Categories
Culture Living

Local therapists and researchers take on psych’s buzziest topic

Renee Branson considered herself a resilient person. She suffered a sexual assault in her late teens but soldiered on. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Ohio State University and a master’s in counseling psychology at the University of Colorado Denver. She built an outwardly happy home life and went into business helping others overcome their own adversity.

But things began to slip. Branson’s first marriage failed. She was inwardly unhappy. Finally, decades after her initial trauma, she realized she was the wrong kind of resilient. She was practicing what she calls “Rocky resilience” in her new book, Resilience Renegade.

“I was operating from this place of constantly living with my boxing gloves on. It was self-sabotaging,” Branson says. “I realized there was a different way to operate.”

Branson, who grew up in Ohio but has lived and worked in Charlottesville for the past 14 years, discovered what she now calls “renegade resilience.” Unlike Rocky resilience, renegade resilience is the ability to pick your battles and avoid situations where you’re forced to repeatedly overcome trauma. It’s the ability to listen to your needs and stand up for them. It’s being proactive rather than reactive.

Branson isn’t the only therapist or researcher thinking about resilience. While the concept traditionally falls under the umbrella of psychological constructs like “emotional regulation” and “cognitive flexibility,” and has taken a backseat to buzzword attributes like “grit,” resilience is having its moment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are thinking about the ways we bounce back from trauma. And in November, the peer-reviewed journal American Psychologist published a special issue on the topic, “Rethinking Resilience and Posttraumatic Growth,” that “aims to provide a foundation for a new generation of resilience … research.”

Among other things, the journal’s special issue takes on the definition of the term resilience, examining it in the context of community support, systemic societal issues, and the way it’s been studied for decades.

“The general advice I would offer anyone who is thinking about resilience, self control, or other psychological processes is to try to avoid the fundamental attribution error,” says Benjamin Converse, an associate professor of public policy and psychology at the University of Virginia. “That is, we have a general tendency to try to explain people’s behavior by appealing to personality while neglecting the power of social situations.”

Understanding resilience

According to Stefanie Sequeira, an assistant professor of psychology at UVA, people tend to observe others who bounce back from tragedy and think of them as being intrinsically resilient. 

“Resilience is this process of adapting well when we are facing adversity—health problems, natural disasters, relationship problems,” Sequeira says. “Adapting requires flexibility, but that is a skill we can develop. Resilience is not a personality trait.”

Thinking of resilience as something we’re born with can actually do us harm, Sequeira says. The mindset might make people decide they are incapable of adapting to hardship and thriving, or that resilient folks don’t feel things deeply. Sequeira says being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t experience negative emotions. Indeed, experiencing sadness is critical for resilience.

In the introductory article to the recent special issue of American Psychologist, the editors likewise call resilience “the ability to adapt successfully to adverse events.” The guest editors go on to say that resilience springs from two sources: both the psychological and social resources within individuals and communities.

Bethany Teachman, the UVA psych department’s director of clinical training, says that part of the conversation today is recognizing that individual actors are often less important than the systems making things difficult for them. In other words, clinicians never put the onus on their patients to solve all their problems or be resilient on their own. “We want to say, ‘you are trying to navigate the system you are in,’ as opposed to saying, ‘this a weakness in you that you are struggling with,’” Teachman says.

According to Teachman, current events like the COVID pandemic, global wars, and the recent U.S. election make overcoming adversity as ubiquitous as ever in clinical psychology. At the end of the day, clinicians help people navigate the hard things in life, and resilience is key for overcoming challenging emotions, relationships, and situations.

Thinking of resilience as something we’re born with can actually do us harm, says Stefanie Sequeira, an assistant professor of psychology at UVA. Photo by Eze Amos.

Enhancing resilience

If resilience is a systemic phenomenon, anyone—from young people to adults—can grow their resilience. For parents, that might mean giving children the “right scaffolding to work through problems,” Teachman says. At the same time, an overprotective environment can hinder resilience development.

Adults who may have failed to develop the social systems necessary to enhance resilience aren’t stuck. Teachman offers several approaches, such as practicing mindfulness during hard times: gain control of your attention, be aware of what you are focusing on, and recognize that you can change your focus rather than being reactive. “That leads people to develop the acceptance they need,” Teachman says.

Clinicians often use motivational interviewing to overcome trauma. If patients feel unsure about whether or how to make a change, the clinician’s job is to help them recognize their desires, abilities, reasons, and needs. (Teachman suggests remembering the acronym DARN.) Through motivational interviewing, individuals facing adversity can find that they want to make a change and have the ability to make a change, why they should change, and the support they require to make it all happen. 

Resilience can also be built on what Teachman calls “behavioral activation,” or recognizing that you are overwhelmed, taking small steps to re-engage, and finding pleasure in small rewards. Cognitive reappraisal is another technique. Say you want to be resilient after being fired from your job. The resilient person focuses on taking action on the opportunity, rather than dwelling on why the hardship happened.

“You want to look at the ways you are withdrawing from a situation or avoiding it and re-engage, even if it is a small step,” Teachman says. “It could be as simple as calling a friend.”

Still, it’s difficult to tell yourself simply to change the way you feel, Sequeira says. Folks suffering from anxiety can’t just stop being anxious. Clinicians must therefore find ways to help their patients embrace change, notice “thinking traps,” and avoid catastrophizing. “It can be helpful to think about times you have felt like this before and how you bounced back” from adversity, Sequeira says.

