104 Mildred Ct.

104 Mildred Ct.

256.656.7753

» WHAT I BELIEVE

Nashville, TN 37211 Kempten, I am interested in becoming a part of the editorial team at Green Olive Media and helping tell the stories of your clients. I believe in Story. I believe that every person in the world has their own unique story waiting to be told. More often than not, these stories are hidden within threads (connecting )running throughout the events and actions of people’s lives and never get to be told. In the hands of the right person, though, these threads can be found and woven together to reveal a coherent and meaningful story. I believe that by extension, any endeavor (professional or otherwise) that a person believes passionately in becomes an intrinsic part of who they are. To tell the story of the businesses that people love is to tell the story of those people's hopes and dreams. I love being given the opportunity to hear of people's lives and I believe that I have a unique gift for seeing their hidden threads and of being able to communicate them coherently and eloquently in new and meaningful ways. I am drawn to Green Olive Media because it is clear that you work with clients who are not simply making a living but who truly believe in the things they do. My dream is to work alongside people like that and to share in their passion while working toward helping them reach their dreams. I also love the South. There is a richness evident in southern culture that adds a unique color to its people's stories that can't be found in other parts of the country and it is a huge draw for me that much of your clientele is based in and around the area. Most importantly though, I feel that working for Green Olive Media is something for which I could be passionate about. I would love to find a place as a part of your team and hopefully provide my talents to communicate the passion that your clients have for their businesses and to help provide them with an even fuller and more complete brand as a result. -Chris Goodson

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104 Mildred Ct.

256.656.7753

August - October 2008 Freelance Writer Relevant Magazine Worked from Auburn, Alabama Hired as an out-of-office writer to produce feature stories assigned by the magazine staff to be published in the print magazine.

May - August 2008 Editorial Intern Relevant Media Group Orlando, Florida

» PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

» EMPLOYMENT

Nashville, TN 37211

Conducted research and interviews for various stories for both the print

Photoshop Illustrator InDesign Microsoft Word Quark Xpress

Other skills Photography (digital + film) Experienced with OSX, Windows and Linux

and online magazine. Copy-edited content submitted by writers. Wrote stories assigned by the staff for both print and web magazine.

April 2006 – June 2007 Assistant Campus Editor The Auburn Plainsman

» EDUCATION

Auburn, Alabama Thought of and distributed stories to staff writers and editing and paginating stories upon submission. Took on a 4-to-5 story per week writing load in order to provide the paper with enough content for publication.

BA of Journalism Minors in English and Psychology Auburn University Auburn, Alabama Graduated: May 2009

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SCOTT HARRISON » PORTFOLIO: WRITING

Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

Scott Harrison is a hard man to track down. On any given day, one would be just as likely to find him taking a conference call behind a desk in his SOHO office as they would of finding him nearly 7000 miles away, digging in the dirt in the arid heat of West Africa. But to anyone who knows Harrison, finding him in either place at any time would hardly be considered out of the ordinary. This is because, for the past four years, his life has been a delicate balancing act between western high-society and third-world poverty. Although seemingly two separate worlds, both integral parts to the story of his life that could lead him anywhere in the world at any time. Unlike other days, though, today is September 7, Harrison’s 33rd birthday, which means that there can be no doubt as to where to he can be found. The place, an unorthodox birthday destination, is known as the Abenea school and is located in highly-impoverished Northern Ethiopia. Here, he is no longer hard to find. Surrounded by thousands of locals, the light-skinned, salt-and-pepper-haired American looks incredibly conspicuous and out of place. His dirty, wet jeans and T-shirt mark him as unmistakably foreign just as his speech erases all doubt. But Harrison has a story, one that explains why, despite all appearances, he knows that he is precisely where he needs to be, doing exactly what he was created to do. And why, here, at a school that is home to more than 1,400 impoverished students living living in one of the most remote and poorest places in the world without even the bare necessities of life, he cannot hide the grin stretching across his face. And, most importantly, this story explains how, under the scorching sun of this place and others like it - places so dry that even the ground cracks and breaks from thirst - Scott Harrison has just made it rain. Water. Every good story has an over-arching theme. It is what connects the story’s events and gives meaning to its characters’ lives, making sense of their actions by providing them with a deeper purpose. For Harrison, this theme is water. For the past four years it has been the focal point of his life, running like a stream directly through its center, touching and influencing nearly everything he has done in that time. And, just like a river etches canyons from creek beds, slowly but surely it has cut and shaped him into the man he is today. Mercy. In the beginning, it was water that carried Harrison away from the life he once knew a life where, for a decade, he had run an event company in New York, where he was payed to plan special events and parties for the city’s social elite the likes of MTV, VH1 and Cosmo. But after spending a third of his life in a state of social climbing and materialism within a world of nightclubs and cocaine, Harrison found himself empty and desperately in need of a change. So, seeking both self-discovery and penance to God for a life thus far misspent, he joined global charity Mercy Ships, a humanitarian organization that provides free medical services to the poorest areas of the world, as a volunteer photojournalist aboard one of their hospital ships. Aboard his new home, the 52-year-

