A Peace of My Mind

Bronagh McAtasney is the daughter of John Bosco McAtasney, a master weaver and the last hand loom weaver in Ireland. She recalls his curiosity, his desire to learn, and his passion to instill the same in his children. When he passed away in 2018, Bronagh used her small inheritance to leave her job in administration, go back to school for a master’s degree in public history and now, in her own words, “I’m actually getting paid to be nosy about people’s lives.”

Growing up during the Troubles, Bronagh kept a diary that weaves the threads of daily headlines and historical trauma with the day-to-day realities of life as a 13-year-old girl in Northern Ireland. In 2013, she started sharing her diary posts daily on Twitter (and now BlueSky) as a way to document and juxtapose the geopolitical realities with her personal experience.

Credits:

• Photos and text, John Noltner
• Field production, summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
• Audio Engineering, Razik Saifullah

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Aoife Moore is an independent investigative journalist from Derry, Northern Ireland and formerly worked as a political correspondent for the BBC.

She calls herself a victim of England’s legacy in Ireland and says that every facet of her life has been marred by British colonialism, including the death of her uncle in the violence of Bloody Sunday.

Aoife chose her path to become a journalist because of her frustration with the British media’s unwillingness to challenge the government’s official narrative of what happened on Bloody Sunday and her desire to be a part of revealing the truth.

She is the best-selling author of The Long Game: Inside Sinn Fein, a book that explores the growth of Sinn Fein from the armed struggle of the IRA to its current political dominance in the country.

Credits:

• Photos and text, John Noltner
• Field production, summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
• Audio Engineering, Razik Saifullah

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Jonny Clark is the program manager for Public Theology at Corrymeela, often called Ireland’s oldest peace center.

Born in New Zealand and married to an American, Jonny has lived in Northern Ireland for 40 years. When he was growing up, his family moved to Belfast at the heights of The Troubles. As he says, “During a time when most people were not moving to Northern Ireland.”

He has spent time in South Africa, Israel - Palestine, and other places of tension, learning ways that other countries have moved through or continue to struggle with conflict.

Jonny was involved with making a documentary called Guardians of the Flame, a film that strives to hear redemptive stories from people in the midst of religious and sectarian violence.

Credits:

• Photos and text, John Noltner
• Field production, summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
• Audio Engineering, Razik Saifullah

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Lisa Retezan works as a substance use disorder navigator at a day shelter for youth who are unhoused. She openly shares her story with them about her own struggles with addiction.

Lisa took her first sip of alcohol at age 15 and struggled for much of her life with addiction. Her husband at the time knew, and as Lisa says, "He cleaned up my messes." Her mother knew and begged her to get help, but Lisa wasn't ready.

Eventually the alcohol lead to a job loss, followed by an attempted suicide. Then, she was ready for help. At the time of our interview, Lisa had been sober for 6 years, 3 months, and 3 days.

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Bruce Sunpie Barnes is a bandleader who plays accordion and harmonica for Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots. The band travels around the world playing what he calls Afro-Louisiana music: a fusion of zydeco, blues, Creole funk, gospel and tunes from Africa and the Caribbean.

But Sunpie also has a parallel career as a naturalist. He spent 32 years working for the National Park Service, much of it in Barataria Preserve, a vast expanse of  wetlands, bottomland hardwood forests, and palmetto groves. The Preserve, part of Jean Lafitte National Park, has 200 bird species and is 85 percent water.

As a young man, Sunpie kept one foot in each world. By day, he surveyed plants and animals and led hikes and canoe trips. At night, he frequented the numerous New Orleans bars that offered live music. He befriended some of the greats, including rock-and-roll pioneer Fats Domino, who would sometimes call him late at night and invite him to hang out at the hardware store in nearby Chalmette.

“He would go through the hardware store, not buy a single thing, just take two hours and walk through it,” Sunpie recalls. “But before he went, he would put on a gigantic pot of red beans and rice or something like that. And it would cook for three or four hours. And he'd come back, play piano, drink a few beers, and just hang out all day.” Sunpie used his sick days for what he calls “those Fats Domino moments.”

Later Sunpie became a ranger at New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, which is based in the French Quarter and offers musical and educational programming.

In both arenas, Sunpie is a conservationist. “I don't have a separation in me as a person between trying to sustain coastal wetlands, trying to sustain fisheries, trying to sustain culture,” he says. “I might be on a few too many boards right now, but I'm on them because it's around the passion of preservation, around the natural world and around cultural things.”

For example, he is Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, a New Orleans tradition that dates back to 1819. Early on Mardi Gras morning, the skeleton gang travels door-to-door in the historically Black Tremé neighborhood, waking residents with calls of “You next!” They bring a reminder of mortality and a message denouncing violence and drugs.

“It came out of enslaved African males trying to say on Carnival Day, Mardi Gras Day, that I'm actually a human,” he says. “And I'm going to self-validate and show you who I am.”

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Caitlin Carney is co-owner of Porgy’s Seafood Market in New Orleans.

Caitlin calls herself the “Lady Monger.” Her business, Porgy’s Seafood Market, is a purple storefront on a busy corner in Mid-City New Orleans. It feels like a cross between a fish shop, a lunch joint, and a neighborhood bar.

It’s a market with a mission: to reconnect New Orleanians with Gulf seafood. A lot of the fish sold in the city is not from the Louisiana coast. Most shoppers are getting their seafood from big supermarket chains, which don't always make buying local a priority. And those shoppers often choose the fish that's most familiar, like salmon or tilapia, which are not from the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, Caitlin says, it's getting less and less profitable for independent fishers to harvest seafood from the Gulf.

