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The We Are One Alliance; A Talk with Heather Mizeur

June 3, 2025 by James Dissette Leave a Comment

This is a long form interview with Heather Mizeur

Is it possible in a polarized society for two people at opposite ends of the political spectrum to breach the chasm and recognize each other’s humanness?

That’s the question Heather Mizeur has been asking for a decade. For the former Maryland legislator, Democratic congressional candidate, and longtime civic leader, a question she is approaching again with her newly relaunched nonprofit: The We Are One Alliance.

The multi-faceted We Are One Alliance was born from Mizeur’s belief that the way we engage in politics must change if we are to heal as a nation—and as individuals.

The journey began in 2017 with the founding of Soul Force Politics, a nonprofit created in the aftermath of the 2016 election. At a time when political polarization was reaching new extremes, Mizeur sought to build a space for compassion, dialogue, and common ground. “I wanted to show people ways that we can bridge the divides and come together in a common-sense way to solve problems in our communities,” she says.

During her 2022 run for Congress in Maryland’s First District, Mizeur temporarily paused her nonprofit work—but carried its philosophy into every aspect of her campaign. Her motto, “We Are One,” became a call to remember our shared humanity, even in the face of fierce ideological differences.

“We’re humans, often with similar dreams and shared struggles,” she reflects. “Politics has turned into what divides us when our democracy calls us to come forward and work together in ways that allow civil discourse again.”

With the guidance of her board of directors, she expanded the organization under a new name—the We Are One Alliance—to reflect a broader mission encompassing a family of initiatives, each rooted in healing, community, and soulful resistance.

One of the flagship programs is Operation Thriving Acres, a therapeutic horticulture and farm therapy project hosted on Mizeur’s farm outside of Chestertown. Inspired by conversations with veterans during her campaign Mizeur developed a nature-based retreat program that is now drawing interest from across the state.

“When they nurtured something that was living, it helped lower their trauma,” she says. “They were giving their attention to something life-giving instead of life-taking. Politics divides us, but the land heals us.”

Through partnerships with the Maryland chapters of Disabled American Veterans and VFW chaplains, the program has already begun hosting small retreats and gatherings.

Another program, Inward Expeditions, offers immersive group retreats to destinations like Costa Rica, where participants engage in deep reflection, self-care, and leadership training. “Some of this work is done best in community,” she explains, “but there’s also a need for solo journeys of the soul.”

The Sacred Dreams Project extends the Alliance’s reach internationally, through a partnership with Zimbabwean educator and humanitarian Dr. Tererai Trent. Together, they are building water wells, gardens, and sustainable infrastructure for rural schools.

Another cornerstone of the Alliance is the revival of Soul Force Politics as a learning platform. Through online courses, monthly community challenges, and writings published on her Substack (“The Honorable Heather Mizeur”), Mizeur is helping others cultivate inner resilience, clarity, and grounded presence.

Mizeur reimagines the idea of resistance. “Resistance, energetically, doesn’t work,” she says. “When you push against something, it pushes back.” Instead, she offers a path of soulful defiance—one that allows kindness to meet cruelty, calm to meet chaos, and joy to meet despair.

“Our power resides in the pause between stimulus and response,” she explains. “And that’s the army I’m looking to build—people who are ready to respond in non-reactive but fiercely loving ways.”

The We Are One Alliance is, in Mizeur’s words, “a living ecosystem” of hope, restoration, and vision, connecting land, politics, humanity, and the soul.

“At its core,” she says, “our mission is to restore faith in the heart of humanity, one connection at a time.”

The We Are One Alliance has launched weareonealliance.org, a comprehensive portal showcasing its diverse programs, including Soul Force Politics, Inward Expeditions, Operation Thriving Acres, Sacred Dreams Project, and personalized coaching and mentoring. At the heart of the initiative is the “Community” page—an ad-free, algorithm-free, and troll-free private social platform designed to foster meaningful, heart-centered engagement. Beginning in June, the Alliance will introduce “Soulful Challenges” and launch “Soul Force Sundays,” a weekly live video gathering for reflection and support amid challenging times. Supporters can also follow the Alliance’s ongoing work on Substack under T(he Honorable Heather Mizeur). All contributions are tax-deductible, supporting the mission of the We Are One Alliance, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

This video is approximately fifteen minutes in length.

