Carolina Quiroga moved to Asheville only about a year ago, but she’s already a distinctive storyteller here, blending folk tales and her own experiences from her native Colombia with newer stories born from observations of her newly adopted home. On July 11, she begins a residency of three weekly performances at Story Parlor in West Asheville. Toda…

Michael Cayse has only been Asheville’s Fire Chief since the start of the year, but he came here with more than three decades of experience in Cincinnati and, as part of that, working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Asheville firefighters received a pay raise in the new fiscal year budget of nearly 9 percent, but that still puts them …

Who says rock music is dying out? A trio of sisters from Asheville are doing their part to bring rock to a new generation. Detective Blind takes the spotlight in the second episode of The Overlook drawn from our May 28 evening of Hear Here, a performance and podcasting series co-presented with Citizen Vinyl. The series is designed to elevate conver…

This is the second half of my conversation with Hedy Fischer and Gail McCarthy, who along with their artist husbands bought buildings in the River Arts District early on and are committed to keeping those buildings open and affordable for other artists. They’re joined here by Stephanie Monson Dahl, the city’s manager of Urban Design, Place Strategi…

Hedy Fischer and Gail McCarthy have been in Asheville since the late 1970s and, along with their artist husbands, played critical roles in the evolution of the River Arts District from a neglected, polluted wasteland of warehouses into the thriving arts and commerce destination it is today. They also have thoughts on whether the scales of progress …

Hear Here is a performance and podcast series designed to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. I invited two all-female bands to the May 28 evening of Hear Here at Citizen Vinyl. The bands Detective Blind and O•VAD•YA come from different generations. Detective Blind are three sisters—the eldest is only 17—while most of the member…

There are about 400 Bee City USA programs across 47 states, all with a mission to sustain pollinators by increasing native plants and nest sites while reducing the use of pesticides. The entire Bee City movement started in Asheville 12 years ago with the efforts of Phyllis Stiles. During the thick of a month of pollination celebration here, I talk …

Pete Candler wears many creative hats. He’s a photographer and maker of short films—all of it self-taught—and he’s also an author and recovering academic. His new book, titled “A Deeper South," is both an internal and external travelogue over 25 years of road trips through the American South. We’ll also talk about leaving a tenured professorship at…

Madison Brightwell and Don Silver are local novelists who don’t know each other but have similar creative trajectories. Both spent early years behind the scenes—Brightwell in film production, Silver working for music mogul Clive Davis—before turning to more conventional careers. It wasn’t until their 40s that both leaned into writing fiction. Silve…

Most people reading or listening to this likely take their literacy for granted. But for thousands of youth and adults throughout Buncombe County, literacy is a hurdle impacting nearly every element of life. My guests are executive director Amanda Wrubleski and program directors Rebecca Massey and Erin Sebelius with Literacy Together. It’s an Ashev…

April 27 marked the debut of "Hear Here," a series presented in tandem with Citizen Vinyl to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. The premiere featured talk and performances with the bands Pink Beds and Caged Affair. This episode is all about Caged Affair, a vocalist-guitarist son and his drumming father from Waynesville, whose m…

We all know the impact of Asheville’s skyrocketing housing costs. What we don’t hear nearly as much about is how artists and arts organizations are finding it more challenging to do their work in Asheville. Affordable workspaces was the topic of the latest ArtsAVL Creative Space Town Hall. Matt Peiken moderated a May 10 panel at Asheville Community…

We hear a lot about pervasive social issues in our community—homelessness, addiction, racial inequities, affordable housing, liveable wages. All of those play roles in one particular need we rarely hear about—diapers. My guests today are Alicia Heacock and Meagan Lyon Leimena, co-executive directors of Babies Need Bottoms, an Asheville nonprofit di…

It’s a female-powered, multi-generational, one-of-a-kind lineup for the next Hear Here—Tuesday, May 28, featuring the Asheville-area bands Detective Blind and O•VAD•YA. Listen here for clips of their music. Advance tickets are just $12. SPONSOR: Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance returns for one weekend only with the premiere of "Before the Scream." Perf…

April 27 marked the debut of "Hear Here," a series presented in tandem with Citizen Vinyl to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. The premiere featured talk and performances with the bands Pink Beds and Caged Affair. This episode is all about Pink Beds, a quartet shaped by disco, old-school pop and contemporary rock. You’ll hear …

Asheville artists Heather Hietala and Nava Lubelski have already tasted success commercial success. Now, their new work in separate exhibitions marks new ground in their personal and artistic evolutions. In the first half, I talk with Hietala, whose response to her mother's death takes shape in the two- and three-dimensional canoes and boats that a…

Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen have spent many years building lives for themselves in contemporary dance. Not long ago, they believed they largely had to perform and teach around the country to make it sustainable. Now, fueled by artistic residencies in Western North Carolina and the embrace of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts, the couple…