Caitlin is trying to educate consumers and also trying to make it more profitable for fishers in Louisiana to keep working. One way she does this is by selling bycatch, which is unintended, non-target catch. Often bycatch is thrown away, even when it’s delicious, and the fisher makes no profit.

“We love what we call hot fish, which are hot fish—you know, they're sexy,” she says. “Whenever we get bycatch, and they come in and they're gorgeous, we're like, ‘Damn, that's a hot fish!’ 

“One of our favorite bycatch is scorpionfish, which is really fantastic as a sashimi,” she adds. “We got some long tail bass in the other day that I didn't even know you could get. So, yeah, it's always an adventure.”

if Caitlin can buy it and then convince her customers that it's worth trying, that means additional revenue for the fisher.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Another bonus this week to share a behind the scenes conversation with journalist Barry Yeoman and A Peace of My Mind's John Noltner, who collaborated to produce this multimedia series of interviews and portraits for Still Here: Stories from a fragile coastline.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Darrah Fox Bach is the restoration programs senior manager at the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

Darrah cultivated her love for the outdoors in her native San Francisco, where environmentalism flourishes and Saturdays were devoted to hiking. She moved to Louisiana to study at Tulane University, and stayed for an AmeriCorps position with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL). When a job opened up at the non-profit advocacy group, she came aboard full-time.

One of the programs Darrah manages is an oyster shell recycling program that collects the shells from restaurants in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Volunteers then turn them into oyster reefs–”living shorelines” that serve as habitat for baby oysters and also reduce erosion and protect cultural heritage sites. 

After listening to Darrah's interview, stay tuned for a bonus preview of our conversation with Rashida Ferdinand, the Executive director of Sankofa Community Development Corporation in the Lower Ninth Ward.

After Rashida earned her master’s degree in ceramics, she considered moving to New York for its energy and professional opportunities. “But I wanted to also be in a warm environment, physically and culturally,” she says. “Being around blue, purple, yellow houses. Being around my family. My grandmother was getting older. So it was a no-brainer.” She moved back home to New Orleans in 2001.

Rashida had grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward, a former cypress swamp that had become a working-class district with one of the nation’s highest rates of Black homeownership. As a child, she heard adults reminisce about the crawfish that used to live in the gullies, about the neighborhood’s informal bartering system, and about keeping their doors unlocked at night.

Then, four years after her return, Rashida’s neighborhood made national headlines. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city’s levee system failed, and the low-lying Lower Ninth Ward took the biggest hit. Thousands of homes were inundated or leveled. Residents fled to their rooftops for rescue. The death toll exceeded any other part of the city. When Rashida finally saw the neighborhood again, she says, it looked like “a shell of nothing.”

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Rosina Philippe lives in Grand Bayou Indian Village, a community that is entirely based in water. The homes, along with the church, can only be reached by boat. This was not always the case. “We had solid ground beneath our feet,” she recalls. “We had garden spaces. We had fruit trees. We had lots of land where you can walk for miles.”

The Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha are a subsistence tribe, and have long relied on the bounty of the land and water: harvesting seafood, foraging for persimmons and wild celery, growing vegetables, hunting deer, ducks, and rabbits. Always, they’ve been guided by an ethos of taking only what they needed. “There was no such thing as overharvesting or just taking and hoarding away,” Rosina says, “because the life around us makes us possible. And as long as they were here, then we were here.”

They are still a subsistence tribe. But with much of the land gone, some of their traditional foodways have become difficult or even impossible to maintain. Disappearing wetlands also means less protection from storms. Most tribal members have moved away, returning to Grand Bayou with their families for holidays.

But Rosina remains, along with about a dozen other households. “I say that we're placemarkers,” she says. “A table is here and it's set and we're like a place card holding the place for others to come. I stay because of my love for my life, my life choices, my lifeway, for the ways of being with this place. I stay because I believe that the Creator in his infinite wisdom has placed my people where we belong. This is our place. This is where we were supposed to be.

“And I stay because I feel that I can make a difference. if I just inspire one person, and that one person can inspire somebody else, and so on, then we continue our inhabitation.”

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Alex Kolker is a coastal scientist with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, while others baked sourdough bread, Alex was studying satellite images of the Mississippi River Delta. As an oceanographer, geologist, and climate scientist, he is interested in how the Louisiana coastline loses land, and also how it builds that land back. 

As he examined the images, Alex noticed a channel connecting the Mississippi River to Breton Sound and Quarantine Bay. Over the course of about a year, he says, the tiny cut had widened into a veritable river. Neptune Pass, as it’s called, carried more than four times as much water as New York’s Hudson River.

That water contained sediment, which was building land. Alex started noticing islands forming in Quarantine Bay. This rapid land-building process was the opposite of what’s happening in much of Louisiana, which has lost 2,000 square miles in the past century.

After listening to Alex's interview, stay tuned for a bonus preview of our conversation with Prasanta Subudhi, a professor of plant genetics at Louisiana State University.

Prasanta grew up near India’s Bay of Bengal, in a village surrounded by rice fields. From a young age, the crop fascinated him. He considered careers in medicine and engineering, but rejected them both in favor of rice genetics.

Prasanta came to the United States to do research at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. In 2001 he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Here, he’s been trying to answer a big question: How do we keep growing rice and feeding a hungry world even as the climate changes?

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.