The Overlook - SoundSage

View Details

Sage Turner first came to a seat on Asheville City Council through her fight for more affordable housing in the city. She has since become well-versed and conversant on a spectrum of issues that come before council, but she’s never dropped the torch to help develop more affordable living in Asheville.

Today is the last in a six-part series of conversations with every candidate for City Council. Turner is one of two incumbents on the ballot, and she speaks with a depth of insight that can only come from working in the trenches. We spend a lot of today diving into some of the factors that have ballooned the costs of Asheville’s housing market and some of the counter-mechanisms at our disposal. We also get into how she approaches public safety, transit, permanent supportive housing for the homeless, climate readiness and her own political future.

SPONSOR: The Asheville Improv Festival mixes top talent from around the country with local favorites into four nights of eclectic improv theater at various venues, Oct. 9-13. Use the code OVERLOOK at checkout and get 20% off your tickets!

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Pick an issue, and voters are likely to view it as yes/no, black-and-white question. They want to know whether their elected officials are for or against something. But Kim Roney has served on the Asheville City Council long enough to learn that behind every yes or no vote, there’s subtext and context.

My series of episodes spotlighting every candidate for City Council continues here with current sitting councilperson Kim Roney. We talk about the nuances and complexities of policy decisions and weave our way through tourism, climate justice, infrastructure maintenance, reparations, even water rate parity. We also delve into one of Roney’s everpresent issues—transparency in government—and the return of structured but off-the-record mini council sessions.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Tod Leaven doesn’t dwell on the details when he speaks of his twin sister, who he says was battling addiction and chronic homelessness in the early 2000s when she was killed. But it isn’t a reach to see the connection with his sister, in part, fueling Leaven’s career as an attorney, his community service and his current run for a seat on Asheville’s City Council.

My conversation with Tod Leaven continues our series of episodes devoted to every candidate for City Council. Today, Tod Leaven talks about his path from the active duty military to a career in law to his current campaign. We dive deep into his takes on affordable housing, stewardship of public money and prioritizing what he believes are core city services.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

CJ Domingo has a particular insider’s vantage of the challenges facing Asheville—until relatively recently, he worked for the parking division of the city’s transportation department. He cites low morale among some city staff as a symptom of a larger void within city leadership.

Today, in our continuing series looking at every candidate for city council, Asheville native CJ Domingo shares his views on a range of city issues, including frustrations with deferred infrastructure maintenance and his thoughts on the new downtown bathroom the city is investing in for the unhoused. He also points to potential paths forward, such as his views on leveraging tourism dollars and the steps he’d like to see city leaders take with affordable housing.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Kevan Frazier can probably put his knowledge of Asheville history up against anyone’s. But the city native and tour guide, entrepreneur and educator hopes his encyclopedic recall of Asheville’s yesteryear can shape his approach to the city’s tomorrow. He’s one of six running for two seats on City Council.

Today, in our continuing series talking with every candidate for city council, Frazier tells us about his backstory and frames his approach to all the hot-button issues atop Asheville’s list of challenges—affordable housing and development, transit, public safety, and racial equity.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This episode begins our six-part series of interviews with each candidate for Asheville City Council.

Most candidates for state and federal offices started in politics at a local level. Bo Hess took a different approach. In 2020, he says, he ran for a U.S. Congressional seat as a training ground for what he wants now—a seat on Asheville’s City Council.

He talks about his varied background—as a social worker, addiction specialist, therapist, law enforcement trainer, community activist, part time teacher and clinical supervisor—and how he believes all of that can serve the city well should he win a seat on City Council. We talk about how he’d like to influence the council’s approach to public safety, affordable housing and other hot-button issues for Asheville and for voters.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

No matter how attuned you believe you are to the upcoming election, there’s a strong chance you have no idea who’s running for the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Today’s episode should help solve that problem.

Martin Moore moved to Asheville in 2015 when he took his first job as an attorney, working as a public defender in Buncombe County. He has since opened a private practice in Asheville while serving on the Buncombe County Commission. Moore sees these as steppingstones in a life calling that brings him, now, to campaigning for a judicial seat on the state Court of Appeals.

Martin Moore tells us about his upbringing and what drew him to public service. He also tells us about why the appellate court is so critical to everyday life in North Carolina, how his time as a public defender and county commissioner have prepared him for this campaign and the values he hopes to bring to the body of 15 judges.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Caleb Rudow is attempting to do something no Democrat has done in more than a decade—represent North Carolina’s 11th District in the US House of Representatives. A gerrymandered map has seemingly kept this district comfortably in Republican hands, but Rudow sees a lot in his favor as he campaigns against the incumbent, Chuck Edwards.

Rudow currently represents North Buncombe County in the State House. Here, we talk about his campaign, the challenge of hurdling the gerrymandered math of this district and the contrasts he sees with Edwards in their public accessibility, their views of the roles of government and how he would define what it means to represent the district in Congress.

The Edwards campaign hasn't responded to repeated requests for him to appear as a guest on this show.

The Asheville Improv Festival mixes top talent from around the country with local favorites into four nights of eclectic improv theater at various venues, Oct. 9-13. Use the code OVERLOOK at checkout and get 20% off your tickets!

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In the second half of this two-part conversation, founders of the coalition Reclaim Healthcare WNC talk about their pressure campaign with HCA Healthcare to dramatically and demonstrably improve conditions for patients and staff at Mission Hospital.

My guests are State Senator Julie Mayfield, retired physician Bruce Kelly and Missy Harris, who recently left Mission Hospital after five years there as a chaplain.

They talk about the potential for competition with Mission in the regional healthcare marketplace. We get into any role Dogwood Health Trust could play, along with the efficacy of independent monitoring. We also talk with Mayfield about her conversations with some Mission board members responsible for approving the sale to HCA. Lastly, my guests talk about what they believe needs to happen to make things right with Mission Hospital, including potentiall selling the hospital back into nonprofit hands.

Wake Up, Asheville! and ¡Despierta Asheville! (in Spanish) are new morning newscast podcasts that give you all the local news you need to know in under five minutes. Both are free to subscribe/follow wherever you get your podcasts!

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

So much has been written and said in the five years since the corporation HCA Healthcare purchased Asheville’s nonprofit Mission Hospital. Doctors, nurses and other staff have fled amid what many see as the company’s push for profits over people. North Carolina’s attorney general has filed lawsuits. Nobody involved in the original deal has spoken candidly about how this sale even made it across the finish line.

Today is the first in a two-part conversation with leaders of a new coalition called Reclaim Healthcare WNC. They are State Senator Julie Mayfield, retired physician Bruce Kelly and Missy Harris, who recently left Mission after five years there as a chaplain.

We delve into the significant changes at Mission after its acquisition by HCA, the changes this coalition wants to see and why, after all that has been said and done to chasten HCA to this point, the people behind Reclaim Healthcare WNC believe they can hold HCA to account and inspire substantive change.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Esther Manheimer is serving her third term as Asheville’s mayor. The challenges this city faces today—and the strategies deployed to tackle them—have evolved a lot during her time in office.

Today, we check in with Mayor Manheimer around a variety of issues—homelessness, affordable housing, enforcing the city’s policy on short-term rentals and property tax increases, along with boosting the salaries for police officers and firefighters. We also get her assessment of how this council has performed its duties, her thoughts on President Biden passing the baton to Kamala Harris and what she sees for her own political future.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Jewish Voice for Peace is a nonprofit with chapters in Asheville and around the U.S. and beyond. Except for the name of the organization, you won’t find much about Judaism on their website or in their talking points. They're focused on peace in the Middle East and, to JVP, that means the liberation of Palestinians.

My guests are Anne Craig, Rebecca Croog and Said Abdallah from the Asheville chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. You’ll learn about their varied backgrounds and what led them to this cause.

We dig into JVP’s mission and how my guests reacted to Hamas’ attack on Israel last Oct. 7, along with how they frame their Judaism through a lens of Palestinian advocacy. We also get into why they believe local activism is important on an issue taking place on the other side of the world and what their hopes are around what is seemingly an intractable stalemate.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Jefferson Ellison is the first to say he grew up with privilege. His father was Asheville’s vice mayor and ran his own law firm for 40 years, and his mother holds two master’s degrees.

Still at 31, Jefferson isn’t taking shortcuts with his own career or place in the city. He sits on the boards of the Asheville Downtown Association and the Downtown Commission, and he’s a voice of influence on The Block Collaborative, which is working with city leaders on the revisioning of Pack Square.

Today, I talk with Jefferson about his upbringing, his perspective on supporting his community, the complexities of gentrification and his thoughts on reparations. Underscoring it all is how he leverages his self-described privilege to help elevate Black Asheville.

SPONSOR: Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance returns for one weekend only with the premiere of "Before the Scream." Performances are July 25-27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Like most leaders in the arts, Heather Maloy spends far more time raising money, hunting for rehearsal spaces and recruiting dancers than she does immersed in the work she’s so committed to—cultivating the ideas and creating the dances that are the signature of her Asheville-based company, Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance.

For 21 summers, Terpsicorps has fielded troupes of young professionals from all over the U.S. and beyond, who put their feet to the fire of Maloy’s imagination. I met with Maloy just before her company started rehearsals for their new production, inspired by Edvard Munch’s singular painting, “The Scream.” Performances are July 25 through 27 at Diana Wortham Theatre.

We’ll talk with the company’s founding director about keeping her dream live and evolving her company through two decades of challenges, how she parses through scores of auditioners to select her company and how she defines growth when her company is only on stage for two weekends each year.

SPONSOR: Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance returns for one weekend only with the premiere of "Before the Scream." Performances are July 25-27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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. Today, we talk about straddling the line between her father’s expectations and her own desires, her self-appointed mission to educate certain people in the Southeast about Latin Americans and the kinds of stories she’s motivated to write and tell today.

SPONSOR: Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance returns for one weekend only with the premiere of "Before the Scream." Performances are July 25-27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 behind where they’d like to be. My guest today, Chief Cayse, tells us about the other ways Asheville works to be a department that attracts and keeps talent. We also talk about how today’s fire departments little resemble those of yesteryear, the demands and skills of the job that go well beyond traditional firefighting and Cayse’s thoughts about what his department needs to become a state-of-the-art unit.

SPONSOR: Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance returns for one weekend only with the premiere of "Before the Scream." Performances are July 25-27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 conversation around local rock and indie music.

The sisters in Detective Blind are ages 17, 14 and 12, but they already show off a confident musicianship and songwriting that belie their years. So let's step back to May 28 and Citizen Vinyl to hear music and an interview with Detective Blind.

Dial back a couple clicks in your podcasting app to hear the other band that performed at Hear Here that night, O•VAD•YA.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 Strategies, and Long Range Planning.

If you missed Part One, dial back in your podcasting app to listen to that first before tuning in here. In today's episode, we talk through concerns of losing artists in the RAD and strategies for keeping them there. We talk about conversations city leaders are having around land equity with the Southside neighborhood and how artists could potentially migrate there. We also get into the stakes for the RAD and all of Asheville if the state takes away the city’s ability to regulate short-term rentals.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 for the neighborhood have tipped too far.

Today is the first in a two-part conversation with Fischer and McCarthy, along with Stephanie Monson Dahl, the city’s manager of Urban Design, Place Strategies, and Long Range Planning.

We talk about how 2010 marked a key turning point for the district and how vision and investments from the city and key developers turned the tide. We talk about the differing impacts of hotel vs. residential development there, managing traffic in the RAD and whether building owners beyond McCarthy and Fischer are as committed to offering artists affordable workspaces.

The second half of this conversation posts Thursday, June 20.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 members of O•VAD•YA are in their 50s and 60s. Still, the bands made fast friends with each other at soundcheck and the good energy between them continued well past the evening’s final note.