David Brendan Hopes has written more novels, poems and plays than he can count. The river of writing hasn’t slowed at all since his retirement from UNC-Asheville, where Hopes taught English and creative writing for more than three decades. Hopes’ newest play is titled “A God in the Waters.” The Sublime Theater in Asheville is premiering it May 9-18…

Talks of establishing a business improvement district in downtown Asheville stretch back to the 1980s. But over the past year, those talks have gained a lot of momentum, and some civic leaders are lobbying city council to approve it before the start of the next fiscal year. A chorus of critics are also reaching a crescendo with their opposition, pu…

There’s seemingly a full-court press from certain civic leaders to push Asheville City Council to approve a business improvement district for downtown. This BID would tax property owners, and by extension downtown commercial and residential tenants, to pay for a supplemental workforce to help the city’s efforts to clean up downtown and make it safe…

Choral groups were among the hardest-hit and slowest to rebound from the pandemic. Two of the region’s enduring choirs are still finding their footing both artistically and in the wider public. Today, we hear from the choirs’ two artistic directors—Kyle Ritter of Asheville Symphony Chorus and Emily Floyd of Asheville Youth Choirs. They’re performin…

Just as Asheville’s arts community has evolved, so too has ArtsAVL. It changed its name just a year and a half ago from the Asheville Area Arts Council and, even before the pandemic, refocused its mission from service to advocacy. My guest today is Katie Cornell, executive director now in her fifth year with ArtsAVL. We talk about that mission shif…

Want to know what’s happening with McCormick Field, Thomas Wolfe Auditorium and the Western North Carolina Nature Center? My guest has the answers. Chris Corl is General Manager and Director of Community & Regional Entertainment Facilities for the City of Asheville. We go into detail about the upcoming trip around the bases for McCormick Field’s re…

Asheville is very much a music town—not just for musicians, but also for fans, as evidenced by the six record stores dotting the city. As we approach the annual Record Store Day, April 20, we talk with Mark Capon of Harvest Records, Jesse McSwain of Static-Age Records and Morgan Markowitz of Earth River Records. We talk about the evolution of their…

Downtown business owners, workers and residents spent a lot of 2023 imploring Asheville officials to get a handle on crime, trash and vagrancy. All along, many were pressing to take matters into their own hands by working with city leaders to form what’s called a business improvement district. A business improvement district—or BID—is a tax assessm…

D. Tyrell McGirt says his career path was blazed as a 10-year-old in Greensboro, when his mother signed him up for a lifeguarding class. He ran parks and recreation departments in Alabama, Arizona and Alaska before moving two years ago to lead the department in Asheville. In this conversation, McGirt talks through his department's recent decision t…

Seventy years ago, Black Mountain College was a petri dish for experimental art, sound and performance. It was also the birthplace of so-called “happenings”—events where practitioners strived to transcend the bounds of existence and expression. Today, the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center throws an annual “(Re)Happening.” The 12th (Re)H…

Middle housing is all the rage in planning and urban development circles—that is, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, clusters of homes with no garages but maybe a shared park, in walkable neighborhoods close to transit. Basically, it's housing with many of the functions of traditional single-family homes but developed with equity, the environment and…

The Buncombe County District Attorney’s office prosecutes dozens of cases every week, from capital murder to trivial infractions. But DA Todd Williams seems at least a bit frustrated by the public’s lingering interest in what, on paper, resulted in guilty verdicts for misdemeanor trespassing. Some are holding up the charges as veiled attacks on fre…

Barbie Angell is a poet and storyteller, children’s book author and emcee. Threading all of it, she’s a survivor. She’s candid about the range of abuse she experienced throughout her youth, and a quarter-century of ongoing psychological abuse she alleges from a domestic partner. The last few years have been particularly difficult for my guest today…

If the nonprofit world awarded medals for bravery on the battlefront, the counselors and volunteers for the SPARC Foundation could be the most decorated in Asheville. SPARC works with people who’ve committed child abuse, domestic abuse and street violence to find other paths of behavior. My guest today is Jackie Latek, the founding executive direct…

Just last week, Asheville City Schools voted to merge Montford North Star Academy into Asheville Middle School. The move will reduce the district’s $4.5 million budget shortfall by as much as half, but it also raised a lot of anger, sadness and questions from affected parents. My guest today is Greg Parlier, a reporter who covers education for the …

Chris Jehly says he used to mock artists who painted the natural landscape. At the time, he was a graffiti artist inspired by BMX and metal music. Since his move to Asheville, he’s become one of the artists he used to dismiss. The plein-air paintings documenting his local hikes and other sojourns into the woods are on through the end of March at Ty…

Watch any of his performances or study his visual art, the easy takeaway on Edwin Salas is he's one disturbed artist. And how could he not be? When I profiled him in 2019 for Asheville's public radio station, he told me about the rape he suffered 30 years earlier and about the murder of his mother when he was just 5 years old. Indeed, much of his c…