Branson suggests considering what is physically happening to your body in times of stress. If you’re having a difficult interaction with a colleague or loved one, tell yourself that your cortisol levels are high and you can do things to lower them—practice a slow breathing technique, step away from the immediate conversation, or simply take a walk.

Community resilience 

Like individuals, communities can be resilient. So, how do you know if you live in a resilient community? Branson says she sees evidence of Charlottesville’s resilience, but she also sees room for improvement. “We could be more brave and more proactive versus reactive,” she says.

Branson has transitioned from a traditional therapy practice to working with law firms and other organizations, including nonprofits, in recent years. In her work, she’s found people throughout the C’ville community who provide the services needed to help people be resilient. 

But as it is for individuals, resilience is not a have-it-or-don’t-have-it phenomenon in communities, Branson says. It lies on a continuum.

“One of the things I say in my book is that resilience has several levers,” she says. “We might have times when one lever for resilience is low. For me, after the election, my ability to self-soothe was low. So I am trying to push up the lever on that while also building connections.”

Sequeira points out that research shows loneliness is detrimental to our health, and people are struggling with isolation now more than ever due to remote work and social media. To be more resilient, she says we have to “make social connections, develop relationships, find other people in the community that share the same values as you.” Community groups can not only be a source of support, but they can also give one a sense of purpose. 

Parents can help guide the social systems needed to build resilience in their children, Sequeira says. Resilience keys for young people include sticking to a routine, having a sense of control, and meeting small, achievable goals—not to mention sound nutrition, hydration, and sleep. 

“Teens want control, they want agency,” Sequeira says. “They are supposed to be departing from their parents and want to feel like they have some control over their environment. So for example, instead of telling teens, ‘you need sleep,’ you might ask them, ‘how are you sleeping and how is that making you feel?’” Taking a break from social media and avoiding behaviors that are “mood congruent,” like listening to sad songs when you’re sad, are also good ideas.

In soliciting articles about resilience, the American Psychologist special issue editors found several recurring themes in the research, including reimagining ways to conceptualize adversity, how we study resilience, and pathways for enhancing resilience. But what emerges most often is how we think about resilience for marginalized communities.

Teachman points out that there are some groups, such as people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, that are repeatedly put into situations where they face adversity and attack. Those people are more likely to develop psychological issues as a result of trauma, according to Teachman, but they are also among the most likely to develop resilience.

“I think it is a really important group to highlight,” she says. “There are costs to being resilient all the time. We can’t just teach people how to cope and think that will solve all their problems.”

Bethany Teachman, the UVA psych department’s director of clinical training, says clinicians never put the onus on their patients to solve all their problems or be resilient on their own. Photo by Eze Amos.

Rethinking resilience

Can a person have too much resilience? Like so many things in clinical psychology, the answer depends on term definition. “You cannot overdose on resilience, but there might be times when you see yourself as a highly resilient person, and that can get in the way,” Sequeira says.

Some of the clients Sequeira has worked with say they feel invalidated by the word resilience. It sounds like an individual-level skill, and they’re turned off by the idea that they just have to cope with all the bad things in their lives.

For her part, Branson doesn’t completely discount Rocky resilience, the ability to take punches and stagger back up. We need Rocky resilience. But for folks in marginalized communities, being resilient becomes too heavy a burden after so many knockdowns. 

Renegade resilience, on the other hand, is a long-term solution.

“We have to put ourselves first and nurture our own needs,” Branson says. “When it really started resonating with me, both in my own life as a survivor and working with other survivors, was when I realized resilience is what sustains us.”

So often, we feel like life is about getting past whatever is plaguing us. Maybe it is a severe trauma, or maybe it’s just that ever-present feeling that “as soon as I get through this week, things will slow down.” Branson says that’s no way to live.

Think about the way the heart works, she suggests. Your heart relies on valves to keep certain things in and other things out. In the world of renegade resilience, those valves are “boundaries and vulnerability.” Our boundaries tell the world what is and what is not okay. Our vulnerability allows us to stay open to social connections and be our authentic selves.

“Renegade resilience is something that we don’t have to wait for; it is something we can start to practice now,” Branson says. “We don’t jump out of a plane, then make sure our parachute is buckled up. Prioritizing ourselves is one of the most generous things we can do.”

Categories
News

Charlottesville Symphony channels unique makeup for talent, longevity

When the schedule for this year’s 50th-anniversary season of the Charlottesville Symphony hits the desk of Elizabeth Roberts, the orchestra’s principal bassoonist eyes the first piece in the first show. It’s Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, and she’s played it many, many times.

For professional players like Roberts, seeing Beethoven 5 on the setlist is like hearing an audience member request “Free Bird” at a Lynyrd Skynyrd show. The band has played it so often, it’s tough to muster up much enthusiasm.

But this is a 50th-anniversary program. Roberts and the other professionals in the Charlottesville Symphony’s principal seats know what Music Director Ben Rous is thinking. The celebratory season is a time not only to show off the nontraditional work they’ve been doing, but also an opportunity to call back to the masters who’ve come before them.

Plus, Charlottesville’s orchestra has a cheat code when it comes to playing the standards with passion: students.

“What we have are a lot of super-smart kids who are passionate and accomplished and really dedicated to improving,” Roberts says. “They are going to play with a level of energy when you put Beethoven 5 in front of them that the audience is going to sense. They’ve been waiting their whole life to play it.”

The Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia is made up of not only professionals and students, but also community members. It’s a unique construction that’s shared only by two or three other orchestras in the United States. And the local ensemble has been doing it that way for a long time—half a century to be exact.