Let's step back to May 28 and Citizen Vinyl to hear music and an interview with O•VAD•YA. I’ll bring you Detective Blind’s portion of the evening later this month.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 with Stiles about her path to pollination through beekeeping and the start and growth of Bee City Asheville and Bee City USA.

We also talk about how to responsibly keep pollinator-friendly gardens, the dangers of non-native plant species and the ecological challenges and stakes at hand. We also get into what governments and other institutions are doing to stave off pollinator loss and promote conservation.

A week of pollination-focused events in and around Asheville starts June 17.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 Baylor University to pursue his creative impulses, why he has always been drawn to photographing places rather than people and his discovery of a family history too close for comfort to the vestiges of slavery.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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.

Silver’s new generation-spanning, coming-of-age book is titled “Scorched.” Our talk is the second half of today’s episode. We begin with my conversation with Brightwell, whose new book, “Under the Redbud Tree,” has a teenage girl heroine and blends fantasy with a certain realism people in Western North Carolina should recognize.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 Asheville nonprofit training and teaming reading tutors with struggling youth, immigrants, people emerging from prison and many others.

Literacy Together isn’t the only local nonprofit focusing on literacy in Asheville and Buncombe County. Last October, I featured the leaders of Read 2 Succeed. Today, we talk about how literacy is often an issue of equity, how myriad life challenges can hold people back from literacy, how someone can graduate high school and still not be able to read well and how tutoring is really only half the work of Literacy Together’s directors.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games run through June 29 for the women's team and July 13 for the men's team at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 music is shaped by '90s bands such as Nirvana, Weezer and Everclear.

The next "Hear Here" evening is an all-female lineup Tuesday, May 28, at Citizen Vinyl, featuring the bands Detective Blind and OVADYA. Detective Blind is a trio of sisters, the oldest of whom is still in her teens. OVADYA has at least a couple members who would qualify for their AARP cards.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 Theater and recorded it to bring it to you here.

Joining Matt on stage were DeWayne Barton (Blue Note Junction), Ashleigh Hardes Koslow (Lexington Glassworks), Jeffrey Burroughs (River Arts District Artists), Tamara Sparacino (Asheville Community Theatre) and Rebekkah Hilgraves (RadHaus Studios).

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: The Sublime Theater premieres "A God in the Waters," by Asheville playwright David Brendan Hopes, May 9-18 at the Bebe Theater.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 diaper bank that distributes about 40,000 diapers every month to partner organizations across 16 Western North Carolinas counties.

Alicia and Meagan say diaper need, as it’s called, multiplied fivefold during the pandemic. They talk about the daisy chain of circumstances, from transportation challenges to state sales taxes, that make it more difficult to afford diapers. They also detail the social and economic impacts, such as being closed off from childcare, when parents can’t afford diapers.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: The Sublime Theater premieres "A God in the Waters," by Asheville playwright David Brendan Hopes, May 9-18 at the Bebe Theater.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

This episode is all about Pink Beds, a quartet shaped by disco, old-school pop and contemporary rock. You’ll hear the episode with Caged Affair next Friday, May 17.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: The Sublime Theater premieres "A God in the Waters," by Asheville playwright David Brendan Hopes, May 9-18 at the Bebe Theater.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 are metaphors for personal journeys. After the break, we meet Lubelski, who was an emerging success in New York City’s gallery scene before she to Asheville. Her newest works are abstracted, chaotic collages of stitching, painting, scraps of fabric and other found material.

A reception for Hietala's new exhibition at Momentum Gallery is May 9. Lubelski's solo show is on view through June 8 at Tracey Morgan Gallery.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: The Sublime Theater premieres "A God in the Waters," by Asheville playwright David Brendan Hopes, May 9-18 at the Bebe Theater.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

LISTENERS: Have thoughts about this episode? Send them my way!

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 hopes Stewart-Owen Dance can become a fixture for Asheville dancers and audiences.

This conversation happened just after a rehearsal inside the Wortham's Tina McGuire Theatre, where the company performs a string of performances there, May 9-19. We dissect their artistic process, how they translate concepts into movement and what sustainability looks like in today’s ecosystem of contemporary dance.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: The Sublime Theater premieres "A God in the Waters," by Asheville playwright David Brendan Hopes, May 9-18 at the Bebe Theater.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 at the Bebe Theater. We’ll talk about the play in the second half as part of a larger conversation on answering the call of creativity. But first, we take an unplanned dive into the financial troubles at UNC-Asheville and what Hopes views as the root causes.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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, pushing back against what they see as vague details, a lack of accountability and oversight and a process they say has been anything but thorough and inclusive.

Today is the second half of a two-part conversation. My guests are Rebecca Hecht, owner of Shining Rock Goods; Susan Griffin, a 20-year downtown resident who co-chaired a previous effort to pass a BID; Karen Ramshaw of Public Interest Projects and Patrick Conant, founder of Sunshine Labs, a relatively new Asheville organization pushing for greater accountability and transparency in local government.

Over the course of this conversation, we dissect some of the details, or lack thereof, of the proposed BID, including the subjective discretion of people hired to patrol the streets on behalf of the BID. We also talk about the potential economic impacts for residential renters and small business, the proposed power structure of the BID’s governing board and criticisms of a process led by the Chamber of Commerce and Asheville Downtown Association.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 safer for the people who live, work and visit downtown.

Amid this push, a pushback is developing steam from people with deep histories and stakes in the city. They smell vague details, a lack of accountability and oversight and a process they say has been anything but thorough and inclusive.

A couple weeks ago, I produced an episode featuring the voices of advocates for the downtown BID. Today, in the first half of a two-part conversation, I talk with people with many concerns about the proposal on the table: Rebecca Hecht, owner of Shining Rock Goods; Susan Griffin, a 20-year downtown resident who co-chaired a previous effort to pass a BID; Karen Ramshaw of Public Interest Projects and Patrick Conant, founder of Sunshine Labs, a relatively new Asheville organization pushing for greater accountability and transparency in local government.

Our talk dissects some of the details, or lack thereof, of the proposed BID, including the subjective discretion of people hired to patrol the streets on behalf of the BID. We also talk about the potential economic impacts for residential renters and small business, the proposed power structure of the BID’s governing board and criticisms of a process led by the Chamber of Commerce and Asheville Downtown Association.

SPONSOR: Make the most of your time this spring and turn over your housekeeping to Greenland Pro Cleaning. Use the code PODCAST at checkout for free bonus services.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Asheville City Soccer Club home games begin May 18 at Greenwood Field on the UNC-Asheville campus.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 performing together April 27 at First Baptist Church.

We talk with the choral directors about the challenges of surviving and rebounding from the pandemic. Kyle goes into detail about his choir’s relationship to the Asheville Symphony Orchestra and building an identity of its own. Emily talks about balancing the sacred and the secular. Both weigh in on marketing choral music to today’s distracted public, adapting pop music into choral music and the future of the world’s oldest art form.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 shift and the work that goes into gathering the data to inform her advocacy with elected officials at the city, county and state.

We also talk about where arts tourism fits into the city’s marketing efforts and how rising real estate costs are potentially pushing artists’ workspaces and arts organizations out of Asheville.

01:32 Shifting Focus: From Small Town Model to Community Support
02:36 Data-Driven Decisions: Navigating Through the Pandemic
07:08 Advocacy and Funding: Transforming Arts Support in Asheville
11:02 Creative Economy Insights: Jobs, Impact, and Future Challenges
16:20 Arts and Tourism: Navigating New Challenges
23:40 Affordable Spaces for Artists: A Growing Crisis
29:15 Looking Ahead: Solutions and Strategies for Asheville's Arts Community

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 renovation, including what’s being done to turn the stadium into a year-round facility. We also go through changes at the nature center, the city’s municipal golf course and how the city managed to patch Thomas Wolfe up enough to get back into business. Will the deeper renovations needed or a completely new facility ever happen? I ask that question too.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 shops—for instance, Static-Age is now also a bar/restaurant and live music venue—the risky and speculative nature of the vinyl record business and the unique approaches each is taking to carving a sustainable life in music.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 assessment that pays for services on top of what cities and counties already provide. Talk of a BID has been in the Asheville air for decades, but could well soon become reality. There’s a vital public hearing at city council set for April 23 and potential council votes in May and June that could launch the BID with the next fiscal year.

My guests today are Zach Wallace, vice president of public policy with the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce; Hayden Plemmons, executive director of the Asheville Downtown Association; and Dana Frankel, downtown projects manager with the City of Asheville. We talk through all the inner workings of the BID process, explore the history of these discussions and how a BID would work day-to-day on downtown’s streets.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 to keep Malvern Hills Park Pool closed this year and balancing the needs of pickleballers and tennis players. We also talk equity, tracking park usage and his call for the public’s voice in shaping a comprehensive plan that will guide his department's decisions for the next 10 to 15 years.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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)Happening is April 20. Artists who embody the ethos of old are descending on the former college campus at Lake Eden for a day and night of hard-to-define experiences.

Today, we preview (Re)Happening with separate conversations with two Asheville artists—Claire Elizabeth Barratt and Madalyn Wofford, a founder of a Swannanoa-centered creative collective Swannatopia. We’ll talk about what they’re bringing to Lake Eden for (Re)Happening and how they’ve built lives and communities in the arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 affordability in mind.

This past week, the Asheville nonprofit Mountain True convened a panel to discuss what’s called the "missing middle"—the absence of the kind of developments proponents believe can turn the tide of Asheville's affordable housing crisis. That conversation happened in front of about 100 people inside Ferguson Auditorium at A-B Tech. The Overlook with Matt Peiken recorded it and is posting it here in its entirety.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 freedom of the press.

Williams, in his 10th year helming the office, talks in depth with me about the charges leveled at two people who produce work for the online media outlet The Asheville Blade. That dovetails into a larger conversation about the news media and the conduct of journalists. We also talk about the importance of his department’s relationships within the Asheville Police and with judges, along with the application of prosecutorial discretion.

00:00 A Surprising Encounter at the Polls: DA's Political Involvement
01:45 Exploring the Political Nature of the District Attorney's Role
04:08 The Intricacies of Relationships in the Legal System
06:27 The Aston Park Case: Journalism, Law, and Public Perception
18:07 Navigating the Complexities of Journalism and Law Enforcement
21:15 The Evolution of Cannabis Laws and Prosecutorial Discretion
22:52 Reflecting on a Decade in Office: Changes and Challenges
25:28 The Relationship Between the DA's Office and APD
27:08 Embracing New Media and the Future of Court Systems

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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. While the pandemic brought its own fears and isolation for Angell, recent health issues have taken a toll. In the week before our conversation, she spent four days in the hospital.

Of course, Angell has always leaned on her traumas for her artistic expression. Several years ago, The Magnetic Theatre premiered “Death By Sparkle,” Angell’s autobiographical play deriving its name from a time she drank window cleaner in a suicide attempt. We’ll hear about all of it, along with two vignettes from her upcoming self-fundraising show, "Uncensored"—March 27 at LaZoom.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 director of the SPARC Foundation. We get granular about how she and her team work to change behaviors that can span generations.

Latek talks about racial and economic inequities and other circumstances that often fuel violence in the home, and the societal perceptions that make solutions more challenging. We also talk get into the role of law enforcement and more holistic community interventions, along with how anybody listening to his episode can make conversation can make a difference.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 Mountain Xpress. We look backward and forward at this decision, along with underlying trends that loom large for public schools everywhere. We talk about the impacts of charter and private schools, where things stand with a potential merger of Asheville City Schools into Buncombe County Schools and the troubled history of Asheville City Schools around issues of equity.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 Tyger Tyger Gallery, in the River Arts District. We talk about his path from graffiti artist to plein-air landscapes and how he sees himself as documenting specific places and time.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 creativity blooms from what he labels his “dark happy place” and is directly shaped by those traumas.

