Episode 11: John Noltner challenges stereotypes and fosters dialogue by helping communities tell their stories
Hi, Side by Side listeners. This is Ellen here. Before we start the show today, I wanted to let you know that this is our final episode of season 1. Thank you so much for your listens and shout outs during this first season. We've so appreciated your support and well wishes.
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Ellen Wolter:Now on to the final episode of the season.
Music (Jim Griswold):Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
John Noltner:No one of us holds the entire truth. When I slow down and I hear those complexities and those nuances and that deeper story, I am always surprised. You talk about urban environments and you talk about a place like Skid Row, and I think the dominant narrative would say, oh, dangerous. It would say the people there aren't looking out for each other. It would say these folks are really isolated and forgotten and they fell through some cracks.
John Noltner:I knew if I went out on the street, I would find things that challenged that narrative and when I did, I found people who were poking their heads into the tents that lined the sidewalk and said, you doing okay in here? Anything you need? What can I do to help? And I saw the sort of care and looking out for one another that maybe gets associated with life in a small rural community and those human moments that I knew existed, but I had to see and experience for myself to challenge some of that inner dialogue that was going on in my mind as well.
Ellen Wolter:That's photographer John Noltner, founder of A Piece of My Mind, a storytelling project that captures personal stories and portraits to foster dialogue across divides. He's talking about his experience connecting with people living on skid row in Los Angeles and the care and community he found there. John joined me for a conversation about his storytelling work and the many urban, suburban and rural communities where it has taken him. He explains how storytelling through photography and narratives can help highlight the complexities found in communities. Nuance that is often not understood unless you've experienced a place firsthand.
Ellen Wolter:He shares how his work also helps people in their communities to feel seen and acknowledged. That their experiences are validated. John's work has taken him across the country to, among others, Manhattan, border towns in Texas, LA, tribal communities, and rural communities in Mississippi and Kansas. And whatever community he is in, he sees the pride that people have for their communities and their hunger for human connection and to understand lived experiences that are different from their own. And he talks about how he is working with other countries like Ireland and South Africa to learn and tell the story of reconciliation.
Ellen Wolter:As he says, sometimes it's easier to learn these lessons when we're not looking in the mirror.
Music (Jim Griswold):When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started just to travel along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Walter from the University of Minnesota Extension, and this is the Side by Side podcast. So you are in charge of, you lead, you are the creator of A Piece of My Mind. Can you tell us and our listeners what that is?
John Noltner:Yeah. The founder and the executive director, I guess. A Piece of My Mind is a storytelling project that I've been working on for about 15 years now. And, my my background is as a freelance photographer. I spent a couple of decades shooting, projects for national magazines and Fortune 500 companies, a lot of human interest stories, a lot of a lot of travel projects around the United States and around the world.
John Noltner:I reached a point where I was frustrated with the quality of our national dialogue, where I was I was increasingly concerned about all of the things that ask us to focus on what can separate us. And I really wondered if there was something I could do with my photography and storytelling to rediscover what connects us. So I started this storytelling project and the the the gist of it is that I sit down with people from all different backgrounds and we record these conversations. We create podcasts. I'm a I'm a photographer, so I also do a portrait of them.
John Noltner:And we've also created 5 traveling exhibits and 4 books through the years. And we bring these stories around the country to, colleges and community centers and conferences, and we use the stories to have conversations about conflict resolution and civic responsibility and social change. And at at the end of the day, around finding ways that we can live better together around all of these issues that we, I mean, real or perceived that seem to, get in the way of robust relationships.
Ellen Wolter:John, what was it that you felt was missing in our in our common discourse, in our narrative that led you to think about photographs being a way to share a common experience or find common ground?
John Noltner:Photography has been my way to explore the world, to get closer to issues, to understand things in a new way. But I've also been a huge fan of an oral historian by the name of Studs Terkel. If you know Studs, he's, he used to work for Chicago Public Radio. He produced a bunch of books. The first one I knew of was called Hard Times, and it was a collection of oral histories about people who had navigated through the depression.
