What the Horse Trainer is Reading, Watching, and Listening to

By Megan M. Seckman Years ago on the North Dakota Chippewa tribe’s reservation, Turtle Mountain, there lived a family of four little girls and a pasture of broken-down thoroughbreds. Each day, the girls would exercise these horses the rest of the race industry no longer deemed valuable. The girls’ father, Sylvester Alex Poitra, may have quietly wished for boys, but taught each daughter to ride before they could properly walk. And that is how he made a living out of these discarded, maned athletes — and how Reta Underwood was introduced to the world of [...]

By |2017-04-02T08:30:00-04:00April 2, 2017|Derby, She's Reading|

What This Environmentalist and Artist is Reading, Watching, and Listening to

By Megan Seckman Clare stands in front of one of her paintings called Osage One. The painting represents the oneness of the cycles of photosynthesis. Clare Hirn never considered art to be a viable career. That is why she split her studies as an undergrad at Indiana University between biological sciences and fine arts. The two worlds of arts and sciences are reflected in her expansive art career: she illustrated an Abiocor artificial heart that appeared on the cover of The New York Times, and she paints majestic murals that bring the vibrant natural world inside [...]

By |2017-01-29T09:30:00-05:00January 29, 2017|She's Reading|

What This Health Coach is Reading, Watching, Listening to

By Megan M. SeckmanAfter her daughter faced back-to-back concussions and began experiencing debilitating headaches, mood changes, fatigue, and severe sensitivity to light, Lynn Greene went looking for answers. Lynn, 49, and a single-mother of three teenagers, met with countless doctors and was finally told by a neurologist that the treatment for her daughter’s post-concussive syndrome would entail blood pressure medicine that could possibly make her already emotional daughter suicidal.That was the moment Lynn began her own extensive research into alternative therapies for post-concussive syndrome. She stumbled upon the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy to regenerate [...]

By |2016-12-27T09:30:00-05:00December 27, 2016|She's Reading|

She’s Painting a Story on Story Avenue

By Megan SeckmanOne drive through Butchertown will remind you how it earned its name. There is the unmistakable odor, for one, and the endless flux of steel-toe booted men traversing crosswalks to the pork processing plant, for another. But look a little closer.There’s a new element to this tapestry of industry. Perched outside the plant on Story Avenue, in a tiny vintage camper, sits an artist. Armed with photographs, projectors, some paint, brushes, and a few very tall ladders, Tara Remington (known to her friends as Remi) works to tell The Story on Story: a [...]

By |2016-12-16T09:30:00-05:00December 16, 2016|She's Reading|

What Inspires this Master of the Mic?

By Megan M. Seckman“I’m already African American, how much black do I need to look slim?...I know I’m no Disney princess but Queen Ursula, royalty. A self-made boss; a threat to you weak-minded mermaids who are too afraid of my tidal wave...So when they call you ‘Fat Girl,’ you say ‘And?’”On stage, Rheonna Thornton, 31, is a lyrical beast — a larger-than-life volcano erupting with hot molten magma in verse, recorded from a tiny smartphone kept in her purse. She is poet, hear her roar.Off stage, she lives quietly with her husband in the West [...]

By |2018-05-23T13:32:48-04:00November 27, 2016|She's Reading|

What the Comic Lady is Reading, Watching, and Listening to…

By Megan M. Seckman Sonya Linser, 49, walked into what was supposed to be a part-time job at The Great Escape 21 years ago and never left. Once she stepped foot into the quirky world of comic culture, she instantly felt at home.“It’s almost like working in Mayberry. The carpets are duct-taped to the floor, it feels like a basement, and you see the same shy, eclectic customers each week — some of whom I have pulled comics for for years,” Sonya says of the store’s regular clientele, who range in age from late 20s [...]

By |2016-09-18T12:34:00-04:00September 18, 2016|She's Reading|
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