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Shelter by Laura J. Oliver

June 1, 2025 by Laura J. Oliver 4 Comments

Editor’s note: Join us for Spy Night with Laura Oliver, who will be reading her work in the Stoltz Listening Room at the historic Avalon Theater in Easton this Wednesday evening, June 4. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

I’m in a standoff with a house finch looking for affordable housing. The blossoms from three hanging baskets on the porch drape in pink and purple profusion but yesterday the impatiens began bobbing around as if someone short was lost in a cornfield. Suddenly, a finch popped out and flew to a powerline. A second later, she was back with a beak full of grass. She landed on the plant hanger, studied me a minute, then darted into the flowers as if down a submarine hatch.

Nooo, I implored her through the living room window. Do NOT build there! (These things seldom end well.)

When she emerged and flew off again, I went outside and climbed up on the porch railing to see into the basket. I plucked out a little stash of grass and tried to wave her off as she returned to watch me from the lilac. She’d brought her husband with her. Actually, they’re not married. They’re just living together until the kids are grown, and like many males in the animal kingdom, he was the flashier dresser.

I took the basket down and put it under a porch chair. Surely, they’d give up and find better real estate. But as soon as I rehung the impatiens, I saw telltale movement beneath the pink blossoms—like cats under a blanket. I climbed up on the railing a few hours later, and the birds erupted from the basket. Peering in, I saw they had already crafted a beautiful nest—it was perfectly round—an astonishing geometry, like the precise roundness of a carpenter bee hole—like the roundness of the moon—of all the planets and stars we have ever discovered. And now I don’t have the heart to dismantle it. It looks like the homesteaders are home.

I became a first-time homeowner by naivety. Mr. Oliver, a Navy Lieutenant, was stationed on the USS Pharris out of Norfolk. There was no way we were going to live in Virginia for more than a year or two, but we didn’t want to live in a concrete box of an apartment. We’d rent a house! But when we walked into the rental office, the agent on duty, who was only on duty because she had no clients, looked up and saw Mr. and Mrs. Dopey Stupid standing there. “Rent?” she asked, “I have a swell idea! Why don’t you buy?”

We looked at each other. “Use our one-time VA loan credit to buy a house we’ll only own for a year? Okay!! Thanks, Pam!”

A few weeks later, the ship deployed to the Med, and we owned a two-bedroom, one-story house in which I would live alone for a year. At the end of that deployment, we would offload the house for exactly what we had paid for it after replacing the entire heating system.

Our next house was back in Maryland — an effort to amass equity this time. A brown stucco with mustard yellow trim and an infestation of elder beetles— it was love at first sight—which is never about looks but always about chemistry.

(You can come back to this later.)

It had a corner fireplace, the huge wavy-glass windows of an early Victorian, a stained-glass foyer window, and an attic in which we found a steamship ticket to the Emma Giles.

As much as we loved that house, with one baby in tow and another on the way, three years later, we went house shopping for a bigger one. Mr. Oliver’s mother, a real estate agent who had never sold a house, saw us coming. “Hey,” she said, “There’s a three-acre lot in our neighborhood for sale, and the adjoining property owner is moving. Cool idea! He’s built an airplane hangar for his Cessna 152 his buyers don’t want. Why don’t you buy the lot and have his airplane hangar moved onto it? You can turn it into a house!” She was making this suggestion to someone whose parents had made a house from a barn. She knew her audience.

“What a swell idea!” exclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Dopey Stupid. “Let’s buy an airplane hangar!”

Which is what the house finch’s home seems to be. An airplane hangar. There have been touch-and-go landings, wave-offs, and flybys. They buzz the tower, and at least one crow has landed like a B52 bomber. I ran him off. I’m on neighborhood watch now.

Mother to any, mother to all. Parent to any, parent to all– if the world would just allow it. I’m protecting some brazen birds when I want to adopt teenagers who got passed over until adorable aged out to adolescence or take in fostered siblings so they will not be separated or orphaned children in Ukraine. I want to feed Gaza. Now. Yesterday. But I’m on bird duty. Like you, I hold that discrepancy, that disparity in stunned bafflement. What do I do with this inadequacy? This helplessness?

The longing to shelter must live in all of us. Which means the sadness of our inability to do so does as well.

My mother once wrote, “The sky keeps teaching the ocean to be blue.” As if love is a tutorial and humans are the students who don’t advance. And it is all so vast that our efforts to help, to heal, feel insignificant. The ocean is not even blue. It’s only scattering light, and the sky becomes the blackness of space.

You want to do more, to give big, so give small. Offer whatever you can from wherever you are.

