Writing

I approach writing with a passion for telling a compelling story that quickly provides my readers with all of the important information, but that also draws them in with a desire to discover even more.

My writing is based on a philosophy of letting the key subjects tell the story in their own words, creating a conversational piece that readers can easily relate to. My aim is to create a work that breaks down complex issues into a story any reader can care about.

But as important as storytelling elements are, accuracy and clear, precise language form the backbone of my work, which is based on the most up-to-date AP style.

The majority of my writing stems from my years of experience as a community journalist, where I learned to find a compelling story in even the driest of issues.

Over the years I have covered everything from local government and criminal justice systems to the launching of new business ventures and complex environmental issues. I have found a true love in feature writing, allowing the people in the communities I have covered to share their stories and successes with their larger community.

My writing has won a variety of awards from both the Virginia Press Association and the North Carolina Press Association.

Please check out some of my work below, and feel free to contact me for more specific examples.

Feature Writing

Moran recognized for development of pet sitting industry

Thirty years ago Patti Moran had an idea for a new business that would help pet owners travel with a clear conscience and provide pets with quality care in an environment they knew and loved.

In September, Moran will be recognized for that vision which has grown into an international business located in King which serves 6,500 pet sitters and has helped millions of pets over the years.

Moran, president and founder of Pet Sitters International (PSI) has been named a winner in the 2015 Pet Age ICON awards program. The awards program is produced by Pet Age, a national publication covering all things in the pet industry, providing the latest industry news and more.

The award honors pet-industry leaders who have shown long-term commitment to the success of the pet industry, based on experience, integrity and leadership. To qualify, a nominee had to meet selection criteria that included having at least 20 years in the pet manufacturing or service industries.

“I am very grateful that my life’s work has been recognized in this way, but more so for the opportunity to have played a role in making it a better world for pets and their people,” said Moran. “While I’m very appreciative of being viewed as an icon in my industry, there are many others, from wonderful employees to dedicated pet sitters around the country, and globe, whose efforts and support deserve credit and who have helped greatly in building the industry that I’m now accorded icon status in.”

Moran said she never dreamed of leading a company which now employs 11 full-time staff members, produces a bimonthly magazine, offers insurance and certification to thousands of small business owners and has provided a true feeling of professionalism to a growing industry.

She started her working life in the human resources department of a local manufacturing company in the late 70’s.

“I had been there for seven years and loved my job and figured I would grow old there, and then the 1981 recession hit and we had to lay off half our workforce,” she said. “I was really disillusioned and thought there must be a better way to make a living. I thought the only way to ensure my financial future was to start my own business.”

A conversation with a good friend who had just moved back to the area from Atlanta pointed Moran down the path to her future.

“She told me there was a lady in her apartment complex who was a pet sitter and I thought ‘This is what I have to do,’” said Moran, a lifelong pet lover. But as she started looking into the field she discovered there was very little information on how to start such a business. “I decided to just go ahead and open my business in Winston-Salem, and learned everything the hard way.”

Moran soon found those lessons were valuable not just to her but to many other aspiring pet sitters across the country.

“Customers we had would travel to other parts of the country and tell other people that they had hired a pet sitter,” remembers Moran. “Other people thought it was a great idea for a business and they would call asking us if we could help them get started doing what we were doing. Over the first two years we were getting as many calls from people wanting help starting a business as we were getting for pet sitting.”

So Moran decided to write all her suggestions down and sell it as a self-published book, Pet Sitting for Profit, in 1987.

“I sold close to 1,000 in a year’s time,” she said. But the calls and questions kept coming, now with requests to use forms discussed in the book. “They were asking if they could buy copies of them to use in their own businesses. Before I knew it, I was selling products to other people.”

Moran quickly became the go-to person for pet sitters across the country and realized the industry had one big problem — it was very hard to get insurance.

