Companion Gardening

Invitation Oxford

August 2020

Tucked behind the Old Armory Pavilion, in what was once a little-used baseball field, the Oxford Community Garden has grown over the past decade from a scratchy patch of compacted red soil and Bermuda grass into a half acre of lush flowers, vegetables and fruiting shrubs, thanks to the work of dedicated volunteer gardeners.

On a recent spring day — before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of social gatherings — the garden was bustling with people during its monthly work day. New gardeners were being assigned plots. The old hands weeded a dense row of communal blueberry bushes. Meanwhile, garden member Andrew Gordon sat beneath a honeysuckle arbor plucking a harp for the workers’ enjoyment.

This is a far cry from the garden’s earliest days. The seeds of the idea to start a garden anyone in the community could join began with Oxford resident Susie Adams. On a trip to Finland for work, Adams saw her first community garden.

“People had their chairs out there and their kids out there and they were hanging out and they had art in the garden,” Adams said. “It seemed like such a neat community place. I thought, ‘We have to do this in Oxford!’”

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Home School

Home School
Wellesley Magazine
Fall 2018

On a recent morning, I walked into my living room at 9 a.m. as I always do, ready to start the day, only to find that my three children had already started “school” without me. My oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, had dragged a small chalkboard easel up from the basement and was demonstrating simple addition and multiplication problems to his 6-year-old brother and 4-year-old sister, who sat on little chairs behind a child-sized table. I sat down on the couch, dumbfounded.

Although I have homeschooled my children for the past three years, this scene bears little resemblance to how I teach. My method, insofar as there is one, is more open-ended—learning as a natural part of life, not the study of clearly delineated subjects. Aside from the birdsong streaming in from our open front door and a cat walking on dirty paws across the table where my younger children sat, this scene looked a lot like a traditional classroom.

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On the Re-launch Pad

On the Re-launch Pad
Wellesley
Summer 2016

Re-entering the workforce after time away can be daunting, but many alumnae have found that with some honest self-assessment, networking, and the willingness to take some risks, it’s possible to wind up on a better career path than before their break.

In the years after she graduated from Wellesley, Danya Underwood Rivlin ’99 put her professional life on hold to be home with her children. But after seven years as a stay-at-home mom, she was ready to return to the workplace and began interviewing. Last November, having been passed over for a couple of jobs for which she was well-qualified, Rivlin wrote a self-described “cry for help” on a popular alumnae Facebook group. “Can I still have a rewarding professional life ahead of me?” she asked. “Where do I start?”

Rivlin was in good company. She was one of the more than 2 million American women between the ages of 24 and 54 who the United States Department of Labor says are unemployed and looking for work.

Of the dozens of alumnae interviewed for this story, many chose to take time off to care for a child or a sick parent. For others, it was a necessity driven by the high costs of child care or the inflexibility of the work world around the responsibilities of family life. It was a conflicted decision for many, who spoke of their alma mater’s emphasis on women’s professional success and the pull of the College’s motto to minister to a wider community. And whether they saw their time off as a luxury or a necessity, all of them acknowledged it as a privilege not shared by most working women. For Rivlin, even the term “time off” is a misnomer. “Time off from what?” she asks. “I feel like I’ve worked harder in the last seven years than I’ve ever worked in all the rest of my life combined.”

Whatever their feelings about their career breaks, at some point they all wanted to return to work. The statistics, however, can be discouraging. The Center for Talent Innovation, founded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and author of the book Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, surveyed thousands of “highly qualified women” in 2004 and again in 2009, after the economic downturn. The latter survey found that 89 percent of respondents said they wanted to return to work, but only 73 percent of them succeeded, and only 40 percent found full-time jobs. A CNN headline in 2013 put the case more bluntly: “Moms ‘opting in’ to work find doors shut.”

Of course, re-entering the labor force is not an issue only for mothers—or even only for women. In today’s economy, career breaks of any sort can seem insurmountable. But just as Wellesley alumnae have earned a reputation for being successful at launching careers, they have proved no less successful at relaunching them.

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Food Blogging for Native Son Farm

Native Son Farm Food Blog
www.nativesonfarm.com
April 2016-present

Since April of 2016, I have written, photographed, and produced a food blog for Native Son Farm, a certified naturally grown vegetable farm in Tupelo, Mississippi. This is a project near and dear to my heart because I love food—and photographing food—and am passionate about supporting sustainable local agriculture. Native Son Farm is real asset to north Mississippi, where fresh, locally grown, pesticide-free produce options are scarce. But I am also particularly proud of this project because it was an idea I pitched and built from the ground up, and it has really taken off.