The Asheville Fringe Festival is just around the corner, and Edwin Salas is about as Fringe as it gets in Asheville. He’s presenting his twisted version of “Hansel & Gretel” in two performances of puppetry, with dolls he carved himself.

We’ll talk about why he never shields his audiences from death, even in his works for children. We’ll get into his recent artistic explorations through virtual reality programming and Edwin’s insistence that, despite his art, he’s far from a scary person.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 show construction and expansion happening within mere yards of their property, NCDOT right-of-way agents said they only need a “partial take," offering less than $100,000.

Rob and Sarah talk about their ongoing battle with NCDOT, their emotional and financial turmoil, what they see as the impersonal nature of the eminent domain process and the broader impacts on their community and quality of life.

The episode featuring my conversation with Nathan Moneyham of the NCDOT posted Dec. 4, 2023.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 his Jewish roots play into his music-making. We also talk about his long connection to ASO music director Darko Butorac and the personal significance he feels in showcasing a broad range of violin-centered works in his native city.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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, Kevan Frazier and Sage Turner.

Three seats on the council will be filled in November’s general election, but to get there, we need to first get through the March 5 primary. The seventh candidate on the ballot, Tod Leaven, couldn’t be at the mixer and isn't part of these episodes.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 casual mixer thrown by the Asheville Downtown Association. Six of the seven candidates showed up, chatted up prospective voters and sat down with me for quick conversations about their candidacies.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Bo Hess, Kevan Frazier and sitting councilwoman Sage Turner. In Wednesday’s episode, I’ll speak with Iindia Pearson, CJ Domingo and sitting councilwoman Kim Roney.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 Mission faces in potentially losing its ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments.

We talked about Mission’s formal plan of correction in response and why regulators approved a plan that many argue doesn’t address the root of the problems. We detail the stakes for Mission’s parent company, HCA, as a deadline for correction looms, and we look forward to what happens on both sides of whether regulators say Mission has effectively corrected what needs to be corrected.

00:31 The Plan of Correction and Staffing Issues
01:37 The Criticisms from Doctors, Nurses, and Officials
02:47 The Fine Line of Criticism and Cooperation
03:10 The Complex Relationship Between Hospitals and Governments
04:25 The Impact of the CMS Report
05:07 The Investigation and Its Implications
05:25 The Role of Traveling Nurses
07:00 The Timeline of HCA's Involvement
08:41 The Investigation of HCA by the Attorney General
11:20 The Immediate Jeopardy Status and Its Consequences
14:30 The Plan of Correction and Its Shortcomings
16:45 The Impact of Staffing Issues on Patient Care
21:02 The Future of Mission Hospital

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 working to educate and engage prospective voters in Western North Carolina. Others working in this effort are the YWCA of Asheville, Just Economics and Asheville Food & Beverage United.

We’ll talk about their work on the ground, overcoming challenges presented by new restrictive voting laws and how they’re working to encourage seemingly low-incentive voters out to the polls.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 wrote an engaging story about this for the online publication The Assembly of North Carolina.

We talk about how the culture around psychedelics has evolved over the past half-century. Daniel tells us about the increasing interest in psychedelic therapy and a utopian retreat in Mars Hill for guided psychedelic exploration. We also discuss pioneering efforts in Oregon and Colorado to decriminalize psychedelics and potentially provide a roadmap for legalization here.

00:47 Understanding the Role of Psychedelic Guides
01:54 Legal Status of Psychedelics
04:17 Psychedelics and Mental Health
04:47 Psychedelic Practices in North Carolina
07:40 The Psychedelic Society of Asheville
09:02 The Role of Research in Psychedelic Acceptance
22:56 The Cost and Accessibility of Psychedelics
25:04 The Future of Psychedelics
26:51 Conclusion: The Potential of Psychedelics

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 employment called Green Opportunities. He developed Hood Huggers International and the Peace Garden in his beleaguered Burton Street neighborhood.

His latest initiative is a business incubator called Blue Note Junction. We’ll talk about all of that, along with his new playbook for community development with accountability.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 Wages Organizer. Just Economics has a living wage certification program that only a fraction of local employers participate in. We talk about the struggles facing Asheville's workers amid increased cost of living and tiny wage increases. We also talk about their advocacy for affordable housing, the importance of supporting businesses that do pay a living wage and signs of hope on the horizon.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 been out front on the local reporting on this. A few hundred people came out Jan. 23 for a Watchdog forum at A-B Tech designed to answer a single question: What can we do to restore better healthcare in WNC?

This episode features the opening remarks from the five panelists: Drs. R. Bruce Kelly and Clay Ballantine, Brevard Mayor Maureen Copelof, nurse and patient advocate Karen Sanders and Democratic State Senator Julie Mayfield of Asheville.

The section of the forum devoted to questions and answers with the same panelists is featured in a separate episode of this podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 Sanders and Democratic State Senator Julie Mayfield of Asheville.

The opening comments at the forum from the same panelists are featured in a separate episode of this podcast.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 motivations and symbolism behind her name change, the eclectic and personal nature of her music and how she’s expressing her music visually. We also talk about her commitment to her faith and about a bad experience she had recently with a music professional that compelled her to double down on her artistic independence.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 Care Resources at Buncombe Partnership for Children. We go through the growing demand and dwindling supply for quality childcare providers. We talk about a new partnership with the Biltmore to open more slots for infants and toddlers. We also lay out the challenges of creating a more sustainable landscape for childcare in this county and around the country.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 family need homes. These siblings are often separated for months at a time or even longer.

My guests today are Amy Hunstman of Buncombe County Health and Human Services and Whitney Burton of the nonprofit Lutheran Services Carolinas. Much of their work focuses on foster care recruitment and training. We’ll learn how the pandemic worsened the imbalance of supply and demand for foster care, particularly for older children and sibling groups. They also relate their own experiences—rewarding and challenging—as foster hosts, and talk about how the community can support foster children and families.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 has invited have painted more than 15,000 square feet of outdoor walls in Asheville with Native syllabary and other cultural symbols and imagery.

In this episode, we’ll take a journey through Wheatley’s complicated family history and walk along his path to the Indigenous Walls Project. We’ll also dissect the racism and criticism he says he regularly experiences, even from other Native people.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

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 audacious—to roll the French Broad Association, South Slope and River Arts District back into the branding of the Southside.

Shuvonda Harper and Sekou Coleman of the Southside United Neighborhood Association detail the damage done by what Harper calls “urban removal.” We’ll learn some of Southside’s history and their efforts to have a voice in shaping the city’s master plan.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Asheville Police Department hasn’t had a homegrown chief in 20 years. Local native Mike Lamb hopes that soon changes. Lamb grew up in Asheville and has been on the force since 1997. In December, city officials named him the interim chief with the sudden retirement of Chief David Zack.

This is the second half of my conversation with Interim Chief Lamb. Part One posted January 10.

Today, we bore into the often-stated statistic that Asheville Police is down 40 percent of its budgeted officers. We talk about elements of the job Lamb says don’t get the attention they should. I ask him about how he and his officers can change a perception many hold, that police come into situations with an adversarial mindset and often use unnecessary force. And Chief Lamb details his own traumatic experience on the job and how he worked through it.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Joe Carroll is a one-of-a-kind comic talent in Asheville: Part Charlie Chaplin, part Robin Williams, part Don Knotts. He's on the eve of his first solo theatrical production, called “Quality Service.” It runs Jan. 19-21 at the Masonic Temple.

We’ll talk with Joe about his upbringing on a rural North Carolina farm, the personal exploration he’s making in the new show and why he has chosen to build his stage career in Asheville.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Mike Lamb grew up in Asheville and joined the city’s police department in 1998. Over the years, he worked under six different chiefs until last month, when he was named the interim chief with the sudden and surprise retirement of David Zack.

Today, I begin a two-part conversation with Interim Chief Mike Lamb. He tells us about his path to law enforcement and what he believes he brings to leadership atop the Asheville Police Department. We also talk about how a carousel of leadership has affected the department, how Chief Lamb views his department’s partnership with Buncombe County Sherriffs and the other partnerships he believes is critical to policing a community marked with visible levels of addiction and homelessness.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

From one perspective, Caleb Rudow is relatively new to public office. Only two years ago was he first appointed to his current seat and, later in the year, won his first state house election, representing NC’s 116th District. But from another perspective, Rudow has spent much of his life in public service. So the North Asheville Democrat says he sees it as a natural step to challenge first-term Republican Chuck Edwards for his seat in the U.S. Congress.

Today, we talk with Rudow through his path to elected office, why he’s challenging Edwards in a state gerrymandered to keep Republicans in office and the messages he plans to campaign on.

I’ve reached out three times to Chuck Edwards’ office to invite him onto this show, most recently in November. His office responded only to the first of those requests, declining the invitation.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Since launching The Overlook with Matt Peiken this past February, I produced 118 episodes enlightening you about the news, arts, issues and trends of Asheville, NC. I’d like to think I give to my community with every episode. If you’d like to show your appreciation in return, please consider supporting the show through my Patreon crowdfunding page. I’ll be back with fresh episodes Monday, January 8.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This is the second half of my conversation with four leaders in Asheville's Jewish community: Rabbis Batsheva Meiri of Congregation Beth HaTephila and Mitchell Levine of Congregation Beth Israel, along with Frank Goldsmith, who is on the steering committee of Carolina Jews for Justice; and Sharon Fahrer, who has documented much of Asheville’s Jewish history.

In the vapors of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in Israel and the ensuing war, we delve deeper into the impact on local Jews, the documented rise of antisemitism across the U.S., particularly at colleges, and the distinctions and double standards of how Israel and Hamas conduct themselves in this conflict. I also ask what these Asheville leaders want to see happen once the smoke of war clears.

Note: Royalty-free music for this episode "Warm Solitude, Cold Loneliness" by Arthur Vyncke.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In the days after Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, some of the fiercest criticisms in this country were directed at Israel, from self-identified liberals and progressives. At the same time, I heard nary a whisper of outrage directed toward Hamas for the attack, its treatment of hostages taken that day and their use of civilians in Gaza as shields.

This is the first episode in a two-part conversation with local Jewish leaders: Rabbis Batsheva Meiri of Congregation Beth HaTephila and Mitchell Levine of Congregation Beth Israel, along with Frank Goldsmith, who is on the steering committee of Carolina Jews for Justice; and Sharon Fahrer, who has documented much of Asheville’s Jewish history.

We talk through the antisemitism they’ve observed and experienced here before and after Oct. 7. We also discuss both the faith-based and cultural nuances of Jewish identity, talk through Israel’s conduct in this war and what these leaders want to see happen once the smoke clears.

Note: Royalty-free music for this episode "Warm Solitude, Cold Loneliness" by Arthur Vyncke.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Islamophobia and antisemitism are on the rise across the United States. That inspired me to reach out to leaders of the Islamic Center of Asheville and two of Asheville’s synagogues. I’m devoting this week’s episodes to those conversations.

Today, I speak with Nasser Ostah, who moved from Jordan a little over a year ago, to become the imam of the Islamic Center of Asheville. Joining us is longtime center member and community leader Khalid Bashir.

From both the Islamic and Judaic angles, I wanted to understand their local histories and ask how their congregations are processing the war. I also wanted to learn about any incidents of vocal or violent blowback in their directions and ask about any roles their congregations can play to make differences in Asheville and beyond.

Note: Royalty-free music for this episode "Warm Solitude, Cold Loneliness" by Arthur Vyncke.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville singer-songwriter Hannah Kaminer has established a pattern of processing and naming the heaviness in life through her music. On the heels of her previous album, “Heavy Magnolias,” comes “Heavy on the Vine,” a new collection of lush music underscoring lyrics born from personal turmoil and evolution.

