. And we especially don’t know everything about the past. We don’t know everything there is to know about the history of whales because the past is incomplete.

You can also slide the scale to historic time, and that’s where it gets really interesting because we hunted whales in the millions last century. Two to three million whales were killed during industrial whaling. That was an industry, that was for profit. So the world we live in today has far fewer whales than it did 100 years ago or 200 years ago. What are the consequences of that for ocean food webs? Nobody really knows, and that makes it a really interesting question.

Moving to the future, we are acidifying the oceans, we’re making them warmer. We also have major impacts just in our own activities directly, with shipping, with noise, with pollution. Military sonar has a big effect on whales, all kinds of whales. And the Navy knows that. But are they going to do anything about that? Probably not, because national security is a pretty big issue.

Plastic is a part of our life, and all that ends up in the ocean … It stays forever and breaks down into smaller and smaller parts and eventually ends up in food webs. I don’t think any of us want to eat salmon that probably has plastics inside, but that’s the reality of the world we live in. We’re starting slowly to recognize the direct and indirect consequences of being several billion humans on the planet. The big question is what room is there for all the other species, including whales, on the planet?

Darrow Montgomery

The Activist Actor

Regina Aquino has wanted to perform since she was four years old. The Clinton, Maryland, native studied acting at Studio Theatre after college and appeared regularly on local stages before taking a hiatus to raise her family. Now Aquino, who has roles at the Folger and Woolly Mammoth in coming months, is focused on dismantling conventional notions about what theater should look like. —Caroline Jones

Did you see changes in the D.C. theater scene in the time you were away?

To be honest, not really. In terms of pushing the boundaries with regards to the stories that are told, it’s always the smaller theater companies that embrace stories written by people of color, diverse casting, stories that challenge the norm. When I started acting here, I was the only Filipina actor in the city and in the time that I was away up until now, there’s only been one other. I think the diversity and breadth of talent that is coming up from all different communities, that alone will demand change of the stories that are being told and hopefully will also force the larger theater companies to look at the entire talent pool.

I understand that it’s very hard for a larger theater company to break away from that when you have some bills to pay. But at the same time, how are you growing your audience base and who are you making these stories for? How are D.C. theaters going to survive if they’re always trying to attract the same audience base when this city’s becoming more and more diverse, and those diverse populations also have funds and the desire to see plays?

What do you think about the leadership changes that are happening in D.C. theaters?

I think what Colin Hovde did—knowing that Theater Alliance is at a peak point in its existence and making space for a new leader to come in, hopefully a leader of color or somebody from the LGBTQ community, to really engage with that specific community in a different way than, you know, a cis het white man—is very self-aware and very intentional.

Losing Howard [Shalwitz, former artistic director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company] was, of course, devastating because he is the real deal. We were so lucky here to have that.

But to know that they brought in a woman of color [Maria Goyanes] who has worked very hard and made huge advancements at The Public ... I mean, when I met her and she made her introductory speech to the board, I felt like she was speaking specifically to me. She was talking about inclusion and the power of storytelling and that America is more than what we have traditionally seen on stage and that we need, at this moment in time, in our history, to tell stories that bring us all together and show all of our common interests and struggles and how our genesis, our arrival here in this country, it’s all so similar, so how do we cross those boundaries?

What excites you about living in D.C.?

D.C. is so unique in that there’s always been intense artistic subcultures. We have so many amazing artists who stay here, so many theater artists who stay here because of the opportunity to work at huge theaters and play huge roles and actually develop yourself and develop relationships.

It seems like there are people, especially in the artistic community, who want to grow a D.C. that’s not the federal government.

There’s always been an opposite to what the world perceives D.C. as being. I think wherever there’s intense politics and conflict, there’s always art. There’s always going to be somebody who challenges that or who thrives in opposition to what the norm is, and that’s me.

When I did The Arsonists at Woolly, we really leaned into me. That was the only time I’ve played a Filipino on stage and that’s not written into the play. I just really leaned into it because all of the ambassadors, everybody in Georgetown, all of their housekeeping staff, all of their nannies, they’re all Filipino. The thought that perhaps I might be challenging these affluent, progressive, “woke” white people makes me feel like I have done something for this specific community that no one else could have done and that fulfills me.

I’ve played a maid now. I don’t want to do that again because at some point, you start to reinforce that stereotype. It’s being constantly aware of the things that I don’t want to reinforce in this community because I don’t want people to become complacent.