John Noltner:And so I've I've always been a huge fan of Studs Terkel's work. And it occurred to me that that by combining someone else's oral history and their way of telling their own story, along with my photo, which then becomes sort of my interpretation of who I see and what I understand about that human, that it was this really interesting combination. And and at the same time, as I was starting to think about this, it felt like there were so many angry voices yelling at one another across these divides. Now, of course, 15 years later, that hasn't gotten better. I think it's gotten worse.
John Noltner:But I didn't want to try to out yell those people. I didn't wanna yell back at that anger and division. I wanted instead to offer a quieter and more contemplative alternative, A place where we could actually slow down and pause and hear those stories and understand things in a new way and really grapple with some of the complexities, that are present in our world.
Ellen Wolter:I follow your newsletter, and some of the things that you share and in your presentations is that this work is also about being seen and having people feel as if they are being seen and understood. And in your experience over the last, you know, many years that you've been doing this work, what do you think it is about being seen that helps to get away from some of those divisions? You know, certainly there's something about folks understanding a different story or a different perspective, but what it is what is it also about feeling seen and understood that helps with those divisions?
John Noltner:I mean, I think for me, one of the biggest obstacles we face is feeling misunderstood, feeling misrepresented, feeling mischaracterized. And and I think when we feel misunderstood, when we feel judged, we we become defensive, and we start putting up these walls that have to protect ourselves. Very often being humans, we protect ourselves by lashing out at others, and it it really becomes divisive and it becomes a barrier. And I've found that when we feel seen, when we feel heard, and when we feel valued, it allows us to lower those barriers and to lower those defenses, become a little bit vulnerable with one another. And there, I mean, that comes with risk, of course, but it also comes with the potential reward of building some of what is the very best of human relationship and experience that we can have.
John Noltner:And so through our methodology of of storytelling, we have found a way to let people feel heard, to let people feel like they're recognized, that their pain is acknowledged, that their experience is validated. And when you do that, it opens up this space where people can connect on a deep level. And I think we don't have that opportunity very often in our lives. And so when when we feel we're in that place, it can be really powerful. It can be really empowering.
John Noltner:And so that that to me is a more effective way of building relationship. That to me is a more effective way of building communities and and finding a path forward together. You know, certainly not I don't agree on all of the issues with all of the people who I interview, and and that's okay. But to get stuck there is a stumbling block. You know, I think when we fixate on those things that differentiate us, I think a friend of mine calls that the arrogance of small difference.
John Noltner:You know, we will fixate on these tiny little things to the loss of all of this common ground. You know, we'll fixate on those those issues and those problems without taking the time to acknowledge and recognize, all of the good that can be there. And I don't I don't really believe in, putting our head in the sand and ignoring these challenges. I don't believe we have to I think it's important that we face them head on and honestly and directly, but I I have to believe that there's a way we can do that with a little bit more grace and hopefulness and the belief that something better is possible than the way we're sort of doing it in our public sphere so often these days.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. And I you know, in some of the conversations that we've had on this podcast, this podcast is, of course, about connecting across rural and urban spaces. I think, what I've heard is that there are people who feel, as you said, mischaracterized and misrepresented as an urban person or a rural person or their their place, their community that they love is being misrepresented in dominant narratives. And so they don't feel seen. And so where are some of the rural and urban places that you visited and what are some of the rural and urban kinds of and suburban too, you know, projects and folks that you've connected with?
John Noltner:Yeah. Well, let me let me back up a little bit from that and start by saying that we sort of live those 2 separate worlds in our own lives. We live in the in the Twin Cities, and we have for a few decades now, But we also have a Christmas tree farm in Western Wisconsin. 80 acres where we've got 50,000 Christmas trees. We started it 15 years ago when we knew nothing about growing Christmas trees, and now we know just slightly more than nothing about growing Christmas trees.
John Noltner:But we see and feel those tensions. You know, we are the city folks who are coming out to the country, and the folks who are our neighbors out there can't imagine why we would ever wanna live in a city. And the folks who are our friends in the city can't imagine why on earth we would wanna have a Christmas tree farm and go spend time in those areas. And there are very real and very distinct mischaracterizations of who those communities are. And and not only that, but those those urban and rural communities have a pretty clear understanding of how the rest of the world sometimes looks at them in these dominant narratives.
