Dear everyone, you are cordially invited to come to my house for dinner. For a while now I’ve been pondering how I can get more engaged here in my town, a subject that TBH I talk and write about far more than I actually do. I wanted to take action. At just the right moment, I stumbled across The Lovable … Read More
Issue 13: It Was Like an Episode of Fixer-Upper
This is how my town works. A couple issues back, in this very newsletter, I said the following: My husband complained about a pothole the other day and I thought, “We really need this app.” And within, like, 5 minutes of pressing send on that puppy, Blacksburg’s community relations manager, Heather Browning, emails me. “Hey Melody, we have just what … Read More
Issue 5: Localism Will Save Us
When I scheduled myself to speak about place attachment to a group in Cleveland, I did not give one single, solitary thought to the fact that the event would be the day after the election. Until I woke up in the Cleveland Marriott, checked my phone, and thought, “Oh crap. What have I done?” As feared, people were like zombies … Read More
The Power of Small in Charleston
The highway overpass that funnels vacationers like me toward the high-end shops and million-dollar mansions of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, soars a hundred feet above a very different kind of neighborhood, a part of the city known as the Upper Peninsula. The homes here are small, interspersed among warehouses and union halls, and lived in primarily by low-income, African-American Charlestonians. … Read More
Three Reasons Why It’s Hard to Vote in Local Elections—and Why I’ll Vote Anyway
One of the fundamental premises of loving where you live is this: If you love your town, you do what’s good for it. Except the bummer part is that what’s good for our town usually requires the kind of effort most of us would prefer not to have to make. Take voting, for instance. You have to do some preliminary … Read More