Tracing back

Even before the Charlottesville Symphony’s official founding in 1974, seeds had been planted in the form of a faculty group. 

“We don’t know a lot about it, like the early conductors’ names,” says Janet Kaltenbach, executive director of the Charlottesville Symphony Society, a community nonprofit supporting the organization. “But the narrative of the earliest symphonic music at the university is even older than the symphony itself.”

Four music directors have led the Charlottesville Symphony over its 50 official years: Douglas Hargrave from 1974 to 1991, Carl Roskott from 1991 to 2006, Kate Tamarkin from 2006 to 2017, and Rous, who took the job in 2017.

When Ben Rous took over as Music Director, he brought his own sensibilities to the role, which former director Kate Tamarkin says is welcome and expected. “[Each new conductor adds] something else very important, which is their temperament,” Tamarkin says. Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.

Each director has also served as the orchestra’s primary conductor, a job that requires more than simply dancing a baton in front of the musicians. The directors oversee the roster, select the music for each season, and bring their own style and energy to the way classical music is translated for the audience.

“Orchestral music is a re-creative art,” Tamarkin says. “The composer needs a partner, an interpreter. Every conductor adds their understanding of the composer and the time when it was written. And they add something else very important, which is their temperament.”

When Hargrave took the lead in 1974, he directed a group of 50 musicians. The orchestra began its subscription series in 1975. Roskott brought with him an impressive resume and bolstered the orchestra’s reputation. At the time, the symphony included six professional musicians as principals. When Tamarkin took over in 2006, 16 principals were on the roster.

Tamarkin again raised the bar in terms of experience as a director and conductor, leading the organization for a decade. In May 2017, Rous uprooted from Norfolk as resident conductor at the Virginia Symphony to move to Charlottesville.

Today, the Charlottesville Symphony is one of the primary public-facing arts organizations at the University of Virginia, according to Jody Kielbasa, UVA vice provost for the arts. “Along with the two museums, the Virginia Film Festival and the theater festival, these organizations have a long history with the university, but more broadly with the Charlottesville community,” he says. “They serve as a bridge to the community.”

A modernist turn

When Rous took the conductor’s baton from Tamarkin, he says he came into a healthy organization. His experience with other national orchestras had taught him that professional groups all share at least one flaw. Professionals, he says, treat playing orchestral music as a job by definition.

Rous immediately felt that the Charlottesville Symphony, with its focus on teaching students to play as well as professionals, had a different air, a more contented air than he’d ever experienced. “We had a great performance culture and a really committed, loyal audience,” he says.

Still, Rous wanted to take the symphony in a new direction. According to Tamarkin, that was expected. As part of the search team seeking her replacement, she wanted someone who would be as different from her as possible.

Rous’ intensity and willingness to experiment with new forms, to take orchestral music to the edge of what people think it can be, fit the playbill. “I decided I could trust this community to be curious along with me, and I made a little bit of a leap of faith that I could be my honest, curious self when choosing what music to program,” he says. 

Janet Kaltenbach is the executive director of Charlottesville Symphony Society, a nonprofit that supports the Charlottesville Symphony. Photo by Alisa Foytik.

The result is an orchestra that, in addition to the standards, features music by unfamiliar composers, arrangements listeners have never heard before, and collaborations with novel artists. Last spring, Rous invited drummer, percussionist, and composer JoVia Armstrong to join the Charlottesville Symphony on her cajon drumset. Armstrong, whose own music draws on techno, future soul, hip-hop, and chamber jazz, was a hit. After the performance, concertgoers and players alike told Rous the symphony should feature Armstrong in every show. 

Under Rous, the Charlottesville Symphony has also featured an afro-futurist improv jazz flutist, a standard jazz quintet, and music produced from the sound of melting glaciers.

This season, the line-up will include rapper A.D. Carson during the March 22-23 shows which feature & metaphors  commissioned from him for the anniversary season, Mozart’s Requiem and Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

“The overarching goal I have is to expand on what people can get out of an orchestral concert—not just what sounds we are making, but what ideas we can represent, what societal issues we can confront,” Rous says.

Looking to the future

Taylor Ledbetter, like so many middle-class American kids, grew up taking piano lessons. In sixth grade, when many students are first introduced to band instruments—some influenced by programs like the Charlottesville Symphony’s own youth outreach efforts—Ledbetter began playing the flute. She took to it and joined her high-school symphony orchestra in Fort Worth, Texas.

When Ledbetter looked at colleges, she knew she wanted to continue playing music while not compromising her education. The University of Virginia was the perfect fit, in no small part because of the Charlottesville Symphony.

Ledbetter has since taken up the piccolo, with help from UVA professor and Charlottesville Symphony principal flute player Kelly Sulick, and joined the orchestra on the smaller instrument for the spring show last season. This year, she’ll play in the February show featuring Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

Ledbetter’s story isn’t unique among the hard-charging, intellectually minded students who make up the youngest portion of the Charlottesville Symphony. But symphonic music isn’t for everyone, especially those who’ve never seen it live before. According to Tamarkin, most folks who see it even once come to love it.

UVA student Taylor Ledbetter will play piccolo with the orchestra in February’s performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Supplied photo.

If the Charlottesville Symphony wants to keep playing for another 50 years, it has to continue to put people in the seats. One way it does that is through education, from the organization’s youth programs up through the students who learn to play pieces like Beethoven’s 5th alongside professional musicians and community members.