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SCOTT HARRISON » PORTFOLIO: WRITING

Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

old, 550-foot ‘Anastasis’ , he left his life of excess for a cramped, below-deck cabin bound for the poverty of West Africa’s shores. Aboard the Mercy Ships’ floating hospitals, doctors and surgeons from around the globe are able to reach the most remote of these regions and provide free treatment for the countless people who otherwise have no access to even the most basic of medical care. It was in these places that Harrison first encountered the incredible poverty that millions around the globe face as reality. Through his camera lens, Harrison saw medical cases unimaginable in areas of the world with access to modern medical care. Every day he saw medical atrocities that Western medicine had all but eradicated in the rest of the world. He saw men slowly suffocating from grotesque, disfiguring tumors that had grown to engulf their heads and he saw children, sad-eyed and hopeless who had been horribly scarred by infections and flesheating bacteria, too ashamed of their own appearance to look him in the face. And through all of this, he learned that the reason for all of this suffering was tragically simple: Water. Although it covers 80% of the world and composes 70% of the human body, there are over 1.1 billion people - one sixth of the earth’s population - who live without access to a safe source of water. For who have it, the inability to obtain water is a concept too foreign to comprehend. Yet for those without, as disease and infection goes unchecked within their communities, spread by the murky, contaminated water they are forced to consume just to stay alive, it is an ever-present reality. "A billion people,” Harrison says, “that’s a big problem. What that actually means is that millions of people walk hours each day to get water that makes them sick.” This water lies stagnant in shallow pools often nothing more than glorified puddles, breeding grounds for parasitic organisms and disease. Because of this, it is estimated that 80% of all disease in the world is transmitted through unsafe water, a statistic supported by Harrison’s countless stories. “You’ve got leaches in water, you have parasites in water, you’ve got water borne diseases,” he says. “There’s a nasty one called chistosomeiasis which is a nice, fancy word for worms crawling through your feet or your intestines.” He has seen ailments, normally considered little more than nuisances, become killers without water. “Diarrhea is killing millions of kids each year,” Harrison says. “A child will drink bad water, then get diarrhea and drink more bad water and eventually just die of dehydration. Something that we would just never even think of being lethal is killing millions of kids.” And he’s right. Every week around the globe, 42,000 people, 90% of whom are just children under the age of five, lose their lives, simply because they lack water and basic sanitation. And as thousands a day died and millions of others suffered, Harrison saw them through tear-blurred lenses, hoping that the images he captured would give a voice to and effect a change for he people he saw quietly dying below the radar of the rest of the world. Charity. So, when the time came for Harrison to return home from Mercy Ships, he knew that

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SCOTT HARRISON » PORTFOLIO: WRITING

Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

he couldn’t forget what he had seen, what he now knew, and go back to his old life. To him, the next step was obvious. “The more I learned about the global water crisis, there was really nothing more pressing that affected the global poor,” he says. “Deciding after my two-year-stint volunteering with mercy ships that I wanted to throw the rest of my life at this, water was sort of the only place to start.” So, with the conditions in water-less communities still fresh in his mind’s eye, Harrison decided to find a way to provide it. The result: out of his SOHO apartment, he founded Charity: Water, a non-profit organization dedicated to solving the global water problem at its source, by drilling life-giving wells inside of the communities. “It’s sort of related to the work on Mercy Ships,” Harrison says. “They were doing a lot of after-care, but by giving people clean water we can perhaps prevent some of these diseases in the first place.” With his two years of raising support for Mercy Ships serving as guidelines, Harrison founded Charity: Water using elements that he had already seen work. Because of this, one of Charity’s main goals is to provide a link between donors and the work being done through their donations. “Charity was sort of born out that,” Harrison says. “We said, ‘Every time we start a water project lets take a GPS coordinate, put it up on Google Earth and take a picture of the community so people can see exactly where the money went.’” Similarly, With little more than these simple guidelines and a fresh remembrance of untold suffering, Harrison held the official launch for Charity: Water on September 7, 2006, his 31st birthday. The event, which was as much a birthday party as it was launch party, was incredibly successful. “That was our start,” he says. “700 friends came and everyone tossed $20 dollars in for a bottle of water. We raised $15,000 dollars and we built 3 wells and fixed three wells in southern Uganda.” And from there, there was no turning back. With Harrison’s vast social connections fueled by his powerful blend of charisma and passion for those in need, Charity was able to OTHER FUNDRAISERS September. Charity’s most successful campaign, however, has been around since day one. Called Born in September, this annual campaign began as a modified version of the organization’s launch party to mark the first anniversary of Charity: Water. “We said, ‘Let’s not throw another party for our one year anniversary,’” Harrison says, “‘let’s actually send out invitations to not attend a party and ask everyone to stay home and just send in a little bit of money. I was turning 32, so we said, let’s ask everybody for $32.” And that was all it took. Ninety others quickly followed his lead, giving up their birthdays in lieu of donations to Charity. By the campaign’s completion, $150,000 had been raised, 10 times the amount from the previous year, which Charity used to dig wells for three hospitals and one school in Kenya, showing donors their progress through videos uploaded nightly to their website . This year, they’re going even bigger. It started in April, when Harrison visited 33 waterless communities throughout Ethiopia, creating and posting short film of each to

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SCOTT HARRISON » PORTFOLIO: WRITING

Originally published in the __ issue of Relevant Magazine

Charity’s website. The films, made to give the public a more intimate look at the campaign, represented the first 33 communities scheduled to receive wells from the campaign. His hope is, after completion of the first 33 wells, to continue building until reaching their goal of 333 wells from this year’s campaign. “The goal of the [2008] September campaign is to build 333 wells in Ethiopia. To do that, we need $1.5 million,” Harrison says. “So this year we said ‘Hey, let’s try and do 10 times what we did last year. If 90 people could raise this money, what about 900 people? could we do 10 times that?’” Hope. Knowing the story of Scott Harrison’s life, that is a question requires no answer. He has already answered it himself many times, in stories just like this one on this day in Abenea. He is still standing in the sun, the smile still betraying his excitement for the day, as tiny water droplets fall behind him, turning the surrounding earth to mud. Each cool, clean drop is the precursor to countless gallons that will follow to provide potable water that this community so desperately needs, the well itself serving as the first proof of this year’s September campaign. And all of these things serve to answer Harrison’s question. All of it: the mud, the smile, the water, the well; they are all signs of the progress that he has made in the last four years, reminders of the lives that have been changed and, more importantly, those who haven’t. Of course he believes that ten times more could be raised, he’s seen it happen too many times before not to. And so, he will keep moving all over the planet, flowing like the water that is so central to his life, until there is no longer a need for him to do so. AT THE TIME OF THIS PUBLICATION, Charity:WATER HAD RECEIVED $408,000 IN MATCHING FUNDS ($816,000 TOTAL I THINK), HAVING RAISED OVER $6 MILLION SINCE THEY WERE FOUNDED, WITH OVER 800 PROJECTS GOING IN 6 COUNTRIES.

