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The Overlook with Matt Peiken
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The Overlook with Matt Peiken

Author: Matt Peiken

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Local newsmakers, civic leaders, journalists, artists and others in the know talk with host Matt Peiken about the growing, complicated city of Asheville, N.C. New episodes are available Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

182 Episodes
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In the second half of this two-part conversation, founders of the coalition Reclaim Healthcare WNC talk about their pressure campaign with HCA Healthcare to dramatically and demonstrably improve conditions for patients and staff at Mission Hospital. My guests are State Senator Julie Mayfield, retired physician Bruce Kelly and Missy Harris, who recently left Mission Hospital after five years there as a chaplain. They talk about the potential for competition with Mission in the region...
So much has been written and said in the five years since the corporation HCA Healthcare purchased Asheville’s nonprofit Mission Hospital. Doctors, nurses and other staff have fled amid what many see as the company’s push for profits over people. North Carolina’s attorney general has filed lawsuits. Nobody involved in the original deal has spoken candidly about how this sale even made it across the finish line.Today is the first in a two-part conversation with leaders of a new coalition calle...
Esther Manheimer is serving her third term as Asheville’s mayor. The challenges this city faces today—and the strategies deployed to tackle them—have evolved a lot during her time in office.Today, we check in with Mayor Manheimer around a variety of issues—homelessness, affordable housing, enforcing the city’s policy on short-term rentals and property tax increases, along with boosting the salaries for police officers and firefighters. We also get her assessment of how this council has perfor...
Jewish Voice for Peace is a nonprofit with chapters in Asheville and around the U.S. and beyond. Except for the name of the organization, you won’t find much about Judaism on their website or in their talking points.** They're focused on peace in the Middle East and, to JVP, that means the liberation of Palestinians. My guests are Anne Craig, Rebecca Croog and Said Abdallah from the Asheville chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. You’ll learn about their varied backgrounds and what led them to t...
Jefferson Ellison is the first to say he grew up with privilege. His father was Asheville’s vice mayor and ran his own law firm for 40 years, and his mother holds two master’s degrees. Still at 31, Jefferson isn’t taking shortcuts with his own career or place in the city. He sits on the boards of the Asheville Downtown Association and the Downtown Commission, and he’s a voice of influence on The Block Collaborative, which is working with city leaders on the revisioning of Pack Square.Tod...
Like most leaders in the arts, Heather Maloy spends far more time raising money, hunting for rehearsal spaces and recruiting dancers than she does immersed in the work she’s so committed to—cultivating the ideas and creating the dances that are the signature of her Asheville-based company, Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance. For 21 summers, Terpsicorps has fielded troupes of young professionals from all over the U.S. and beyond, who put their feet to the fire of Maloy’s imagination. I met with...
Carolina Quiroga moved to Asheville only about a year ago, but she’s already a distinctive storyteller here, blending folk tales and her own experiences from her native Colombia with newer stories born from observations of her newly adopted home.On July 11, she begins a residency of three weekly performances at Story Parlor in West Asheville. Today, we talk about straddling the line between her father’s expectations and her own desires, her self-appointed mission to educate certain peopl...
Michael Cayse has only been Asheville’s Fire Chief since the start of the year, but he came here with more than three decades of experience in Cincinnati and, as part of that, working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Asheville firefighters received a pay raise in the new fiscal year budget of nearly 9 percent, but that still puts them behind where they’d like to be. My guest today, Chief Cayse, tells us about the other ways Asheville works to be a department that attracts and keep...
Who says rock music is dying out? A trio of sisters from Asheville are doing their part to bring rock to a new generation. Detective Blind takes the spotlight in the second episode of The Overlook drawn from our May 28 evening of Hear Here, a performance and podcasting series co-presented with Citizen Vinyl. The series is designed to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. The sisters in Detective Blind are ages 17, 14 and 12, but they already show off a confident musici...
