Interesting Humans

April Sawicki is a 19 year old woman from New York who lived during high school in a broken down motor home in a vacant lot at the edge of town her father won in a poker game. Her mother left her father when she was young, then her father left April at 16 to fend for herself when he went to live with his girlfriend and the woman’s son.  April, a budding singer-songwriter, ran away by stealing a ne...

I met singer-songwriter Reese Mayfield here in Raleigh last fall. Friends had invited me to what has become known as the Five Points Music Festival. It's a gathering of local musicians performing on an impromptu stage set up in the driveway of someone's garage. it's a fundraiser for a local school. Reese was one of the musicians performing that day. As the various musicians worked t...

What I know about trauma is that nearly all of us carry something in our psyches. Almost everyone you know has some part of their past that overwhelmed their emotional capacity to understand and process it and became trauma. Not all trauma is the horrific kind of rape or shooting or a tragic accident. These are the kinds of events plastered across the news that garner the most public attention.  S...

Trailer for Gordon Darr, a victim of Dr. Robert Anderson, the doctor at the University of Michigan who allegedly sexually molested hundreds of students and student-athletes as head of the UM's University Health Services. Anderson was never prosecuted but the University has proposed a $490 million settlement to more than 1,000 alleged victims of Anderson, who died in 2008.  Gordon tells his co...

Andrew Lafferty is a 20-year-old stand-up comedian learning the craft. He wants to become a comedy writer.  After graduating from high school during the pandemic, he now the University of Pittsburgh, where he studies political science.  Now three years into his journey as a comedian, Andrew has made people laugh everywhere from basements in the dorms at Pitt to tents, to clubs from Ann Arbor to Ma...

When Kassondra and Will Lambert’s son Ethan was about two he was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic disorder referred to as KAND . The couple had noticed early in their son’s life that he wasn’t progressing physically as expected. Ethan was unable to hold a bottle himself and wasn’t starting to verbalize took them more than two years to finally get a diagnosis of this disease so rare only ab...

When I was a kid I would often accompany my parents on Saturdays to a store that was both a grocery and department store, a bit like Costco is today. Sometimes my father would give me some cash and I would hotfoot it to the toy section to grab one of the latest models of these miniature cars called Hot Wheels. I was obsessed with building my collection. I would make my purchase and then was faced...

Pablo Picasso said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” I was thinking about Picasso’s words during my conversation with today’s guest, Haven Tunin, a young potter I met at a show in Ann Arbor last fall.  Haven comes to pottery by way of discovering a gift for art, specifically painting and drawing, during high school. In college, she fell in love wi...

What, really, are the qualities of a good man today?  Toughness? Grit? Courage? The reliability of the one who comes home after a long day at the office, even if that office down the hall or in the basement, and earns the money that pays bills then expects dinner to be on the table? Is it simply the man who takes out the trash?  What sorts of exchanges are men and women making in the day to day ba...

We’ve all heard about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, often referred to — and even minimized in today’s lexicon  -- as PTSD. It is a psychiatric disorder that sometimes occurs in people who have experienced or witnessed a horrific event, such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act (think 9/11) war or combat or rape, or who have been threatened with sexual violence or serious ha...

I've known Lisa Hesse for decades. When you live in a community like Ann Arbor for as long as I have and also are part of a smaller, tighter community--the running community--one is bound to bump into the same people from time to time. I knew Lisa coached runners, particularly women. And I knew she was a Girls on the Run coach as well. What I didn't know is the depth to this person and t...

Abby Rosenbaum is as passionate as any artist about her craft. What I noticed Abby possesses better than some artists is a sense of the practical side of her photography. The opposite of the image of a fantastically talented and engaged artist who is dead broke and starving might emerge for some. Abby  had a successful photography practice focused on weddings for more than 15 years. Successful in...

We are currently in the throes of August here in North America. The days are lazy, hot and long. Light is plentiful. In fact we still bask in more than 14 hours of daylight. And for some that still is not enough.   Today's guest, JANE SLADE ,  isn't saying we need sunlight less. She says we need to appreciate darkness more.  The constant barrage of man made light form our devices to how...

