Prabir Mehta On the Language of the Cosmos

Prabir Mehta clung to his mother’s hand as they made their way through the bustle of the Ahmedabad Market. He was no more than five at the time and could hear music everywhere. A herd of cars, congested in traffic, blasted five or six different music styles simultaneously, as if competing. Hindus and Buddhists sang their prayers, and even in those rare quiet places you would almost always hear somewhere in the distance the rhythmic pulse of a sitar. In the family home, Prabir would sit on the kitchen floor from the time he was three and beat on pots and pans in imitation of the tabla his uncle played. He looked up to his mother, and she smiled down on him and squeezed his small hand. And then they began to sing classical Hindi songs in unison. 

By Charles McGuigan 10.2024

Andrew Alli On The Blues

Andrew Alli, who was majoring in environmental studies at VCU at the time, happened to be strolling through the Byrd House Farmers Market in Oregon Hill when he heard something that would change his life forever. It was a plaintive wail, punctuated by short licks with punch and grit that came from a small rectangle of stainless steel and plastic smothered in hands clapped to a mouth that breathed life into the listless.  The groove he heard at that moment pierced Andrew’s soul in a way no other music ever had. He moved toward the source of the music—a busker on his harmonica with a tip jar at this feet.  After leaving the market Andrew went directly to a music store and bought a five-dollar Hohner Blues Band harmonica. He blew into it and sound instantly came forth.

By Charles McGuigan 09.2024

Questions for Third District Council Candidates

08.2024

Richmond’s Third District Council race is one of the most hotly contested in recent memory. Incumbent Councilwoman Ann-Frances Lambert is squaring off with Kenya Gibson, the District’s School Board representative, and Maria Carra Rose, a small business owner. NORTH of the JAMES asked nine questions of each candidate. Here are their responses.

The Rivanna

It was the first time in more than two weeks that the heat dome finally fractured. Temperatures that had hovered in the upper nineties and at times rose into the triple digits gave way to a day that could have been scooped out of autumn. Not a cloud in the sky, no humidity, just a slight breath of wind out of the northeast, and temperatures topping out in the high seventies. So we drove at a leisurely pace out Patterson Avenue from its origins on Arthur Ashe Boulevard to well beyond the suburban sprawl of western Henrico where Route 6 goes from four lanes to two lanes.

By Charles McGuigan 07.2024

Ending  Homelessness: With Patricia Gould-Champ and Allison Bodanovic 

Call it fate.

Call it destiny. 

Call it kismet. 

Whatever you want to call it, it was that strange thing that occurs when two people are in the right place at just the right time, their lives intersecting. In this case that crossing of cosmic paths, and the union that would follow, ultimately ensured that 86 people would have the most fundamental human dignity of all—a place to call home.

By Charles McGuigan 06.2024

Liberate Your Lawn! 

In the enclosed side yard of my boyhood home on the Isle of Palms, I was lying on a bed of grass staring into a flawless blue sky. The only interruption to this field of vibrant blue was a single white cloud that moved leisurely to the east, heading toward the Atlantic. I breathed deeply of new-mown grass that was tinged with the pleasant sweetness of gasoline, and I could hear the sputtering of the lawnmower and the whirr of its blade.

By Charles McGuigan 05.2024

The Many Arts of Julie Elkins 

They sat around the kitchen table as the house settled into slumber, its systems quietly shutting down for the night, until there was just the soft purr of the refrigerator, barely audible. This was Bryan Harvey’s house in Woodland Heights just blocks away from the house Mike Lucas called home. The two sat across the table from Coby Batty, and these three men, linked by a love of music, had been good friends most of their lives. Each one of them began singing a song. 

By Charles McGuigan 04.2024

Bellevue: Our Town 

Bellevue has a soul. It has trees. It has architectural integrity. It has animals, and not just dogs and cats and other pets (though we do have plenty of them); but also an abundance of the wild sorts, a plethora of squirrels and rabbits, along with chipmunks, possums, raccoons, foxes, ground hogs, birds of prey and songbirds, snakes and toads and tree frogs, even coyotes.  Plus this: Bellevue has diversity both in terms of the people who inhabit it and the houses they dwell in.

