A displaced furniture factory worker. A veteran with PTSD. A group of Somali Bantu refugees who are finally getting outside the public housing apartment they’ve been stuck in for five years and doing what they loved before the war tore their lives apart: digging in the dirt. For more than 25 years, I’ve been privileged to report on these stories from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia — previously for The Roanoke Times and, more recently, in occasional essays for The New York Times. I’ve also written for magazines, radio and online journals; from locations ranging from a mobile home in Bassett, Virginia, to a crowded cholera ward in Limbe, Haiti.

Somali Bantu farmers I met when they landed in America in 2003, then re-interviewed eight years later when they began farming again in Virginia. |Photo by Faduma Guhad

I love what I do. I’ve eaten ceviche in Sauta, Mexico; hung out in trap houses and nursing homes; plunked myself on a tenement floor to get a battered African refugee to look me in the eye. I’ve witnessed birth and death and joy and suffering, and there’s pretty much nothing I’d rather do than talk to strangers and then tell other strangers what I’ve witnessed and heard and felt.

I believe what Annie Dillard said when she wrote that: “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

I love Anne Lamott’s advice about writing shitty first drafts, and keeping it real, and, above all, if you really want to see your name in print, stop whining and start writing.

I believe Will Durant nailed it when he defined civilization as a stream with banks: “The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.”

A rare light moment during the storied 1937 flood that put a hurt on Bassett, Va. The creation of the Philpott Dam in the ’50s, a $13 million project that finally kept the Smith River silt out of factory workers’ homes. | Photo courtesy of Bassett Historical Center

The daughter of a factory worker mom and housepainter dad (an eighth-grade dropout), I was the first in my family to go to college. So when a displaced furniture-factory worker gives me her elderly mother’s phone number — because her own phone is about to be turned off — I recall exactly how that feels. My first book for Little, Brown & Co. was called “FACTORY MAN,” about a black sheep furniture-maker from the storied furniture-making family in Bassett, Va., who gave cheap imports from China the middle finger and kept his Galax factory workers employed.

My second book, published in 2016, was a story I began 25 years earlier — back when my hair was still dark. It’s called TRUEVINE, and it’s a moving story about race, greed and the human condition. When I first heard about the story, I almost didn’t believe it. But George and Willie Muse really kidnapped and made to work circus sideshows for decades without pay while their mother fought to get justice for her family.

Keep digging, has always the gist of my journalism M.O., and follow what moves you.

I love talking to students, readers and  journalists alike about the importance of covering diverse communities. I’ve spoken in venues as varied as a South African newsroom to young students and to readers across the United States.

I figure I’ve been reporting since I was 4 years old. That’s when I ran away from home with my tricycle and my beagle mutt, Tessie — to the grocery store (a great story-finding place, by the way). A neighbor spotted me there, chatting up the butcher and staring longingly at the Popsicles, and returned me to my frantic mom. Six years later, I got my first newspaper job — delivering the Urbana Daily Citizen from my 10-speed.

I still run all over the place being curious, only now they actually pay me to do it. I’m privileged to get to follow what moves me most of the time.

Author, 4. Photo courtesy of her mom