Bruce Fraley is the 5th Mayor of Berea Kentucky. He is serving his second term and plans to run for a third. He is very excited about a program that will create new building sites in this part of the Bluegrass region designed to attract new business to Berea and beyond and generate perhaps more than 1,000 jobs. In this era of bitterly divisive partisan politics, I thought it would be good to hear from an elected official who is not driven by ideology or party loyalty, but by getting things done for the people in his city and in his state.

Jeffrey Sanderson is a painter based in Chicago where he has been engaged in an intuitive and exploratory home studio practice steadily for over 20 years. Jeff says. “My work depends upon and celebrates the remarkable sensitivity and uncanny memory that humans possess.” We talk about how his work can preserve marks and evidence of a conversation between a maker and a surface. His paintings are improvised which leads us to a wonderful conversation about how each mark or color or brush stroke leads to the next in the thrilling moments of creation. It leads us to talk about how great live music can also feel that way and even how life itself is often the decisions we make and steps we take upon realizing our plans may not meet the moment.

Christina Cornelison is the Director of the Madison County Public Library with branches in Richmond and Berea Kentucky. In a county with fewer than 100,000 residents her libraries welcome more than 300,000 visitors and circulate over a half million books each year. She is passionate about the role a library can play in encouraging early reading and language development and in providing a vast array of services to the community from 3D printing to GED classes--all for free. We have a great conversation about the importance of neutrality in a library where there should be no agenda, and the crucial role that libraries play in offering unfettered access to information to anyone who wants it. Christina makes it clear that libraries should be focused on books but also on the many ways they serve and educate all members of a community with no cost and no barriers.