“Agents were just hanging up the phone saying they would not touch it with a 10-foot pole,” she said. “So I thought if more of us banded together as an association we would get more respect and access to insurance would be easier.”

In 1989 she started the National Association of Pet Sitters with a membership of around 300 sitters from throughout the country, and quickly found an insurance company that could tailor a plan to the industry.

“That was the catalyst because then we had what people needed to really get these businesses going,” said Moran.

In 1990 she sold her own pet sitting business and moved her product company to King to be closer to her home in Pinnacle. Eventually she put the association into the hands of a management group which moved it to Washington, D.C. and in 1993 she left the association to focus more on the products she supplied to pet sitters across the country.

“I really thought I would just continue to help people on my own and sell products, but so many of the people I had known said you can’t leave pet sitting, you are pet sitting,” said Moran. “They wanted me to start another association and finally I did, but I wanted it to be a for-profit without a board of directors and keep it simple, but also expand it to be international. That was in 1994, Pet Sitters International just celebrated 20 years of success last year. We went from 300 members to our highest membership in 2008 with 8,000 members. We have members in 18 to 30 different countries at different times.”

Pet Sitters International provides insurance options for members, but their key focus in recent years has been on bringing professionalism and education to the industry.

“We feel that education is how you are going to raise the standards so we started a certification program a year after PSI opened,” said Moran. “We deal with everything from pet care, pet health and nutrition, best business practices and add-on services to pet sitting. It is the most comprehensive curriculum available for pet sitters.”

She defined pet sitters as people who go into a customer’s home to take care of the pet while the owner is away.

“The pet gets to stay in their own environment, there are just so many advantages to doing it that way,” said Moran. “There are a lot of pets out there that need care and can now have a better life because they have a loving person who comes to serves them.”

She said pet sitters take care of everything from the usual cats and dogs to exotic animals and even farm animals like llamas and horses.

“The way it works is after you get to know your pet sitter, you kind of become friends and you give them your key and then just call them when you are going to be away and they take care of everything,” said Moran. “They can water the plants or pick the tomatoes. It is a win for the pet owners, the pets and the pet sitter. Sometimes a pet sitter will see the pet more than a veterinarian does which is also a benefit because our members care so much and keep up with products that are new. They can see the symptoms a pet is experiencing, know what foods are better and can leave something on the counter for the owner to look at to learn more about new products.”

Moran said her main excitement about winning the ICON award is that it will help to raise awareness of the pet sitting industry.

“Hopefully it will encourage more pet owners to give us a try,” she said, noting that PSI does not actually provide pet sitting services itself, but serves as a directory and resource for independent businesses throughout the world. “We have a locator on the website where you can just put your zip code in and it will bring up a list of pet sitters in your area. There is also an app that links to that database.

“I also hope that my story may serve as an inspiration to others who have an idea,” she added. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and one day, or 20-30 years later, you go from an idea to being an icon.”

ICON Winners were chosen by an independent panel of judges including John Cullen of Bulldog Marketing and Sales Inc., Erin Terjesen of Propel Communication and Elizabeth Yong of Forever Yong PR.

The ICON award winners will be recognized and profiled in the September 2015 issue of Pet Age.

For more information about the Pet Age ICON awards program and to see a complete list of honorees, please visit http://www.petage.com. To learn more about Moran or PSI, please visit http://www.petsit.com.

Lawson play to be respectful retelling of tragedy

On Christmas Day in 1929, Charlie Lawson killed his wife and six children before taking his own life on a small farm in the Germanton area.

The tale of that tragedy, and the attention it got throughout the region, has, over the years, become a part of the fabric of Stokes County. Books have been written about the killings and people can still be found talking about it in country stores.

Over three weekends in August, residents of Stokes County will have a new way to learn about the tragedy, thanks to the efforts of Rural Hall playwright Justin Hall and director Justin Bulla.

They have been working together for the past couple of years, at the request of the Stokes County Arts Council, to develop a tasteful way to present the well-known tragedy on stage.

