There Are Good Things Here
There Are Good Things Here
Highlights from the first-ever Good Folk Festival.
Hello Folks,
Happy Wednesday. I write this to you from Charleston, South Carolina, where I’m basing for the week as I continue my work on climate, artistry, and narrative. It’s been a whirlwind of a few weeks—last week I turned 25 climbing over the Roan Highlands on the Appalachian Trail, and the week before that we hosted Good Folk Fest 2023, a celebration of local arts, music, and culture here in the North Carolina Piedmont.
As much as I work with musicians these days, I myself come from a very different creative world—one of the written and literary—and this event challenged and pushed myself and this project into a whole new space. I left for the woods at 5am the morning after the event, and spent the next seven days off-grid awash in gratitude: for this place, for the folks who make it, and for the communities we are building. It feels to me that there is something special brewing here, a new type of creative work that has the potential to change cultural perceptions and start a whole new conversation around what being an artist in the 21st century looks like.
Artists are everywhere, and they always have been. So many of our conversations here revolve around the underlying pressure we all feel as artists to up and leave the places we are from—to go to the big city and find creativity there, in these hubs that have always been presented to us as spaces to find ourselves and in them, find inspiration.
The city is a constantly moving space. There is always something there, bursts of energy in every sidewalk crack, every alleyway, every stranger on the street. For some, this is the ultimate form of inspiration: to be a part of something. For a long time, I thought that rule held true for everyone. But more and more, this project has taught me what it is I truly value about art: the slow, ongoing act of paying attention.
Mary Oliver said it: Attention is the beginning of devotion. In my favorite novel, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, she writes of protagonist Bit, who grew up on a commune in upstate New York before moving to the city: “One legacy of Arcadia is that his push for happiness was out of sync with the world’s; his ambition was for safety, security, a life of enough food and shelter and money, books and love, the luxury of pursuing the truth by art. The luxury of looking deeply, of finding a direct path to empathy. It didn’t seem unattainable. In the city, where there were a million talented artists, his quiet, slow pursuit was seen as a form of ambitionlessness.”
This place has allowed me to look deeply. And that has made all the difference in the world—in the community that I have built, in the art that I have made. Good Folk Fest felt like a celebration of the art of looking deeply: of people coming together in support, curiosity, wonder, and joy. To all those who braved the summer storms (and how classic) to join us— thank you. There are good things here. You’re a part of them.
Below are some highlights from the event, which I can’t describe any other way besides incredibly special. I am so grateful for the performers who joined us: 1,2,3 Puppetry, The Violet Exploit, 723, Nia J, Tre. Charles, and Dissimilar South. Endless gratitude goes out to the Haw River Ballroom for hosting us in your beautiful space. A special thank you in particular to Skylar Simmons of Papr.text for being a designer of dreams.
All photos shared here were taken by Victoria Landers, our podcast producer here at Good Folk and photographer extraordinaire.