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» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

A WAVERLY STORY Inside Conrad Carpenter’s house, a fresh breeze blows through an old screen door, preventing the insects of a warm South Alabama afternoon from joining the festivities inside. They are not needed tonight; the air inside is already abuzz, full of the sights, smells and sounds of laughter and cooking. Jazz music emanates from a radio in the kitchen where Carpenter’s friends each have a role in preparing for the night’s chili: chopping green peppers, searing meat, washing, talking, drinking, each task equally important in its own way. These are friends and neighbors, joined together for no special reason other than to be with one another. Just as the meat is ready to go in to the pot, three young boys bearing plastic fire arms burst from the back of the house and chase each other through the front door out into the cool early evening of their neighborhood. This is Waverly. With a population hovering just below 200 residents, it rests in the bottom ten percent of cities in Alabama. Founded sometime around 1830 as Pea Ridge and becoming the incorporated town of Waverly in 1910, it has rarely seen times when its population has drastically exceeded this. Its size, 2.7 square miles, has been preserved over the years due to the strong hedging of tree farms owned by longtime residents who have refused to sell. From the 1950’s, the town was host to old U.S. Highway 280, a two lane stretch of tarmac jutting East from of Birmingham. Finally, in 2000, a bypass was completed which diverted the highway back out of town, leaving Waverly as a sleepy little town once again. According to native Willie Mae Mcdonald, a lifetime resident and one of its oldest at 85, Waverly is a very special town. “There ain’t never real bad people in Waverly. Everybody used to hunt and fish together and whatever. We just be neighbors to each other and good to each other, that’s all we want.”Willie Mae Old School Waverly is a modern day Mayberry, iconic small town America. It is the kind of town where people grow their own vegetables in neatly seeded rows in their front yards. The kind of town where people still sit on old southern front-porches enjoy the cool night air under countless stars, untainted by light pollution from big cities. The kind of town where houses are just a little bit too close to a road that was constructed when the only traffic involved moving through had four legs. And Waverly is the kind of town where the cemetery is still located, both geographically and personally, to most of the residents’ lives; a celebration of a proud town heritage where the names etched deep into to the headstones can still be found painted on to the sides of mailboxes throughout town because the bloodlines memorialized there still flow strong in the veins the of residents. It is exactly the type of place where you would expect to meet a man like Marcus Moremon. Upon first impression, Marcus Moremon is an imposing man. His powerful voice emanates purposefully from deep within the tall, broad frame that he holds startlingly straight and easily for his 80 years. Preceding even his physical stature, Moremon’s namesake bears a heritage deeply and proudly rooted in Waverly. His family was one of the first to move to town, arriving in 1845. His Father and Grandfather both established themselves by owning their own stores in Waverly. Perhaps more impressive here, there are 9 Moremons resting in the local Cemetery, securing him firmly in the lineage of this town.

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» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