John Noltner:And so when that happens, again, you find people getting defensive, and people protecting, and people sometimes lashing out at the other. And also you find people, and this is a this is a profoundly human thing to do, engage in confirmation bias. So if you believe this certain thing is true about rural communities, or if you believe this certain thing is true about urban settings, if you happen to see one thing on the news that confirms that, you're gonna point at it and say, Uh-huh, see, I told you, They're all like this. And if you see 10 or 12 things in the news cycle that would challenge your preconceived notion, you're gonna probably work overtime to ignore those. You know, those don't support my preconceived notions, so they're they're irrelevant.
John Noltner:I'm gonna just wash over those. But the couple of things that may support your preconceived notion, we're human, and we tend to embrace those and prove to ourselves that we were right all along.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. I am sure that I have done that. Yeah. Mhmm.
John Noltner:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm sure I've done it today already.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah.
John Noltner:It's a really common thing. I don't think we necessarily have to beat ourselves up if we do it, but I do think we have to challenge it. You know, when we know when we understand that something else is true, if we feel those scripts replaying in our mind, I do think that we're obligated to challenge them and try to work through them. You know? So so we tend to be pretty aware and and cautious and intentional about the ways we travel through different communities.
John Noltner:I mean, I've worked on this project in rural Kansas, and I've worked on this project in Midtown Manhattan, and, I think that there's beauty and wisdom in all of it. Oh, I seem to have strayed from your original question, but,
Ellen Wolter:No. No. You're you're right on track. You were I was asking about where you've traveled, in terms of rural, urban, and suburban spaces.
John Noltner:Well and and so I'll I'll tell you that during the pandemic, my wife and I sold our house in the Twin Cities, and we bought an RV. And we spent two and a half years living full time on the road gathering stories and drove 93,000 miles across our country. And so we were on Skid Row in Los Angeles. We were, again, in Midtown Manhattan. We were, down along the border in small rural, border towns in in Arizona.
John Noltner:We really hit a broad cross section of who we are as Americans, really with the goal of of rediscovering what connects us. And and so, you know, there are different issues that we're addressing when we're in the middle of Skid Row talking about housing security, and when we're in Southern Utah talking about water resources in an arid community, but all focused on how human beings are engaging with challenges and trying to find creative solutions to some of those challenges. I mean, what maybe what's most interesting to me as we as we circulate amongst these urban and rural communities is is the amount of pride and the the sense of place and the sense of community that people will have about where they live, and the willingness to do the hard work to to make that community work better, even in the face of some really daunting challenges. And I think that that sense of ownership, and that sense of belonging, and that sense of wanting the place that you are to be a little bit better, I think is a universal human experience, whether you're talking about urban or rural. And, again, the specific issues you might be dealing with might be different, but they also might be pretty similar.
John Noltner:I've just launched into a whole new series of work around addiction and recovery. And, man, you can go to rural communities and find the opioid epidemic as challenging as it is in the in the middle of urban cores, you know, and for a lot of the same reasons of economic challenges and, you know, stresses about how we're gonna make ends meet and and a sense of frayed social fabric. You know, those are those are shared experiences, whether you're in the projects or whether you're, you know, out in an isolated farmstead, I think.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. In fact, I was just looking at survey data from the Blandin Foundation. They do a survey. The Blandin Foundation is a rural serving organization in Minnesota and they do a survey every year or every few years on kind of rural issues and urban issues. And opioids was in the top five for rural and urban communities.
Ellen Wolter:Mental health was in the top five for rural and urban communities. Health care services was in the top five for rural and urban communities. So that's supported, I think, by by research as well.
John Noltner:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that there I mean, there are culture wars that exist in our country, and they're they're sometimes well funded and they're sometimes, present for political gain. But I think that those culture wars will go into overdrive to point the finger across the divide at the other people and indicate why it is their fault.
John Noltner:And, I think when we start to see through that narrative and when we start to understand the common struggle that we all have, I think that will serve us a lot better.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. One of my favorite TED Talks is by Chimamanda Adichie. She's an author. It's it's called, The Danger of a Single Story. And so highly recommend it listeners.