In the blog's three farm seasons, I have shepherded it through a redesign and help grow readership into the thousands. It serves as a clearinghouse for information about the farm's community-supported agriculture (CSA) program as well as a way for CSA members to share their favorite tips and recipes. I have also solicited, edited, and produced several guests posts from area members, chefs, and restauranteurs. My fourth season as editor of this blog begins tomorrow, and I am really excited about where this blog is going, as well as some bigger longer-term projects I have planned with Native Son Farm.  Here is a sample of recent posts:

Beer Nuts

Beer Nuts
Hendrix magazine
Spring 2015

Meet the growing number of alumni who are tapping into the craft beer movement

The first thing I notice about Lost Forty Brewing is its size. Although technically a microbrewery, everything about the operation is big. Towering over its entrance, in a former warehouse district just east of Little Rock’s River Market, is an enormous grain silo that holds the 48,000 pounds of malt that will be used to produce some 3,000 barrels of beer this year. The day it opened last December, Lost Forty because one of the biggest breweries in the state and one of the most talked-about dining venues in the city.

Although new to brewing, co-owner John Beachboard ’01 has been a big name in central Arkansas food and business circles for years. He and partners Scott McGehee and Russ McDonough would seem to have a Midas touch, having rolled out one hit restaurant after another: ZaZa in 2008, Big Orange in 2011, followed by Local Lime in 2012. Now the trio, who joined with businessman and “serial entrepreneur” Albert Braunfisch ’86 on this venture, are making a big splash on Arkansas’s burgeoning brew scene.

But Beachboard and Braunfisch are just the latest among a growing number of Hendrix College grads who are ridding the tidal wave of craft beer that is washing over the state: including Evan McDonald ’03 in Fayetteville, and Ian Beard ’02, Patrick Cowan ’03, and Ida Mehdizadegan Cowan ’05 in Little Rock. So what’s causing all this brew-ha-ha?

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The Expert: What I Know About ... Body Odour

The Expert: What I Know About … Body Odour
Avenue Edmonton
June 2015

Who: Rachel McQueen

Age: 40

Job: Assistant Professor of Textiles Science at the University of Alberta

Experience: Rachel McQueen grew up on the South Island in New Zealand, where her father ranched about 1,500 Perendale sheep on 300 acres of land, which may explain her love of wool. As an undergrad at the University of Otago, she got turned on to textiles science. “What I liked about clothing was the science, but also the social aspects as well.”

In 2007, she moved to Edmonton to take up her current position as a professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta, one of the only university in Canada with such a program. In addition to teaching, she studies the retention of odor in textiles—“Why does this T-shirt stink and the other not?” is a question she often finds herself asking—and works with several manufacturers of sports apparel.

Her research involves a lot of “wear trials,” where volunteers sniff the sweaty underarms of other people’s clothing, and her findings on stinky garments have generated interest, from Scientific American to Cosmopolitan.

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A New Swamp Fire

A New Swamp Fire
The Oxford American
March 15, 2015

Since their inception more than a decade ago as a band of teenage musical wunderkinds, Feufollet has been leading a revival in Cajun music and bringing the traditional tunes of Acadiana to a wider audience. Their last album, En Coulouers (2010), earned a Grammy nomination and a nod from Elvis Costello, who called it “the most beautifully melodic album I’ve heard all year.”

In the years since, the members of Feufollet—which means “swamp fire”—have been pursuing diverse musical careers and retooling the band after the departure of former lead singer Anna Laura Edmiston, who ran off to join the circus, literally. (Edmiston left the group under amicable terms in 2012 to tour with Cavalia: Odysseo, a theatrical circus created by one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil.)

Next week, Feufollet will release Two Universes, their first album in five years. The album debuts vocalist and fiddler Kelli Jones-Savoy, as well as a strikingly different sound: less accordion and more honky-tonk. It signals a radical departure from the Cajun music tradition on which Feufollet built their identity and is the first of their albums not sung entirely in French. Although Jones-Savoy displays a brilliant bilingualism, her roots are in the old-time music of North Carolina, and this translates into her songwriting.

And Two Universes is a showcase for songwriting. Feufollet’s earlier albums relied heavily on the band’s arrangements of traditional Louisiana tunes, while this album features their own songs almost exclusively. For those of us who have enjoyed their music without ever comprehending a word of the French, it is a pleasure to finally be able to appreciate their talents as lyricists, as in the duet “Red Light,” where Jones-Savoy and Feufollet co-founder and frontman Chris Stafford trade off harmony and opposing viewpoints:

I saw an end, but you saw a start
I declared it over, thought I had played it smart
But you built a castle from all that fell apart
I saw an end, but you saw a start

I was curious about the story behind this new project, so last month I spoke by phone with Jones-Savoy and Stafford. I caught them at Stafford’s music studio in Lafayette, getting ready for a spring tour.

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