According to Concertmaster Dan Sender, the educational structure of Charlottesville Symphony rehearsals is unlike any other experience for young players. While Sender admits “first rehearsals are the worst” as the students sit down in front of a new piece of challenging music, the opportunity to play alongside professionals and accomplished community members in their section brings the students along quickly.

“We develop a language to coach and critique our section play,” Sender says. “Could you imagine how good a student’s essay would be if the teacher was sitting next to them and helping them with each sentence? The final product would be outstanding.”

The Charlottesville Symphony’s efforts are paying off. After five decades of continuous operation and overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, the local audience remains strong.

“It has become a real challenge for many orchestras,” says community member and clarinetist Rick Kessel, who’s played in multiple national orchestras over the past 20 years. “The fact that this community comes out to support us is just amazing, and we see a lot of young faces in the audience. That is why Charlottesville is so unique. They pack the house.”

Symphonic riches

The Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia is the longest-running classical music organization in the city (by a margin of five years), but it’s not the only place to get your orchestra on.

Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra, the 2021 American Prize winner for Best Community Orchestra Performance and 2024 recipient of the Shenandoah Valley’s Circle of Excellence in the Arts Award, plays an extensive season of classical music at the First Presbyterian churches in Waynesboro and Staunton.

Albemarle Symphony Orchestra Formerly the Crozet Community Orchestra, the Albemarle Symphony Orchestra typically has around 70 players on the roster. Launched in October 2013 by co-founders Denise Murray and Philip Clark, the orchestra plays two to four shows per season at churches and schools in Crozet and Charlottesville.

Youth Orchestras of Central Virginia In addition to the area’s award-winning high school orchestras, the Youth Orchestras of Central Virginia, founded 45 years ago, play a full season of classical concerts. The orchestras, headquartered in Charlottesville, feature players from elementary, middle, and high schools around
central Virginia. The two full symphony orchestras, string orchestra, and chamber music club draw public, private, and homeschool students from the surrounding counties to participate in their annual programs.

Youth Orchestra of Central Virginia. Photo by Caleb Davis and Abe Granger.

Other organizations  Still haven’t reached your cap on classical? The Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival held its 25th annual show in September and shows no signs of stopping heading into next year. Charlottesville Classical, a service of WTJU and available for streaming at charlottesvilleclassical.org, plays the full classical repertoire, from medieval chants to modern compositions, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Tuesday Evening Concert Series, founded in 1948, features shows on semi-monthly Tuesdays in Old Cabell Hall. And go off the orchestral path with Three Notch’d Road—The Virginia Baroque Ensemble’s performances of historical repertoires offered in a subscription series, or the Cville Band, one of the oldest amateur community bands in the nation, which performs locally several times a year.

Categories
Abode Magazines

Local real estate market (mostly) tracks national trends

Charlottesville area homes are selling at higher prices on average this year than they were in 2023, but they’re sitting on the market longer, and total sales are down. That roughly matches what’s happening nationwide, but there’s a key difference, according to local realtor Paul McArtor.

“Charlottesville is so tied to the university, government, and hospitals, so we have a natural churn of people that have to leave and come,” McArtor says. “Our market is just kind of going to follow that cycle.”

According to McArtor, that means both sellers and buyers should feel confident in making moves these days, even as the season comes to a close and many folks around the country look toward next spring to act on their housing plans.

Homeowners going to market today should expect a roughly 5 percent uptick in their selling price from this time last year, according to Zillow data, with current typical home values sitting at $490,890. The local median sales price, per Redfin numbers, is up quite a bit more, to $550,000, a nearly 20 percent increase from August 2023.

Buyers, meanwhile, can expect to see lower interest rates than they did last year (in September, the Federal Reserve lowered key interest rate by half a percentage point). McArtor notes that those rates won’t be anywhere near as low as they were at the start of COVID-19, but they are inching closer to pre-pandemic levels.

Will sellers see the effects of the slight uptick in time-on-market across the local landscape? Maybe, maybe not, McArtor says.

“That is a little bit of a flaw, especially because many buyers and sellers have only been paying attention since the pandemic,” he says. “If you compare us to a year ago or two years ago, homes are staying on the market longer. But if you compare us to five years ago, this is normal.”

McArtor advises sellers to act like they’ve seen it all before. Sure, some homes will sell on their first weekend, but a couple weeks or even months of waiting is no reason to panic.

Critically, inventory remains low locally, as it is nationally. Housing availability is slowly ticking up, but McArtor says we haven’t yet reached a balanced market. Part of the low supply is driven by limited space to build, but the 3-year-old interest rate nadir is also making some buyers hold onto their property when they might otherwise have sold.

One real estate trend McArtor suggests is not reflected in reality is the notion that housing prices are slumping toward the end of the selling season. Observers might see single-unit price drops, he says, but that actually points to higher-than-comp opening prices, rather than an actual market dip.

In McArtor’s experience, sellers do need to be more proactive now than they were when the market was red hot in 2022. “They need to prep their houses to be sold nowadays,” he says. “For that stretch of time, it really felt like a seller just didn’t have to do anything. It didn’t matter if it needed repairs, someone was going to buy it. Because there is a little bit more inventory, prices are still high, and interest rates are coming down, buyers aren’t necessarily willing to just take anything.”

For prospective homeowners waiting to see if interest rates drop further, McArtor says there’s no need. The market is showing signs of pent-up demand, and prices could continue to climb, so buy now and refinance if rates do decline. “If you go ahead and buy now, you could get today’s price with tomorrow’s interest rates,” he says.

