[imgcontainer] [img:currid_yonder_003.JPG] [source]All photos by Katie Currid[/source] Etta Wilcox-Hughes sweeps the floor as Ariel Shapiro leaves the pantry during “beautification day,” a day of cleaning. The people who come to the Possibility Alliance do so for different reasons. Some find the lack of electricity peaceful; others want to do their service to the planet by living simply; some want a break from the hustle and bustle of the city. But the message of the members of the alliance is simple: simply living so that others can simply live. This intentional community lives without electricity on an 80-acre homestead in northern Missouri, growing their food, biking to where they need to be and relishing in the simplicities of life. [/imgcontainer]
Daily Yonder: Tell us a little bit about your background.
Katie Currid: I grew up moving around a lot. I think I’ve lived in ten different states across the United States. Most of my childhood from middle school on was spent in Missouri. My first experience with photography was in 8th grade, when my parents gave me a little digital point and shoot for my graduation. We lived on a farm, so I would go and take pictures of my sisters running through the fields with the cows on our farm in the Ozarks in Missouri.
[imgcontainer] [img:Currid_dyptic.png] Left: Sisters Jennifer, 9, and Rachel Hartzler, 7, behind the Sugar Tree Country Store on Saturday, March 8, 2014, during the Highland County Maple Festival in McDowell, Va. The two said they have never cut their hair. Right: Nathan Showalter pauses after a turkey culling at Heartland Harvest on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012, in Mt. Solon. Nathan, who is 20, has been involved in his family’s farm all of his life, and though his job culling the turkeys is a messy business, he said he’s never imagined doing any other job. [/imgcontainer]
DY: And you eventually went on the study photography.
KC: Yes, I studied Photojournalism at the University of Missouri’s Photojournalism school. The University of Missouri does a really good job of showing the importance of community journalism. One big thing that I took part in when I was there was the Missouri Photo Workshop, where they go and spend a week in a small town in Missouri to document it and photographers from all over come down to take part in this workshop. That really shaped my future career in terms of the kind of work I wanted to do.
During college, I was also the Executive Producer for My Life, My Town, which was a multimedia project that The Missourian (the city newspaper) and KBIA (the local NPR affiliate) would work on together and the whole purpose of it was to focus on issues facing rural teens to give this group of people who aren’t often heard from a voice that way.
[imgcontainer] [img:currid_yonder_004.JPG] Noah Arbuckle, 4, gasps as he lets go of a turkey’s legs after his father, John Arbuckle, chops off the turkey’s head at their farm in La Plata, Missouri. John is a farmer and a butcher and used the experience slaughtering the turkey to teach Noah about life and where food comes from. [/imgcontainer]
DY: What was it like talking to those teens as someone who was once a rural teen herself?
KC: The project was really good. There was a lot of variety in the stories- a gay teen, a story about a brother and sister that lived on a farm and their diverging paths as they graduated high school. We did a screening at a local movie theatre in Columbia, Missouri, and it was very cool. Our friends came, as did the families of the people in the movies and people from their hometowns. All these people converged and we discussed what we thought about these stories and these issues and how important they were to tell.
I also did a story about my own hometown called Bored in Lawson. I think a big thing when you’re growing up in a small town is the boredom you face. You talk about how bored you are all the time and you spend a lot of time trying to just find something to do. So I ended up hanging out with my younger sister and her friends and spent the weekend shooting them, and talking to them about what it’s like to grow up in a small town.
I wanted to do that story because that was my experience growing up. I knew what it was like to go cruising on a Saturday night because we didn’t have a movie theatre and the only thing we’d do was go drive around cornfields and meet up with people in fast food parking lots and talk and make up things to do, basically.
[imgcontainer] [img:currid_yonder_006.JPG] Daniel Will and uncle Frank Will pull a calf into a trailer to move it to a larger pen on Wednesday, April 10, 2013 in Mt. Crawford. The Wills raise Holstein and half Jersey/Holstein cattle. [/imgcontainer]
DY: Until recently, you lived in Staunton, Virginia, working for the local paper. How did you end up there?