By Charles McGuigan 03.2024

Mike Lucas: Singer-Songwriter

They sat around the kitchen table as the house settled into slumber, its systems quietly shutting down for the night, until there was just the soft purr of the refrigerator, barely audible. This was Bryan Harvey’s house in Woodland Heights just blocks away from the house Mike Lucas called home. The two sat across the table from Coby Batty, and these three men, linked by a love of music, had been good friends most of their lives. Each one of them began singing a song. 

By Charles McGuigan 03.2024

Colette Miller: The Better Angels of Our Nature

Early in the morning she and her friend, both Americans, would leave their rooms and make their way into the street and join a group of others who were waiting to be selected for a day of work either picking olives or plucking oranges in the groves just outside of this coastal town called Chania on the island of Crete. Some days they found work; other days they would sit and while away the hours with others who had not been selected, and they would play chess and drink Ouzo.

By Charles McGuigan 12.2023

Dawoud Bey: Elegy

All art, in the very germ of its seed, is political. Which is not to say Democrat or Republican, Progressive or Independent. For art springs from the politics of humanity, a deep well that quenches the thirst for ultimate truths, and propels us forward in a sort of aesthetic evolution that actually alters the mind and the soul and the heart. With Guernica, Pablo Picasso compelled us to confront the real terrors of war.  Mary Cassatt insisted we acknowledge a noxious patriarchy that had ruled the West for millennia. And Dawoud Bey reminds us of the eternal horrors of the enslavement of Africans, and the persistence of racism in our culture.  

By Charles McGuigan 11.2023

RampsRVA: The Freedom Fighters

Eagles, falcons and hawks can see far better than any human being, and moths can hear the flapping of a bat’s wings from fifty yards. In terms of speed on land and water, animals easily outmaneuver us— cheetahs top out overland at 70 miles an hour, and black marlins have been clocked at swimming 80 miles an hour. In the weight-lifting division dung beetles take the gold, easily pressing over 1,000 times their body weight. And the broad jump goes to the common flea that can leap 220 times its own length. Human beings do have some strengths unsurpassed in the animal kingdom, but only if those strengths are nurtured and encouraged: They are called compassion and empathy.

By Charles McGuigan 10.2023

Megan Slay: The Mystery of Music

Music flowed through the house for as long as she could remember. Sometimes it fell gently as a spring rain, and other times it pelted the very air with a soaking downpour, accented with thunder. Every cell of her being had been informed by these sounds since she was an infant.  As she grew older, Megan Slay would often watch her mother’s fingers move across the keys, fingers with a secret knowledge of every note they could coax from this grand piano. And then her mother would raise her head and begin to sing along with the music, and sometimes this would bring tears to Megan’s eyes, and she began to understand the meaning of each syllable of this transcendent language called music.

By Charles McGuigan 09.2023

Victor Ayala On the Art of Giving

Some people take and take and take and take. Consider how just a handful of American billionaires, in their excessive greed, possess the vast majority of our nation’s wealth. It is a pathology consistent with psychopathy.

Fortunately for us all, there are people who give for one reason and one reason only: It’s the right thing to do. Giving, even when you have very little yourself, ensures the preservation of the best angels of our humanity.

By Charles McGuigan 07.2023

Alleys, Roads Less Traveled, Part 2

Alleys in Richmond serve functions both utilitarian and aesthetic. They make it easy to gain access to the rear of almost every property in Richmond. Not only does this supply a means for removal of trash and recycling, but it also affords police and firefighters a way to enter a property from the rear, if necessary. Alleys are much more than that though. They showcase the other side of our homes. In some parts of the city, carriage houses, hearkening back to a pre-petroleum era, are built up to edge of the alley. And many alleys contain remarkable outdoor spaces, pocket parks and the like, some of which feature massive playgrounds, while others are planned with the artistic eye and botanical sensibility of a Gertrude Jekyll.