Categories
Abode Magazines

UVA reopens its main library after a massive 3.5-year construction project

What’s 80 years to a library? The Rotunda itself served as the University of Virginia’s main volumes venue for more than 100 years, after all.

But by 2018, eight decades after a new library took the Rotunda’s place and shepherded in an era of research-driven scholarship, change was necessary. UVA administrators decided they would take on one of the most challenging renovations in school history: expanding, reorganizing, and overhauling Alderman Library.

“From a construction point of view, it had never had a major renovation,” construction project director Kit Meyer says. “There was some discussion of renovating in the ’70s, but the students complained about their main library being closed.”

The $141 million Edgar Shannon Library, as it’s known now, officially opened in January, more than three years after construction began. Led by UVA architect Brian Hogg and Chicago-based HBRA Architects, the project involved gutting the 100,000-square-foot structure, demolishing what were known as the Old and New Stacks, and building a 130,000 square-foot, five-story addition.

A university statement just before the library’s grand opening said the renovation was intended “to create light-filled, easily accessible study space for users” while maintaining the building’s historic interior features. The result is an aesthetically vintage structure with modern conveniences designed to both allow people and books to coexist and match the way we now use libraries.

According to Elyse Girard, executive director of communications and user experience, library-goers in the past entered and headed for the service desk. Now, assisted by online search and navigation tools, they browse on their own. All but one card catalog is gone from the new library, with digital kiosks helping guide bibliophiles. The study rooms have digital amenities as well, like monitors and ample connectivity.

The books, some of which are still finding their way to the library, haven’t been replaced by digitization, of course. “The books on the shelves bring life to the building, and you really notice that as we fill floor to floor,” Girard says.

Meyer says physical books were a driving force behind the renovation. Logistically, UVA needed more space for them, both on site and in climate-controlled, off-site storage. And environmentally, publications and people like different conditions. Modern technology allows the Edgar Shannon Library to balance the dry atmosphere books prefer with the fresh air humans like to breathe.

With an eye for preserving the library’s original design, some of the rooms in Shannon library seem unchanged at first glance. That’s a feature not a bug (book?), Girard says. It makes folks who remember the old library feel comfortable. Some design elements, like the prominent iron railings, are even taken from the university’s original Rotunda library. Other parts of the structure are new and surprising, giving the next generation of Hoos a chance to love the library in their own way.

“We are a public library and a community space,” Girard says. “People think of us as only supporting faculty and students, but anyone can come in and use the library, and we encourage that.”

Categories
Abode Magazines

Local homewood firm branches out, stays true to its roots

The HeartPine Company made its name crafting custom products from stuff a lot of people would throw away. It’s that commitment to finding beauty that has allowed the firm to thrive for 25 years.

“I think there are two or three things that make it different,” says Debra Kirschnick, who directs the company’s sales and marketing efforts. “One is that [the owners] really treat you like family. Two, they give you autonomy. They know their employees want to do what’s best for the company, understand what your strengths are, and let you make decisions.” The third thing, Kirschnick says, is how hands-on ownership remains even after a quarter decade. 

Richard Morgan Sr. launched the HeartPine Company in 1999, selling antique heart pine flooring to discerning builders, designers, and homeowners. Operating out of Nelson County, the firm’s one and only product when it launched was heart pine. Richard Morgan Jr. joined his father’s company after graduating from college and dabbling on his own in the wood biz for a few years.

“It just started when I was renovating an old farmhouse,” Morgan Sr. says. “The house was from the early 1800s, and I was trying to find material. I had been farming full-time, and it just mushroomed from there.”

From the beginning, HeartPine was a manufacturing-intensive business, with a focus on milling and kilning products to the high-level specs the Morgans and their customers demanded. The company grew quickly, hiring more people to operate its at-the-time small manufacturing facility. The Morgans hired another sales person and then another, Kirschnick. Today, HeartPine employs 35 people across its 35,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in Amherst and storefront showroom on Market Street in downtown Charlottesville.

HeartPine has received multiple local awards and was recently featured on “World’s Greatest Television,” a series highlighting successful family-owned businesses. In addition to serving clients in the local area, HeartPine ships product nationwide.

With natural wood more expensive than vinyl flooring and other competitive products, HeartPine serves primarily high-end builders and designers, but the company also sells some flooring directly to consumers. While Kirschnick says pine remains the firm’s “heart and soul,” HeartPine moved into reclaimed oaks and hickories early on, then into a line of newly sawn wood. Today, the it sells European and domestic oak in the form of not only flooring, but also custom beams, stair treads, and millwork. A line of French oak—distinct from European oak—is coming online next.

Everything is bespoke, and two products are rarely, if ever, the same. Sourcing is a constant challenge. Consumer preferences make things even trickier for wood-makers. While buyers for years were hooked on gray tones, they are now moving into more organic colors like browns and sandy tans, according to Kirschnick.

“We’re all still really drawn to the antique woods,” she says—the Morgans have it throughout their own homes. “The antique part of the business is complex. The buying is very difficult because people don’t always tell you the truth about what they have.”

That’s where the Morgans and their team excel, verifying every piece themselves with no regulatory authority providing much support, Kirschnick says. HeartPine’s book of business is still about 50 percent reclaimed wood, 35 percent European oak, and 15 percent newly sawn wood (mostly domestic oak). Kirschnick expects the new French oak line to take over about 10 percent of the sales mix. Reclaimed wood, which remained relatively price-stable through the COVID-19 pandemic and is actually less expensive now than it was five years ago due to sourcing efficiencies, shifts in pricing strategies, and competitive pressures, is about 30 percent pricier than newly sawn wood.