Ellen Wolter:Anne, John, you as well, if you haven't seen it. It's on YouTube. And one of the things she says is that the thing about stereotypes is not that they're not true, but they're incomplete stories. Right? You know, you're talking about a place where you you just have a single story about that place, but you know nothing else about the complexities and multitudes of that place.
Ellen Wolter:And so I'd love for you to share some of the multitudes that people might be surprised to know that you heard about in rural areas and in urban areas. Some of the, you know, things that we don't hear about in the dominant narratives. You know, we kinda get an only only a single story about those places.
John Noltner:Yeah. Yeah. Of course. This is the whole methodology for a piece of my mind to, especially during these last two and a half years on the road, to go into these fraught places in American life, to go down to the border, to talk about immigration, to see beyond what the headlines are, and to hear the human stories. And so when when I go down to a place like the border, I don't I I definitely wanna talk to asylum seekers, and I wanna talk to activists, but I also want to talk to ranchers, and I wanna talk to border patrol agents.
John Noltner:And I want to I want to start to uncover some of that complexity and some of that nuance in in the story, because we no one of us holds the entire truth. You know, I think each of us holds a thread of the truth. But for me, when you can start to weave those threads together, it really turns into this beautiful fabric that allows us to understand things in a new and complex way. And so when I when I went down to Mississippi so here I am, this middle aged white guy from up north trying to wade into this deep and complex history of race in Mississippi. And I went in with a certain set of expectations about who people would be and what the narrative would be, mostly because I'd suffered from the danger of a single story.
John Noltner:You know, mostly because I had heard a narrative about what it's like in the South. And so to encounter progressive whites who are working in in rural communities, who are working towards racial equity and working for civil rights to find people in the black community who are grateful for their white allies. You know, there are some unexpected relationships and unexpected dynamics that that bubbled up in that space, but I think that's where this notion of proximity is so important to me. You know, Bryan Stevenson, who runs, the Equal Justice Initiative, talks about that need to get proximate, to get close to these issues so that you can understand it in new ways. I'm gonna flip through my book here and see if I can find a particular story that was really compelling to me.
John Noltner:This is a man named Slim Smith, and he's a he's a white white man, a newspaper columnist in Columbus, Mississippi. And, and I was going specifically to Columbus because Columbus was one of the first communities in Mississippi to move their Confederate monument, To take it down from in front of the county courthouse where it had been for a 100 years and shift it to a Confederate cemetery, over on the edge of town. And and Slim shared this quote, which I thought was really insightful, and he said, generally speaking, in Mississippi, court houses have 2 features in common. 1 of them is a clock tower, the other is a Confederate memorial or monument, and they both tell you what time it is. That was a new way for me to look at the issue, and it wasn't necessarily a comment that I expected to come out of a white southerners mouth.
John Noltner:And that I mean, that shame on me. Right? Because I went in with my preconceived notion. I went in with my with my dominant narrative about what a rural community in the South would look like as it relates to race. So when I do the storytelling, I will do these long form interviews where I sit down and record an oral history with people, but I'll also do this studio process.
John Noltner:And we ask a single question, and we have people respond in 25 words or less, and we do a black and white portrait to combine the image and the words. And when I was in Oxford, Mississippi where there are 2 Confederate monuments, we set up at the base of the Confederate monument in front of the county courthouse and just asked people, what does this monument mean to you? What does this statue mean to you? And and prepared to just listen, to let people respond as they were going to respond. And out of the 36 people who came and shared a story, 35 of them said, I really think this thing should move.
John Noltner:I really think it should go somewhere else. It doesn't have to be in front of the courthouse. And those people who shared were predominantly white allies from the community who who were working for that sort of change. So those sort of things surprised me, and I'll tell you that every community I go into, when I come in with some sort of preconceived notion, when I slow down and I hear those complexities and those nuances and that deeper story, I am always surprised, and I am always challenged. And it's up to me then to keep my mind open enough that I can begin to embrace those those subtle truths.
Ellen Wolter:John, do you have a similar example from from an urban setting where you were like, oh, I hadn't really thought about it like that?