“We decided to take a page from how they used to deal with tragedy in Greek theater,” said Hall. “You have this Greek chorus of people that act as narrators telling things to the audience instead of actually depicting the horrible things on stage.”

He said “The Meaning of Our Tears,” his theatrical adaptation of the book by author Trudy J. Smith based on the Lawson Family tragedy, would take a similar approach.

“We have a chorus of residents of Germanton from that time period that act as narrators,” said Hall. “They give a slice of life of what it was like to live during that time. When it comes time for the actual murders to occur, we have already established this relationship with this group of people who tell us about it.”

Hall said he spent about a year researching the murders and what life was like in the area in 1929.

“We got permission from Trudie Smith to use both of her novels, ‘White Christmas , Bloody Christmas’ and ‘The Meaning of our Tears,’ as the source material,” he said. “Trudie was a font of knowledge. She talked to a lot of extended family and also did a lot of extended research as to what was happening agriculturally in Germanton.

“We also did research into what was happening in that time period of 1929 and the years leading up to it to form the time Charlie moved into Germanton until the point of the murders,” added Hall. “We were figuring out things like what kind of music they were listening to, what it was like to be a tobacco farmer and the actual steps to harvest and grow a tobacco crop at that time.”

He said the play, while dealing with the Lawson murders, is actually about the Lawson family and what it was like to live in Germanton in that time.

“It is easy to think of this as a melodrama and being about a gory murder, but we really want you to look at the event and the story of Charlie Lawson and his family as a deterioration of a man of this time right before the stock market crashed,” said Hall. “I think people will be surprised by that and that it will not be a black and white story. All of the facts are still there, but I think you will have a better understanding that this was a person and this was not what he was born to do.

“When writing I was trying to find a balance of not making Charlie be a villain from the moment he stepped on stage,” said Hall. “You have to humanize him and make him a fully fleshed out, rounded person that loved his family but made very bad choices at the end of his life.

But despite that, Hall, who has written plays since middle school including several murder mystery dinner theater plays performed in Stokes County, said writing about the tragedy was not always easy.

“Having to go through the process of making Charlie Lawson a character you could understand and then having that persona doing these things, especially to his youngest children, it does kind of hurt you,” he said. “It haunts you.”

Bulla said it was hard to cast the play, given the gravity of the subject matter.

“The cast is about 18 to 20 people so it is the largest cast for a community theater production we have ever had in Stokes County,” he said. “Most of the people who auditioned were people I had worked with before.

“Everyone is being really truthful and very respectful and honest in their approach and delivery of these characters,” he added. “They are not in it to make it something it is not. Robert Evans, who plays Charlie, is not trying to make him a crazy guy, he is trying to make him a real man, a real dad. The whole cast is trying to make these people real and they are doing a really good job with that.

“Our number one concern is that we want this production to be respectful,” he added. “Even though the Lawsons are not part of my family, this story is part of my geographic heritage and we want this retelling to be respectful. Everything in this production is pulled strictly from the book. We are not generating any new thoughts, we are specifically taking what is from the book.”

But Bulla said the location of the performance, at South Stokes High School, added some poignancy to the play that could not be found at other venues.

“The road you travel to the play is the same road the Lawson’s traveled every day,” he said. “You will pass Palmyra Church which is where they are planning to go to a Christmas pageant at in the play.

“There is a certain authenticity by having it performed in Stokes County and in theatrical space which is less than a few miles from where it all happened,” agreed Hall.

“The Meaning of Our Tears” performances are scheduled for the weekends of Aug. 7-9, 14-16, and 21-23 at South Stokes High School, 1100 S. Stokes High Drive in Walnut Cove.

Tickets are already on sale and can be purchased by calling the Stokes County Arts Council at 336-593-8159. Performance times are 7 p.m. for all scheduled Friday and Saturday shows and 3 p.m. for Sunday shows. Stokes Arts has designated a portion of the proceeds from the performances in support of Stokes County domestic violence advocacy and renovations to the South Stokes High School auditorium.

