Craft: Exploring Creativity

When someone asks “Where are you from?” is your answer a region? An area of a state or country? Or do you think of the home where you lived as a young person?

For Trent Wagler and the other members of the Steel Wheels, where they’re from is all of this and more, an amorphous assortment of memories that have meaning to them. As Trent put it

If you’d like to catch up with the sounds and smeels of home, the Steel Wheels will be in town with Six String Concerts on January 21, when you can buy their latest, Everyone a Song Volume Two, featuring the song “Where I’m From.”

Once again, Craft Studios and Ready-to-Bake Pizzas offers you the finest in Halloween merriment, from psycho killers stalking the innocent to teachers struggling with urges to massage therapists with unexpected clients – we aim to entertain and inform. We hope you’ll have nightmares because of enjoy this year’s smorgasbord of madness. If not, that’s just part of the terror of Halloween.

The daughter of a 1950’s widowed working mother, Carolyn Aaron grew up in an unusual circumstances, some of which she’s used in her acting. She calls her civil rights activist mother an “inverse influence” on her character of Shirley Maisel, because her mother “would not have any relationship to Shirley whatsoever.”

Aaron has plenty of other projects besides acting, including her podcast Angst And Daisies, a call to political action, which she looks at as “I feel like everything I do… has to do with…how do we make things better?” For her, it comes down to taking a measured view and not trying to make huge changes but to “make a difference to one [person].”

So make a difference to your day by listening to Carolyn Aaron.

Comic Sumukh Torgalkar will return to central Ohio after a few years on the West Coast to record his second comedy album at Madlab on June 3. Listen in as we discuss his comedy interests, the impact of the pandemic, and what kind of comedy he prefers to do.

Singer-songwriter Jeff Black will appear on June 3 with Columbus’ Six String Concert series. He brings a back catalog of 12 albums and a new one that he’s in the process of writing, so be prepared for something potentially new. We talked about his career, his childhood musical interests, and how the pandemic may have played to his strengths of being something of an introvert, a feeling to which I can relate. We also discussed the genre he’s often placed into – roots/Americana-and what this means for him.

And thanks to the magic of Zoom, you can now watch Jeff Black. I once again play the role of the hidden interviewer as I do on WCBE, 90.5 FM every Wednesday at 8 PM.

Vance Gilbert has released 13 albums so far, with another one on the way that he’s been working on live in concert. When the pandemic struck, he switched to the live streaming concerts every Monday at 7:30pm. For the past 107 weeks, he’s donated 10% of his live stream tip jars to charities with 107 checks sent out so far. Vance Gilbert will appear with Six String Concerts on May 6.

In and out of care facilities for many years, Dr. Carolyn Bailey Lewis persevered and became director and general manager of OUB public media at Ohio University in Athens, where she served for 13 years as the first woman and first African American to lead this entity and the first woman to be emerita. While recovering in different health care facilities, she decided to write a book about her experiences and those around her, which became Love and Loss: The Storied Nature of Nursing Home Care. Listen in to hear her remarkable journey of healing and writing.

Author, speaker and media specialist Christina Dorr, PhD, will appear as part of the Ohioana virtual Book Festival on April 29-May 1. Her most recent book is Profiles in Resilience: Books for Children and Teens That Center the Lived Experience of Generational Poverty. Dorr started work on this book after discovering that librarians who had grown up in middle class or higher income homes had difficulties understanding children living in generational poverty. Since Dorr identifies with growing up in poverty, she brought her insight into the issues that the books explore.