Flat River Front Porch

At long last, it's our end-of-summer edition of Flat River Front Porch! This one has been a long time coming, but it is packed full of (low-key, nerd-friendly) celebrity guests. While we will be coming back home in our next episode to interview a local retired teacher, our guest this week is a teacher from much farther away. She is Amanda Jones, small-town Louisiana school librarian turned freedom fighter who has been making headli...

We are in the home stretch of summer and it has been BUSY, so we're a little bit behind with sitting down indoors and recording. However, we are celebrating the summer fun and planning for the warm weather we have left with some local guests (and one far-flung one). I sit down with Amanda Lee (AGAIN, I know -- but we have so much fun) to talk summer fruits and veggies and the bizarre slang terms Midwesterners come up with for them,...

June is Home Ownership Month, and we're celebrating it by talking to a set of people who eat and breathe housing and all its facets. We kick it off with Kamey Krum-Howe, newly back at FRCL from other adventures and full of her own interesting home history tales. Then we sit down with Mike Adams from Montcalm Habitat for Humanity, local realtor Andrea Belding, and Larry Moss from Greenville City Council and City Planning Commission....

This week we celebrate the kick-off of Summer Reading by chatting with two members of one of our biggest reading families, the Quigleys! I've been talking books and everything else with Amanda Quigley and her EIGHT (yes, 8) kids for 7 years, back when we were both still in Belding. Amanda is a homeschooling coach, a Cannonsville Critters volunteer and animal lover, and a strong advocate for open discussion about mental health, neur...

This episode is an out-of-the-office, off-the-grid adventure as we dive into this year's Montcalm One Book One County selection! We are joined by Brooke Whipple, native Stantonite and star of The History Channel's Alone and National Geographic's Yukon River Run. Brooke has a million fascinating stories about adventuring and surviving under harsh conditions, and this episode features my conversation with her as well as highlights fr...

The "body safety" in this episode is not the fleeing-from-Freddie-Krueger kind! We honor Sexual Assault Awareness month (which, to be fair, was April) by sitting down with Alexis Thane, Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator for RAVE, Relief Against Violent Encounter. Their organization provides support, shelter and counseling for survivors (of all ages and genders) of sexual assault and domestic abuse. While these topics are rarely ea...

We appreciate your patience as we get out this last episode, and it is a doozy! This is the second half of our two-part series with the Outmans, our local state legislators. This time we are joined by Rick Outman, senator for the 33rd district. Rick talks his grudging entrance into politics years ago, the history of redistricting in Michigan, his chihuahua Chico, and his serious fandom of the cartoon Bluey (which he admits he may w...

Our guest this week takes a break from partisanship to join us for a low-key conversation on the front porch: State Representative Pat Outman! We talk parenting young kids, outdoor hobbies, childhood aspirations, travel spots, and the challenges of representing all the voices from a rural district. Then we play the first half of a father-son version of the Newlywed Game, to see how well he and his dad know each other (to be conclud...

Our community and front porch are stretching this week to bring in an (uncaped) crusader from up north, Michele Howard, the director of the Traverse Area District Library system! I met Michele at this year's Michigan Library Association conference in October. Her story of firing up organizations in her city to dig in and work together to make change inspired me to make her my first recorded interview for the podcast (if not our fir...

We're working outside the box in this very special episode, featuring a cavalcade of guests from the Montcalm Area Intermediate School District. Our five guests include: Kyle Hamlin, MAISD Superintendent; Cindy DeYoung, Early Childhood Special Ed Supervisor; Kristen Larson, principal of the Seiter Center and Special Ed Supervisor; and Shannon Tripp, Associate Superintendent of Career Tech Ed and Early College. And joining us fashio...

We're making up for lost time with an early release of Episode 7! This is an all-singing, all-dancing, theatre-all-the-time edition of Flat River Front Porch featuring Maddi Huntoon, Theatre Coordinator for the Hans Christian Anderson Theater department of Greenville Area Recreation and Community Center. HCAT puts together family-friendly shows that are acted and produced by kids and community members. Maddi is a drama geek through...

It's extremely fitting that our technology episode was delayed a week by technical difficulties... though we learn by trial and error, right? This episode is the perfect mix of tech adventures and human error as we're joined by Steve Schofield from Montcalm Community College to talk about Tech Fest, the upcoming event on February 8 on the Sidney Campus. It hopes to appeal to future tech professionals and the generally tech-interest...

With all this snow and cold, when you don't want to go into the community, let the community come to you on Flat River Front Porch! This week we spend time with Terri Legg and Bethany Broom Dombrowski from United - Montcalm Ionia Way Counties. They are gearing up for tax season with the VITA program, which brings free tax prep to anyone eligible in our area and nationwide. While they're here, we get a taste of the myriad other thin...

Let's start the new year with this "All Directors" episode of Flat River Front Porch! Brian Blomstrom, the Director of the Greenville Department of Public Safety and the Montcalm Township Supervisor, joins us to talk the challenges and joys of serving our community, why he chose Greenville, and how he spends his (extremely limited) spare time. We also get to sit down with Amanda Lee, the Director of Montcalm Area Reading Council, a...

Welcome to the Flat River Front Porch! We are joined this time by Cory Smith, Senior Staff Writer for the Daily News, and I force him to put away his journalistic persona and express some opinions of his own (if only on his favorite reality TV shows). We also sit down with Cara Mikaelian, the other half of the two Cara's on our circulation team, who is a history nerd, marine biologist wannabe, Missourian and archival librarian-in-t...

We're joined by Cara McGee, new circulation assistant, who manages to go ten minutes before bringing up her "other" job, and later explains how she bailed on Los Angeles to settle in her family home on Baldwin Lake. Then we interview Dave and Michelle Seppala. Michelle works at the library as well, and has made friends with most of our patrons in the past year. We let her husband Dave tag along. Dave works as a lender for Isabella ...