Where in the United States does heart pine fare best? In the areas of the country where it once dominated the forests, an expanse stretching millions of acres from the southern part of Virginia, down to Florida, and across the plains to Texas.

“Heart pine actually built this country,” Kirschnick says. “As soon as Jamestown was settled, the king put a mark on the pine trees and said, ‘These belong to me.’”

Categories
Knife & Fork Magazines

Sbrocco’s delights MarieBette spinoff offers traditional take on donuts

Donuts have been on a certain trajectory for the last two decades: bigger, more toppings, more creativity—an arms race of candy, cookies, and fried pork.

After several years working with semi-traditionalists Jason Becton and Patrick Evans at MarieBette Café & Bakery, Melissa Sbrocco is going in a different direction. When she opens her namesake donut shop the second week of September (hopefully), dough nuts can expect to find a rotating lineup of classics: glazed, jelly-filled, chocolate iced, plain cake, chocolate iced cake.

“Jason is from New Jersey, and I grew up going to the Jersey Shore,” Sbrocco says. “We’re used to strip mall donut shops where you grab and go, kind of similar to a Dunkin’. That’s the concept.”

Sbrocco’s relationship with Becton and Evans began in 2020, when her temporary move to Charlottesville stretched long-term. A real estate agent before the move, Sbrocco’s plan was to stay until the pandemic ended, then go back to her life. But she and her husband fell in love with the town, and she found her way into baking, a passion project she’d always wanted to cultivate, via a job at MarieBette.

After four years together, Sbrocco, Becton, and Evans will partner up for Sbrocco’s Donuts & Espresso. Sbrocco will lean on her former bosses for consulting, she says, as well as for the brioche recipe they’ve developed at MarieBette. “We sometimes take the basic brioche dough scraps and fry them up,” Sbrocco says. “You can call any fried dough in a circle a donut.”

As the three partners prepare the new Sbrocco’s space on Maury Avenue in the former Anna’s Pizza spot, they’re also heavily involved in recipe development. Sbrocco’s favorite so far? Another traditional offering, the apple fritter. For that crispy hunk of nooks and crannies, Sbrocco uses a sturdier dough than the standard brioche base—kind of like a milk bread, she says.

A baker at heart, Sbrocco typically favors cake over yeast donuts; she says her 1,500-square-foot, eight- to 10-seat breakfast counter will always have two non-leavened crullers on hand. She and her partners have also experimented with a potato donut, a nod to Charlottesville’s spuddy pastry past.

As for coffee, Sbrocco hopes folks enjoy it the way she does. “We’ll have full espresso drinks,” she says. “But the classic is you have a donut and you have your drip.”

Categories
News

Albemarle High senior helps make repurposing breakthrough

Local high school student Vidya Ambati has potentially saved pharmaceutical researchers several years and billions of dollars in the fight against arthritis, and the breakthrough comes with at least one major side effect: a $50,000 college scholarship.

Ambati, along with 19 other gifted high school students nationwide, was named a 2024 Davidson Fellow in late August. The award’s administrator, the Davidson Institute, has given 448 students under 18 years old $50,000, $25,000, or $10,000 scholarships for groundbreaking research projects since 2001. This year, Ambati was among only four students to receive the top award.

“Vidya … her project was extraordinary,” says Tacie Moessner, Davidson Fellows Program director. “That’s not to say the students at the $10,000 or $25,000 level are less than, but the judges were really impressed with Vidya’s project. We have seen this level of work before, but they seem like they get better every year.”

Albemarle High School student Vidya Ambati won a $50,000 college scholarship for making a breakthrough in arthritis treatment. Supplied photo.

Working with advisors from the University of Virginia, 17-year-old Ambati discovered that a drug traditionally used for mental health disorders can reduce the risk of developing two forms of arthritis. The researchers found that the drug, Haloperidol, suppresses both rheumatoid arthritis and gout by binding to a newly identified protein.

Ambati says more than 200 million people worldwide have the two forms of arthritis. The Albemarle High School senior says she was inspired to pursue the Haloperidol project in part because several of her own family members suffer from arthritis.

Since Ambati and her mentors made their breakthrough, UVA has filed four patents around the technology, and the researchers are planning clinical trials. “It’s exciting but challenging,” Ambati says.

In addition to her exemplary work in the lab, Ambati runs an international webinar intended to connect students with scientific leaders and inspire them to explore science. She is also a promising young painter and sculptor. 

Ambati says she wants to continue studying science and pursue a career in biomedical research and/or health policy. Just starting her senior year of high school, she says she’s considering “several schools in the Northeast” for college but hasn’t made any decisions.

Drug repurposing has received heightened attention in recent years. While not a traditional form of repurposing, where a drug used to treat one malady is found to be effective for fighting another, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was built on pharmaceuticals originally developed to fight viruses like Zika and Nipah.

“Finding new drugs and using AI and machine learning to try to find new drugs and speed up that process is very top of mind with student researchers—and professional researchers,” Moessner says.

The Davidson Fellows Scholarship has provided about $9.9 million in funds over the years to students in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, literature, and music. Moessner says science and technology applicants are the most common. 

According to Moessner, “the vast majority” of Davidson Fellows go on to graduate school, and many eventually earn doctoral degrees. The 2024 Fellows will be honored at a reception in Washington, D.C., in September.

