All these stories have appeared in top-tier journalistic publications, whether in print, online or both.
Notre Dame Magazine | Autumn 2012
With a semester left at Notre Dame, Kelsey Falter dropped out, moved to New York, and started her own company.Two years later, Falter is remaking the social media landscape.
But when we first spoke, her fledgeling startup was just getting off the ground. This is how she did it.
Since he burst onto the New York City club scene in the early 2000s, singer and pianist Tony DeSare has earned rave reviews as a standard-bearer for a new generation of young jazz musicians.
On the verge of launching a new show at New York’s 54 Below supper club, the new father—and overall second-place winner of the 2013 USA Songwriting Competition—spoke with me for Making Music Magazine about connecting with audiences all over the world, why YouTube is his next frontier, and which of his songs is Sir Paul McCartney’s favorite.
Click here to read “A New Generation of Jazz” at Making Music
Notre Dame Magazine | Summer 2012
In 1946, a group of American soldiers returned from the world’s most hellish battlefields to the picturesque campus of the University of Notre Dame.
There, under the steely gaze of former Navy lieutenant Frank Leahy, they found themselves in a war of a different kind.
This is their story.
Notre Dame Magazine | Spring 2014
As one of 12 black freshmen at Notre Dame in 1965, Dr. Bill Hurd was a pioneer.
His life is one of giant steps. A five-time All-American sprinter — he still holds two Notre Dame records and nearly qualified for the 1968 Olympic team — Hurd was also an honors electrical engineering student and a standout jazz saxophonist who was named “most promising sax” at the Collegiate Jazz Festival.
In Hurd’s senior year, Ara Parseghian personally invited him to join the football team for a season (he played wideout). Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, encouraged him apply for a Rhodes Scholarship (he was a finalist).
Now a practicing ophthalmologist with two U.S./foreign patents for ocular devices, the Memphis native annually travels to such places as Madagascar, Mexico and Kenya, where he performs pro bono eye surgeries for hundreds.
“Most of these people [have] never seen a doctor before, let alone an eye surgeon,” says Hurd, who is composing an autobiography tentatively titled Memphis to Madagascar.
Even with a career as remarkable as his — “I’ve been very blessed,” he says — Hurd is reticent to single out a defining moment. There is his latest album, Return of the Hip, which opened in 2014 near the top of the Memphis jazz charts. There is the NCAA Silver Anniversary Award he received in 1994 alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and other legends. There is the pride, shared with his wife, Rhynette, of seeing their sons Bill Jr. and Ryan ’05 attend Notre Dame.
If there is a defining moment, it might be this: During one of his medical journeys to Madagascar, Hurd successfully restored vision to an elderly woman who “had never seen her grandchild before.” The surgery complete, Hurd removed her eye patch. As she saw her family for the first time, “She just started crying. And I did too.”
Read more of the “Stories of Us” at Notre Dame Magazine.
Notre Dame Magazine | Spring 2012
Like any good rock musician, Don Savoie looks like a mechanic.
He has Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar appeal, as if he should be installing sheetrock or working at a car wash when he’s not playing onstage.
But Savoie isn’t a mechanic or even your average rock ’n’ roll musician. He’s a professor at Notre Dame.
Click here to read “The Professor of Rock” at Notre Dame Magazine
Photo by Barbara Johnston for Notre Dame Magazine
(A note about the photo: I helped Barbara and Kerry Prugh, Notre Dame Magazine’s art director, scout several locations for the photoshoot. We ultimately chose the University’s motor pool as the backdrop. The gritty concrete-and-metal interior matched Don’s blue-collar look. Speaking of which: The outfit? All Don. He arrived at the shoot from a junkyard, where he was searching for spare parts for his daughter’s car.)
Notre Dame Magazine | Winter 2011-2012
It is 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and the six resident assistants of Alumni Hall are sitting in a third-floor apartment in their dorm, trying politely to convince the governor of Indiana to go downstairs with them and try a slice of student-made Dawg Pizza.
Click here to read “Governor, Meet Students” at Notre Dame Magazine
Notre Dame Magazine | Spring 2013
Lawrence Santiago is an architect. A rock singer. A Coushatta Native American.
His friend Jeffery Stephens is a lawyer. A rapper. An African-American.
Together, they are Santiago X The Natural.
Click here to read the whole story at Notre Dame Magazine.
P. S. The X is pronounced “times.” Like a multiplication sign.
Notre Dame Magazine | Spring 2013
A love letter to a truck, searching for the soul of America.
Click here to read “Is The Romance Over?” at Notre Dame Magazine.
Notre Dame Magazine | Summer 2013
Ryan Doherty went from being a minor-league pitcher to a couchsurfing beach bum to a legit beach volleyball star. Along the way, he became a comedy blogger.
Notre Dame Magazine | Autumn 2013
I jumped out of a plane. Then I wrote about it. The beginning:
Way up there, in the first weightless moments of free fall at 10,500 feet, the cold atmosphere is silent.
There are only wisps of sound: of thudding heartbeat, of nylon jumpsuit against parachute container, of clinking metal fasteners, of the plane’s droning engine fading into nothingness above. An island of whispers through a vast stillness.
Gravity vanishes. It is still there, of course, tugging downward, but its apparent absence is palpable in sudden weightlessness. Stomach flutters upward. Nerves spark with energy. Brain struggles — and fails — to comprehend it. To process it. Total free fall.