Darrow Montgomery

The Survivor Advocate

Indira Henard is the executive director of the DC Rape Crisis Center. As an advocate for survivors of sexual violence for more than 20 years, the #MeToo movement has thrust her agency and her life’s mission into the national conversation this year. —Alexa Mills

When you started as a volunteer at the DC Rape Crisis Center 11 years ago, what was the work?

I was a hotline advocate and I was a hospital advocate, and we would get called out for hospital advocacy to support survivors who had just been sexually assaulted. And we run a 24/7 hotline. So that was the work.

What are your memories of doing that work?

My first hospital advocacy case, I’ll never forget it. It was at three in the morning. I was called to Greater Southeast Hospital—it has a different name now—and there was a woman who had been sexually assaulted. And when you walk into that exam room, you don’t know what’s going to be on the other side of that door. And so what I always tell people is that it’s about being able to connect with another human being. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like or what your background is. You are showing up for somebody in their most difficult time. They want to know that you are there to support them, that you are there to believe them, that you are there to do whatever it is you can to make a very tragic situation as comfortable as possible.

Do you still have chances to do that in your executive director role?

My role is quite different now, but I’m always on the ground. So for example, we sent a crisis team out to Capitol Hill to help support survivors who were being triggered by what was happening around the SCOTUS nomination, and to support Dr. Ford, and I led the team. I take hotline calls still. I meet with clients at least a couple times a quarter.

What did your team do on Capitol Hill?

We were in the Hart Senate Office Building for the most part, and we had advocates as well as licensed clinicians, and we partnered with other local agencies. If there were folks who needed to talk to us, we were there. Then our other team was also here at the office because clients were showing up in record numbers. We received a significant spike in our hotline, so we were in the trenches. It was all hands on deck.

As someone who has dedicated your life to these issues, what has the #MeToo movement been like?

The #MeToo movement has ignited a national conversation around sexual violence, which is a good thing. The challenge is that there is a lot that is not talked about within the #MeToo movement. There is this paradigm of what folks think sexual violence is, but sexual violence sits on a continuum. It’s incest, and childhood sexual abuse, and some of those things that we are not hearing about in the national spotlight.

What do people need when they call the rape crisis hotline?

When people call the hotline, and even when we showed up at the Hart Building, it’s for emotional support. Sometimes people call the hotline when they have just been assaulted, but more times than not, people call because sexual violence—when you have been sexually assaulted, you’re always going to be dealing with that on some level. Not in a bad way, but it’s just always going to impact you. You may have a trigger, it may be your anniversary, you may just be having a hard time. We see a spike in calls during the holidays.

Why are the holidays a trigger?

If you were assaulted by a family member, what does that mean to go back home, what does that mean to sit at the table with a person who possibly perpetrated against you? If you’ve never disclosed to your family, you may be showing up a particular type of way, but nobody knows why. If you don’t have family. All of those things. We always have special events for our clients during the holidays.

Darrow Montgomery

The Spiritual Leader

Rev. Randy Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, was born in the District and raised in Alexandria, but spent three decades away, leading Episcopal congregations in Savannah, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia, before returning in 2016 to lead the Cathedral. In those two years, he’s had to grapple with major national issues, from gun violence to racism, but finds joy in connecting with the Cathedral’s many visitors. —Caroline Jones

How do you see the Cathedral’s role in D.C., in a time when people are asking a lot of questions about how humans relate to one another and treat each other?

When I arrived at the Cathedral, the focus of the Cathedral for recent years had been moving us into a place of financial stability, so I was really focused on continuing that work. And shortly after I got here, Trump was elected president, which sort of changed the whole dynamic of everything. It was a painful time for many people, we saw a lot of grief in the Cathedral the day after Trump was elected, but it’s a fascinating time as well. We occupy this interesting space at the intersection of the religious and the civic. I think the Cathedral has an important role to play in that, trying to bring those two together in some ways.

The Cathedral has a great conevening platform. It has a wonderful ability to bring people together for some of the important conversations that need to happen. As I like to say, I’m trying to live into Lincoln’s language to call us to the better angels of our nature.

One of the things I wanted to ask about was the “Seeing Deeper” program (an initiative that invited people of all faiths to visit the Cathedral when it was decked out in colorful lights). What is the goal of that?

The goal, on the one hand, we’re a Christian community. We’re committed to following the ways of Jesus. On the other hand, we’re also really committed to helping people find their own spiritual expressions and not saying you have to have our way as the only way. So “Seeing Deeper” was a way to say to people, “OK, here we are in the depths of winter. We want to create these very non-ideological opportunities to maybe experience something transcendent.” I thought we’d get 700, 800, maybe a thousand people who would be interested in that. I was blown away that last year in one night, 7,000 people signed up to come to the Cathedral just for that purpose.

