We hear a lot about pervasive social issues in our community—homelessness, addiction, racial inequities, affordable housing, liveable wages. All of those play roles in one particular need we rarely hear about—diapers. My guests today are Alicia Heacock and Meagan Lyon Leimena, co-executive directors of Babies Need Bottoms , an Asheville nonprofit diaper bank that distributes about 40,000 diapers every month to partner organizations across 16 Western North Carolinas counties. Alicia and Meagan sa...
May 13, 2024•45 min•Ep. 159
It’s a female-powered, multi-generational, one-of-a-kind lineup for the next Hear Here —Tuesday, May 28, featuring the Asheville-area bands Detective Blind and O•VAD•YA. Listen here for clips of their music. Advance tickets are just $12. Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month. Support the show Support The Overlook by joining our Patreon campaign ! ...
May 12, 2024•3 min
April 27 marked the debut of "Hear Here," a series presented in tandem with Citizen Vinyl to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. The premiere featured talk and performances with the bands Pink Beds and Caged Affair. This episode is all about Pink Beds, a quartet shaped by disco, old-school pop and contemporary rock. You’ll hear the episode with Caged Affair next Friday, May 17. The next "Hear Here" evening is an all-female lineup Tuesday, May 28, at Citizen Vinyl, featuring t...
May 10, 2024•43 min•Ep. 158
Asheville artists Heather Hietala and Nava Lubelski have already tasted success commercial success. Now, their new work in separate exhibitions marks new ground in their personal and artistic evolutions. In the first half, I talk with Hietala, whose response to her mother's death takes shape in the two- and three-dimensional canoes and boats that are metaphors for personal journeys. After the break, we meet Lubelski, who was an emerging success in New York City’s gallery scene before she to Ashe...
May 08, 2024•38 min•Ep. 157
Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen have spent many years building lives for themselves in contemporary dance. Not long ago, they believed they largely had to perform and teach around the country to make it sustainable. Now, fueled by artistic residencies in Western North Carolina and the embrace of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts, the couple hopes Stewart-Owen Dance can become a fixture for Asheville dancers and audiences. This conversation happened just after a rehearsal inside the Worth...
May 06, 2024•29 min•Ep. 156
David Brendan Hopes has written more novels, poems and plays than he can count. The river of writing hasn’t slowed at all since his retirement from UNC-Asheville, where Hopes taught English and creative writing for more than three decades. Hopes’ newest play is titled “A God in the Waters.” The Sublime Theater in Asheville is premiering it May 9-18 at the Bebe Theater. We’ll talk about the play in the second half as part of a larger conversation on answering the call of creativity. But first, we...
May 03, 2024•30 min•Ep. 155
Talks of establishing a business improvement district in downtown Asheville stretch back to the 1980s. But over the past year, those talks have gained a lot of momentum, and some civic leaders are lobbying city council to approve it before the start of the next fiscal year. A chorus of critics are also reaching a crescendo with their opposition, pushing back against what they see as vague details, a lack of accountability and oversight and a process they say has been anything but thorough and in...
May 01, 2024•26 min•Ep. 154
There’s seemingly a full-court press from certain civic leaders to push Asheville City Council to approve a business improvement district for downtown. This BID would tax property owners, and by extension downtown commercial and residential tenants, to pay for a supplemental workforce to help the city’s efforts to clean up downtown and make it safer for the people who live, work and visit downtown. Amid this push, a pushback is developing steam from people with deep histories and stakes in the c...
Apr 29, 2024•30 min•Ep. 153
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 performing together April 27 at First Baptist Church. We talk with the choral directors about the challenges of surviving and rebounding from the pandemic. Kyl...
Apr 19, 2024•29 min•Ep. 152
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 shift and the work that goes into gathering the data to inform her advocacy with elected officials at the city, county and state. We also talk about wher...
Apr 17, 2024•39 min•Ep. 151
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 renovation, including what’s being done to turn the stadium into a year-round facility. We also go through changes at the nature center, the city’s ...
Apr 15, 2024•33 min•Ep. 150
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 shops—for instance, Static-Age is now also a bar/restaurant and live music venue—the risky and speculative nature of the vinyl record business and th...
Apr 12, 2024•48 min•Ep. 149
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 assessment that pays for services on top of what cities and counties already provide. Talk of a BID has been in the Asheville air for decades, but could well...
Apr 10, 2024•41 min•Ep. 148
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 to keep Malvern Hills Park Pool closed this year and balancing the needs of pickleballers and tennis players. We also talk equity, tracking park usage ...
Apr 08, 2024•30 min•Ep. 147
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)Happening is April 20. Artists who embody the ethos of old are descending on the former college campus at Lake Eden for a day and night of hard-to-defi...
Apr 05, 2024•38 min•Ep. 146
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 affordability in mind. This past week, the Asheville nonprofit Mountain True convened a panel to discuss what’s called the "missing middle"—the absen...
Apr 03, 2024•53 min•Ep. 145
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 freedom of the press. Williams, in his 10th year helming the office, talks in depth with me about the charges leveled at two people who produce work for ...
Apr 01, 2024•38 min•Ep. 144
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. While the pandemic brought its own fears and isolation for Angell, recent health issues have taken a toll. In the week before our conversation, she ...
Mar 22, 2024•30 min•Ep. 143
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 director of the SPARC Foundation. We get granular about how she and her team work to change behaviors that can span generations. Latek talks about racial an...
Mar 20, 2024•40 min•Ep. 142
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 Mountain Xpress. We look backward and forward at this decision, along with underlying trends that loom large for public schools everywhere. We talk ab...
Mar 18, 2024•36 min•Ep. 141
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 Tyger Tyger Gallery, in the River Arts District. We talk about his path from graffiti artist to plein-air landscapes and how he sees himself as document...
Mar 15, 2024•29 min•Ep. 140
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 creativity blooms from what he labels his “dark happy place” and is directly shaped by those traumas. The Asheville Fringe Festival is just around the ...
Mar 13, 2024•33 min•Ep. 139
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 show construction and expansion happening within mere yards of their property, NCDOT right-of-way agents said they only need a “partial take," offering l...
Mar 11, 2024•32 min•Ep. 138
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 his Jewish roots play into his music-making. We also talk about his long connection to ASO music director Darko Butorac and the personal significance ...
Mar 01, 2024•21 min•Ep. 137
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, Kevan Frazier and Sage Turner. Three seats on the council will be filled in November’s general election, but to get there, we need to first get through th...
Feb 28, 2024•32 min•Ep. 136
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 casual mixer thrown by the Asheville Downtown Association. Six of the seven candidates showed up, chatted up prospective voters and sat down with me ...
Feb 26, 2024•30 min•Ep. 135
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 Mission faces in potentially losing its ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments. We talked about Mission’s formal plan of correction in res...
Feb 23, 2024•35 min•Ep. 134
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 working to educate and engage prospective voters in Western North Carolina. Others working in this effort are the YWCA of Asheville, Just Economics and Ashe...
Feb 21, 2024•29 min•Ep. 133
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 wrote an engaging story about this for the online publication The Assembly of North Carolina. We talk about how the culture around psychedelics has evolv...
Feb 19, 2024•33 min•Ep. 132
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 employment called Green Opportunities. He developed Hood Huggers International and the Peace Garden in his beleaguered Burton Street neighborhood. His latest i...
Feb 14, 2024•33 min•Ep. 131