Last year, the North Carolina Department of Transportation began the process of claiming properties through eminent domain for the widening of Interstate 240 and construction of the I-26 Connector. Rob and Sarah Shearan noticed the NCDOT offering their neighbors full replacement value on their properties. Not so for them. While the project maps sho…

Noah Bendix-Balgley is a revered violinist—concertmaster with the Berlin Philharmonic and a soloist who performs with orchestras internationally. He’s also a native of Asheville. I talk with him about the details on his ambitious, weeklong residency with the Asheville Symphony, beginning March 11. We talk about his training and career path and how …

This is the second of two episodes recorded from the Feb. 20 Asheville City Council candidates mixer at Citizen Vinyl, thrown by the Asheville Downtown Association. You'll hear my short conversations with candidates Iindia Pearson, CJ Domingo and Kim Roney. The previous episode, posted Monday, features my conversations with candidates Bo Hess, Keva…

Three seats on Asheville’s City Council will be filled in November’s general election, but to get there, we need to first get through a small-stakes primary. I say small stakes because of the seven candidates on the ballot, only one will drop off after the March 5 primary. Still, that didn’t keep locals from packing Citizen Vinyl last Tuesday for a…

Andrew Jones of the Asheville Watchdog is so busy covering Mission’s past, present and future, he has nine bylined stories about the hospital so far in February alone. I talked with him just yesterday to get the latest, including details of alarming findings from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the so-called Immediate Jeopardy…

The North Carolina primary election is March 5 and early voting is already underway. But the Republican supermajority in the stage legislature has passed laws making voting more difficult. My guests today are Robin Lively Summers of Indivisible Asheville and Leslie Boyd of the Poor People’s Campaign. They’re part of a coalition of nonprofits workin…

It should surprise no one that Asheville and other parts of Western North Carolina have become launching pads for a nascent industry of psychedelics. What is surprising is the recent state-sanctioned research into psychedelics and the legislative openness to legalization. My guest today is Daniel Walton, an Asheville journalist who reported and wro…

Dewayne Barton is an artist, activist, social entrepreneur and voice of vision—all from the vantage of uplifting his Burton Street community. He escaped the scourge of crack cocaine while growing up in D.C., moved to Asheville after time in the U.S. Navy and devoted his life to building up community. He co-founded the nonprofit pathway to employmen…

If you’re not earning at least $22.10 an hour, you can’t afford to live in Asheville. That’s according to Just Economics of WNC, which last month updated its living wage rate for Buncombe County. It climbed $2 an hour in less than a year. My guests today are Vicki Meath, Director of Just Economics, and Jen Hampton, the organization’s Housing and Wa…

What Can We Do to Restore Better Healthcare in WNC? The nonprofit investigative news outlet the Asheville Watchdog posed that question in a Jan. 23 public forum at A-B Tech. In this episode, Watchdog editor Peter Lewis moderates a panel with Drs. R. Bruce Kelly and Clay Ballantine, Brevard Mayor Maureen Copelof, nurse and patient advocate Karen San…

The exodus of doctors and nurses, the mountains of complaints from patients, the lawsuit from North Carolina’s Attorney General. Those are just the broad areas of fallout in the five years since HCA Healthcare purchased Asheville’s formerly not-for-profit Mission Hospital. The Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit investigative news outlet that has bee…

Carly Kotula is an Asheville singer-songwriter who has gone through two name changes in the time I’ve known her. First to her married name—she first made her way in music as Carly Taich—and now to her new artistic persona, Moon Bride. We talk with Carly here about her new album, “Insomnie,” and preview some songs from it. We delve into the motivati…

There’s a childcare crisis in the United States. First, the cost is enormous. Second, parents of infants are meeting waitlists of many months, even up to a year, just to land openings. In Buncombe County, where incomes are pretty modest, parents often weigh whether they can afford to go back to work. My guest today is Jenny Vial, Director of Child …

There are far more young people in need of foster homes than there are homes to take them in. This is true all over the country, but it’s particularly acute in Buncombe County. More than 100 local youth are now in homes outside the county because there’s such a shortage of spaces here. The challenge is greater when two or more kids from the same fa…

Jared Wheatley will tell anyone who asks, he is Cherokee. But it took him decades to begin the deep exploration of what it means to be Cherokee—the history of his people, his family, and how to live his layered lineage and heritage in the world today. Wheatley’s quest led him to create the Indigenous Walls Project. He and other Native artists he ha…

Before there was a South Slope or River Arts District, those neighborhoods were wrapped into a swath of Asheville called Southside. Southside still exists, but its formal boundaries are tighter, separated from more prosperous neighborhoods. People fighting for Southside’s identity and relevance are asking city leaders for something some might find …