By Charles McGuigan 06.2023

Alleys: Roads Less Traveled, Part 1

Having grown up in Northern Virginia’s sprawling suburbia, alleys were something new to me. I had experienced them to some degree in Philadelphia where my grandparents lived, but my explorations there were merely cursory. So when I first arrived in Richmond to attend VCU I became immediately enamored of these extraordinary byways that traversed every neighborhood in the city. I came to know them as well as I did all the streets in the city, and would more often than not map my routes along them when I traveled by foot or by bike.

By Charles McGuigan 05.2023

Meghan Varner: A Silver Lining

Meghan Varner grew up on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood filled with Arts and Crafts cottages. In her backyard, twenty feet off the ground, was the best treehouse in all of Bellevue. It was painted green and had electricity but no plumbing, and Meghan played in this lofty fortress for hours on end, thinking of the things she would one day do. She could already do what many of her peers couldn’t. For instance, she could bring her feet over her head while sitting down.

By Charles McGuigan 04.2023

JOBIE Arthur: A Modern Troubadour

The wedding band had just finished their set and were headed over to the bar for some refreshments. Their instruments stood like small sculptures on the makeshift stage, and a little girl stared at them for a moment, then climbed up on the stage. She clasped a microphone with her tiny fingers and without any musical accompaniment sang a song she had committed to memory thanks to her grandma who had sung it to her every night for as long as the girl could remember.

By Charles McGuigan 03.2023

Until I Found You: Georgia Brown

We are living in an age of aggressive clout-chasing. People are tumbling to their deaths in the Grand Canyon mid-selfie. TikTok challenges induce medical emergencies—all in the pursuit of online popularity. Then there’s Georgia Brown. She’s sitting on something big, but chooses not to cash it in for her fifteen minutes.

By Fayeruz Regan 01.2023

Saint Nicholas: On The Essence of The Human Soul

This all happened years ago, shortly before Christmas. I had tried to interview one of the so-called real Santas, but to no avail. Fawning PR flacks hovered around him, making an interview impossible. One person had told me that Santa didn’t become Santa until after Thanksgiving. I thought about some of his helpers, the men who carry out his work locally, men like Joe Stankus, people who really embody what Saint Nicholas was all about. But I wanted to meet the real St. Nick.

By Charles McGuigan 12.2022

Northside RVA Food Pantry

“For I was hungry and you gave me food ...”

Food. The most basic of all human needs. Without it we perish. The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet, and yet one in every seven Americans goes to bed hungry each night, not knowing where their next meal is coming from. And many of them are children. Still, some major grocery store chains this past year recorded record-high quarterly profits.

By Charles McGuigan 11.2022

State Fair of Virginia: A Memory Maker

It all started back in the early fall of 1998 when my daughter, Catherine, was about a year and a half old. Her very first ride was in the kiddie section. It was called the Killer Whales and featured eight hollowed out orcas that paraded at a snail’s pace in a circle with a few slight ups and downs. We had to ask the operator to stop the ride; it was too scary for this little girl who would go on to ride every gut-churning amusement from Kings Dominion to Bush Gardens, and can now scale sheer bluffs with bare hands and bouldering shoe-clad feet.

By Charles McGuigan 10.2022

Jordan Hensley: Living Life to Its Fullest

Jordan Hensley embraced life, hugged it dearly, roaming across the globe to experience all of it in its myriad manifestations. Witty, bright, silly, engaging, a stickler for detail, and as her mother says, “stunningly beautiful”. Jordan was extremely protective of her brother Chad, five years her junior; when he was an infant she treated him as her own son. She loved her father dearly, and Jordan and her mother were best friends. Everything changed in an instant as she was driving west along Route 290 from Austin to Fredericksburg, deep in the heart of Texas. Thousands now know of her death, mourn her loss, yet celebrate that life so well-lived through One Life, Don’t Waste It, which her mother, Areina, now a life coach, created as a lasting tribute to her beloved daughter.