Hard News

School mourns loss of students

“We have lost two precious babies and we miss them.”

Polar Springs Elementary School Principal Shannon Boles said her school was in a state of shock and mourning Thursday as students and staff came to school missing two fellow students who died in a tragic murder-suicide on Wednesday that took the lives of both Charlie and Coleton Tarpley and their parents.

Boles said the school would eventually have a memorial service for the Tarpley children, but that on Thursday all efforts were centered on helping the students and staff deal with their sudden and tragic loss.

“We are just tying to get through meeting the needs of the kids today,” said Boles. “We are flying the flag at half staff and we have a message about them on our sign. The kids are signing a banner that says ‘We love you Charlie and Coleton.’”

The school had a variety of counselors, clergy and school resource officers from throughout the county on hand when students arrived at school on Thursday to help student talk through their grief.

“We started off this morning in the classrooms that Charlie and Coleton were in,” said Boles. Coleton was a student in Kim Newsome’s third grade class and Charlie was in the first grade special needs class. “The hardest thing was walking into their classrooms and desks being empty. His name tag was still on his desk. His stuff is still sitting in his desk. We have not moved it.

“In Charlie’s room those kids do not really comprehend what happened, but the teacher said she was carrying on conversations about Charlie not being there so the kids could hear it and absorb it,” said Boles. “In our third grade class we talked explicitly about how they were feeling, what triggers these feelings, and the process of death and how we as human beings carry on afterward.”

Boles said both students were loved throughout the school.

“They were fantastic boys,” she said. “They were just both really happy. Coleton was loved by his classmates. He loved to come to school and liked giving things out that were religious symbols. He had given my assistant principal a necklace that has Jesus on it and she is holding that very dear today.”

Boles said both boys had been top fundraisers in the school’s recent Boosterthon.

“Coleton got to come and spray our hair the other day and he leaned down in my ear and said ‘This is the best thing we ever did,’” said Boles. “He also really loved his brother.”

She said Charlie was equally loved despite having some trouble communicating.

“He loved to run, he would get up and just take off,” said Boles. “I know that where he is now he is running and able to communicate.”

Boles sent out a message to parents Wednesday afternoon, informing them of the tragedy.

“I asked the parents to speak with their children as they deemed necessary,” said Boles. “They had last night to talk with their children in the way they felt they needed to and kind of respond to the questions the children had.”

On Thursday the school’s media center was used for counseling for students from throughout the school who were having concerns about the Tarpley’s deaths or just needed to talk about other losses they may have experienced in their lives.

“Our number one priority is to make sure the students are emotionally and physically safe and today we are having to focus on the emotion,” added Boles. “It is a very, very tragic event.”

Duke: Belews Creek seeps not a hazard

“No imminent hazard to human health or the environment has been identified.”

That is the key finding in a comprehensive site assessment of the Belews Creek Steam Station ash ponds conducted by HDR Engineering, Inc.

The report, released last Thursday, was commissioned by Duke Energy as required by recent coal ash legislation.

The study involved borings and installation of monitoring wells at and around the ash basin as well as collection of soil, groundwater, seep and surface water samples.

While the initial finding indicates the existing ash basins pose no immediate threats, it does identify a number of areas where some seepage is occurring.

According to the report, the area around the ash basin has several naturally occurring constituents including antimony, iron, manganese, pH and vanadium. In addition to those constituents, the EPA uses indications of boron, TDS and chloride to indicate the impact that ash ponds can have on groundwater.

The report notes that at Belews Creek, boron exceedances were present within the the basin’s compliance boundary in shallow and deep flow water layers, but there were no exceedances within the deep or bedrock flows.

TDS exceedances were found both in shallow and deep flow areas within the compliance boundary and in the deep flow areas immediately west of the basin and near Middleton Loop Road outside of the compliance boundary.