Where do you find the joy in your job, when your public statements often come at times of sadness?

The Cathedral is a nonpartisan place. We’re not Democrat or Republican, but the Gospel has some pretty serious implications, and so we find at times that it’s really important for us to speak up and speak out about things. And so we don’t shy away from that.

At the same time, the heart of our faith is a thing of joy. It’s about joy and it’s about hope and it’s about human possibility and it’s about helping people to become the best that they can be, so I find great energy and great joy in lifting that up for people and trying to help people find that. We’ve got a lot of problems, a lot of issues, but there are a lot of wonderful people and wonderful things going on in our city and in our country that need to be lifted up.

Have you found that people have come to the Cathedral in search of reminders of that?

We find that a lot. Michael Curry, our presiding bishop, preached the sermon at the Royal Wedding. It was the most simple sermon, it was about the God of love, but you could see across so many people that they needed to hear that very simple message. So we find people all the time that they come to the Cathedral and they’re looking for some hope and they’re looking for some greater sense of meaning or some way to lift up something deeper than the meanness that exists around us.

Darrow Montgomery

The Local Activist

As a core organizer of the D.C.-area chapter of Black Lives Matter, April Goggans has been at the forefront of community organizing against police brutality and harassment in the District. From marches through busy downtown streets in the middle of rush hour, to rallies in front of the Wilson Building, Goggans has made it her mission that, as D.C. sees a surge in national-level activism, outrage over local issues affecting longtime residents isn’t drowned out. —Matt Cohen

How did you get involved in activism and Black Lives Matter DC?

So I’ve been in D.C. for, I think, 12 years. I started doing tenant work, actually, at Marbury Plaza. After I did that whole rent strike and everything, I started noticing people thinking Anacostia was going to turn really quick with gentrification at that time. I noticed the increased police presence. But the thing that was unique, was people’s ... their normalization of over-policing.

I didn’t actually join BLM right off. My brother was involved for a while. Then I had taken off a year or two from activism in general because I was burnt out. But after, I went with him to the White House the night [Officer Darren Wilson] got off. It was mostly college students from Georgetown and GWU. People were taking selfies. I was just like, “I can’t.” I remember feeling like … this isn’t a place for us to mourn.

How do you think the work that you’ve done with Black Lives Matter DC has changed since you started to now?

I think we were really fortunate that the people who founded our chapter very much founded it out of [a want] to be different than a lot of other groups that were doing Black Lives Matter work at the time. They thought that ... police, over-policing, police murder was a symptom of a larger framework of looking at the world for black people.

People went really, really hard in the beginning, really fighting against things. Then the Charleston shooting happened. I remember that week, we had just as many meetings as we always did, but we couldn’t get through any of them. Everybody was just sobbing, just tired. You’re like, “Will it ever stop?” You just literally can’t go anywhere, which is when we started really focusing on healing trauma … trauma both suffered around the movement, but also things that we carry with us just as a result of the effects of white supremacy and microaggressions at work, all that kind of stuff.

Do you feel that your work on getting the NEAR Act (Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results, an effort to reduce violence in D.C.) fully implemented has gotten city officials to pay more attention to what you have to say?

I do. I think you see it in our social media interactions. They don’t like us to say that they’re not doing something, especially if it’s in their own ward, even though they’re not. Because I think the fact of the matter is that we have a track record of—we’re not just throwing [accusations] out there. Generally, if we’re calling you out, we’ve seen it. We have the receipts, and we’re not afraid to show them.

Darrow Montgomery

The Filmmaker

Christian Oh loves creativity. As the president of the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival and board chair for DC Shorts, Oh—an IT trainer by day, and a producer and director at other times—is always thinking creatively for his next project. But beyond filmmaking, Oh says organizing events and looking for opportunities for Asian-American performers is his calling. —Diana Michele Yap

What drew you to film in the first place?

I got into film back in high school. We were playing around with a VHS camcorder, and my friends and I shot a film about a weird sci-fi love story. I remember doing the in-camera edits of having people disappear and appear by turning the camera off and on again. I love film for the basic architecture of being able to tell any story. It’s that simple.

Why did local Asian-Americans want their own film festival?

Back in 2000, there was a desire to tell Asian-American diaspora stories. A few friends, before my time, decided to create a film festival centered on those stories. Being Asian-American and growing up here in the U.S. is very different from being an Asian in our motherlands. There are some cultural aspects that are somewhat universal, but our experiences are different.

