A Peace of My Mind

Caitlin Carney is co-owner of Porgy’s Seafood Market in New Orleans.

Caitlin calls herself the “Lady Monger.” Her business, Porgy’s Seafood Market, is a purple storefront on a busy corner in Mid-City New Orleans. It feels like a cross between a fish shop, a lunch joint, and a neighborhood bar.

It’s a market with a mission: to reconnect New Orleanians with Gulf seafood. A lot of the fish sold in the city is not from the Louisiana coas...

Darrah Fox Bach is the restoration programs senior manager at the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

Darrah cultivated her love for the outdoors in her native San Francisco, where environmentalism flourishes and Saturdays were devoted to hiking. She moved to Louisiana to study at Tulane University, and stayed for an AmeriCorps position with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL). When a job opened up at the non-profi...

Rosina Philippe lives in Grand Bayou Indian Village, a community that is entirely based in water. The homes, along with the church, can only be reached by boat. This was not always the case. “We had solid ground beneath our feet,” she recalls. “We had garden spaces. We had fruit trees. We had lots of land where you can walk for miles.”

The Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha are a subsistence tribe, and have long relied on the bounty of the land...

Alex Kolker is a coastal scientist with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, while others baked sourdough bread, Alex was studying satellite images of the Mississippi River Delta. As an oceanographer, geologist, and climate scientist, he is interested in how the Louisiana coastline loses land, and also how it builds that land back. 

As he examined the images, Alex noticed a channel connecting th...

Ebony Woodruff is an agricultural attorney in Chalmette, Louisiana.

Ebony entered law school with plans to become a corporate attorney. As the daughter of a welder-electrician and a teacher, her initial goal was upward mobility. “It was really all about the money,” she said. 

But her professors at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, themselves first-generation attorneys, encouraged students to return to their communities a...

Kristian Bailey is a farmer, and he also considers himself a land steward and teacher. At Orais Hand Farm, located across the road from the Mississippi River, he is trying to move away from the idea of human dominion over nature. Instead, he is working in cooperation with it.

Kristian talks about farming with “tenderness”: recognizing that Southern land carries wounds (his own farm is on a former plantation site) and that part of hi...

Chief Devon Parfait spent his early years in Dulac, a bayou community at the watery edge of Louisiana. He caught fish from the dock, bounced on his neighbor’s trampoline, and went out on his grandfather’s shrimp boat. But Hurricane Rita destroyed his family’s home in 2005, when he was 8, setting off years of displacement. The extended family migrated inland and eventually settled in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. 

Trauma followe...

Nate Suppon's mother died when he was an infant. He says he was born into a home filled with depression, anxiety, and turmoil. A lack of love. And he tried to fill that void with drugs and alcohol. Between the ages of 15 and 38, he was addicted and spent time in and out of prison.

It was a self-absorbed cycle. He found both faith and sobriety and now lives his life in service to others. At the time of our conversation, he had b...

Dan Brandt is a father, a husband, and an entrepreneur who says he likes to think of himself as a kind, decent person who tries to do the next right thing. 

Dan stopped drinking when he was 35 years old and he is now 56. He didn't lose his job, he didn't have a string of arrests, but he had seen alcoholism around him and he knew he was on a bad path. And he knew that he needed help.

Dan joined a 12-step program and surround...

Josue Gonzalez grew up in difficult circumstances that he said left a lot of holes in his life. Holes where the sense of love and belonging, and being cared for should have been. He tried filling those holes with different things.

He remembers sneaking his first drink at an early age in a house that always had alcohol available. In his teens he experimented with other drugs and found himself in active addiction that cost him jobs, r...

Vanessa Weyaus is a member of the Lynx clan of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. Her name in Ojibwe translates as The Shining Light in the Sky Woman. 

Vanessa spent years in addiction, eventually living on the streets and running from the law. When she tired of it all, she turned herself in during a routine traffic stop. She was offered treatment, but chose to serve her prison sentence instead and has now been clean and sober for more ...

John Gerber is a graphic designer and a fine artist in Minneapolis. He describes himself as someone who thinks and feels deeply. He has had an on again / off again relationship with alcohol. He stopped drinking completely between the ages of 30 and 40, but when his 40th birthday came around, he decided to celebrate. He describes it like this: "Then between 40 and 60, I think I drank probably to make up for those 10 years."...

Casey Pytleski is a mother, a wife, and a recovering addict. Although she had experimented with my substances as a youth, it was an unexpected introduction to meth as an adult that led to a quick addiction and unraveled the idyllic life she and her husband had created. At the time of our interview, it had been 89 days since her last use. 

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for ...

Welcome to A Peace of My Mind, a project that uses storytelling and art to rediscover what connects us. I’m John Noltner, the founder and director of A Peace of My Mind and I have the good luck to travel the country and the world interviewing people to help reveal the beauty and wisdom that is all around us….if we choose to see it.

This new season of the podcast is called Sobr. S-O-B-R and we are exploring stories of addiction and r...

Joe Davis is a spoken word artist in Minneapolis. I interviewed Joe in front of a live audience for one of our Creative Changemakers events on July 25 at Squirrel Haus Arts in Minneapolis. He joined us with his band Poetic Diaspora. Enjoy a little music with them and then our conversation.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagr...

Jan Selby is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has been screened internationally in settings ranging from film festivals and art museums to university classrooms and on Public Television. BEYOND THE DIVIDE premiered at Montana’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and won Best Feature Documentary at the Peace on Earth Film Festival. After a year of traveling to festivals world-wide, BEYOND THE DIVIDE was broadcast on Twin Cities ...

Duncan Gray is a retired Episcopal Priest and was the 9th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi. I met him at St. Peter's Episcopal church in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was rector, like his father before him. His father served from 1957 to 1965 during the turbulent era when James Meredith was the first Black man who was allowed admission into the University of Mississippi.

St. Peter’s organized itself in 1851. The c...

Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar is chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. She has spent decades helping her community fight for federal recognition of their tribe and finding resilient solutions to the political and environmental challenges that have seen their traditional lands literally wash away into the Gulf of Mexico.

(We did this interview on the front porch, ...