Tell Me Your Story

Everyone Has Something to Say (Day 76)

I’m sitting on an upside-down, orange Home Depot salt barrel in the middle of a empty, tiny home with architect Maggie Randolph, taking about our dogs.

We’re supposed to be talking about her and her husband’s new, surprising complex of work force housing homes in Dover, NH, but her Golden Retriever, Hugh, keeps knocking my recording phone off my knee and begging for attention, which I’m happy to give him.

Maggie and John run GSD Studios, an architecture and planning firm that also runs a couple assisted living complexes down the road. This newest build, called Cottages at Back River Road, is designed to help their own company provide housing for staff, but also serves as low-income housing in a part of the state that desperately needs small affordable mini-houses like the one in which we’re sitting.

The little home complex

When built out, there will be 44 of these 450-square-foot houses on this 4 acre plot of land just outside the main drag. The homes are designed around four common areas, each with a “town center” and each with a front porch. It’s charming and reminds me of those old White Mountain tourists cabins that still sprinkle the mountains up north.

But none of that matters much as we sit there in the little home and show each other pictures of our dogs. Hugh tucks himself in under my feet.

Anyway, the point of my mentioning all this today is to say that sometimes, like during an interview such as this one, I miss my past life as a reporter. I was out here on the dime of NH Home Magazine for a piece on GSD Studios and their little home complex. That story will come out in March.

I have a feature in the current issues, by the way. You can take a peek at that here if you like: Friendly, Not Fussy

But I digress. What I wanted to mention today is a question that I’ve often been asked about writing non-fiction, which is how do I get people to open up. And the answer was right there for me today. I mean, yes, dogs, in this particular case, but more generally because people are interesting.

Just at a base level. They want to talk about their lives. They want somebody out there to find what they do to be neat. Or worthy. Listen, 99.9 percent of us aren’t celebrities or politicians. We’re just accountants, or brick layers, or architects, or librarians.

I cut my teeth as a reporter working a police and fire beat and that’s a whole different sort of game. But once I moved to feature writing, it felt like everything came together for me - the interviews, the history, the non-fiction.

Like the architect and her dog. Like a weather observer atop Mount Washington. Like a taxi driver in Delhi. Like the salmon fisherman in Alaska. I remember all of them, even though in some cases maybe our paths crossed for only 15 or 20 minutes. But I’ve found if you’re authentic and you listen, man, do people have stories to tell you. And I like telling them. And I hope you like reading about them, in fact I’m sort of counting on that last part!

So, lend me your ears and eyes, and look for my piece on Maggie and Hugh to come out soon. Meantime, pull up an orange plastic barrel and take a load off, I have some stories to tell.