Give new meaning to shelter in place.

For tickets, go here.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Food Friday: Blueberry Harvest

May 30, 2025 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

Suddenly they are everywhere — blueberries. June is about to be busting out all over, summer is almost here, and if you listen carefully you’ll hear the blueberries ripening. Little globules of vitamin-rich blue goodness! ’Tis the season to revel in local blueberries!

Local blueberries are ripe for the picking, as they say. We don’t have to worry about those tariffs, for the moment. Instead of waiting for imports from Mexico, Peru or Chile we can wander into a You-Pick-It blueberry farm, and spend some time in nature, plucking our own sweet breakfast jewels. Deelish.

Mr. Sanders starts each day in a healthy manner – unlike me – who still yearns for those good old days of cold pizza for breakfast. No, Mr. Sanders always sets a good example, and manfully tosses a handful of glistening blueberry goodness on top of his bowl of leaves and twigs every morning. Sometimes he just rinses them off in a wire strainer, and drops them into a bowl for easy munching. Or he mixes them with other berries and some yogurt. Sometimes he ladles a handful on top of a bowl of overnight oats and has a healthy, crunchy breakfast. Luke the omnivore wonder dog does not care for blueberries, strangely enough, so he won’t be staring up at you with a deep-throated yearning for the blueberries in your breakfast bowl. Not that you won’t feel his silent reproach for your dubious food choices. Now would be a good moment for you to fetch him a yummy dog treat. Dogs and Blueberries

I like my blueberries as a special component: in piping hot, just baked blueberry muffins, with melting Irish butter, and the Sunday papers. Or in blueberry pancakes, with warm blueberry bursts in each mouthful. Nigel Slater has a divine recipe for blueberry French toast:

Or, with a little planning, you can bake a breakfast cake. How perfect is cake for breakfast? A blueberry breakfast cake is the best way to start a day

Surely the ultimate blueberry moment is the first bite of blueberry pie. You might prefer your pie open-faced, lattice work, crumble, or with a second crust. It’s going to be a long summer, so try every permutation. Our friends at Food52 have done lots of research, and lots of baking. I rely on them to guide me through these treacherous blueberry pie waters: Food52 Blueberry Ideas

Father’s Day is in a couple of weeks (June 15th this year). You can start your celebration with warm, butter-dripping blueberry muffins at breakfast! Later on, how about a colorful salad? For a delightfully cool lunch salad, try pairing blueberries with cucumbers and some feta cheese. Blueberry Cucumber Salad

Later on we will be having cocktails, too, of course. John Derian is as stylish and clever as folks come, and this is his recipe for a Blueberry Smash. Deelightful!

Visit the farmers’ market of your choice to get lots of local blueberries and other produce:

Chestertown Farmers’ Market

 St. Michaels FreshFarm Market

 Centreville Farmers’ Market

 Easton Farmers Market

 Lockbriar Farm
10051 Worton Road, Chestertown, MD 21620

Redman Farms
8689 Bakers Lane, Chestertown, MD 21620

“Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.”
—Stephen Fry

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Thread by Thread: Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard at the Academy

May 28, 2025 by Val Cavalheri Leave a Comment

It started in 1986 in a tight-knit fiber cohort at Cranbrook Academy of Art. That’s where Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard first met—two young artists drawn to textile, space, and the possibilities of working with their hands. Nearly forty years later, they’re showing side-by-side at the Academy Art Museum (AAM) in Easton. Their solo exhibitions, seen and unseen by Lindberg and Fields, Voids, and Translations: Works on Paper and Textiles by Shepard, occupy separate spaces but feel in conversation—with each other, with the building, and with those stopping by to look.

“When I came to the museum last fall,” said Lindberg, “I was encouraged to make the project in a fairly narrow, two-story space at the north end of the museum. And so it became quickly apparent to me that if I built something in that space, you would see part of it on the first floor, and you would need to go to the second floor to see the rest of it. So quite literally, it’s seen and unseen.”

“seen” 2025 graphite, Flashe, acrylic and colored pencil on mat board 60 x 70 inches by Anne Lindberg

Her installation consists of thousands of fine chromatic threads stretched from wall to wall, forming a diaphanous field of color. From a distance, it looks like light or film. “Lots of questions come about,” she said. “Is this light? Is this paint? What is it? And eventually, you do discover what it is and what it might mean to you.”