By Charles McGuigan 09.2022

Sun Against Artemis: Giving Voice to an Inexpressible Duality

Here’s the lineup: vocalist June Kambourian, with Nick Erickson on lead guitar, Cason Duszak on drums, Raegan Harrhy on keys and guitar, and Cole Wise on bass. And each member of this Richmond band is a powerhouse in his or her own right. On a blistering July afternoon, we are gathered around a table in a house in Bellevue. Only Raegan Harrhy is missing from the group; he’s up in Maine at the time of this interview, but he will send me a little bit about himself later in the week.

By Charles McGuigan 08.2022

Doug Dobey: Master of Design

Doug may not have been born with a sense of style and design, but it came to him at a very early age. Over the years he has produced a massive volume of work, and personifies style even in the way he lives and presents himself. From logos to magazines to T-shirts and CD covers, to his impressive body of work with Shadetree Sports, he has created a lasting legacy. He is now at the top of his game and it all comes down to a keen aesthetic eye that knows that less is more.

By Charles McGuigan 07.2022

Theodore Taylor, III: Illustrator

Teddy Taylor is a gifted artist who already has eight titles in print to his credit, with another one coming out in October, and three others currently in the works. One book of his illustrations was on The New York Times Best Sellers list, another won the prestigious Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent. He even has the honor of having had one of his books banned in certain libraries—a distinction he shares with the likes of Alice Walker, George Orwell, Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and so on.

Charles McGuigan 06.2022

Ed Trask: Taking Ego out of Art

Ed Trask grew up in Loudon County, Virginia just outside Purcellville, on the edge of a suburban tide from the east that would eventually swallow a good portion of the county, but in those days, it was still largely rural, spread across hills that gently rolled into the Blue Ridge.

By Charles McGuigan 05.2022

Uliana Bazar and Frank Pichel on the Spirit of Ukraine

Every cell in her body remembered, and as the memories persisted she could feel herself being drawn back. Something almost magnetic was at play here. It was as if the sediments of her homeland, liberally sprinkled among the threads of her DNA, demanded a reunion, a return to the rich soils, the ancient earth, tilled since time began by her own ancestors. Great tides of yellow flowed across this fertile land cradled by the Carpathian Mountains.

By Charles McGuigan 04.2022

Going Native with Bill Shanabruch

When I ask Bill Shanabruch, who owns Reedy Creek Environmental, about his business, he smiles, and says, “Restoring watersheds—one plant at a time,” to be the tagline of his company. As staggeringly complex as the environmental catastrophe is, by tackling one small space at a time, we might be able to bring back entire ecosystems, these intricate webs of life that are on the verge of collapse because of human intrusion and defilement.

By Charles McGuigan 03.2022

The Diamond District

Or

Arthur Ashe Village

Richmond is on the cusp of creating a brand new neighborhood on a sizable city-owned tract that resembles a patchwork quilt, never quite completed. Throughout it there are gaps and holes, scraps of wasteland sprinkled with gravel, and stitched together by an uneven assortment of hurricane fences.

By Charles McGuigan 01.2022

The Birds by Dale Vanderheyden

Armed with patience, persistence, and a Nikon, this woman has given the cyber world, through thousands of photographs chronicling the lives of the inhabitants of the cities of the air, an ongoing record of the majesty and the diversity of the avian kingdom. She has also learned firsthand how our continued degradation of the environment through the use of fossil fuels and the haphazard destruction of ecosystems is pushing more and more animal species to the rim of extinction. 
By Charles McGuigan 12.2021

Ghosts: A-Haunting We Will Go 

As earth tilts ever farther from the sun and the days become shorter and darkness gobbles up ever more light, the veil between the physical and the spiritual becomes gossamer thin so that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a membrane of stretched cobwebs. Or, at least that’s what my ancestors—the Celts—believed, as did virtually every other human culture that ever inhabited the globe. 

By Charles McGuigan 11.2021

Susanna Calvert: Heaven on Earth

Susanna’s house is not far from the mighty James. We sit on her back porch which is surrounded by small groupings of river birch, their lace-like leaves casting a veil of shadows across her face. On the rear end of the property a number of loblolly pines tower above the birch trees, and everywhere there is the ratchetting of cicadas and the trilling of birds.