“This indicates groundwater flow through the northwestern rim of the ash basin toward the Dan River,” reads the report. “The seeps may represent preferential flow paths. This flow direction is away from the direction of the nearest public or private water supply wells.”

The North Carolina Department of Energy and Natural Resources has tested seven off-site private water supply wells in 2015, resulting in a decision by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to recommend that five of the sampled wells not be used for drinking water due to the presence of one or more constituents including iron, vanadium and chomium, but the recent report notes those constituents are naturally occurring in the area.

The report notes that there are still several data gaps for the area, recommending the installation of additional groundwater monitoring wells to fully understand the horizontal extent of concentrations of impacted groundwater west and down gradient of the ash basin dam.

Although the report says there is no imminent hazard to public health from the basin, it does suggest corrective action to address the identified soil and groundwater contamination in certain areas.

“It is generally limited to within the ash basin compliance boundary, with the exception of the area impacted west of the ash basin dam and Middleton Loop Road,” reads the report’s conclusion. “The source and cause of impacts from boron, and TDS that is associated with elevated levels of chloride… is the coal ash contained in the ash basin. The cause of contamination… is leaching of constituents from the coal ash into the underlying soil and groundwater. However, some groundwater, surface water and soil standards were also exceeded due to naturally occurring elements found in the subsurface, including antimony, cobalt, iron, manganese, pH and vanadium.

“The human health and ecological screening-level risk assessments did not specifically identify the presence of health or environmental risks; however, the results indicate that constituents in environmental media could be of concern and further investigation by a site-specific risk assessment may be warranted,” adds the report.

The full report can be found online at http://www.duke-energy.com/ash-management/groundwaterstudies.asp.

Columns/ Op-Eds

A Real Prize

Shortly after moving to Halifax County I interviewed Longwood University President Patricia Cormier about the ongoing transformation of an old tobacco building into a first-class community arts center.

Cormier, who has long considered Halifax County as a natural outreach area of Longwood, had only good things to say our community.

She was especially impressed with how we had responded to the loss of our former economic bases of textiles and tobacco.

Cormier said she had never seen a community do so much to reinvent itself, to come up with new economic plans to ensure its future.

And boy have we.

Our community has done everything it could to pull itself up by the boot straps from the construction of a high tech (I mean you feel like you are on the Starship Enterprise just walking in the door) industrial park to a higher education center with partners through out the state, from first class restaurants that draw people from out-of-state to a first class resort (erm, ah, well maybe private college, I’m not quite sure anymore), from Main Street programs to Main Street renovations – if it could help us we have done it.

But the biggest success, at least in my experience, is that old tobacco building I interviewed Cormier about.

I’ve had the chance to spend some time in The Prizery during the past couple of weeks, and let me tell you that building is alive.

Here’s the way a typical evening goes:

The downstairs floor is strewn with drying Pre-K art class paintings as members of Halifax County Little Theatre rehearse in The Chastain Theatre for their upcoming performance of “The Children of Eden.”

The art gallery is open (please pardon the shameless self promotion) and filled with students, teachers, and school system administrators talking about photographs of Richmond.

A gentle buzz is emitting from a back corner where a pottery class transforms gooey hunks of earth into attractive and usable vases and pots.

In another room, a table is filled with young children busily preparing to be the next Van Gogh.

And in the midst of this jungle of activity a sound like thunder or a stampeding heard of elephants comes charging through the door as the tap dancing class breaks for a trip to the water fountain.

Keep in mind that this is just what’s happening on one floor of the three-story community center.

Listing all the events, community organizations, educational programs and tourist attractions involved with the rest of the building would take more space than I have in this column.

Suffice it to say that our county got everything it paid for and more when it decided to build a community arts center.

If you haven’t had chance to see everything The Prizery has to offer you are doing yourself a disservice.