The same rhythm lives in Lindberg’s graphite drawings. “There are thousands of lines tightly stacked together,” she said. “My arm is moving from one side of the board to the other. So it’s almost as if each of those lines is a breath. They often take me more than one breath, but they’re an expression. And then I lift the pencil, return to the start point again, and carry on with another one.” She describes it as rhythmic, paced, and slow. “We’re also aware when we breathe—of a big breath or a short breath. So the metaphor of the breath makes a lot of sense to me.”

Like Shepard, Lindberg is interested in how a viewer first encounters the work with their body. “The drawings and thread installations greet you through your gut first, your physiology. And then maybe later you start asking analytical questions—what am I looking at?”

That physical, sensory entry point is something both artists lean into, even if their methods differ. For Shepard, it begins with familiar material. “There’s something so accessible about textile,” Shepard said. “We all know it so well—we wear it every day. So that ubiquity, that accessibility, allows me to connect with the audience.”

Shepherd’s panels—some as tall as a doorway—are hand-cut with surgical precision. “It’s a subtractive process,” she said. “Yet at the same time, I’m making a work that becomes present through what’s taken away.” Cutouts become lace, and lace becomes architecture. “I’m working with the kind of in-between space of light and shadow, of presence and absence, of the haptic and the optic.”

Once the form is complete, she adds a layer of graphite. “I start with drawing in order to create the imagery or the pattern that I’m making,” she said. “Then, by layering it with graphite, it’s the suspended drawing in space you’re experiencing.”

“Thicket”, 2023, 13’ x 10’, handout muslin, gesso, graphite, aluminum armature by Piper Shepard

Although both artists were trained in fiber, they have since moved beyond their traditions. “We’re making work with textile materials or in textile ways,” said Lindberg, “but not in traditional ways.” She sees this exhibit as part of a larger shift: “The place of textiles in contemporary art has changed, certainly in the time that we’ve made work. We’ve watched that change, and that’s been rewarding and exciting.”

Their shared history makes the exhibit feel like more than just a pairing. “We’ve been in conversation since graduate school,” Shepard said. “Even if we weren’t in the same place, we’ve always been talking. There’s just a long-standing dialogue between our work.”

Besides the dialogue, they’ve also collaborated formally in the past—at the Kansas City Art Institute, where they both taught in the ’90s, and later on exhibitions that combined Shepard’s textile printing with Lindberg’s printmaking. One early piece involved a sculptural base and three large textiles. “The middle one we worked on together,” said Lindberg. “Piper made one, I made one, and the third we made together.” In another collaboration, they used cameras to photograph landscapes, then each transformed the imagery into large-scale environmental work—Shepard through silk screen printing and Lindberg through carved wood.

Even now, they still approach space the same way. “How do we want people to experience the work?” Shepard said. “How do they move through it? How does the architecture shape their experience?” That kind of thinking, she added, “has been a part of our conversation since 1986.”

It’s also a part of their lineage. Their mentor at Cranbrook, Gerhardt Knodel, urged them to think about textiles on a larger scale. “He understood that textiles can have an impact at scale,” Lindberg said. “They don’t have to be intimate. They can be architectural.” She referenced historical examples like the “wild man tapestries” that stretched across castle walls. “He showed us those and said, ‘You can work this way.’”

That respect for size and for the women in the field who shaped it continues to ground both artists. “We had really strong women role models,” said Shepard. “Olga de Amaral, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Joyce Scott, Anni Albers—people who believed in textile as a serious form. I’m forever grateful.”

For Shepard, Anni Albers remains a constant touchstone. “She was the first textile artist to have a solo show at MoMA,” she said. “She wrote an essay in 1957—The Pliable Plane—and it’s still one of the most important texts for anyone thinking about textile and architecture,” Lindberg added that even the campus of Cranbrook was steeped in that legacy. “It was designed by Eliel Saarinen,” she said. “And his wife, Loja, was a weaver. Her work is everywhere—on the walls, under the windows, in the chapel. We were encouraged to sit under it, touch it, and be around it. It was part of our education.”

Their exhibitions in Easton may be solo shows, but the friendship is threaded through both. “We don’t see each other as often these days,” said Lindberg, who lives in the Hudson Valley. Shepard is based in Baltimore. But their work remains in conversation—on the walls, in the air, and across the space between.