Today, Hannah guides us through her departure from organized religion and her societal observations born through song. We’ll also talk about tacklung her anxiety by studying and performing theatrical improv. And we’ll preview cuts from a record before anyone else hears them. Hannah launches “Heavy on the Vine” with a January 4 show at The Grey Eagle.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Tourism officials want people to think of Asheville as Beer City, USA. Never mind that breweries now dot the downtowns of even the smallest of cities. Still, there are only a handful of schools in the country like Craft Beverage Institute of the Southeast, on the campus of A-B Tech.

Today, we talk with Jeff “Puff” Irvin, the institute’s director. Every semester, people from throughout the South and far beyond study at the Craft Beverage Institute, many pursuing a career change. While the school teaches the facets of winemaking and distilling the gamut of spirits, this conversation largely focuses on beer. We talk about Irvin's approach to training tomorrow’s professionals in an industry under constant evolution and competition.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

One of Asheville’s iconic concert venues will vanish in the coming years—not because of poor business, but because of eminent domain. Salvage Station on Riverside Drive is on the map of businesses that will be forced to sell and give way to the I-26 Connector. A number of homes are also on the map for clearance.

Nathan Moneyham, a division construction engineer based in Asheville for the NC Department of Transportation, talks about eminent domain and how today’s DOT works with affected communities and steers away from the practices and policies of yesteryear, which particularly eviscerated communities of color.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Nabil El Jaouhari grew up in a village outside of Beirut, Lebanon. Even amid post-war cycles of sectarian violence, Nabil followed a path of artistic expression. His fine art studies eventually led him to the United States. Since moving to Asheville, about eight years ago, he has regularly shown at Mark Bettis Gallery in the River Arts District. In today's conversation, we learn about his life in Lebanon, how moving to the U.S. affected his art and his explorations of memory through visual collage.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

It took the formation of Thrive AVL, a relatively new nonprofit here, to formally connect tourism and affordable housing—and the policies and practices around them—as affecting one another.

Casey Gilbert and Kate Pett of Thrive AVL go into detail about what’s called sustainable tourism—that is, encouraging tourism that enhances all avenues of life. They also dissect a recent Thrive AVL study that, among other surprises, found that much of the affordable housing initiatives in Asheville leave out those who need help the most.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Hospital Corporation of America purchased the nonprofit Mission Hospital four years ago in a deal shrouded in secrecy. Since then, hundreds of doctors, nurses and support staff have resigned. North Carolina’s attorney general has joined them in protesting what they see as an unflinching profits-over-people business model.

The Asheville Watchdog has written many stories detailing much of the decimation of Asheville’s once-vaunted hospital. Recently, the Watchdog’s executive editor, Peter Lewis, wrote an extensive column that asks “What can be done?”

Lewis walks us through a purchase that, from every angle, appears nefarious. We talk about HCA’s anti-competitive actions and some missed opportunities to place certain quality-of-care guardrails on the sale. We also run through a range of ideas and options for influencing how HCA manages Mission Hospital.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville guitarist-songwriter David Wilcox has been at the vanguard of American folk music since the late 1980s. His observational storytelling and lyrical turns of phrase have earned him a loyal following throughout this country and beyond. Sixteen studio albums into his career, he’s still finding new things to say.

Today, we go deep with Wilcox about his songcraft, his vein of inspiration through the pandemic and the range of emotion he mined for his newest record, “My Good Friends.” We also get into his obsessive compulsion about a particular make and model of motorcycle.

Wilcox celebrates the release of his latest record with a solo performance Nov. 24 at the Grey Eagle.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville city leaders have had a “Complete Streets” policy in place for more than a decade—that is, a commitment to make streets as friendly to cyclists and pedestrians as they are to cars and trucks.

We’ve seen that policy take shape in the form of so-called road diets along Charlotte Street and North Merrimon Avenue and the Riverside Drive Greenway. It’s also the reason College Street and Patton Avenue are about to each lose a lane of automotive traffic to make room for bike lanes.

And predictably, city officials are hearing a chorus of protests from people who envision apocalyptic traffic.

Jessica Morris is the assistant director of the city’s transportation department. She talks with us today about the coming changes downtown and how they’re tied to the city’s master plan. We get into how the city prioritizes and funds these projects. Jessica also does her best to make sense of projects that, to many, don’t seem to make sense at all.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

We often hear about the lack of affordable housing in and around Asheville. But there’s a flipside to the coin that is often overlooked—overdevelopment is having a devastating effect on agriculture.

Today's guest is Gina Smith, the features editor with Edible Asheville. She has reported and written a two-part series of stories titled "Losing Ground." where she examines the loss of farmland in Western North Carolina, its broad impacts and efforts to address the trend. Only the first story was published at the time of posting this episode.

We dig through her reporting, including one of the more interesting developments—young farmers forced to lease land from more established farmers, and the arrangements don’t always go as hoped.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Sue Polston’s story is a screenwriter’s dream. Raised in a dysfunctional home, she became a mother while still in high school, and fell into a crack addiction. Today, Polston is the executive director of Sunrise Community for Recovery and Wellness.

We talk about how Sunrise operates as a peer support network helping those with mental health and substance use disorders, experiencing homelessness and incarceration. We also explore the stigmas that challenge people in her circle and learn about Polston’s own path from addiction and despair to community leadership.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

There are high hopes in Asheville for two former hotels converted into permanent housing for the chronically unhoused. The first of them up and running is Compass Point Village, developed and managed by the Asheville nonprofit Homeward Bound. The second, due to open in mid-2024, is a private, for-profit development that will convert a former Days Inn into a 115-unit complex called Step Up.

Today's guests are David Nash, the interim executive director; and Jenny Moffat, permanent supportive housing director, of Homeward Bound. We talk about the path that led to conceiving and developing Compass Point Village and the range of support available to Compass Point’s residents. We also get into how, even with these projects, Asheville’s affordable housing crisis will continue adding people to the rolls of the unhoused.

This is the second part of a series of episodes this week focusing on housing Asheville's chronically unhoused.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville's homeless strategy division has invited the public into a three-part educational course that dives deep into the actual causes of homelessness, the array of solutions at play and how we, as individuals, can play a critical role.

Today's guests are Emily Ball and Debbie Alford, two-thirds of the city’s homeless strategy division. We talk about the prevailing myths around homelessness and the contradictory evidence. We also talk about two permanent housing developments—remodeled hotels now known as Compass Pointe Village—expected to make deep and visible impacts to Asheville’s chronically unhoused.

The city's lunch-hour Homeless Learning Series continues with sessions Nov. 9 and 16 inside Pack Library.

Today's episode is the first in a short series this week on combatting homelessness. Our next episode looks into the new Compass Point Village project with leaders of Homeward Bound.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Hannah Cole is an Asheville artist who translates her everyday observations into her studio craft. These observations started out as external. Now, partially inspired by the incursion of artificial intelligence, Hannah's newest body of work sees her turn her gaze inward.

Here, I talk with Hannah about what representation by human hands means in the era of AI. We also talk about Hannah’s turn to accounting and personal finance and building a career helping other creatives manage their money.

Hannah Cole’s show at Tracey Morgan Gallery, “A Mirror, Not a Window,” opens Nov. 3 and runs through Dec. 16.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that people bottled up their mental health struggles or got real about them only with a therapist, if at all. Today, much of the stigma is lifted but, for many, access to quality mental health care remains elusive.

My guests today are Meredith Switzer, the executive director; and Brendan Hughes, the development director, for the nonprofit All Souls Counseling Center. We talk about how the demand for counseling has climbed with and since the pandemic, how the circumstances and needs of All Souls' clientele have evolved and how All Souls is addressing the racial and cultural barriers that can challenge access to quality mental healthcare.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Until this current school year, student enrollment at UNC-Asheville had dropped in each of the previous five years—down 25 percent from where admissions officials want it to be. The drop mirrors national trends.

My guests today are Marcio Moreno, UNC-Asheville's associate vice chancellor of admission and financial aid; and Michael Strysick, head of the university’s communications and marketing. We talk through the university’s Access Asheville program, which waives all tuition and fees for North Carolina-based undergraduates in households earning less than $80,000 a year. We also get into larger trends, such as an increase in competition for students, along with changes in admissions designed to address issues of equity.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Resonant Rogues allowed The Overlook to use their "Maker's Song" as the show theme. It's only fitting to have Sparrow and Keith, the heart of the band, as guests for the show's 100th episode—closing a week of episodes recorded Sept. 27 in front of an audience at the Tina McGuire Theatre, inside the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Here, Sparrow and Keith tell how two itinerant musicians stopped in Asheville long enough to find each other and build lives together around their music. We also delve into the personal nature of their new music and hear them perform a couple songs from their upcoming album.

The Resonant Rogues formally launch the album with a full band performance Nov. 17 at the Grey Eagle.

Photo by Meredith Katz.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

We continue our week of episodes recorded in front of an audience at The Overlook Live with Asheville Symphony Orchestra music director Darko Butorac.

We talk about how the orchestra pivoted this season after city officials deemed Thomas Wolfe Auditorium uninhabitable because of outdated and nonfunctional infrastructure. I ask why this orchestra only performs monthly programs and why he and other symphonic orchestra directors don’t look to collaborate more with contemporary rock (special nod to Tool) and pop composers.

Photo by Meredith Katz.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

We launch a special week of episodes recorded from The Overlook Live with a deep dive and dissection into Asheville’s commitment to racial reparations. Three years after city leaders committed to a formal reparations resolution, the commission tasked with drafting specific proposals is still debating what reparations even means.

My guests are Dr. Dwight Mullen, a retired UNC-Asheville history professor who co-chairs the city’s reparations commission, Torre Garrison of the Reparations Stakeholder Authority of Asheville and Rob Thomas of the Racial Justice Coalition. We talk through their views of the reparations process and their vantages on this question: Will Asheville see a meaningful, impactful resolution at the end of this?

The Overlook Live, our first podcasting event in front of an audience, happened Sept. 27 in the Tina McGuire Theatre at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Photo by Meredith Katz.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Violinist Andrew Finn Magill has an eclectic, genre-crossing new album called “The Polaris Project.” Horror writer Jamieson Ridenhour is the writer and co-creator of the popular fiction podcast "Palimpsest." The two Asheville artists split this episode of The Overlook.

Ridenhour and “Palimpsest” actress and co-creator Hayley Heninger celebrate the upcoming fifth season of their show with a performance Oct. 26 at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts. Magill launches his album with an Oct. 27 concert at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Just last year, roughly four out of five Asheville-area Black children tested below grade level in reading proficiency. My guests today are Ashley Allen and Jess McLean, co-executive directors at Read 2 Succeed, one of a handful of Asheville nonprofits supplementing the reading education happening at under-resourced schools. Read 2 Succeed is particularly focused on closing what it calls “the race-based opportunity gap—not an achievement gap—through community-powered literacy programming.”

We talk about how a white-centered approach to education perpetuates the gap. We work through different methodologies, including the controversial “Whole language” approach. We also about Read 2 Succeed’s board working through its own mission drift and get into the details of how its tutors work with schools and children.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

You’d have to be a shut-in not to notice the prevalence of panhandling in Asheville. It’s become so visible along Interstate on-ramps and off-ramps that, early this summer, a committee of city councilwomen proposed penalizing sympathetic motorists who stop to give money to panhandlers.

A public outcry compelled them to walk back that proposal and soften other language in a pending update to the city’s panhandling ordinance. But Asheville’s civic, business and tourism leaders still see a crisis of perception and an economic cost connected to panhandling.