By Charles McGuigan 10.2021

Chincoteague and Assateague: A Delicate Balance

Islanders are a rare breed, from those who inhabit places like Vinalhaven off the coast of Maine, to Ocracokers, to the denizens of the more remote Florida Keys, still unspoiled by excessive development. All these folks seem to possess a strong sense of individualism, but at the same time, perhaps because of the closeness that islands by their very geography dictate, are also inextricably united, and work together toward a common good. This, too: due to the palpable limits of natural resources, these island people adamantly protect the very nature that permits them to live and work within these fragile ecosystems, and they manage their fisheries like doting parents. This is all true of those who call Chincoteague and Assateague home.

By Charles McGuigan 09.2021

Reverend Patricia Gould-Champ: Living The Word

Gurus and evangelists, swamis and proselytizers, new agers and mystics—they immediately arouse my suspicions and raise my hackles as I prepare for an onslaught of barbed panaceas dipped in slimy snake oil. 

But every now and again I encounter someone who restores my faith in faith itself. These folks are rarer than hen’s teeth, and utterly devoid of hubris. One of them is Reverend Patricia Gould-Champ, a woman who lives The Word every day of her life.

By Charles McGuigan 08.2021

Lou Keeton: How to Slay a Big Bad Wolf, and Other Tales

Some are born with the least common of all talents—a proclivity for compassion, a sort of evolutionary gene that moves us closer toward ideal humanity. Among them are a few rare ones who are endowed with something even less common—an uncanny ability to feel exactly  what others feel as if they can slip into the skin of a fellow human being, do more than simply walk in their shoes, and in fact become them. There’s a sadness about this though. These empaths, because of the very quality that makes them so uncommon, can become easy prey for sinister parasites who feed in a narcissistic frenzy on these rare few.

By Charles McGuigan 07.2021

Emergence

Seventeen years ago, they dug deep through the rich loam, through hardpan, and successive layers of clay, from red to yellow to chalky gray, until they reached a depth of eight feet where they waited and whiled away the days and weeks and months and years, nibbling at woody filaments from the roots of trees to sustain themselves, their glowing ruby eyes wide and glaring through that darkest of nights. 

By Charles McGuigan 06.2021

 ARE ALL BETS OFF?

Ground Game May Beat the Odds

In the architectural rendering of the Cordish casino proposal for the Bow Tie property, there looms an illuminated monolith of steel and glass that appears to rise a full 20 stories, dwarfing every other building for miles around. To put that in proper perspective, our City Hall, by comparison, is 19 stories tall. This edifice would forever change the cityscape along Arthur Ashe Boulevard.

By Charles McGuigan 05.2021 

Cover design by Doug Dobey

Nico Cathcart: Art with Purpose

Nico Cathcart sits at a table on her back deck in the Northside just a stone’s throw from the city line, but it feels as if it’s way out in the country many miles removed from the urban discord. The yard is ringed in tall trees that have just started budding out, and everywhere there is the trill and warble and chirrup and cheep of a hundred birds seen and unseen in among a forest that seems intent on gobbling up this home and its plot of land.

By Charles McGuigan 04.2021

Ann-Frances Lambert: Political Destiny

Ann-Frances Lambert has a rare blood pumping through her veins. It was something she inherited from her father, “Benny” Lambert, who was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in the 1970s. Almost immediately after that election, he and the small Black Legislative Caucus began undoing the grave injustices against Blacks in Virginia that has dominated the Commonwealth’s history from the time the state was just a colony.

By Charles McGuigan 03.2021

2020: The Year of Perfect Vision

As we celebrate the dawn of a new year, and the welcome sunrise of a new administration, it seems an appropriate time to cast our mind on the much vilified year of 2020. To put it mildly, the past year turned our world upside down.

By Charles McGuigan 02.2021

Indira Sultanic with Guppy Jo on the Universal Language

Indira Sultanic was born in a small town called Konjic, a sort of hyphen, midway between the cities of Sarajevo and Mostar. When she was just eight years old a war broke out in her homeland that would last for three years, a devastating civil war with a signature of ethnic cleansing, and even after the truce, recovery was slow in coming.