————

Lindberg: seen and unseen runs through Fall 2026
Shepard: Fields, Voids, and Translations runs through October 12, 2025
Academy Art Museum

Both exhibitions are located at the Academy Art Museum, 106 South Street, Easton, Maryland. For more information, visit academyartmuseum.org.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

All the Love You Cannot See By Laura J. Oliver

May 25, 2025 by Laura J. Oliver Leave a Comment

My dog Leah can see a squirrel at night and people approaching a mile down the road, but she can’t see herself in the mirror. I hold her up to it, and she acts as if the mirror is repellent. She’ll look anywhere else.

This is how I feel about Zoom. I’ve never wanted to teach online and now I have to. It’s like being forced to look into a mirror for hours at a time. It’s demoralizing for the non-photogenic and I’m wondering how old you must be to not care how you look in mirrors and photos. (I mean, other than clean.)

Whatever the age, I’m not there yet, and apparently, I have the same aversion my dog has seeing my own image.

It probably started when I was working at the Chesapeake Boatman Magazine, and the editor, Mike, saw a photo of me tossed on my desk. He was visibly startled. “Whoa!” I remember him saying as he looked from me to the photo. “Never let anyone take a picture of you.”

And just like that, I had learned something about myself I hadn’t known. Thanks, Mike.

Later, I was made aware of the difference between being beautiful (as is my friend, Dar) and in being “no slouch,” as I once heard my boss refer to me. He and an advertiser had been commenting to each other on the loveliness of our receptionist, Mary. “Oh, and that’s our associate editor, Laura,” I heard him say as I walked by. “She’s no slouch.” Which I interpreted as “That’s our associate editor, Laura. She is good at standing up.”

For the record, I still excel at this.

Committed to promoting the non-superficial, my parents put no emphasis on how my sisters and I looked at all, except they did make a big deal about the fact we looked like each other. As if we were, perhaps, more appealing as a set. Virtually every photograph of us in our youth is a stair-stepped group shot.

What’s interesting is that you share the exact same number of genes with your children as you do with your siblings—1/2. So, your chances of having children who resemble you are about the same as having siblings who resemble you. In my case, siblings are batting 100 and children zero.

But no matter how you feel about being photographed, there is something profound about having another person in the world who resembles you. I had a writing client who was adopted, and in writing the story of giving birth to her first child on a stormy Caribbean night, she observed that with the arrival of her baby, she was meeting her first blood relative. The first person in her world who might look like her. I was undone by that.

As my mother aged, she loved looking at herself in photos and continued experimenting with her appearance. One day, I went to her assisted living facility to pick her up, and she came cruising down the corridor behind her walker, looking like Maverick. “Whoa. Mom. Where’d you get the aviators?” I asked.

“What? Oh, these?” she responded airily, touching her shades, “I found them. “How do I look?”

Like a thief wearing Top Gun’s sunglasses?

And one Saturday, I knocked on her door and Groucho Marx opened it. My mother had taken note of a younger woman with lovely brows in the facility’s dining hall one evening and inspired, had gotten her hands on a marker of some kind and drawn two thick black lines above her real eyebrows. It was startling. We stared at each other, me shocked and trying to mask it, and her waiting for a reaction to her new look. I went into her apartment and pretended she appeared normal while strategizing ways to wrest the marker from Maverick.

There is a whole behavioral science called Mirror Talk. You repeat affirmations while gazing at your own reflection. This supposedly raises self-acceptance and self-love. Apparently, we are hardwired to feel love and compassion from faces and eye contact. Even our own.

So, I wonder if I stand here gazing in the bedroom mirror and say, “You are photogenic!” I will believe it. And in so doing, become it? What if I say, “You are doing the best you can? You are living out your soul’s plan?” A researcher did note that there is a difference between an affirmation, and a prediction. “You are so smart” is okay; “It’s all going to be fine” is not.

I actually don’t agree with this. I think predictions are their own form of spiritual alchemy. Light is both a wave and a particle until observed. Let’s collapse the wave with attention; give intention form.

I will be your mirror, and you will be mine. That’s what stories are, right? Reflections of each other?

Look into my eyes.

Angels attend you. You have much to do, and you have time.

You are racing towards joy.

Love leaves no one behind.

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Food Friday: Getting Back to Grilling

May 23, 2025 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

Here we are again—on the cusp of summer, on the eve of grilling season, keeping watch for fireflies, swatting early mosquitoes, and planning the Memorial Day cookout. I’m looking forward to a gathering of old friends on the back porch, with songs from college playing in the background as we laugh and scarf bowls of chips like it was still the good old days of few consequences.