So go see a HCLT production, or catch The Manhattan Music Ensemble’s Christmas performance, or sign up for an art class, or go see a display of pottery, or go to a wedding, or visit with our county’s tourism director, or learn about the Crossing of the Dan…

The possibilities are endless.

Another P.O.V.

Santa Claus and I have had a contentious relationship during my years on this earth.

It all started back when I was in preschool and the jolly elf messed up my order.

I had been playing with this black and white science-fictionish helmet during school hours for over a year which I affectionately called a Dar-Dar helmet.

Knowing that Santa was a pretty smart guy who was usually really on top of things (he even knows when you have been bad) I figured that just calling it the Dar-Dar helmet in my letter to him would be enough to ensure joy on Christmas morn.

But it must have been a very busy year, or maybe the elves labeled things wrong; I’m not quite sure what happened, but when I rushed to the tree with visions of helmeted bliss flowing through my head I was in for a rude surprise.

There it was – a helmet – but it was all wrong. First of all it was bright yellow. Then there was the fact that it had a visor instead of the white conical ear guards with antennas that made any Dar-Dar helmet an object of high desire for a four-year-old.

I tried the weird, poor imitation that had been left for me on and started crying. My parents, nice folk that they are and all, tried to cover for old Saint Nick’s mess up, asking me what was wrong, trying to distract me with other really cool presents and candy.

They even tried to make sure the fat guy got it right the next year, pestering me for months to explain why the offensively yellow hat could never be a Dar-Dar helmet.

Between that sad teary morning and the next year my parents killed a small forest with the postage they sent northward explaining exactly what a Dar-Dar helmet was.

But it was worth it because, through all of the missives, the description must have sunk in and Santa Claus got it right the next year.

But by then I knew I had to be very clear in my requests, which makes sense given all that Santa has to deal with, what with keeping track of every kid, and their behavior, and their heart’s desire.

That must have been a lot of work when I was a kid, and I can only assume it has gotten harder since then.

That is one reason I am glad we can help the old guy out with our annual Letters to Santa section.

We send a copy of it to Santa every year, so he has a good idea of what every kid in Mecklenburg, Brunswick and Lunenburg county wants for Christmas.

Think of it as a fall back, a “cheat sheet” for Mr. Claus.

Of course, the other reason I like it is that it gives me a chance to read all the letters myself – and let me tell you, there are some good ones in there.

Most of the area kids are asking for what might be expected – video game systems (Xbox 360’s, Wii’s and Dsi’s seem to be the top ones) a variety of action figures and dolls and, of course, cars, toy guns and pets.

One young letter writer pointed out that, “I have seen so many commercials about what to get for Christmas, it looks like a hard decision.”

Another decided to cover all bases, asking for every known video game system or electronic thing imaginable. One figured money was the best route, asking for $300,000,000.

But there were quite a few children that just wanted to have a good Christmas.

“Santa the only thing I want is for my family to be together as a family,” wrote one.

“If you do want to give me a gift, this is what you should bring me, a great Christmas with my family,” wrote another. “If you can’t do that then I don’t want anything.”

Some even wrote asking for presents for those less fortunate than themselves.

“I would like for my family and friends to be happy and healthy!!! That is my wish,” wrote one boy.

“I would like my friend in Brunswick County to find a family,” wrote another.

Then there were a couple of kids after my own, sci-fi heart.

One 9-year-old is apparently working on building a robot dog and asked for parts.

“His name is gong to be Rex,” wrote the boy. “He needs some metal for his skin, wires for his veins, a computer chip for his brain, and muscles. I don’t know what we are going to need for his muscles.”

Maybe rubber bands?

Another kid asked for a zero-gravity car.

That just sounds really cool.

In fact, Santa, could you put me down for one of those?

And, if you paint it black and white, put some really cool conical head lights on it, add some antennas and paint “Dar-Dar” on the hood, then we might call it even.

I’ll leave you some milk and cookies.