This is the second half of my conversation with Hedy Fischer and Gail McCarthy, who along with their artist husbands bought buildings in the River Arts District early on and are committed to keeping those buildings open and affordable for other artists. They’re joined here by Stephanie Monson Dahl, the city’s manager of Urban Design, Place Strategies, and Long Range Planning.If you missed Part One, dial back in your podcasting app to listen to that first before tuning in here. In today's epis...
Hedy Fischer and Gail McCarthy have been in Asheville since the late 1970s and, along with their artist husbands, played critical roles in the evolution of the River Arts District from a neglected, polluted wasteland of warehouses into the thriving arts and commerce destination it is today. They also have thoughts on whether the scales of progress for the neighborhood have tipped too far.Today is the first in a two-part conversation with Fischer and McCarthy, along with Stephanie Monson Dahl,...
Hear Here is a performance and podcast series designed to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. I invited two all-female bands to the May 28 evening of Hear Here at Citizen Vinyl. The bands Detective Blind and O•VAD•YA come from different generations. Detective Blind are three sisters—the eldest is only 17—while most of the members of O•VAD•YA are in their 50s and 60s. Still, the bands made fast friends with each other at soundcheck and the good energy between the...
There are about 400 Bee City USA programs across 47 states, all with a mission to sustain pollinators by increasing native plants and nest sites while reducing the use of pesticides. The entire Bee City movement started in Asheville 12 years ago with the efforts of Phyllis Stiles. During the thick of a month of pollination celebration here, I talk with Stiles about her path to pollination through beekeeping and the start and growth of Bee City Asheville and Bee City USA.We talk about ho...
Pete Candler wears many creative hats. He’s a photographer and maker of short films—all of it self-taught—and he’s also an author and recovering academic.His new book, titled “A Deeper South," is both an internal and external travelogue over 25 years of road trips through the American South. We’ll also talk about leaving a tenured professorship at Baylor University to pursue his creative impulses, why he has always been drawn to photographing places rather than people and his discovery of a f...
Madison Brightwell and Don Silver are local novelists who don’t know each other but have similar creative trajectories. Both spent early years behind the scenes—Brightwell in film production, Silver working for music mogul Clive Davis—before turning to more conventional careers. It wasn’t until their 40s that both leaned into writing fiction. Silver’s new generation-spanning, coming-of-age book is titled “Scorched.” Our talk is the second half of today’s episode. We begin with my convers...
Most people reading or listening to this likely take their literacy for granted. But for thousands of youth and adults throughout Buncombe County, literacy is a hurdle impacting nearly every element of life.My guests are executive director Amanda Wrubleski and program directors Rebecca Massey and Erin Sebelius with Literacy Together. It’s an Asheville nonprofit training and teaming reading tutors with struggling youth, immigrants, people emerging from prison and many others. Literacy Together...
April 27 marked the debut of "Hear Here," a series presented in tandem with Citizen Vinyl to elevate conversation around local rock and indie music. The premiere featured talk and performances with the bands Pink Beds and Caged Affair.This episode is all about Caged Affair, a vocalist-guitarist son and his drumming father from Waynesville, whose music is shaped by '90s bands such as Nirvana, Weezer and Everclear.The next "Hear Here" evening is an all-female lineup Tuesday, May 28, at Citizen ...
We all know the impact of Asheville’s skyrocketing housing costs. What we don’t hear nearly as much about is how artists and arts organizations are finding it more challenging to do their work in Asheville.Affordable workspaces was the topic of the latest ArtsAVL Creative Space Town Hall. Matt Peiken moderated a May 10 panel at Asheville Community Theater and recorded it to bring it to you here.Joining Matt on stage were DeWayne Barton (Blue Note Junction), Ashleigh Hardes Koslow (Lexington G...
We hear a lot about pervasive social issues in our community—homelessness, addiction, racial inequities, affordable housing, liveable wages. All of those play roles in one particular need we rarely hear about—diapers.My guests today are Alicia Heacock and Meagan Lyon Leimena, co-executive directors of Babies Need Bottoms, an Asheville nonprofit diaper bank that distributes about 40,000 diapers every month to partner organizations across 16 Western North Carolinas counties.Alicia and Meagan sa...
It’s a female-powered, multi-generational, one-of-a-kind lineup for the next Hear Here—Tuesday, May 28, featuring the Asheville-area bands Detective Blind and O•VAD•YA.Listen here for clips of their music. Advance tickets are just $12.Wake Up, Asheville! and ¡Despierta Asheville! (in Spanish) are new morning newscast podcasts that give you all the local news you need to know in under five minutes. Both are free to subscribe/follow wherever you get your podcasts!Support the Show.Support ...
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