Today's guest is Chase Davis, a relative newcomer to the reporting staff at Mountain Xpress. We talk through his recent reporting on panhandling and efforts to stem the tide. We break down the differences between panhandling, vagrancy and the unhoused. We also get into the challenges for a city striving to balance empathy with solutions and contrast Asheville to the town of LaGrange, Ga., where Davis last reported on these same issues.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Andrew Scotchie is one of Asheville’s homegrown musical successes. He was an active busker, he played in local clubs long before he was old enough to legally get in the door and even started his own successful knockoff of the popular Bonaroo Festival, called Barnaroo. A few months ago, Scotchie released his fifth album of eclectic Appalachian music, called “Love is Enough.”

Scotchie talks here about his early life in music, recounts the classic years of his Barnaroo Festival in Weaverville and the influence of his father, both when he was alive and after his murder.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Social politics are making inroads into public schools. State legislatures, particularly those controlled by Republicans, are mandating that elections for school boards become partisan, and they’re drafting legislation to censor books available in school libraries, the curricula taught in classrooms and even classroom conversations.

This is the second in a two-part conversation with board members George Sieburg and Amy Ray of the Asheville City Schools, and Ann Franklin and Amy Churchill of Buncombe County Schools. We dig into State Senate Bill 49—a so-called parents’ bill of rights when it comes to public education—along with efforts to erode public education while steering money to private schools. We also talk through the state-mandated redrawing of district lines for electoral purposes and a movement to merge the Asheville City and Buncombe County Schools Districts.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

There’s no glory in serving on a school board, at least not in North Carolina. State legislatures control your policies and purse strings. Parents sling arrows at you online and at public meetings. There are efforts to turn school board elections into overtly partisan affairs and pass legislation forcing teachers away from certain books, curricula and even classroom conversations.

This is the first in a two-part conversation with board members George Sieburg and Amy Ray of the Asheville City Schools, and Ann Franklin and Amy Churchill of Buncombe County Schools. We talk about the responsibilities and considerations that go into their work, how control at the legislature affects and limits how school boards respond to conditions in their own districts, and the evolving social and political climate playing out at school board meetings.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In this dual episode, we have separate conversations with dancemakers Vanessa Owen and Gavin Stewart and emerging rap artist Luicya.

Stewart Owen Dance makes duets, dances for larger ensembles and outdoor pieces, and collaborates with other artists. They're in residency next week at Trillium Arts in Mars Hill and performing next April at the Wortham Center in Asheville. We discuss how the pandemic changed their approach to their art and careers.

You won’t find much online from the emerging local artist who calls herself Luciya. She’s the daughter of classical musicians, but she calls her own music goddess rap. We’ll meet her and hear about her impulses and influences in the second half of the program. She's stepping her up local performances, including an intimate Sept. 30 date through Pan Harmonia.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the show

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Steep Canyon Rangers embody and evangelize the Asheville sound as much as any musical artist. They’ve certainly had success with it.

Their collaborations with the actor, comedian and banjo player Steve Martin put them on the national map, and they won a Grammy Award on their own 10 years ago for best bluegrass album. Now, more than two decades into their career, the departure of co-founding vocalist and guitarist Woody Platt has pushed the Steep Canyon Rangers into new territory and compelled the band to find themselves all over again.

My guests today are the band’s remaining co-founders, banjo player and songwriter Graham Sharp and mandolin player Mike Guggino. We talk about the band’s early years, their work with Martin, how they processed Platt’s departure and the making of “Morning Shift,” their new album with new vocalist Aaron Burdett.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

If Asheville crowned a reigning native queen, Libby Kyles would certainly fall into the city’s royalty. She has lived all over the city, led educational efforts here as a teacher, administrator and nonprofit leader and been an unwavering voice around inequities she pins on race. In this conversation, she explains how the Asheville of today is different than the city of her youth. We get her thoughts on the city’s reparations process and run through her life’s work as seen through the vital programs and community resources she has helped create.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

It’s no secret—Asheville has a housing crisis. Among the strategies to combat that, city planners are looking more closely at developing what’s called “middle housing.” These are townhouses, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and smaller apartment complexes—essentially almost anything other than traditional single-family homes.

My guest today is Candra Teshome, a longrange planner for the City of Asheville. We talk about an extensive study the city conducted this year that looked at middle housing, put it in context with the larger housing supply and delve a bit into how Asheville and cities all over the US found themselves with a housing imbalance, along with the creative ways they’re trying to right the scales.

SPONSOR: Satirical comedian Robert Dubac performs “Standup Jesus,” 8pm May 3-4 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

SPONSOR: Adlib Clothing in downtown Asheville celebrates its 35th year all throughout April. Drop by and tell founding owner Anna Sagel you learned about her milestone on The Overlook podcast.

Support the Show.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

One of the pitched rivalries in all of sports is probably taking place in your neighborhood: Tennis players vs. pickleball players. Outdoor public courts that tennis players had to themselves since the dawn of history are now the site of community turf wars.

Today's episode features representatives from the Asheville Tennis Association and Asheville Pickleball Association. There are only 11 asphalt tennis courts in Asheville’s parks and recreation system. Pickleballers have made those courts their surfaces of choice. They’ve ardently lobbied city council for courts dedicated to their sport, but those don’t appear on the horizon anytime soon. Parks officials have brokered meetings between the two sides and come up with an even-handed, agreed-upon schedule of use that nobody seems particularly happy with.

Get tickets to The Overlook Live, our first live podcasting event! 7p Wed., Sept. 27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Rebekah Todd is a seasoned songwriter and performer who moved from Wilmington to Asheville two years ago. On Aug. 22, she posted a video to social media talking about unwanted communication from an unnamed festival promoter, the blame he placed on her for the festival's cancellation and the avalanche of backlash that came her way. Hundreds of people commented on and shared it.

Even before this episode, Rebekah made social media posts going back to March touching on other experiences she had with men in positions of power. Misogyny in the music industry is a difficult topic. Rarely do men address it, nor does the music press. But an Asheville music festival called Women to the Front happens Sept. 17. It’s founded by and exclusively featuring female artists. The timing seemed right to meet Rebekah and hear her story as a microcosm of what many women artists experience.

Asheville Habitat for Humanity is sponsoring this episode of The Overlook. To volunteer, visit ashevillehabitat.org/how-to-help/volunteer/

Get tickets to The Overlook Live, our first live podcasting event! 7p Wed., Sept. 27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

North Carolina legislators recently legalized sports betting in the state. Once enacted, that could funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each year to the athletics programs of UNC-Asheville and Western Carolina and Appalachian State universities.

Justin McGuire, a reporter with Mountain Xpress who has covered this development, talks about the forces that led to legalization and how concerns about gambling addiction shaped it. We also talk about the broader cultural tipping point of legalized gambling in this country and what this might forecast about the development of more casinos in North Carolina.

Asheville Habitat for Humanity is sponsoring this episode of The Overlook. To volunteer, visit ashevillehabitat.org/how-to-help/volunteer/

Get tickets to The Overlook Live, our first live podcasting event! 7p Wed., Sept. 27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Passenger trains haven’t rolled through Asheville since 1975, but there’s a serious plan from the North Carolina Department of Transportation to bring them back. Daniel Walton's recent story for Mountain Xpress connects the tracks between three decades of studies and recent federal infrastructure funding to a planned 140-mile route from Asheville east to Salisbury. We talk about the environmental and cultural factors playing into the rekindled interest in passenger rail, how the proposed line out of Asheville would feed into a wider web of passenger lines and a long timeline that could leave the project prone to shifting political and economic winds.

Get tickets to The Overlook Live, our first live podcasting event! 7p Wed., Sept. 27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

When the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill sounded its final whistle on June 8, 115 years of continuous operation in Canton came to an end. 1,100 jobs were lost and some heavy questions remain about what will happen to those people, along with the 185-acre site and its buildings. Cory Vaillancourt and Holly Kays, reporters with the Smoky Mountain News in Waynesville, have led local coverage of the plant’s closure. We talk about the business trends that led to the closure, the environmental impacts and outlook for the site, along with how people in Canton are weathering the closure. We’ll also talk about possible next-lives for the facilities, the stakes for Canton and, perhaps, for people priced-out of Asheville.

Get tickets to The Overlook Live with Matt Peiken, our first live podcasting event!

We're taping three episodes in one evening—Wednesday, Sept. 27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. I'd love to see you in the audience!

Asheville Habitat for Humanity is sponsoring this episode of The Overlook. To volunteer, visit ashevillehabitat.org/how-to-help/volunteer/

Get tickets to The Overlook Live, our first live podcasting event! 7p Wed., Sept. 27 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Overlook Live with Matt Peiken ismy show's first event in front of a studio audience. It happens Wednesday, Sept. 27, inside the Tina McGuire Theater at the Wortham Center. I’ll be recording three episodes in one night:

The Resonant Rogues talk about and preview songs from their upcoming album.
A panel discussion lays out where we are and aren’t when it comes to reparations for Asheville’s Black community.
Asheville Symphony Orchestra music director Darko Butorac talks with us about an upcoming season already challenged by the forced closure of Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.

Get tickets here.

Fresh episodes of The Overlook return the Tuesday after Labor Day.

Support the showSupport The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Mary Gallagher and her husband owned Kilwin’s Fudge and Ice Cream in downtown Asheville for 13 years before handing the store off during the pandemic. Then Gallagher did something a little crazy: She wrote a piece of musical theater from scratch. She found a composer, a director and a cast, then booked a theater. “At the Cafe” premieres inside the McGuire Theater at the Wortham Center Aug. 18-27.

We’ll talk about Gallagher’s commitment, investment and bringing her vision to reality. We’ll also get into the story she wants to tell about middle-aged women and what success means for her as a late-stage creative.

Support the showSupport The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The renovations needed at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium were well-known for many years to anyone who’s worked or performed there. Now, with the heating and air conditioning system out of order, the auditorium is closed at least until next spring and possibly longer. That’s forced a scramble to move some shows into the neighboring Harrah’s Cherokee Center. Still, the economic impact of lost shows is expected to be in the millions.

Chris Corl, Director of Community and Regional Entertainment Facilities for Asheville, lays out the condition of the auditorium, the timeline for repairs and the costs of closure that go beyond financial. We get into the deeper issues that have plagued the auditorium for decades and what a state-of-the-art auditorium could mean for Asheville.

Support the showSupport The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Homes and land with the highest market values are systemically under-assessed and under-taxed, while properties at the lowest market values are over-taxed. That's at the heart of findings uncovered by Asheville urban planner and consultant Joe Minicozzi. His findings show that’s true in Buncombe County and the 17 other counties in Western North Carolina.

We walk through Minicozzi's research, the responses he says he received from county officials and the financial and social costs of these inequities. He talks about long-entrenched biases and arbitrary processes baked into how properties are assessed for taxation. We go through some stunning numbers and the economic costs in a cash-starved county. Minicozzi also answers this question: Why and how is this inequity allowed to continue?

Support the showSupport The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In college, Lauren Yero found a way to marry up her interests in creative writing and ecological science. A handful of years later, Yero wed both those commitments into her debut novel for young adults, titled “Under This Forgetful Sky.”

Yero lives with her husband and two young kids on a budding hobby farm in Madison County. We talk about threading her concerns with climate change into a near-future fantasy set in Chile. We also get into the thick of her creative process—turning disparate kernels of ideas and dreams into a cohesive story—and also why she only sprinkled in slivers of Spanish onto a story featuring South American characters but told in English.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In 2022, less than 3 percent of North Carolina workers belonged to a union. Only South Carolina had a smaller percentage. Still, in Asheville, food and beverage workers are organizing and seeing momentum.

