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 performin…

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 shif…

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 re…

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…

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 assessm…

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 t…

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)H…

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…

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 fre…

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…

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 direct…

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 …

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 Ty…

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 c…

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 sho…

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 …

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, Keva…

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…

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…

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 workin…

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 wro…

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 employmen…

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 Wa…

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 bee…

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 San…

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 motivati…

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 …

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 fa…

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 ha…

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 …

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 Chie…

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 maki…

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 enfor…

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 se…

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.…

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 Jewis…

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 shield…

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 …

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 depa…

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. E…

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 construc…

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…

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.…

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…

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 …

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 Green…

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…

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 sub…

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 I…

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 …