As we catch up with our merry band, hearing about new babies, new homes, young lives in big cities, I wonder, as one does, if we made the right choices along the way. Maybe we would have been happier with an urban life. And then I read magazine articles and feel smug about our life decisions. I was never destined to be a West Village Girl – looking for frozen espresso martinis while posting influencer content to TikTok. I was never going to be someone who worked in finance, and I never would have strolled into the short-lived Brooklyn Mischa restaurant this Memorial Day Weekend, and plunked down $29 for a hot dog. Nope. I think I plunked down about $29 for our entire cookout. For that kind of money, I’d rather learn to love caviar.

Instead meeting at an au courant bistro in the West Village in NYC, we will gather on the back porch, where we have a few Adirondack chairs (which are never as comfortable as they look). I love these al fresco nights, as we elude those pesky mosquitoes and enjoy fluttering candles and swaying strings of white lights. We can watch the last of the sun’s rays gilding the tops of the pecan trees, and the bellies of the robins as they squabble in the back yard. There is time to slow down and the enjoy the lengthening navy shadows. There is no television news in the background. It is a pleasantly warm and humid summer evening. Far away you might hear a hint of distant thunder growling.

We aren’t going to serve anything extravagant this weekend, just our old reliable favorites: hamburgers, hot dogs, corn-on-the-cob, potato salad, green salad, and strawberry short cake. Also, chips and classic 1950s French onion dip, with WASPy bowls of radishes, cucumber spears, celery and carrots for karmic balance. There will be beer. No Aperol spritzes or frozen espresso martinis. Welcome to summer. Welcome to ordinary America— no fancy pants West Village girls here!

This is the best sort of holiday meal, one that doesn’t require numerous trips to the grocery store for elusive exotic ingredients, or perusing cookbooks. Jacques Pepin and Alice Waters can sit sullenly on the bookshelf – these are tried and true dishes that vary little from year to year, or really from family to family. I sometimes miss the dry, charred, hockey-puck-hamburgers of my childhood, but I must say that Mr. Sanders can flip a mean burger. And I still make my mother’s potato salad. Maybe you’ll grill brats, or have a watermelon or lemon meringue pie. Maybe your family always grills chicken. Be sure to enjoy yourselves!
We will be trying one new dish as Mr. Sanders does love a challenge: grilled artichokes. In preparation, he has even cleaned the grill for the new season. Bring on summer! We’ll see you at the farmers’ market!

Food52 Grilled Artichokes

Food and Wine Grilled Artichokes

The Schmidty Wife Artichokes

We will be sticking close to home this weekend – we are painting a bathroom for a well-intentioned family project – so we will be flipping our burgers and watching the fireflies dance here. Heat up your charcoal briquets, enjoy your crab feast, fry up a batch of chicken, spike a cold watermelon, melt a batch of s’mores, enjoy the Chestertown Tea Party, wave your flags at the parades, and remember the brave souls who gave their all.

“Summertime is always the best of what might be.”
― Charles Bowden

Hints from the New York Times for effective grill cleaning.

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Spy Long-Form: Chesapeake College’s Cliff Coppersmith on Leading During Tough Times

May 21, 2025 by Dave Wheelan Leave a Comment

It’s hard to imagine an institution more vital to the Mid-Shore’s economic future than Chesapeake College. For nearly 60 years, the region’s community college has played a central role in educating, training, and launching thousands of students into careers essential to the growth of the five counties it serves.

Despite a strong track record, Chesapeake has faced no shortage of challenges—from shifting demographics and uncertain state funding to the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic. As President Cliff Coppersmith enters his seventh year at the helm, he remains focused on navigating these headwinds while building for the future.

In our annual interview, Coppersmith emphasized the college’s local momentum, underscored by unanimous county support for a $56 million capital project to expand skilled trades education. The planned facility—twice the size of the current Queen Anne’s tech building—will break ground in 2026.

He also spotlighted recent advances, including a $1.2 million mobile welding lab, a new marine trades vessel, and a $500,000 annual investment in nursing programs. With 37% of students now dual-enrolled high schoolers, and federal programs like Pell Grants and Upward Bound under scrutiny, Coppersmith is alert but optimistic—confident in the college’s enduring role as a regional engine of talent and opportunity.

This video is approximately 24 minutes in length. For more information about Chesapeake College please go here.

