Kim Kobersmith

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Kiran Singh Sirah wears many hats: as a public folklorist, storytelling artist, peacebuilder, and cultural narrative practitioner.

For high school students from a small Eastern Kentucky county, competing in – and winning – a regional theater competition is a big deal. Even a bigger deal: the play they performed, “Shiners,” is one they collaboratively wrote about growing up in rural Appalachia in one of the poorest counties in the nation.

I visited The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky, on a warm, sunny spring day. Even on a weekday afternoon, the Lexington garden hosted women pushing jogging strollers, college students out for power walks, and kids playing on the natural playscape. A couple rested on a blanket; another couple talked quietly on a shady bench. I headed for the arboretum, a 15-acre remnant of the Inner Bluegrass Woodland, after the visitor center host shared it had a nest of baby owls.