Stay 731: Potential

I am convinced that every young person dreams of leaving their hometown, going to a larger city, and making it “big.” That was definitely a dream of mine. Born in Memphis, I moved to Jackson with my family at the age of four. Jackson is my mother’s hometown. This is when my understanding of what made living in Jackson special began.My siblings and I were in a childcare program, and Jackson Parks and Recreation’s summer program is where I met many friends.

Everyday Exotic

When I think about the vocation of a photographer, I think of the words of Simone Weil, saying that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Paying attention is what gets most photographers into their profession. They pay attention and capture a moment and then linger in the darkroom, spending hours waiting to see an image develop from the blank white of a sheet of photo paper, the details slowly emerging in a chemical bath.

Cheaper By the [Half] Dozen

We’ve all seen our fair share of family-focused reality TV. Men, women, and children sign up to put their lives on display for all to see. So what does that look like in Jackson, Tennessee? The recently launched web series, Loving My 6. Now happily married for over ten years, John and Timond Williams are the parents of six children under the age of ten.

Stay 731: Simplicity

When I tell people that my family moved from Seattle—and that we didn’t move to Jackson because of family or a job—I often get the response, “Why would you move here?” Really it all started with woods. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, about his own time living in the woods, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Team Noah: Together We Wait

Noah was five years old when we found out that he had cancer. He was in my Sunday School class and would come walking down the hallways at church with this skipping kind of swagger and the biggest grin on his face, like he knew something—or maybe had just done something. He was always smiling. So one day I asked him why he smiled so much. He grinned even bigger and said, “I don't know.”