I’m an educator, researcher, and lifelong Barnesville, Georgia native who couldn’t stop asking questions about what happened in my own hometown.
Those questions led to Emergence — an oral history of desegregation and the end of the military legacy at Gordon College, the institution that served Barnesville at different points as a city high school, a military boarding academy, a two-year college, and now a four-year college. What started as curiosity became a two-year community research project, and ultimately a book told through the voices of the people who were actually there.
The research was never mine alone. Over two years, diverse groups of Gordon State College students — different ages, races, genders, majors, and backgrounds — conducted the interviews that form the heart of this project, through human services and psychology courses and an honors colloquium that started as a study of Carl Jung’s famous Red Book and ended up somewhere none of us entirely expected. My daughter Ryla was among those students. She interviewed a family member who had attended Gordon during the years desegregation was unfolding and wrote the opening quote for the book.
That’s the thing about community memory. You go looking for history and you find people. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the people find you back.
The research also produced the Barnesville-Lamar Community Memory Project, a living digital archive where voices, photographs, and documents from this history are preserved and shared and where community members can contribute their own memories and materials. Because this history doesn’t belong in a book alone. It belongs to the community that lived it.
By training, I’m a school psychologist and educator with three graduate degrees — a doctorate in adult learning, and both a specialist degree and a master’s in school psychology. I’ve been a certified school psychologist since 2005 and have been teaching college courses since 2014. I’ve also co-authored Real Girls, a group counseling guide for professionals working with adolescent girls, and a chapter on using book clubs to promote mental health literacy. My broader interests run from deliberative dialogue and community engagement to yoga, Reiki, holistic nutrition, and the ongoing project of figuring out how to stay centered in the middle of a chaotic and fascinating world, which is really what this whole site has always been about.
I’ve been married to Ryran since 2004. Our daughter Ryla is studying to become a surgeon. Our son Hutson is working toward a degree in mechanical engineering. When I’m not working, I’d rather be exploring somewhere new. My next adventure is a three-week road trip through Costa Rica.
If you want to follow Emergence, explore the archive, or share your own memories of Barnesville and Lamar County, I’d love to hear from you.