My guests today are Jen Hampton of Asheville Food and Beverage United; and Ariana Lingerfeldt, a chef at Green Sage Cafe South Asheville, who this past March led a successful effort to unionize that staff. We talk about their separate paths toward organizing, overcoming anti-union propaganda and confronting employment systems they say are designed to divide workers. We also dig into the industry-specific issues they’re fighting for beyond higher salaries.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority just approved a budget of nearly $40 million for the next fiscal year. By state law, the TDA will steer about a third of that into a sort of discretionary bucket called the Tourism Product Development Fund. Many in the community have different ideas for how that money should be spent.

This is the second half of our two-part conversation with Vic Isley, president and CEO of the TDA. We dig into that TPDF. I ask Isley why hoteliers and other vacation rental owners have such an outsized presence on the committee that chooses which projects to fund. I also challenge what I see as her broad definition of our local creative community and propose what Isley says has never before been proposed as a use for TDA funds.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This is the first in a two-part conversation with Vic Isley, president and CEO of the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority. We roll out Isley’s own background in tourism marketing, the TDA’s evolving priorities and how Isley sees the TDA as a partner in diversifying Asheville’s economy. I push back on Isley’s definition of who encompasses Asheville’s creative community. Isley also addresses this question: Can there be too much tourism in Asheville?

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Overlook spent last weekend at The Big Crafty. Matt Peiken roamed the floors and talked to local artisans, asking "How do makers make it work in Asheville?" A handful of makers offer up their stories, lessons learned and advice for other makers considering a move to Asheville.

Voices in this episode are Jen Toledo, Mary Labianca, Kimberly Obee, Ashley Gandiza, Laura Wood, Edwin Salas, Bill Green, Maxx Feist and Cara Steinbuschel.

Here are their Instagram handles: @jentoledoart, @infiniteselflove, @laurawoodstudios, @edwinsalasart, @otherdesert, @caramaeskincare, @maxx_feist, @tinymountain.clay, @wishingflowerpress

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Hendersonville author Meagan Lucas is an emerging voice in the literary niche called Grit Lit. Her newest collection of stories is titled “Here in the Dark.” Much like her earlier work, these stories center on Appalachian women of simple means and complicated lives. We talk about Lucas' drive to portray women of this region with truth, dignity and complexity. Meagan also talks about how her own traumas play into her writing and how she maintains relationships with family members who aren’t thrilled with some of her language and subject matter.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The North Carolina legislature has voted to turn school board elections into partisan affairs. That means, in Buncombe County, future candidates will have to run in specific districts as opposed to one at-large pool, likely diluting Asheville’s core advantage of population. Andrew Jones of AVL Watchdog, my guest today, breaks down the coming changes and their potential impacts. We talk about how new district maps could be drawn and also pull the lens back to the broader incursions by social conservatives into what happens inside public schools.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

2023 is the North Carolina Year of the Trail. It’s also the 100th anniversary of the Carolina Mountain Club. So the timing is right for this gathering of leaders of three local trail advocacy organizations to talk about their work, their challenges and what’s ahead. My guests are Tom Weaver, president of the Carolina Mountain Club; Rebekah Robinson, the assistant director of programs for Conserving Carolina; and Marcia Bromberg, president of the board of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville’s public school teachers and staff are in an existential battle for greater pay. That fight is also happening with pre-K childcare and education, where wages are often comparable to the fast-food industry. Throughout Buncombe County, a coalition of learning centers, nonprofit advocacy groups and business interests hopes to boost regional and state funding.

Today's guests are Marcia Whitney, president and CEO of Verner Center for Early Learning; and Greg Borom, Director of Advocacy for Children First Communities and Schools of Buncombe County. We talk about the alarm they’re sounding, their call for extending the boost in funding that happened during the pandemic and the disparities they see around access to quality early childhood education and care.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

North Carolina hasn’t legalized the growth or sale of marijuana yet, but the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, on the Qualla Boundary, are a sovereign nation. Two years ago, the Tribal Council approved the growth and sale of medicinal marijuana for Tribal members and just last month opened their program to anyone living in North Carolina, though its dispensary hasn't opened yet.

Jennifer Emert, an investigative reporter with WLOS-TV, recently produced a three-part series for the station about the tribe’s program and the prospects for statewide legalization. We talk through her reporting, including some tension within the tribe about the program’s fiscal responsibility and what the impact of state legalization might mean for the region’s CBD and hemp industries.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

On the U.S. Independence Day, we fittingly turn to baseball and our first conversation with Asheville Tourists manager Nate Shaver. We talk about his path from having aspirations on the field to his current aspirations in the dugout. He details the day-to-day role of managers at his level, what personnel directors with the Houston Astros dictate from above and how he and his coaching colleagues strive to support their players in ways that aren’t necessarily reflected in their stats. Also, Shaver is likely among an elite few in pro baseball: Managers with a PhD.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Local teachers and staff had asked Buncombe County commissioners for a 7 percent pay raise. Commissioners recently approved a budget that gives them a 2 percent bump. My guests today are Lissa Pedersen, an art teacher at Leicester Elementary School and vice president of the Buncombe County Association of Educators; and Timothy Lloyd, a custodian at Asheville Middle School and incoming president for the Asheville City Association of Educators.

Pedersen and Lloyd talk about their reactions to the budget just approved by county commissioners. We dive into how teacher associations differ from traditional unions and why that mattered during budget deliberations. We also talk about how charter schools and private schools affect the conversation of pay at public schools.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Michael Hayes was serving his fifth term in prison when an epiphany struck. He had never acknowledged the trauma he grew up with, let alone worked through it. The process of doing so changed his life, and he focused on helping others do the same.

Hayes founded Umoja Health, Wellness and Justice Collective, a Black-run nonprofit in Asheville devoted to disrupting generational trauma for people in and out of prison, along with school-age youth. In this conversation, he details his "healing journey," talks about the critical factors of community and peer-to-peer support, how Umoja differs from traditional 12-step programs and how he and others in their 50s work to break through to teenagers.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Scores of Asheville minors get into legal trouble every year, and Buncombe Alternatives is working to keep them out of the judicial system and put them back on a positive track. Karen Peerson, the executive director; and Juan Holladay, director of program services and community development, with Buncombe Alternatives. We’ll talk about teens who come to them from inside and outside the court system, the details of their community service through this program and how restorative justice looks through the lens of Buncombe Alternatives’ teen court.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Investigative journalist Karen Zatkulak produced a recent three-part series on North Carolina's evolving for WLOS-TV. We talk about the magnitude of the North Carolina legislature doing away with any required permits to purchase a handgun. We go through the efficacy and differing approaches to background checks, the influence of the NRA and the absolutism of those who regard the Second Amendment of the US Constitution as sacrosanct.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville's rising rate of violent crime inspired US Congressman Chuck Edwards, a Republican representing Western North Carolina, to convene what he billed an 'Anti-Crime Summit.' The forum happened this past Friday at Ferguson Hall, on the main campus of A-B-Tech.

The Overlook brings you this edited version, focusing largely on voices from Asheville. The complete, two-hour forum is available to our Patreon supporters. You’ll hear about the roots and underlying causes behind the spike in crime, the challenges of battling this crime and what some panelists touted as victories and hopeful signs.

In addition to Edwards, panelists included:

Mark Buchanan, Clay County Sheriff
David Denninger, Assistant District Attorney, Buncombe County
Van Duncan, former Buncombe County Sheriff
Bill Hollingsed, Executive Director, NC Association Chiefs of Police
Helen Hyatt, Asheville Coalition for Public Safety
Esther Manheimer, Asheville Mayor
Quentin MIller, Buncombe County Sheriff
Andrew Murray, District Attorney, Henderson-Polk-Transylvania counties
John Pritchard, Assistant US Attorney for Western District of NC
Caleb Rudow, NC Representative District 116
Bob Schurmeier, Director of NC State Bureau of Investigation
Chris Swecker, former director, NC field office of the FBI
Zach Wallace, vice-president of public policy, Asheville Chamber of Commerce
David Zack, Asheville Police Department Chief

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Lorrie Pande has spent her career in the scenes and behind the scenes of the performing arts, mostly in the theater. And for reasons that, even now, aren’t entirely clear, Pande felt compelled to create a theatrical musical about the life of artist and naturalist John Jay Audubon. “The American Woodsman” premieres June 23 at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. Pande talks about her path from Chicago to South Florida to Asheville, what led her to Audubon’s work and story and marshaling her financial and professional resources to bring her vision to life.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Affordable housing is an increasingly rare commodity in Asheville, but city staff working in housing are turning to one weapon in the fight to develop affordable homes—land the city owns. Sasha Vrtunski, Affordable Housing Officer with Asheville's Community Development Division, breaks down the city's recent $4.3 million investment in five affordable housing projects. She also talks about updating the city’s affordable housing plan and the criteria for selecting buyers and renters outside the capital marketplace when demand far outweighs supply.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

About 23,000 people take classes every year through A-B Tech. As tuition and student debts everywhere rise hand in hand, students across the demographic spectrum are turning to technical and community colleges. Today’s guest is Terry Brasier, who has spent 10 years as the college’s vice president for student services. We talk about how A-B Tech has evolved to meet the broadening backgrounds and goals of today’s students, its partnerships in a variety of industries to produce employment-ready graduates and the challenge of student engagement when everyone lives off-campus.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Hundreds of teachers, school staff and board members, parents and even students rallied at Buncombe County Commission hearings as recently as last week. They’re calling on county officials to meet living-wage standards by raising local supplements to match other North Carolina districts with high costs of living. Greg Parlier, a recent addition to the reporting staff of Mountain Xpress, breaks down the stalemate over salaries within Asheville City and Buncombe County school districts, the politics involved at the local and state levels, the limited impact of teachers’ associations and how the proliferation of charter schools is affecting teacher pay.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Nathan Ballingrud, a 1989 graduate of Asheville High School, is a venerated dark fantasy novelist with two collections of short stories and a novel adapted into a movie. His new novel, “The Strange,” is set almost a century ago but in a world—or, rather, worlds—we can only envision. Ballingrud talks about his path to writing, setting the futuristic elements of “The Strange” in our familiar past and how an author in his 50s took on the vantage and voice of a teenaged girl as the book’s central character.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Asheville Watchdog has published a series of stories dissecting various issues plaguing downtown. One of the best in the series is from journalist Tom Fiedler, our guest today. His story probes why law enforcement, city officials and nonprofits face such a challenge with the effects of meth and fentanyl addiction. Among other elements of our conversation, Fielder gets to the crux of what he sees as a key roadblock for Asheville—it’s state-mandated form of government.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In the second of our two-part conversation, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer addresses her take and the city’s approaches to a number of big challenges. We also talk about Asheville’s formal commitment to reparations and where the city is in its assessment of the water outages Asheville experienced last December.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

By North Carolina constitutional law, mayors count as just another vote on the city council and have no singular authority to enact initiatives or manage the city. But residents and city staff expect their mayors to show leadership and vision, along with an authority that goes beyond their constitutional purview. And when things go wrong, mayors are often the first target of outrage.