A WAVERLY STORY A resident of Waverly his entire life, Moreman entered the Army at the age of 16, serving for two years before Auburn University. He was called back into service in 1950 for the Korean War, this time serving for 26 years before serving for 20 more years as a commandant at Lyman Ward Military Academy. He then moved back to Waverly where he was Mayor from 1990 until 1999. According to Willie Mae McDonald, an 85-year-old lifelong resident, Moremon is something of a champion for the town and its people. “It don’t matter what comes up, if it’s good or bad, he keeps pickin’ at it, he wants to get it goin’ right,” she says. “If I called Marcus he’d be right here, if I needed to go somewhere, he’d take me. Marcus always stood by our family soon as anybody else that I know of. I tell ‘em all, I say if Marcus wasn’t here to help do these things and get em going, nobody wouldn’t do nothin’. He’s a good man. He may roar a little bit but that don’t matter nothin’” New School Despite being a haven of so many old-world charms, Waverly is also home to a lot of diversity. The kind of town where in the early afternoon you can find a 65-year-old bearded man plowing the garden surrounding his home, sitting shirtless on an old tractor, sipping on a beer while discussing the conflict in the Middle East and quoting Yeats. The kind of town where if you call either Waverly Town Hall or the Waverly Diet Center The kind of town where graphic design professors from nearby Auburn University move to raise their families and open studios from which to practice their craft. And it is the kind of town where you would find someone like Scott Peek. Just down the road from Moremon’s, Peek’s building is unmistakable. Its outside walls are adorned with an assortment of signs of every color imaginable, making it noticeably more eclectic than the other buildings on the road through town. The largest of these signs, placed in a prominent position in front, reads, “Real Southern Vernacular Postmodern Eclectic Screen Printing.” This is the Standard Deluxe silkscreen and print shop owned and operated by Peek for a decade from right here in Waverly. Despite this and though he has lived in Waverly since the fall of 1991, Peek is still very much considered a newcomer to town in comparison to others. Although his building is located directly across the street from the cemetery, Peek’s only link to it is a string of orange and yellow flags stretching from his into the graveyard, a connection not held in high regard by the locals. He moved here directly after graduating from nearby Auburn University with a degree in Graphic design whereupon he opened the Standard Deluxe with two partners. Since then he has gone solo and built the business to national acclaim, attracting a loyal following as well as many ties with Auburn’s graphic design program. Peek’s love for art also extends beyond the realm of design through a passion for local and regional music. He does his best to support these bands by bringing them to town to perform at parties that he throws throughout the year. As a result his influence, the artistic community in Waverly has seen a lot of growth during his time living here. “I think Scott Peek probably had a lot of influence on me moving here,” says Andy

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» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

A WAVERLY STORY Anderson the Vice President of Wickle’s Pickles and resident of Waverly. “I didn’t even really know him until about the time I started working here but just the cool artsy culture of the town for the size town it is intrigued me.” Change The truly unique thing about Waverly is how, for years, it was a place of harmony between these very different groups of people. Old and new coexisted in community in a quiet little town that held refuge for both artists and the locals whose families had been there since its foundation. But recently things have begun to change. Growing tension between Peek and the landlord from whom he was renting the buildings he ran the Standard Deluxe out of led Scott to move his business down the road, toward his own home and into another house that he had been remodeling and had recently purchased. However, due to zoning regulations in Waverly, the house and the land it occupied were zoned historic residential, prohibiting a business from being operated there. On August 21, 2008, Peek and Carolyn Stubbs, a life-long resident of Waverly, filed an application to have seven buildings, including his, rezoned from historic residential to central historic so that business could be run out of them. On September 29, 2008, the Town of Waverly Planning Commission met about the zoning and sent a positive recommendation for approval to the Town Council, a move that normally results in the City Council also approving the rezone. However, when the Town Council finally met in November, they received dozens of letters written by citizens expressing their concerns about the rezoning. The majority, like David and Kyla Garner’s, focused their attention on the parties that Peek had been having on his property. “Over the past few years we have been disappointed about the path we have seen Waverly heading down,” They said. “Our biggest concern are the parties that are happening in town,” referring to the parties thrown by Peek at the Standard Deluxe.” After reviewing letter after letter expressing concern for the parties held at the Standard Deluxe and their effects on the community, the City Council sent the rezoning matter back to the Planning Commission where its original decision was reversed. With this decision, at the next City Council meeting, without any public hearing, the rezoning application was formally denied in a majority vote. So, as a result, Peek and Stubbs filed a lawsuit suing the City Council, including Marcus Moremon. Under counsel from legal advisors, all parties involved in the suit were unwilling to speak about the case. And now, this town that used to live in simple harmony is divided against itself, each side fighting for its own version of Waverly. The older set wants to maintain the quiet, peaceful town of their childhoods that they carry with them, forever persevered in their minds. For the old fighter Moremon, this means one thing, and he does not seem intent on backing down from what he believes. “I think most people want to keep it a nice quiet, peaceful safe town,” he says. “Most all the people I know kind of like it the way it is with its small-town atmosphere. It’s a quiet town safe town, a peaceful town, and a good place to raise kids and I hope it stays that way.” Mcdonald feels the same way. She loves her home and wants to see it survive, even after she is gone. “It used to be every-

