A Peace of My Mind

Alex Kolker is a coastal scientist with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. During the Covid-19 lockdown, while others baked sourdough bread, Alex was studying satellite images of the Mississippi River Delta. As an oceanographer, geologist, and climate scientist, he is interested in how the Louisiana coastline loses land, and also how it builds that land back.  As he examined the images,...

Ebony Woodruff is an agricultural attorney in Chalmette, Louisiana. Ebony entered law school with plans to become a corporate attorney. As the daughter of a welder-electrician and a teacher, her initial goal was upward mobility. “It was really all about the money,” she said.  But her professors at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, themselves first-generation attorneys, encouraged stud...

Kristian Bailey is a farmer, and he also considers himself a land steward and teacher. At Orais Hand Farm, located across the road from the Mississippi River, he is trying to move away from the idea of human dominion over nature. Instead, he is working in cooperation with it. Kristian talks about farming with “tenderness”: recognizing that Southern land carries wounds (his own farm is on a former...

Chief Devon Parfait spent his early years in Dulac, a bayou community at the watery edge of Louisiana. He caught fish from the dock, bounced on his neighbor’s trampoline, and went out on his grandfather’s shrimp boat. But Hurricane Rita destroyed his family’s home in 2005, when he was 8, setting off years of displacement. The extended family migrated inland and eventually settled in the New Orlean...

Nate Suppon's mother died when he was an infant. He says he was born into a home filled with depression, anxiety, and turmoil. A lack of love. And he tried to fill that void with drugs and alcohol. Between the ages of 15 and 38, he was addicted and spent time in and out of prison. It was a self-absorbed cycle. He found both faith and sobriety and now lives his life in service to others. At th...

Dan Brandt is a father, a husband, and an entrepreneur who says he likes to think of himself as a kind, decent person who tries to do the next right thing.  Dan stopped drinking when he was 35 years old and he is now 56. He didn't lose his job, he didn't have a string of arrests, but he had seen alcoholism around him and he knew he was on a bad path. And he knew that he needed help. Dan...

Josue Gonzalez grew up in difficult circumstances that he said left a lot of holes in his life. Holes where the sense of love and belonging, and being cared for should have been. He tried filling those holes with different things. He remembers sneaking his first drink at an early age in a house that always had alcohol available. In his teens he experimented with other drugs and found himself in ac...

Vanessa Weyaus is a member of the Lynx clan of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. Her name in Ojibwe translates as The Shining Light in the Sky Woman.  Vanessa spent years in addiction, eventually living on the streets and running from the law. When she tired of it all, she turned herself in during a routine traffic stop. She was offered treatment, but chose to serve her prison sentence instead and ha...

John Gerber is a graphic designer and a fine artist in Minneapolis. He describes himself as someone who thinks and feels deeply. He has had an on again / off again relationship with alcohol. He stopped drinking completely between the ages of 30 and 40, but when his 40th birthday came around, he decided to celebrate. He describes it like this: "Then between 40 and 60, I think I drank probably...

Casey Pytleski is a mother, a wife, and a recovering addict. Although she had experimented with my substances as a youth, it was an unexpected introduction to meth as an adult that led to a quick addiction and unraveled the idyllic life she and her husband had created. At the time of our interview, it had been 89 days since her last use.  Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts...

Welcome to A Peace of My Mind, a project that uses storytelling and art to rediscover what connects us. I’m John Noltner, the founder and director of A Peace of My Mind and I have the good luck to travel the country and the world interviewing people to help reveal the beauty and wisdom that is all around us….if we choose to see it. This new season of the podcast is called Sobr. S-O-B-R and we are...

Joe Davis is a spoken word artist in Minneapolis. I interviewed Joe in front of a live audience for one of our Creative Changemakers events on July 25 at Squirrel Haus Arts in Minneapolis. He joined us with his band Poetic Diaspora. Enjoy a little music with them and then our conversation. Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit...

