(Release Date: 6.18.24) Title: Julie Speer Jackson, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker & director of ‘A Home in Paradise’ Overview: In this episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Adam Williams talks with Julie Speer Jackson, Emmy Award-winning documentary director and producer. Julie talks about how she went from studying biochemistry Read more…
My first weekend in college, I swam across a local lake with one of my new mates from the basketball team. It was and still is the only time I’ve swam across a lake. From the beach to the floating dock on the opposite shore. Two 18-year-old males showing off Read more…
We crossed the imaginary line into panhandle Texas, having rolled down from the peaks of Colorado and dogearred the corner of New Mexico, almost immediately a story of Texas being written across our windshield, our vision increasingly consumed by the corpses of winged insects, cataracts clarifying the point, as if Read more…
I started pushing a powered lawn mower at age 11. It was nearly autumn in northern Missouri and the mowing season was winding to a close. The next summer, around the time I’d cross my twelfth birthday, I took over my family’s mowing business. Which is to say, I’d start Read more…
Editor’s Note: I am the host, producer and photographer for We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I also write a monthly guest column related to the podcast for two local newspapers in Chaffee County, Colo.: the Chaffee County Times (Buena Vista) and The Mountain Mail (Salida). This is my column Read more…
(Release Date: 6.04.24) Title: Carrie & Michael Fox, on grief & healing, Russian roulette & revelation, poetry & music, and a whole lotta love Overview: In this episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Adam Williams talks with Michael and Carrie Fox, a married musical duo that perform as Read more…
I am of the last generation to experience childhood in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era of human existence. Let’s think about that. All the what and who and years that came before. Uncountable and unfathomable, really. And the mere few decades, not even a blink of the universe’s eye, that Read more…
The span of my outstretched arms was wider than my room at the White House Hotel. Already, you can see that “room” and “hotel” are generous descriptors. It was a flophouse on the notorious Bowery in NYC at a time when few of those havens remained. A four-story red-brick building Read more…
(Release Date: 5.21.24) Title: Thuy Nguyen, on self-empowerment & breaking free from a cult-like religion, overcoming postpartum depression, choosing gratitude & the pursuit of joy Overview: In this episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Adam Williams talks with Thuy Nguyen, a poet, writer and speaker on self-empowerment. Thuy Read more…
Editor’s Note: I am the host, producer and photographer for the We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast. I also write a monthly guest column related to the podcast for two local newspapers in Chaffee County, Colo.: the Chaffee County Times (Buena Vista) and The Mountain Mail (Salida). This is my column Read more…
I ran over an already dead snake with my pickup truck today. Unavoidably. It was on a rural two-lane highway. I’d come around a gentle bend and didn’t see it reaching into the lane from the right edge until it was too late. When it happened, I shuddered. It was Read more…
I don’t know if I’m autistic or not. But that knowing hardly feels relevant to me. It very much might to others and I support that. What I’m about to say expresses why I do not feel inclined to seek affirmation/rejection for myself through diagnosis. I hesitate to publicly use Read more…
I clashed with my editor when I was a high school sports writer at a suburban newspaper chain in St. Louis. Dennis was a peaceable man in his 50s who seemed to have resigned himself to this life of high school athletes and coaches and sports seasons. To deadlines and Read more…
(Release Date: 5.7.24) Title: Mahting Putelis, on his Latvian roots in Michigan, his ‘dirtbag’ 20s, realities of adventure photography, emergence of AI & the three things people want Overview: In this episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Adam Williams talks with Mahting Putelis. Mahting grew up in a Read more…
Davis, we’ll call him, was an editor at National Geographic magazine for decades. His advice to me in the early aughts, and no doubt to countless young adults throughout the years, photographers and otherwise, was to broaden my diet. Don’t study just photojournalism to learn photojournalism. Read poetry. Listen to Read more…
It’s been at least five years since I’ve fly fished. My tween-aged son is drawing me back into it by way of his emerging spinner rod fishing obsession. Now I cast, standing alone in the Arkansas River while he is at school. My first time in a river, fly rod Read more…
I am committing to a new writing practice, a memoir/essay series that I will publish weekly on this blog for at least 52 weeks. I’m calling it “Among Other Things.” I see beauty, value and power in this creative practice that is worth exploring in a way I have not Read more…
(Release Date: 4.23.24) Title: Jason Marsden, on GARNA, the state of journalism today, being a cocktail party diversion at Harvard, and his friend Matthew Shepard Overview: In this episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Adam Williams talks with Jason Marsden, executive director of the Greater Arkansas River Nature Read more…
I often write, speak and art as a hopeful means of connecting with some new snippet of clarity about some age-old idea. Nothing original, I assume, though it carries a sense of seeming newness to my way of thinking at that moment. I scratch out thoughts on scraps of paper Read more…
In Steven Pressfield’s memoir, Govt Cheese, he opens chapter 47, “Art Is Artifice,” with these lines: I’ve heard that birds sing out of pure joy. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe writers write or painters paint because they’re bursting with the exuberance of life. They write because they’re in Read more…