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When Your Life is the Story By Laura J. Oliver

May 18, 2025 by Laura J. Oliver 4 Comments

Note: On June 4, Laura Oliver and Andrew Oliver will be reading stories as part of the Spy Night Series at the Avalon Theatre. Doors open at 5:30 pm

Three years ago today, when I started writing these weekly stories, I confided, “You might as well know up front that I believe in life after death, mental telepathy, and mind over matter.” I was being a little facetious since I also mentioned having spent my childhood trying to make my cat Purrfurr levitate. But I’ve created a book of these columns now and titled it “Something Other Than Chance” because when I think about how we met and about the other intriguing connections we’ve explored, I do believe we experience inexplicable miracles of timing that may be an expression of a power we have yet to comprehend.

As a panelist at the Washington Writers Conference two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to pitch this next book to several of 12 literary agents who had come for a ‘pitch fest.’ If this sounds kind of fast and aggressive, that’s because it is. Each pitch is precisely five minutes. Having sold my first book without an agent, I’d never subjected myself to a multiple pitch fest before. It’s like Speed Dating meets Shark Tank.

Here’s how it works. You line up ahead of your appointment time outside the pitch room, with the 11 other writers pitching one of the agents in that time slot. If your appointment is, say, 11:52, then at exactly 11:52, on the dot, the door opens, and you all crowd in simultaneously, scanning the room for the desk at which your target is seated. Once you find her, you have until 11:57 to vacate your seat for the next hopeful. If you don’t get up on your own at the sound of the bell, you are tasered.

Not really. You are escorted out by a very polite timekeeper.

Having helped other writers prepare queries and pitches, I had learned a few things about this process. Like know who your target readership is, which means who will buy your book? And the answer can’t be “Humans.” Or “Earthlings,” or “Everyone with eyeballs.”

So, you sit there wishing you could just do a Mr. Spock mind-meld—put three fingers on the side of the agent’s temple and telepathically transmit your book into her brain so that you don’t even need your whole 5 minutes. Instead, you must articulate your subject, audience, books similar to your own that have sold well, your ability to market, and your credentials– in a charismatic yet professional way.

In 300 seconds.

The gun went off, and we all pressed through the door only. I couldn’t recognize which agent was mine because all the seats filled immediately. Bewildered, I approached desk after desk as if searching for a seat in a game of musical chairs, only to realize someone had taken my spot and was using up my precious five minutes pitching her book out of turn. The timekeeper saw my distress, recognized the interloper and made her leave, but by that time I had less than 240 seconds. Four minutes to explain how the agent would make money helping me get my book published and why I would be a low-maintenance, super-fun person with whom to collaborate.

I think I said I love dogs because I knew from her bio she had a labradoodle. I hope we bonded over All Creatures Create and Small. The stakes felt so high at the time, though less than 1% of agent requests to see the manuscript become a book.

The high stakes made it feel like the proverbial life review when we make the transition from this life to the next. When we end this book and start another and hope for a 4-star review or a positive blurb.

This is my story, you say, and I am the only one who could have written this particular tale. I needed a lot of help, thank you. It’s full of conflict and loss, and the protagonist is deeply flawed, but she knows this and works hard to improve.

Here, you see the timekeeper edging over, and you revert to sputtering everything you know about plotting a story and crafting a life. And nothing is as it appears! Someone goes on a trip! A stranger comes to town!

“Sorry, you’re out of time,” the timekeeper says, and you rise to stand in front of the person who holds your fate in her hands.

A girl loves a dog. Has babies. Makes bad choices, then better ones.

“Is there transformation,” the agent asks?

I hope so. After all, that was the point of this effort, this book, this life.

“What’s the genre?” the agent asks. “ Adventure? Romance? Mystery? Coming of age?”

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

“Sum it up in one line,” she says as the timekeeper touches your arm. “What’s this book really about, and why would I read it?”

“Because it’s about you,” I say, suddenly realizing this is true.

And because, in the end, it’s a love story.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Food Friday: Deelish Sammies

May 16, 2025 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

Ah, late spring. It is a beautiful time of the year. The fireflies are beginning to sparkle in the blue twilight of the back yard. A bunny is enjoying chowing down on the new grass in the front yard. There are even more wondrous smells these days for Luke the wonder dog on our daily tours of the neighborhood’s hedges and flower beds. The long days stretch slowly toward the last day of school. There are too many awards nights, school field trips, graduation parties and political protests to attend – who has time for normal, sit-down family dinners? For that matter, who has time to plan those meals? Maybe Martha, but don’t forget, she has staff on hand. The rest of us, running our own tiny on-a-shoestring-enterprises, need to plan on the fly. Which is why I am suggesting deelish Sammies for every occasion. They can be made ahead, they are portable, they are economical, and they are filling. And they are easy to accessorize.

