The official Dancing Deer Baking Company Blog

The more miles Trish conquers, the more she shares her thoughts and observations with us. In today’s phone call, she was riding along Route 78 between Athens and Augusta in 80 degree weather, and talked about meeting families at the Atlanta and Athens shelters.

She talked about encountering a new kind of journalism. “This is reporting without primary research, fact-checking, without contextual verification,” Trish says. Trish is meeting people with stories, without defined starting and end points. These stories are about the journeys that brought them to the shelters today, and like any life story, the path isn’t always clear.

"There are twists you aren’t going to hear; twists you’ll never know. You will never hear the whole story unless you spend a lot of time with this person,” Trish recalled, as a truck whizzed by in the background. “Whoever the individuals are, whatever the details are, these stories are different color on the lens.”

How do these stories impact her? “ At the end of the day, it’s fairly overwhelming to go to these shelters and meet all these people, and hear all their stories,” Trish admits. She continues, “Even if you are not hearing the thing that might have made them seem less heroic or more troubled, or whatever the thing is, the overwhelming evidence is that most people have come across hard luck and no support system.” Even more compelling, Trish says, “It’s not that much different than what many of us are right next to ourselves.”

More miles and more stories to come.