How would you advise fellow creatives of Asian descent who may face family disapproval for pursuing arts careers?

All of our parents want their children to be successful. They rarely see artistic pursuits guaranteeing economic advantages. But I beg to differ: Success is not just about money. And I feel that the next generation of Asian-American parents is embracing that. I am truly thankful when I see parents who support their kids who pursue the arts or sports. It means we are letting our kids follow their dreams. Many of my friends have had those dreams torn away from them.

Where have you found your personal strength to become who you are?

Having been homeless and penniless at one time in my life has allowed me to build upon those harsh experiences and made me realize that true strength comes in your resolve and not giving up. We are here for a limited time on this earth, so do as much as you can to achieve as much as you can. You may not be able to get it all done, but look for those small wins and keep plugging away.

What are your ambitions for the Asian-American and D.C. film and creative communities?

To provide more channels of engagement, education, and distribution. Engagement: There should be Asian-American performers at ethnic festivals, but more important, representation at mainstream events and festivals. Education: more opportunities to have Asian-American youth be exposed to the creative arts—all forms of it. Singing, dancing, rapping, filmmaking. And distribution: more access to get creative content out there within the mainstream.

How can people get involved in D.C.-area film festivals?

There are over 65 different film festivals within the D.C. metro area. Find one that you are passionate about and become a volunteer. Learn from the directors, the actors, the festival planners and more. And most importantly, enjoy the films!

Darrow Montgomery

The Outside Artist

There’s an arcadian quality to Twin Jude’s music. It’s intentional, and you can hear it on her excellent 2017 EP, MĒM—named after the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for water. Originally from San Diego, Twin Jude’s family has roots in the D.C. area and she officially moved here in the spring of 2017. Since then, she’s performed all over the region, establishing herself as one of the area’s most innovative experimental artists. —Matt Cohen

How did you get into music and art? What was your path into the creations that you’re making now?

Well, I grew up in the ’90s. I had a Walkman. My dad, he’s a musician. He’s actually a minister but he’s a musician inherently. His father, my grandfather, he was an orchestra instructor so it’s been passed down from generation to generation. I’m one of those jack-of-all-trades in terms of music and creating. I used to play around with Walkmans, record my own tapes and stuff like that. They were really shitty but it was fun.

What do you draw the most inspiration from?

For me, it’s the ocean. Growing up in San Diego, that’s where we went. We spent all of our time there, especially together as a family. Then even as an adult, that’s where I spent a lot of alone time. The ocean, and definitely film. I have a deep love for film. I really like how moving even the simplest ideas can be. Outside of art and music, real, genuine connection with people. I learn so much just by hearing people’s stories. I’m always open to learning something new, especially from the elders. They always got something to say.

One of the things that’s really striking to me about your music is the environmental influence. How do you draw your environment into the art that you make?

Well for me it’s connected to my spiritual beliefs. I feel like I’m the most at ease and at peace, and actually the most connected to the universe, when I’m outside. That’s why I love summer. Well, even though I’m more of a temperate person—I do love a nice early fall feeling.

But I’m outside all the time. Even this week I was at Rock Creek Park, just enjoying it. Sometimes it will be an animal that will just decide to linger. It’s not afraid, which feels really cool because we get so desensitized and we’re so far away sometimes from the natural life. Sometimes I come out just to look at the stars, just to be present there. Just from that … I’ll channel that energy and create a song that personifies that feeling.

What has been your experience in the D.C. music community and how has that influenced you?

Honestly, it’s been such ... I don’t even know how to describe it really, but it’s been really, really, really nice. Everyone’s so open and genuine. I feel like on the West Coast my music is a little bit more weird for them, unless you’re in L.A. or something ... I really didn’t want to go there at all. Here I feel like I can just be myself. It feels really, really nice just to be accepted for who I am and what I create.

Is there a specific place that you would say is one of your favorite places—

Exactly! I feel like everyone has that one spot: outdoors somewhere that they always like to go and they can just feel completely at peace and at home.

Yes. For me that’s Sligo Creek Park. It’s the perfect place. It’s right between everywhere. I really love the Takoma Park area. That’s where my mom ... Well, she’s from here, but that’s where she spent her time. I feel really connected to that area. There’s this one part that’s further down. I forgot what the cross street is, but you can find this little quiet area right by where the stream gets really loud. It’s hard to have a conversation but it’s nice if you want to go there by yourself.

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