John Noltner:Okay. So so I will tell you a story about visiting, Skid Row, like I said, in Los Angeles. So 50 square blocks with somewhere between 5,8,000 people who are unhoused, who are living on the streets. So a lot of mental health issues, a lot of substance use issues. And when you go into a space with 5 to 8000 people, and you're carrying cameras in in your hands, and this is a group of people who maybe have had the experience of being marginalized or being misunderstood or being judged, there is every opportunity there there is a a huge opportunity for being misunderstood and for people feeling exploited in the process.
John Noltner:And so when I was going to do some interviews on Skid Row, the first folks I talked to were people who were leading programs, Union Gospel Mission, things like that, people who worked in those organizations. And by the time I'd done a few of those because if I was going to be there talking about Skid Row, I needed to be out on Skid Row. You talk about urban environments and you talk about a place like Skid Row, and I think the dominant narrative would say, oh, dangerous. It would say the people there aren't looking out for each other. It would say these folks are really isolated and forgotten, and they fell through some cracks.
John Noltner:I knew if I went out on the street, I would find things that challenged that narrative. And so and so I did. I just I just went for a walk, you know. And when I did, I found people who were braiding one another's hair, and I found people who were singing along to music with one another. I found people who were poking their heads into the tents that lined the sidewalk and said, you doing okay in here?
John Noltner:Anything you need? What can I do to help? And I saw the sort of care and looking out for one another that maybe gets associated with life in a small rural community. I saw people people taking care of each other in a way that I don't see often in the in the news cycle when it's talking about homelessness. And I saw a level of humanity that I knew was there, but that I wanted to see and feel firsthand.
John Noltner:And I couldn't do that by driving down the street and parking in an underground parking ramp. I had to do that by being out on the sidewalks and making eye contact with people and getting the getting the little head nod, and the how you doing? And the those those human moments that I knew existed, but I had to see and experience for myself to challenge some of that inner dialogue that was going on in my mind as well.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. You know, one of the the challenges I think too as we've as we've talked about is there's these dominant narratives and kinda single stories that are shared in our in our media, which is, you know, becoming more fragmented. Right? And so we're not getting all the information that we hopefully could about a certain community. I'm curious how you have shared some of these stories or distributed some of these stories or gotten the word out about complexities in communities or ways in which communities have used these stories to support the work that they're doing?
Ellen Wolter:What are ways in which this work is being is being used?
John Noltner:Yeah. Yeah. Boy, it's a little bit of an octopus. There are so many different arms that reach out into the world and and ways that we engage. And so, like I said, we've got, I mean, we've got 4 different books.
John Noltner:The latest one is called lessons on the road to peace, and it it is a journal of our two and a half years on the road and the people we encountered and the lessons we learned along the way. And so we see churches and community groups and schools and book clubs using these for discussion. So they'll they'll do a common read, and there are discussion questions in the back that just ask people, you know, which of these stories resonated with you and why, and what challenged you and why. And, you know, and and and walks people through a series of questions and dialogue that can open up some some common ground and some space to reflect. We do that.
John Noltner:We've got our 5 traveling exhibits that move around the country to, college campuses and high schools and libraries and community centers. And, this is kind of a, contemplative process, and each each of the exhibit panels has a portrait and a little biography and an excerpt out of the person's, story. And, and, again, we build workshops around these to ask people which stories moved them, which stories challenged them, how the how it helped them see the world in some new ways. And then we, I do a lot of lectures and workshops, around the country. We will keynote at professional development things.
John Noltner:We'll we'll, give talks in faith communities, having people consider how their faith calls them to work towards social justice, and to to bridge divides and and work towards the common good. And what you saw up in in New York Mills, we'll do these public studios. So in New York Mills, a small rural community in Northern Minnesota, I went for a week and we set up these public studios asking people, when have you felt a sense of belonging? Over the course of that week, we photographed over a 180 people who shared a short story. And we we visited the high school.
John Noltner:We visited independent living facilities. We visited the VFW. We we visited the library, and and we invited people from all these different interest groups in the community to participate. And then we printed those out, and we filled literally filled the walls in the in the regional cultural center from floor to ceiling with these 180 portraits and stories so that people could come in and see their community in a new way. But then also they had this this beautiful grain bin on the edge of town.