KC: I was interning at the Dallas Morning News, and it was my second internship out of college, and I started getting really nervous about my finances and so I started applying for all these jobs and this one in Virginia at The News Leader popped up and the ad was everything I wanted. They talked about community journalism, they talked about wanting to get into more online media, which is uncommon for smaller papers, and the town sounded really cool. I went and visited while I was still at the internship, and I fell in love with this adorable Victorian town nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I felt that this was where I could do what I always wanted to do, which is community journalism. They always did a really good job with providing me with the tools to do the stories I wanted to do.
[imgcontainer] [img:currid_yonder_007.JPG] Kenny Will leans against a piece of feeding machinery to take a break before starting the day’s second milking on Saturday, April 6, 2013, at Mt. Crawford Creamery. Kenny and his brother, Frank, have spent the last three years and invested over a million dollars trying to open their own creamery. They say the creamery was a last-resort option to keep their farm afloat, as they say they were not earning enough money selling their milk for others to bottle. “By golly, if we’re going to stay in business we got to do something else or quit. We’re too old to quit and we’re too dumb to run a computer,” Kenny said. [/imgcontainer]
DY: What was it like being a staff photographer for a paper in a small town when you didn’t grow up in that town?
KC: I felt this huge responsibility to take care of the community that I was shooting in and be really sensitive to the issues I was covering. It wasn’t like I was an outsider coming in and just going there for a story and then leaving. I was an outsider coming in with a duty to be these people’s voice and tell their stories and I knew that I had to do a good job because I was going to be there for a long time and they would hold me accountable. I didn’t do any really controversial stories, but I was always trying to be super informed about anything I was doing because I was a Midwesterner coming into this Southern culture where they had traditions like fox hunting or historical traditions that had to do with the Civil War that I wasn’t used to at all.
[imgcontainer] [img:currid_yonder_008.JPG] A girl looks out the window of a station wagon while waiting for the movie to start at Hull’s Drive-In Theatre on Sunday, July 7, 2013, in Lexington. Hull’s is the only community-owned theater in the country, and has non-profit status. [/imgcontainer]
DY: Do you think being a reporter in a small town makes you more accountable for your work?
KC: Absolutely. I never had anyone call me out on anything, but people would come up to you and say, “I saw the story you did last week. I think it’d be really great if you did this story.” I would go to the farmer’s market just as a citizen and people would say “Oh, you’re the lady from the newspaper. Just so you know, this creamery is opening up and I think it would be a great story for the paper.” It was really cool to be this citizen of the town but also be a person people recognized as a journalist and if they cared about something they could go to you and tell you about it. And then if you thought it warranted a story, you could do it.
[imgcontainer] [img:currid_yonder_009.JPG] A man walks in front of the projector booth at Hull’s Drive-In Theatre on Sunday, July 7, 2013, in Lexington. The theater converted to digital format last year, though it still has some old film reels in the projector booth. [/imgcontainer]
DY: Some of your early work deals with the struggles of living in a small town as a young person. What is the difference in your perception of rural life when you were a kid versus living in a rural place as an adult?
KC: That’s a funny question. When I was in college I did an internship on Long Island. And I remember going there and doing the Manhattan thing on the weekends and being on this giant populated island with all these people and I felt like I could never live in a place like this because it drove me insane. And I feel like a lot of your upbringing when you living in a rural place is you talk smack about it, like “Oh, my town is so dumb, I can’t wait to get out of here.” That’s what everyone says. And then you grow up, and now I’m like, I love living in a small town. I love knowing my neighbors and being able to depend on the community. I felt like I made a difference in Staunton. You feel like you can help people and become a part of the community and you are this active participant that makes a bigger impact. When you’re younger you just want to leave, and now that I’m a bit older, I appreciate it a lot more.
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