In the first of a two-part conversation, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer defines her leadership when all the legal authority to run the city sits with the city manager. She also addresses whether the city manager and city council are tackling issues with the same urgency.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Melvin AC Howell traces his obsession with hip-hop street dance as early as 9 years old. His parents couldn’t relate to it, nor could anyone in his hometown of Morganton, NC. But when he found himself living out of his car not all that long ago, Howell said he climbed his way out through dance. Now living in Asheville, Howell is about to stage new work through a residency with Trillium Arts in Mars Hill. We talk about his instinctive, improvisational approach to movement, building self-confidence without feeling support from anyone around him and finding refuge in Western North Carolina during and after his bouts of homelessness.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The I-26 Connector carries the long promise of a clean, multimodal, locally dedicated artery. Today's guest is Jason Sandford of the AsheVegas Hot Sheet. He’s well-versed on the detours and delays, promises and politics of I-26. He’ll fill us in on the history of the Connector and where the project stands, the economic interests at play and how community feedback and pushback have shaped its direction.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Asheville Airport is at high altitude these days. The airport served more than 1.8 million passengers in 2022—a record-breaking year by 29 percent—and is about to begin construction to expand its terminal from seven to 12 gates. Lew Bleiweis, in his 14th year as the airport’s president and CEO, talks with host Matt Peiken about the airport’s booming business and coming expansion. We also discuss how complicated it is for regional airports to add destination cities and why the Asheville Airport has only one restaurant and gift shop.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The trash dotting Asheville’s streets, riverbeds and freeway underpasses has seemingly grown so bad, even TV news is devoting time to it. But no local reporter has dived deeper into the proverbial dumpster than today's guest, Jessica Wakeman of the Mountain Xpress. We discuss what she found in her reporting, beneath the surface of the trash we see to root out the myriad sources, the disparate agencies and people tasked with cleaning it up and some of the social and cultural forces at play.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Two quick items in this bonus episode: A huge thank-you to our Story Parlor and founder Erin Hallagan Clare for holding down our first audio residency. Also, we're launching a quick-hit daily newsletter of local headlines called "First Look." Subscribe for free at podavl.com/newsletter.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Chelsea Labate is an incredibly gifted and giving songwriter and poet. Even before the pandemic, she began experiencing psychotic episodes that required hospitalization. They eventually compelled her to sell her Asheville home and move in with her parents in Florida. She also has made an array of music and poetry inspired and ignited by her struggles. Now back in Asheville, Labate talks with host Matt Peiken about how her episodes have fed her creativity and performs some of her newer work.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville For All is a new nonprofit run by volunteers, but it’s addressing a need in Asheville that goes back decades—developing more affordable housing. Andrew Paul and John DeRusso, two of the founding volunteers behind Asheville For All, talk about their political advocacy, the resistance to add more housing often coming from existing homeowners and how they’re making the case for investment from the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Buncombe County District Attorney Todd Williams He won’t discuss the Aston Park case directly because it’s still active. But in the second of a two-part conversation, Williams does talk in broad policy and gives an analogy about a case his department handled several years ago. We also talk about the evolution of Williams' approach to the job, including his view on seeking the death penalty, and Williams lends context to how his office handles charges related to vagrancy.

Todd Williams provided this public link to the Christopher Hickman / Johnny Rush case files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1766BecUuhJp5NkAl9a3Dqj3AiKsZykHO

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

It's rare when an elected official, let alone someone in the position of district attorney, initiates an interview with a journalist. But Todd Williams isn't the stereotypical prosecutor. In the first of a two-part conversation with Matt Peiken, Williams talks about his path from social justice attorney to prosecutor and discusses perhaps his most controversial case since winning office in 2015—the assault of Johnny Rush at the hands of Asheville Police officer Christopher Hickman and the eventual dismissal of charges against Hickman.

Todd Williams provided this public link to the Christopher Hickman / Johnny Rush case files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1766BecUuhJp5NkAl9a3Dqj3AiKsZykHO

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This week's Story Parlor residency invites local poets Sebastian Matthews and Marie Harris to share some of their work, and a bit about their collaborative and creative processes, in advance of the May 11 event, Jazz Hybrid Presents: An evening of poetry and music.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Margaret Curtis’s paintings are gorgeous and lush and haunting, filled with allegory, historical references and connections to what she calls cultural collapse. In this episode, we talk about the personal and communal trauma informing her work, her subversive commentary as torches for feminism and climate change and the balancing beam she walks in her work between darkness and beauty. Curtis lives in Tryon and has a solo show running through May 27 at Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville’s South Slope.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Keynon Lake is a third-generation Asheville native and the founding director of My Daddy Taught Me That. It’s a nonprofit born from the values Lake attributes to his father, Bennie Lake, and a mission to pass them down to Black youth. Keynon Lake talks about what he learned from his parents, his program’s evolution and growth and the challenges of instilling the bedrocks of his father’s influence to the Black youth of today.

Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign!

Advertise your event on The Overlook.
Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

For 30 years in United State politics, North Carolina US Senator Jesse Helms set the bar for this country’s social conservatism. Helms was unabashed in his opposition to civil rights, gay rights, disability rights, environmentalism, feminism, affirmative action and access to abortion. Today, one of his granddaughters lives in Asheville and is doing what she can to rebuke his legacy.

Ellen Gaddy is using the Helms lineage as a pulpit to fight for causes her grandfather opposed—chiefly women’s bodily autonomy and their access to abortion. Matt Peiken talks with her about growing up under the spectre of Jesse Helms’ rhetoric and the price she has paid within her family for speaking against the late senator’s views.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

We aren’t posting new episodes this week. The Overlook returns May 8. Among upcoming episodes: The granddaughter of infamous senator Jesse Helms is reclaiming the family legacy for liberal ideals, a look into efforts to curb the city’s growing trash problem, Keynon Lake of My Daddy Taught Me That and a two-part conversation with Buncombe County attorney Todd Williams. In the meantime, open this week's issue of Mountain Xpress to read a profile about Matt Peiken and The Overlook.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This week's Story Parlor audio residency features audio from its "Gathering of the Bards" themed Story Mixer held on Saint Patrick's Day—an evening of art, stories, music, and poetry that paid tribute to the magic, mysteries, and muses of Celtic culture. Readings and performances come from author Julyan Davis, storyteller and vocalist Paula O'Brien and the musical duo Robin Bullock and Sue Richards.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Susan Reinhardt's second novel, "The Beautiful Misfits," is a polemic against our system for treating those with drug addiction. The Burnsville author comes to the story through her own experience as a mother whose adult son seesawed between addiction and treatment. She talks with host Matt Peiken about her days as a journalist and humor columnist, her experiences of the addiction-to-treatment pipeline and her ideal alternative, as laid out in her novel.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Despite Asheville’s leafy reputation, Western North Carolina doesn’t exactly have a robust farming industry for hemp. Daniel Walton, formerly a staff writer and now regular contributor to Mountain Xpress, talks with Matt Peiken about his recent coverage of the region's hemp industry, where the state legislature stands around the legalization of marijuana and how that legalization would affect the hemp and CBD retail markets.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Wildlife officials say the black bear population in Western North Carolina stands at about 8,000. That’s eight times the estimated total of just 40 years ago. Karen Zatkulak, a reporter with WLOS-TV, was among the journalists who produced stories for the station’s recent “Bear Week.” We’ll talk about the factors leading wildlife officials to pivot from a strategy of boosting to curbing the region’s bear population. We’ll also talk about findings in her reporting she found surprising and get details about a controversial black bear center in Cherokee.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This week's Story Parlor audio residency pays tribute to National Poetry Month, featuring the works of local poets Lady Be and Juan Sánchez Martínez, along with select excerpts from Mildred Barya's recently released collection, The Animals of My Earth School.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Maggie Ullman is just several months into her first term on the Asheville City Council, but she brings years of work inside and alongside government, largely in sustainability and addressing climate change. She brings an unwaveringly positive approach to her role on City Council. We talk about her emphasis on what she calls finding the flow, working to build coalitions and the issues that matter to her most as the city sets its next budget.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Kim Roney is in her second term on Asheville's all-female City Council, and she has established herself as the council’s torchbearer for progressive ideals. Her principles have left her alone, or nearly alone, in dissent on dozens of resolutions before the council. Roney talks with host Matt Peiken about how she sees her role on the council. She also talks through a range of issues the council looks to address in current budget talks, including her approach to community safety, and her vote to put millions of public dollars into the renovation of McCormick Field.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

It’s a challenging time to be a Democrat elected to statewide office when Republicans hold supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Senate. In the second half of our two-part conversation, NC Sen. Julie Mayfield and Rep. Lindsey Prather talk with Matt Peiken about their fight for women’s rights and voting rights, and also for progressive values at a time when democracy itself is under threat. We also talk about the push to give cities like Asheville more local control in a state where the legislature determines so much of what can and can’t happen at a local level.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Republicans now hold veto-proof supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Senate. Where does that leave the Democrats elected to serve Asheville and other blue communities? In the first of a two-part conversation, NC Sen. Julie Mayfield and Rep. Lindsey Prather talk with host Matt Peiken about how they define and carry out their work in Raleigh at a time when they can’t hope to pass legislation coming from their own desks. They also about building relationships behind the scenes, the battle lines they’re drawing as members of the minority party and their strategies on moving the ball downfield when democracy itself is under threat.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In our continuing audio residency with Story Parlor, this week's episode spotlights the West Asheville venue's Story/Arts Residency program. Past artists-in-residence Gina Cornejo and Meta Commerse share a bit about their experiences, along with what they created for their residencies.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Most people know little about Goodwill beyond their stores and donation centers. But the money spent in there funds a range of job training and social services for high schoolers, veterans, adults with disabilities and people needing second chances. Our guests today—Lance Crawford, Jordan Meeks and Samantha Randolph—are responsible for just some of the social service programming of Goodwill’s Northwest North Carolina chapter. They’ll talk with host Matt Peiken about the community needs their work addresses, how the pandemic affected that work and Goodwill’s comprehensive approach to putting people on paths of success in and out of the workforce.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Nearly three dozen volunteer boards and commissions advise Asheville City Council. Today's guest, Brooke Randle of Mountain Xpress, breaks down for host Matt Peiken how these boards and commissions work, the politics that can steer council away from their recommendations and what happened when city officials tried to drastically cut back on these commissions.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Joel Burgess of the Asheville Citizen-Times talks through his recent coverage of Asheville’s rental market, the forces that limit the power of local officials to directly address the issue and the creative methods some in local government are coming up with to try keeping Asheville affordable and livable.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Overlook is spending the week working behind the scenes on the next batch of episodes. When new episodes begin April 10, I’ll explore Asheville’s escalating rents and the city’s struggle to fill vacancies on advisory boards. I also interviewed the granddaughter of the late social conservative US Senator Jesse Helms. She lives in Asheville and has broken away from her family’s legacy to fight for reproductive rights.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In our continuing audio residency with Story Parlor, we close out Women's History Month by paying tribute to local women artists and their work. Music, poetry, and prose in this episode come from Laura Boswell, Tracey Schmidt, Tina Collins, Ali McGhee, Jane Kramer and Alli Marshall.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville native Datrian Johnson is the new vocalist for the Asheville funk/soul band The Fritz. He and the band's founding guitarist, Jamie Hendrickson talk with host Matt Peiken about The Fritz's new album, "Take Your Time," Johnson's path through gospel and how the band and their new voice found kismet through improvisation.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville City Planner Stephanie Monson Dahl talks with Matt Peiken about the reimagining of Pack Square, keeping West Asheville pedestrian-friendly, the challenges of bringing North Merrimon Avenue into the 21st Century and using creative zoning to stem the effects of mushrooming development.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Four years ago, the board of Asheville’s nonprofit Mission Health system sold control of its six hospitals to the for-profit HCA Healthcare. Since then, more than 3,500 doctors, nurses and support staff have left the system. Patients and healthcare workers have sued HCA over quality of care and working conditions—complaints that continue in freeflow to this day.