ALETHA VANDERMAAS is friendly, approachable and funny. She laughs easily. but don't let that easygoing style fool you. Aletha is a significant player in the trend in midcentury interior design, both in her home state of Michigan and in  social media.  I first met Aletha through my wife Elin Walters, curator of Exactly Designs . Aletha and Elin are "design soul sisters" who both have...

I first met today’s guest, Helen Newman , about 10 years ago. I was traveling to Chicago with my wife Elin who was the buyer for a local fitness studio and she was meeting Helen for the to see the fitness lines she represented. Her showroom was in a warehouse in Chicago’s garment district that had been converted to sales offices. I knew the first time meeting her she was special and a class act. ...

As New Year’s Eve turned to 2021, for the first time in a while I felt a real energy and excitement for a big period of growth. How about you? Are there things you are looking forward to? And speaking of, how are you doing on those New Year’s resolutions? Been working out at the gym to lose that extra 20 you’re carrying? Started that side hustle?  Mended those fraught relationships with the Uncle...

"I love relationships. I like observing them. I like thinking about them. I like back in the olden days going to the coffee shop and sitting there with my coffee and my laptop pretending to write and  watching people around me," today's guest, Liz Crowe , tells me. Liz Crowe is a novelist who has published more than 25 books with two more coming soon. Her focus is romance but before...

Hey everybody. How‘s it going out there?  I truly mean that. It’s not just a rhetorical question. How is your health, particularly your mental health? Let’s be honest. These have been times for which there is no context. To date, there are more than 61 million coronavirus cases and more than 1.4 million deaths. In the US alone we’ve seen more than 13 million cases and just under 270,000 deaths.  ...

So we had a pretty big event called over this past weekend. The US Presidential election was called on Saturday in favor of former Vice President Joe Biden. I don't know about you but the sense of relief and joy in our home was palpable. It's as if a dark cloud had been lifted on our spirits. Not it's time for the transition to a new administration. With all the weight of politics i...

On the surface, today’s guest, blogger Sandy Riguzzi, seems like  a perfectly ordinary mom and grand mother from suburban New York.  Yet the depth of her experience, which she mines as the source of her writing on Sunday Morning with Sandy , is anything but ordinary. Sandy is deeply reflective of the challenges she has faced growing up and raising five children. And from what I’ve seen she has fac...

Autumn has come alive here in the midwest. It's my favorite time of the year. For most of three months -- from about September 1 to December 1 -- I feel productive and energized by the cooler temps and the color.  I've appreciated the color of fall all my life.  I love bringing out the sweatshirts and the coats to accommodate the early morning and evening chill. How about you? Do you lov...

I have to admit to being a bit bouncy right now. It happens every year around this time. It’s as if I emerge from the doldrums of late summer with a renewed sense of purpose and, yes, even optimism. The change of the calendar from August to September is exciting for me. I always anticipate good things for September and October. E and I were married in September—and yes, I haven’t forgotten our ann...

One of the great gifts of curiosity is that it takes you places you can’t foresee. That was the case for Elin and me July 4th when we slid over to downtown Ypsilanti to see the 2nd Annual Black Empowerment Awards . We were not feeling the patriotism associated with the national holiday with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police and Ahmaud Arbery by white men who chased him down...

“I was born with a big engine, a big heart and a really bad chassis," Keith Kelly, today's guest tells me in his familiar Irish.  Keith was the NCAA National Cross Country Champion for Providence College in 2000. He has won dozens of races at the national and international level as he was the Irish National Cross Country Champion in 2009, which would have been a comeback year for Keith a...

Flow. Details. Impact. These are the hallmark words in Elin Walters' world. She is the owner and curator at Exactly Designs , an interior design firm she founded a little more than four years ago. As Elin says on her website, "I was once asked, “how do you feel when you walk into a room? What do you notice?”I replied, “I just know visually and emotionally if it is exactly right, if the r...