Categories
Arts Culture

Guitar guru comes to C’ville fresh from Grammy nod

Blues rocker Samantha Fish says she “didn’t know what [she] was doing” when she made Girls With Guitars alongside Cassie Taylor and Dani Wilde in 2011. The same might be said of the albums’ producers, who probably should’ve known better by then.

When Wynonna Judd released her hit song of the same name in 1994, the guitars-are-for-boys trope was maybe not so tired. Thirty years later, Fish is part of the reason it’s hopefully ancient history.

Fish will take The Jefferson Theater stage on August 30 in the wake of 2023’s critically acclaimed Death Wish Blues, which earned the artist/singer-songwriter/guitarist her first Grammy nomination earlier this year. A collaboration with punk rocker Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album and sat at No. 1 on the Billboard blues chart for three straight weeks.

“I really hadn’t collaborated since Girls With Guitars,” Fish says. “Now that I have some experience, coming back and doing this with Jesse … you learn to take ‘no’ out of your vocabulary. Even if it is something that is a complete departure from you as a singular artist, you say, ‘I can try that.’”

Fish grew up in Missouri and began learning the guitar at age 15, essentially teaching herself, with family and friends showing her tricks here and there. Without any formal lessons, she listened to classic rock—AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Tom Petty—and learned to pick out the riffs by ear. She began writing songs in her late teens, citing Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen as central influences, and found gigs by cold-calling bars. 

“Blues was all of my favorite musicians’ favorite music,” Fish says. “So I was just digging backwards and going through the list of all the great traditional blues artists.”

Fish has produced an album every two years since 2009, when she recorded Live Bait with what was then known as the Samantha Fish Blues Band. The guitarist began attracting high praise in 2019, when she made the first of three albums, Kill or Be Kind, on Rounder Records. Produced by Grammy winner Scott Billington, Kill or Be Kind landed on album review outlet AllMusic’s list of editors’ “Favorite Blues Albums.” Fish’s next solo effort, 2021’s Faster, received similar critical acclaim.

Death Wish Blues was born when, after many years of discussing a side project, Fish and her manager decided to approach Dayton, whose resumé includes recording with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, touring with seminal punk band X, and working with Rob Zombie on horror film soundtracks.

Produced by Jon Spencer of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Death Wish Blues attracted not only the attention of the Grammy committee, but also two of Fish’s idols. Eric Clapton invited her to perform at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles, and GNR guitarist Slash brought Fish on for a run during his S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour earlier this year.

Now onto her own Bulletproof tour, Fish says she’s finally able to ruminate on her full career and focus on her growing canon. “This is the first time I’ve been on tour without a new record,” she says. On August 30, that means Charlottesville fans will get to see the musician revisit older material and dig into unique covers, along with adapting songs from Death Wish Blues to arrangements sans Dayton.

“It is weird, your relationship with songs over the years,” Fish says. “I will hear some things that I did and cringe—like, ‘what the fuck was I thinking?’—but then other things will hit differently. Here I am years later, and I’ll find I wrote about something I’m just now experiencing. It’s a refreshing look.” 

While Fish shakes up the old and new arrangements, she’s also eyeing her next record; after all, she’s never gone more than two years without recording. If her luck holds, she says she’ll be back in the studio sometime during the Bulletproof tour. “We’re aiming for spring or summer, but every time I verbalize it, it doesn’t happen,” she says. 

What that record will be, Fish has yet to decide. She’s come a long way since Girls With Guitars, and she says part of the evolution happens all the way up to the time when she steps into the studio with her band. By way of example, Fish says she and Dayton originally conceived of the decidedly roots-driven Death Wish Blues as a “punk rock side project.” 

“Talking about things doesn’t necessarily guarantee what they will be,” she says. 

What Fish does know is that she plans to make music for a long time to come. “I don’t know what else I would be doing. I don’t have any other skills,” she laughs. “I love playing music, and there’s a little ecosystem built into what we’re doing. We’ve got the train rolling here.”

Categories
Culture Living

Local funny (business) man’s comedy evolves

A few years ago, Abhishek Kulkarni was just a guy getting a business degree who dabbled in comedy. Now, he’s a local open mic mainstay who’s learned to work a crowd.

“Initially, I was writing a lot of new content for the U.S. audience, so I would go like three weeks of telling the same jokes with subtle variation,” Kulkarni says. “Then I got a handle on what they like … and I started riffing on stage.”

Kulkarni, who’s working on a PhD in business ethics and strategy at UVA’s Darden School of Business, started doing stand-up when he was studying in the U.K. He signed up for a random talent show, told a few jokes, and caught people’s attention. He stuck with it and, when he moved back to Mumbai, fell in with a comedy troupe with a large internet following. 

Mumbai had just opened its own outpost of the legendary Comedy Store at the time. When five performers approached Kulkarni about joining them in SNG Comedy, he jumped at the opportunity. The experience gave him exposure to multiple formats: podcasts, improv, skits, and stand-up. Kulkarni traveled around India, opened for the more seasoned SNG funnymen, and studied comedy writing.

“Initially, it was very much about getting the joke right,” Kulkarni says. “Usually, when the comedian first writes a joke, it’s not funny.”

Since the early days, Kulkarni’s evolved as a comedy student, dissecting setups and punchlines like business researchers dissect regressions and spreadsheets. It’s no wonder that in 2023 he decided to build on his MBA and find a PhD program where he could dig deep into ethics and strategy research.