John Noltner:And on on one December evening for the community Christmas party, we projected the images, you know, 20 feet by 30 feet on the side of the grain bin so that they could see themselves. And even though it was about 11 degrees and a little windy that night, people came out to see themselves in that way. And so we we continue to find new ways to project images, to create, exhibits of the local stories, to share them back to the community in ways that can help them to see some connections that they might otherwise be overlooking.
Ellen Wolter:And one of the things that I love is that each person who has their portrait taken gets a portrait of themselves.
Music (Jim Griswold):Yeah.
Ellen Wolter:And so, which I I think is so important because back to our earlier conversation about feeling seen. Right? There's sort of this literal sense of feeling seen because you have this portrait of yourself, but then there's also this kind of feeling, right, of feeling seen.
John Noltner:Well, and I've had
Ellen Wolter:people see me.
John Noltner:I see people use those images and stories on social media as their profile picture. I see people using it. I I mean, I was in somebody's house the other day who I had met during one of these sessions, and I was I was revisiting, and they had it, a little 5 by 7, stuck up on their refrigerator. And they said, oh, this is this is my reminder of my better self. You know, they brought their best selves to this process, and they wanted a reminder of that.
John Noltner:And, yeah, everybody who participates gets a link to the gallery, and they can download their own finished photo as as a thank you for them sharing their story in this public art project, but also as a way for them to ripple out this positive narrative into the world, you know, because there is enough negative and ugly garbage that floats around through our social media and through our online networks. And this is an opportunity to share a positive story, to to aspire to something better, and to remind one another of what we can do together.
Ellen Wolter:John, what do you have in store for 2025? Are you able to share with us what might be on the horizon?
John Noltner:I'm going about as fast as I can, and I'm really excited about some of the possibilities. In 2025, we will really, ramp up some of these stories around addiction and recovery and look at the ways people have moved towards healing and look at some of the obstacles that are in the way and some paths toward success. And so that will be one of the things we're focusing on. But a piece of my mind is shifting into some international stories as well. And so I just came back from a trip to Northern Ireland and was visiting a reconciliation center there, talking about ways that folks moved through through their sectarian violence in the eighties nineties, you know, what they refer to as the troubles in in a very Irish, sentiment.
John Noltner:It's this huge thing that that they experienced and that is not completely done the way that we have not fully resolved issues of race in America. You know, there is still work to be done, and there is still there's still divisions between Protestant and Catholic communities. In Belfast, there's still 20 some miles of what they call the peace walls, these 40 foot barriers that that separate the communities. And so our our plan is to go back and do some some in-depth storytelling around that process. And then after Northern Ireland, we'll probably go to Rwanda and talk about how they moved through their genocide.
John Noltner:We'll probably go to South Africa and talk about how they moved through apartheid. None of these places has done it perfectly. There's been some progress. There remains some struggles, but I think that there are a bunch of lessons to learn in that truth and reconciliation process, in the ways that groups of people who are committed to reconciliation have come together to heal some of those divides and some of those deep wounds in a country and reckon with some of the ways that that work is not done yet. So we wanna we wanna look at the ways different countries have moved through conflict and use that as a model for how we can do better here.
John Noltner:I think that sometimes it's easier to learn these lessons when we're not looking in the mirror, and we can look at somebody who's adjacent to us. And and being human, we'll say, woah. Look at how they're messed up. And a little bit easier than we can say, look at how we're messed up. And so I think that there there is an opportunity to learn lessons in that process and to hopefully apply some of those skills and some of that learning to what we're facing here as a country.
John Noltner:And so that's gonna that's gonna keep us busy for a while. At the at the same time, we're starting to grow the team for a piece of my mind. We have we have developed a methodology and a process of engaging with communities around storytelling that I think is really effective and that I think there's a deep need and hunger for, in this methodology of using stories to bridge divides and build community, to see one another in a new light, and to find a better path forward together. So those are those are sort of the three things that are gonna keep us busy in the coming year or 2 or 3 or 4.
Ellen Wolter:We are excited to see all the things that come out of your great work. And thanks so much for joining us today, John. We really appreciate it.
John Noltner:Oh my gosh. It's great to talk to you. Thanks for having.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at side by side at umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Walter. Nancy Rosenbaum is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jan Jekala who designed our wonderful logo and Jim Griswold who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is Side by Side.