Talking about all that with Matt Peiken are AVL Watchdog journalists Barbara Durr and Andrew Jones. Their deep reporting has documented the broad effects of Mission’s sale to HCA, and our conversation sheds some light on how one of Asheville’s most important nonprofit boards chose to surrender its mission.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Rob Thomas, executive director of the Racial Justice Coalition of Asheville, talks with Matt Peiken about the steps he helped pave toward a local reparations resolution, why some demands in the resolution are more challenging to achieve than others, and his advocacy for doing it right rather than doing it fast.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This episode comes from Story Parlor's "Homeland" story mixer from January 2023, showcasing stories from local artists paying tributes to their homelands. Performances come from Jimmy Griffith, Adama Dembele and the duo of Gina Cornejo and Mar.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Many visual artists start by envisioning scenes or images, or they work from sketches, photos or memories. Kirsten Stolle has spent a decade taking artistic inspiration from agrochemical companies. She pulls and manipulates imagery and text to spotlight what she calls the greenwashing and troubled histories of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. In this episode, Stolle talks with Matt Peiken about the seeds of her artistic inquiry, the heavy research fuelling her work and the line she straddles between artistry and activism. Her current show is on view through April 8 at Tracey Morgan Gallery.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Like all contemporary police departments, The Asheville Police face a range of challenges, both inside the department and with a growing range of issues on city streets. In the second in our two-part conversation with Asheville Police Chief David Zack, we discuss his frustrations at the salary ranges for his officers and with certain local nonprofits he sees as standing in the way of critical community partnerships. We also broach the arrests and trespassing charges against two people working for the online publication the Asheville Blade.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Much is made, at least anecdotally, about rising crime in Asheville. At the same time, the Asheville Police Department is down roughly 40 percent of its force. Citing both, Asheville Police Chief David Zack says the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 created a perfect storm his department is still struggling to recover from.

Our wide-ranging conversation spans so much territory, The Overlook is breaking it into two parts (Part 2 is tomorrow's episode). Here, Chief Zack discusses the challenges he faced from the beginning of his tenure here, the recruiting and retention of officers and the stresses on officers working overtime to fill the gaps.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

On Christmas night of 2021, Asheville Police descended on Afton Park to clear out a couple dozen people, their tents and other belongings after a city-imposed 10pm curfew. Among those arrested were two people wearing press passes from the Asheville Blade. They say they were in the park covering what had been billed to them as a protest about how the city treats its homeless. Now, Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss face an April 19 court date on charges of trespassing.

Bliss and Asheville Blade founding editor David Forbes talk with host Matt Peiken about their coverage of homelessness in Asheville, the events of the night Bliss and Coit were arrested and what they believe the existing charges reveal beneath Asheville's progressive reputation.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In excitement for Story Parlor’s “Gathering of the Bards” Story Mixer, held on Saint Patrick’s Day evening, today’s episode is dedicated to art and stories that pay tribute to the magic, mysteries, and muses of Celtic culture, all from local artists here in Western North Carolina.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In a town with a reputation for oddity, the annual Asheville Fringe Festival is a celebration of the most odd, the most outsider performance. My guest today is Erinn Hartley, director of the Asheville Fringe Festival. Next week’s festival will be the 21st Asheville Fringe. But this will be the first since the pandemic that’s completely back to unmasked, in-person performances.

I talk with Erin about the evolution of Fringe as an idea, how this festival weathered and emerged from the pandemic and why a January festival throughout its history has now moved to March. We also talk about the mix of local and visiting performers you’ll see and why some applicants don’t make the cut.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

If you hike, bike, hunt, hammock, picnic, forage or just otherwise like to wander around the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests, you care about how these forests are managed. And the history and culture of this region play into the mistrust some people feel about management at the hands of federal officials. Today's guest is Jack Igleman. When he’s not teaching economics courses at Warren Wilson College, he’s the lead environmental reporter for Carolina Public Press. He recently wrote about the finalized plan to manage both our neighboring national forests. We’ll unpack his story and also dive deep into the evolving forest ecology and the conflicting politics that shaped the plan.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Today's episode began with a question: Why does Asheville struggle to attract large corporations and the thousands of highly paid, highly skilled jobs that come with them? For answers, we turn to UNC-Asheville assistant professor of economics Jonathan Brown. Our conversation spans the region’s history, culture and livability amid a heavy dependence on tourism. We also talk about how remote working is changing the equation. This conversation took place before the announcement that the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill in Canton will close later this year, taking away about 1,100 jobs.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Owners of the Asheville Tourists baseball team insist McCormick Field needs $30 million in renovations. If Asheville and Buncombe County leaders don’t agree to carry most of that cost, the team is threatening to leave Asheville. Our guests today say that’s an age-old play: Owners of pro sports teams leveraging cash-strapped cities for new or improved stadiums.

Today's guests have studied this issue on a local and national level: Justin McGuire is a reporter for Mountain Xpress; Jonathan Brown is an economics professor at UNC-Asheville; and John Mozena is a Michigan-based writer and president of the nonprofit Center for Economic Accountability. The Asheville Tourists didn’t respond to an emailed request to speak with someone from their ownership group for this episode.

You’ll hear about the history of this team’s requests for stadium renovations, the economics of public funding vs. the financial return to cities and how nostalgia, politics and other factors you can’t find on a ledger play into these decisions.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

I'm taking March 6-10 to focus on behind-the-scenes business of The Overlook, but I'll be back March 13 with fresh episodes. Topics on the near horizon include reparations, the public stakes of forest service management plans and public financing for proposed renovations of McCormick Field.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

This week's Story Parlor audio residency features an interview with the creators behind The Big Beautiful Crankie Project—a multidisciplinary arts collaboration utilizing a unique and timeless form of storytelling.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Secret Shame is a young Asheville band that has already caught waves of national attention. The songs are built around the darkened headspace of vocalist Lena, who says her battles with mental illness have been a double-edged creative sword. In this episode, Lena talks at length with host Matt Peiken about the difference between expressing herself on paper and reliving her traumas every night in performance. She also relates her feelings when fans tell her how deeply her lyrics affect them. In the second half, we’ll hear pieces of several songs from the band's new album, “Autonomy,” and Lena discusses the more recent challenges she gave herself of writing from a positive place.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Are you wondering why Asheville lacks affordable housing? For answers, step into the February gathering of the Goodwill Industries Business Advisory Council. The Overlook brings you the illuminating Q&A session, featuring panelists are Robin Cape of EXP Realty; Andy Barnett, the executive director of Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity; and Anna Zuevskaya, executive director of Asheville-Buncombe Community Land Trust.

Photo credit: St. Louis Habitat For Humanity.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

New hotels are blooming in and around Asheville like wildflowers in the spring. Some are new construction. Other projects, particularly in the River Arts District, plan to repurpose older buildings. But the connecting thread is undeniable—this city’s dependence and deference to tourism is only deepening. Today’s guest, Jason Sandford, is the founding journalist of AshVegas, who now channels most of his work through the AshVegas Substack newsletter. He talks with host Matt Peiken about the political maneuvering that paved Asheville’s hotel boom, the restricted waterfall of money coming in every year through occupancy taxes and the efforts of handcuffed city leaders to address issues connected with the hotel rush.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Sarah Honosky, the city government reporter with the Asheville Citizen-Times, has extensively covered the varied angles of homelessness in Asheville. In this conversation with host Matt Peiken, Honosky details the goals of city and county officials to cut the city’s growing population of the unhoused by half. We also go through a report calling for major structural change in how local officials handle the issue and talk about the status of plans to convert former hotels into permanent housing.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Our Friday audio residency from the stage of Story Parlor, in West Asheville, continues honoring Black History Month with performances from Kelly Morris, Mildred Barya and Jasmin Morrell.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Luzene Hill didn’t think of herself as an artist until well into midlife. Today, she’s untethered by discipline in her feminist and Native American matrilineal expression. Hill is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians living in Cullowhee. A series of recent drawings and a new performance video are at the core of “Revelate,” an exhibition of Hill’s work on view through May 15 at the Asheville Art Museum. In today’s episode, Hill talks about her formative years in Atlanta, her path to artistic expression and the personal and cultural trauma and violence informing her art.

Episode photo credit: Jeffrey Gibson Studio

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

It can be frustrating to think these two problems coexist in our community — food scarcity and food waste. Food Connection is an Asheville nonprofit addressing both sides. Today’s guests are founder Flori Pate and Marisha MacMorran, the executive director. They call their work food rescue, delivering prepared foods to residential centers and individual homes. We talk about the details of that work, their creative pivot during the pandemic and their ongoing struggle to meet the community’s needs.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Sally Kestin of AVL Watchdog has done extensive reporting showing Asheville City Council members have skirted the spirit, if not the letter, of North Carolina’s open meetings laws for years by holding closed-door sessions in groups of two or three. I talk with Sally Kestin about her reporting on this issue, what’s potentially happening in these meetings outside of public view and the effects on a public kept in the dark. City Council just last week announced they would begin holding so-called “work sessions” in public, but there’s no indication whether the closed sessions will continue.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Asheville Police have been public about their challenges recruiting and keeping officers. Daniel Walton, today’s guest, has covered the travails of the Asheville Police as a reporter and city editor with Mountain Xpress. Host Matt Peiken talks with Walton about the department’s checkered history both on the streets and within its ranks. Walton also details some of the factors keeping Asheville from making more headway in its recruitment and the department enlisting outside help.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

The Overlook is devoting Friday episodes to the Asheville community in the form of "audio residencies." Our first block of Friday episodes are curated by Erin Hallagan Clare, the founding director of Story Parlor. It's a West Asheville that opened in 2022 and has quickly become a go-to hub for storytelling in a variety of stripes. In this first episode of the residency, Clare spotlights poet Glenis Redmond in a performance from the Story Parlor stage in December 2022.

Stay tuned to the end of the episode to find out how to apply for an audio residency with The Overlook.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

In the pantheon of rock operas, “Tommy,” “The Wall” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” come first to mind on the list of classic titles. Could we someday add to that list “Happyland?” Host Matt Peiken talks with Zach Knox and Brayden Dickerson, the Asheville creators of “Happyland,” an ensemble-cast musical premiering this month at the Magnetic Theatre. We talk with about the theatrical nature of their band, Smooth Goose, the creative evolution of the “Happyland” music and how this project is influencing their band’s direction.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Hospice care in the United States is largely defined and shaped by health insurers and Medicare. The Center for Conscious Living and Dying, set to open this spring, is a new nonprofit in Swannanoa driven to reposition hospice as a communal passage. Host Matt Peiken talks with Dr. Aditi Sethi, the center's founding director; and Hannah Fowler, a registered nurse and the center’s director of education. We talk about their vision of the fusion of life and death and how, through the center, they’re hoping to change the end-of-life dynamic.

Fowler and Sethi also reference "The Last Ecstatic Days," a documentary film out soon about the communal hospice care supporting the final days of the film's subject, Ethan Sisser. Details about the film are at thelastecstaticdaysmovie.com.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

If you travel Merrimon Avenue in North Asheville with any regularity, you probably have a strong opinion about it. The road diet of last fall cut four driving lanes to two with a center turn lane and new bike lanes on the margins. Host Matt Peiken talks withMike Sule, the founding director of Asheville on Bikes. Some people applaud the lobbying he and his group did to bring the road diet forward. Others left fuming in midday single-lane traffic jams likely hold a different view of Sule’s efforts. In this conversation, Sule talks about his path to bike advocacy and the fight he’s waging to make Asheville a more livable city.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

For every question Asheville officials have answered about what happened with the city's water system over the holiday calamity, another hangs in the air, unanswered. Host Matt Peiken talks with AVL Watchdog's John Boyle, the dean of shoe-leather journalism in Asheville, about the checkered history of the city’s water system; how the city handled public communications in the latest failure, which left tens of thousands of residents and businesses without water over Christmas week; and the road ahead for the committee tasked with looking backward and forward.

Instagram: AVLoverlook | Facebook: AVLoverlook | Twitter: AVLoverlook

Listen and Subscribe: All episodes of The Overlook

The Overlook theme song, "Maker's Song," comes courtesy of the Asheville band The Resonant Rogues.

View Details

Imagine two of public radio’s most popular shows—The Daily and Fresh Air—come to Asheville, N.C., meet up with a doula and have a baby. That baby is The Overlook, a new daily podcast all about Asheville, from award-winning journalist Matt Peiken.

The Overlook: Recent Episodes

Matt Peiken