What brought him to Darden’s newly relaunched program is laughable. He knew he needed experience to get into a top-flight U.S. university, so he signed on as a research associate at the Indian School of Business. One day he was sitting alone reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. A professor walked by and struck up a conversation. The two shared an interest in stoic philosophy and the discussion came around to Kulkarni’s pursuit of a doctorate. The professor told him about Darden restarting its PhD track, and Kulkarni looked into it. The program offered him a chance to pursue all his interests—strategy, ethics, and entrepreneurship—and moved quickly to the top of his list. He applied and was accepted.

“After I got the admissions letter and had the offer in hand, I went to search for this professor,” Kulkarni says. “I could not find this man. I described him to people; I went to the admissions office and told them what he looked like. They said, ‘There is no such person.’”

Since coming to Charlottesville, Kulkarni has scarcely missed a Monday open mic at The Southern Café and Music Hall. He still gets easy laughs for his faux naiveté as an Indian in the United States, but his comedy’s come of age since he started taking on current events and plying the improv chops he learned with SNG. On a recent night, he overheard a young lady in the front row say he was cute and joined the conversation. “You know this is not a TV screen,” he quipped. “But I am very happy you find me cute.”

During the now infamous Biden-Trump debate week, Kulkarni riffed on the candidates’ sophomoric golf dustup: “I was like, ‘First of all, how is this a conversation about vitality? Golf is not a measure of vitality. It’s not even a sport; you use a tiny vehicle to get around.”

Kulkarni finds this kind of humor works well in Charlottesville. 

“Honestly, the audience here is just ripe for comedy,” he says. “There have been some cities where I’ve performed where you have to dumb down certain jokes—like, these are the three topics they laugh at. Charlottesville is not one of those places. They enjoy a vulgar joke as much as high-brow comedy.”

As Kulkarni’s comedy has changed, so have his research interests. He’s still fine-tuning his doctoral thesis topic, but it will almost certainly have a humorous edge. One promising avenue? Examining the humor in the show “Shark Tank,” where famous investors decide whether to give an entrepreneur money if they like the pitch. He’s gone through countless episodes of the show, cataloging jokes, how they’re made, and how they’re received. He’s still crunching the numbers, but one takeaway: Jokes are effective in business, but only in the right context.

Kulkarni hopes he’ll be doing comedy for a long time, but not as a professional. There’s too much pressure in entertaining and generating content for a living. He envisions himself as a respected business professor sprinkling lectures with laughs. More than the gratification a performer gets cracking up an audience, lecturers with a human touch are the most likely to reach students—or so Kulkarni finds from his own experience on the other side of the classroom. “I want students to feel like a participating audience in one of my shows rather than [like they’re] being talked at,” he says.

To keep performance a part of his life, Kulkarni thinks he might one day open a comedy club of his own. Who knows? Maybe after he’s well established, he’ll start an open mic for young entertainers, giving them a place to make bad jokes, then make them better, and eventually figure out what the hell they’re doing.

Categories
2024 Best of C-VILLE Staff Picks

Indie Short Film Festival looks to expand after successful launch

Ty Cooper defies categorization. As a marketing professional, he’s worked with all manner of companies and in myriad media. As a visual artist, he’s made his mark as an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and designer. 

Perhaps that’s why Cooper is drawn to short films.

“If a person is interested in being a filmmaker, shorts are an easier entry,” Cooper says. “They’re less expensive, and you can be super creative and do things you can’t get away with in a feature film. You can have fun and learn to love filmmaking. It gives [filmmakers] an opportunity to experiment and get better and be as quirky as possible.”

Cooper held his inaugural Indie Short Film Festival, a three-day rumpus of screenings, table reads, and parties in March. He showed nearly 75 shorts, held panel discussions, hosted a screenplay competition, and helped select best-of-show winners—all in four locations centrally located around the Downtown Mall.

The festival was an expansion of Cooper’s long-running short film series—a way to “massage the market,” he says, and get a sense for whether he should keep the festival going annually. After the success of the first event, during which three of the 12 screening blocks were sold out and several others were at greater than 80 percent of capacity, Cooper says he’s planning a second festival for 2025.

“I quantify success not only by looking at the numbers of people coming in—the sold-out screenings—but by going to the panel discussions and seeing the Common House with only a couple seats open and seeing people engaged with the filmmakers,” Cooper says.

To select films, Cooper started his search at Sundance, which he attends every year to see movies and meet filmmakers. Nearly 25 percent of the eventual Indie Short Film Festival playlist came from the renowned Salt Lake City independent film festival. Another 25 percent of the flicks came straight from Virginia, and the rest were selected from other submissions, festival screenings, and foreign films, with at least 11 countries eventually represented. 

Cooper has eschewed a themed festival to maximize voices, but he organizes the films for screening blocks. The 2024 festival featured animated blocks, documentaries, Virginia-focused segments, and miscellaneous narrative blocks. It included films by people of color, women, and wide-ranging ethnic representatives. The panel discussions took on topics like women in film and the Black experience in American cinema. 

“Part of my goal is to put all these voices on the screen,” Cooper says. “It was a melting pot.”

Cooper, whose marketing and branding firm Lifeview Marketing and Visuals counts the Virginia Film Festival among its clients, says his 2025 event will be bigger and better than his first foray. After polling attendees about their experiences, he says he’ll implement changes large and small. “I talk to every single person I see with their lanyard swinging,” Cooper says. 

The 2025 Indie Short Film Festival will be held March 21–23 at various theaters and restaurants around the Downtown Mall.