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» PORTFOLIO: WRITING

A WAVERLY STORY one wanted to make a livin’, there wasn’t nothing like this sittin’ down work,” she said. “Everybody was friends, we never had a lot of fighting, we had a few drunks once in a while but not always but it’s been a nice quiet town and that’s the way we want to keep it.” On the other side, Peek is fighting a battle for his livelihood, trying to operate the business that he loves in the place he calls home. “The whole thing for me is to sell T-shirts and posters,” said Peek. “I don’t think we’re hurting anyone doing that. I love this town, but this is my business and they’re trying to take that away from me.” Mace Glasscock, a local farmer and carpenter, has been a Waverly resident for over thirty years. No longer considered a transplant yet still not a true local, he is able to look at the situation from somewhere outside. “You’ve got an old crowd that’s very entrenched that feel like they are Waverly and that anybody that’s a transplant is not,” he said, “and to a certain extent, they’re right. Small towns are all about whose names are already in the graveyard. Scott is the new wave, and I guess in some people’s minds, he still represents The Hippies... They’re still fighting the battle with the 60’s in their minds. The problem is this isn’t the 60’s anymore” For now, neither side has a clear edge over the other; both parties are locked in a stalemate trying to save the town they love. Everyone is confident that this will someday end, they have somehow missed along the way that they’re all fighting for the same thing. “I mean, it’s a Mayberry,” summarized Carpenter. “So I can understand that conservative side to keep it a Mayberry. But what they don’t realize is that a lot of these people, the same reason some of those artists and hippies and so forth moved out there was for the same reasons. They don’t want to change that, they want to keep that too. A lot of people are on the same page and they’re fighting and they don’t understand that they’re on the same page.” The Future In Conrad’s house, the chili is now simmering on the stove while music still plays from the small kitchen stereo. Now, however, the notes have to fight through a growing cacophony coming from the back yard. The back yard is an eclectic collection of various tools and colorful objects collected around an large white van and an old wooden shed, both of which Carpenter works from at different times. The sound is coming from a covered porch connected the back of the house where a tired and weather-worn piano is surrounded by the neighborhood boys from earlier, reigned in from running through the neighborhood to focus on their current venture. One sits at the bench, hammering the ivory keys while another stands back, blowing random notes from the shiny old trumpet in his hand as the third simply watches and grins. Extending a Coors to me in offering, Carpenter nods in their direction and smiles. “Have you met the boys yet?” he asks. “This the Waverly Gang. They’re the future of this place.” And from innocent joy on their faces, it is clear why everyone, young and old, is confident that whatever conflict has arisen will someday reside. It has to. They are, inevitably, the future of this town and it is apparent that they love it. “To me, one of the main reasons I stayed out there is that I want my son to know what it’s like to walk up and down the street, maybe even with a BB gun in his hand without someone calling the cops or someone getting upset,” Carpenter said. “Just knowing that there’s a lot of

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A WAVERLY STORY » PORTFOLIO: WRITING

eyeballs on him in town and I know that they’re going to be ok and I don’t have to worry.”

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» PORTFOLIO: PHOTOGRAPHY

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» PORTFOLIO: PHOTOGRAPHY