Jan Selby is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has been screened internationally in settings ranging from film festivals and art museums to university classrooms and on Public Television. BEYOND THE DIVIDE premiered at Montana’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and won Best Feature Documentary at the Peace on Earth Film Festival. After a year of traveling to festivals world-wide, BEYOND THE D...

Duncan Gray is a retired Episcopal Priest and was the 9th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi. I met him at St. Peter's Episcopal church in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was rector, like his father before him. His father served from 1957 to 1965 during the turbulent era when James Meredith was the first Black man who was allowed admission into the University of Mississippi. St. Pet...

Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar is chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. She has spent decades helping her community fight for federal recognition of their tribe and finding resilient solutions to the political and environmental challenges that have seen their traditional lands literally wash away into the Gulf of Mexico. (We did this inte...

Greg Campbell has gone home to die. His liver and kidneys are failing and on Wednesday, March 8, he left the hospital because he didn't want to die in an institution. He has chosen to die at home where he finds peace and love and safety. We talked about his faith, his desire to teach people that they don't need to fear death and the deep joy in having time to say goodbye to friends. Greg...

April Grayson was born and raised in Mississippi. She left the state after college and returned again 10 years later to tell stories about her home state and, in particular, about the Civil Rights Movement and the history of race in Mississippi through oral history and documentary films. April is the director of Community & Capacity Building at the Alluvial Collective , formerly the William Wi...

Randell Sam is a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe . I met Randell while spending some time with the Water Protectors near Palisade, Minnesota. After a brief introduction in Ojibwe, Randell shared some of his history with alcohol and drug addiction. After years of using, he found the true meaning behind his Anishinabe name, which is, “I Am The Walking Light.” Randell plays an important role...

Harvey Goodsky, Jr. lives in McGregor, Minnesota. As a part of the Sucker Fish Clan, he carries the responsibility of being the shepherd of the land. His priority is to keep that teaching and learning alive through his own seven children and their future generations. Harvey opens our interview with a message in his native language, Ojibwe.  We talked about his childhood and growing up as Anishinaa...

Sandy Gokee is Anishinaabe—Bear Clan—and lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. For the interview, we sat outside at a park overlooking Lake Superior as a storm skirted around us, so you might hear a little wind and maybe even thunder in the recording. Sandy introduces herself in her native language, Ojibwemowin.  She shares her concerns about the invisibility of Indigenous people and how imbalanced life is...

Afton Thomas is the Associate Director for Programs at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Afton talks about Oxford as the progressive south, and the importance of continuing to share stories of the past so we can live better today and in the future. At the time of this interview, Afton's involvement and voice in the community...

Mary Dougherty lives in Bayfield, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior. As she says, just about as far north as you can go in the state without getting wet. She is the author of "Life in a Northern Town: Cooking, Eating, and Other Adventures along Lake Superior." We talked about preserving the watershed of the world's largest fresh water lake and how we need to look upstream at...

Mike Radtke is the operations manager for the Madeline Island Ferry Line in Bayfield, Wisconsin. He started there as a captain and over the past 32 years, he has made the 20-minute, 2.5 mile journey between the mainland and the island thousands of times.  We talked about his observations of how Lake Superior has changed through the years, his family's long-time habit of hosting international...

Michael Skoler describes himself as a reformed NPR correspondent, a dad, a meditator, and a backpacker. Michael is the communications director for Weave the Social Fabric Project , an initiative of the Aspen Institute , designed to address the broken social trust in America.  We spoke about  his work in Africa during the Rwandan genocide, his desire to care open-heartedly and his goals to foster c...

Dr. Simran Jeet Singh is the Executive Director of the Religion and Society Program at the Aspen Institute and the author of The Light We Give, How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life.  We talked about his love for basketball, his advocacy for religious pluralism and a surprise lesson he learned one day recently when he forgot his earbuds while going for a run. Thanks for listening to A Peace of M...