By Charles McGuigan 12.2020

Night Noises

“Everything can change just like that.”  But there is no snap of fingers. This is the preamble to a story Jane’s retold a hundred times in person or on social media. The beginning of the story is always jarring, but it’s the end that leaves people speechless. 

By Charles McGuigan 11.2020

Thriving Not Just Surviving: Local Businesses that Beat the Odds During the Pandemic 

The wise among us listened to the scientists, and began transforming ourselves to combat a pandemic that is changing the way we live. Denial is a lie, nothing more; and the only way to confront a disease of this magnitude is with the naked truth, as harsh as it may be. That is a hallmark of courage and endurance.A quality shared by all successful local business owners is resilience, and an ability to think quickly on your feet, knowing when to bob and weave, and when to rope a dope.

By Charles McGuigan 10.2020

Piedmont: Fall Line to Blue Ridge

COVID-19 changed our vacation plans this summer, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Rather than traveling great distances, we contented ourselves with rediscovering our own state and her public lands, which are quite expansive. Some 3.7 million acres, more than ten percent of Virginia, is public land. That includes everything from city parks like Bryan Park to National Park holdings like the vast wilderness encompassed by the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson National Forests, and, of course, public land trusts and the land preserved in perpetuity by The Nature Conservancy.

By Charles McGuigan 09.2020

Tidewater: Ebb and Flow

The novel coronavirus disease has crimped much of what we once took for granted, including annual summer vacations. Typically, our family meanders from place to place over a couple weeks (sometimes three or four), staying in Airbnbs, camping when necessary, sleeping in the Honda-CRV when options run out or funds dry up, sampling local culture and cuisine whether sophisticated or crude, and generally getting lost in small acts of discovery.

By Charles McGuigan 08.2020

Charles Brandon Rapp McGuigan: Words and Deeds

From the time he was an infant, Charles had the bluest of eyes, luminous and wide, and they scrutinized the world around him, and he stored away all the images he had gathered. Out on walks with him, in a stroller, or on my shoulder, he would watch everything around him, studying all things with care, and something like devotion.

By Charles McGuigan 07.2020

A Monumental Change: It Is Time

It may not have been “the shot heard round the world,” but it was an excruciatingly long and violent video seen and heard by billions of people across the Earth.

By Charles McGuigan 06.2020

 COVID-19 Stories

A series of monthly stories about the COVID-19 Era. The stories share a common thread—they are stitched together with humanity’s greatest strengths. Compassion and generosity.

By Charles McGuigan 04.2020

Margaret Arnette Woody

is a survivor, her mettle first tested by extreme events when she was just an infant. Throughout her life, truth has been her quest. She burns away lies with an honesty that can sometimes be more than uncomfortable. Margaret’s calling came to her later in life, though there were hints of it from the time she was a girl. It comes down to cleansing, to making new again, preparing for something beyond.

By Charles McGuigan 03.2020

Sophie: Queen of Cats

 I have become many things over these past forty-eight hours—a coffin maker, a gravedigger, a grief counsellor, a headstone fabricator. Even a priest. The acquisition of these skills, which I never apprenticed for or ever desired to perfect, has left me queasy and dizzy as if I’ve just stepped off a boat recently tossed on heaving seas.

By Charles McGuigan 01.2020

The Planet Part II: The Sea

“For all at last returns to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the everflowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.” So wrote Rachel Carson, mother of the modern environmental movement, almost seventy years ago.

By Charles McGuigan 12.2019

Haunts of Richmond with the Houlihans

It’s a warm, warm, late October evening, just past seven, and the sun’s already set. I’m standing with a crowd of about twenty people in downtown Richmond at the corner of 20th and Main streets.

By Charles McGuigan 11.2019

The Planet Chapter 1: Land

It is the most expansive war in human history, and it is occurring on every continent. Unlike all previous wars, this one is truly a world war because it is a global conflict against the very planet we all call home. Fortunately, we have forces on air, land and sea to combat these assaults. These forces are armed with reason and truth and a deep love for all life.

By Charles McGuigan 10.2019

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North of the James and COVID-19

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