In this complicated, overly-scheduled, anxiety-fraught, spread sheet-specific life, don’t be a Stanley Tucci. I know, Stanley Tucci is sweet and winsome. He has sparkling eyes, and tasteful scarves, and the jovial air of bonhomie. He is a foodie. He got us through COVID with his videos of nice, stiff homemade Negronis. We loved him in Julie and Julia. He helped us understand the mysterious ways of the Vatican in the timely film Conclave. If I see him passionately swallow one more obscure regional Italian delicacy on yet another travel show, I will surely puke. I have maxed out on the ubiquity of Stanley. He was quoted in a recent Food and Drink Magazine about the most delicious sandwich he has ever eaten. He didn’t wax poetical or nostalgic about his mother’s homemade tuna salad sandwiches, or the prosaic turkey sandwich he could have had at his local London pub. He didn’t mention even the legendarily expensive burger from Balthazar in New York City. No. Stanley Tucci’s best sandwich was street food in Rome. It was a smoked cow tongue, with Romaine lettuce, and homemade mayonnaise, on local bread. Surely, without a doubt, it was the best he has ever tasted. We cannot top that. We cannot possible compare our own boring, drab, suburban life with his glittering world.

But we can try. Luke, Mr. Sanders, and I are not going to Italy any time soon. In fact, cooking has been a challenge this week, because we have been painting the kitchen cabinets, and the long pine table is crammed with boxes of silverware, plates, bowls, cookie sheets, wooden spoons, measuring cups and boxes of foil, Saran Wrap, and parchment paper. It’s hard to find anything. But there is a cutting board around here, someplace, and a good bread knife. We don’t need homemade mayo. Bring on the tomatoes and the fresh mozzarella, Stanley.

When you are driving home from a graduation, or get stuck in traffic going to the beach, you can pull over along the way, and reach inside your souvenir Trader Joe’s insulated bag, and pull out a homemade burrata caprese sandwich. You won’t need homemade mayo. In fact, some Utz Sour Cream & Onion chips and a Diet Coke can only enhance your foodie experience. Go ahead – you can be an Eastern Shore original, and have Utz Crab Chip seasoned chips. (Stanley will probably opt for Italian chips: San Carlo – PiùGusto Porchetta. Ewwww. )

The Spy Test Kitchen Caprese Sandwich.

Don’t take my word for it – here are some more Deelish Italian sandwiches for your own armchair travel experience.

Here is the interview with our worldly, movie star pal, Stanley Tucci:

“There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound.”
― Douglas Adams

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Chesapeake Scenes With Andy McCown

May 14, 2025 by James Dissette 1 Comment

For nearly three decades, the music-and-poetry project Chesapeake Scenes: Words and Music has carried the rhythms and reflections of the Chesapeake Bay into community halls, schools, and concert venues across the region. Now, with a remastered archive and a new generation of artists on board, local educator and storyteller Andy McCown is ensuring that this living tradition endures.

A recent open-air concert, presented by Echo Hill Outdoor School and hosted by Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society, showcased songs and poetry from the group’s repertoire.

The origins of Chesapeake Scenes trace back to a serendipitous conversation between McCown and the late Tom McHugh, an English professor and musician. McCown, who has spent much of his life on the Chester River with Echo Hill Outdoor School, shared stories of reading Gilbert Byron’s The Lord’s Oysters aloud to students aboard skipjacks and that conversation sparked a creative partnership: McHugh on bay-inspired music, McCown on poetry and prose.

Over the years, their performances—joined by regional talents like Sue Matthews, Karen Somerville, and Tom Anthony—ranged from humble bar gigs to a black-tie show at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Regardless of the venue, the mission remained the same: to bring the voices of the Chesapeake to life through storytelling and song.

The legacy continues today. After McHugh’s passing, McCown assembled a new group of Kent County artists to carry the torch. With support from the Hedgelawn Foundation, matching funds from community members, and production work by Benji Price, a two-volume digital recording of Chesapeake Scenes was created. The remastered archive is now accessible on most streaming platforms, allowing teachers, students, and the public to explore the heart of the region through poems by Gilbert Byron, Meredith Hadaway, Joel Barber, and music by James Stankewicz, Zack Kelleher, Warren “Pres” Harding, Sue Mathews and others.

More than nostalgia, McCown sees the project as a form of preservation—capturing not just the physical beauty of the bay but the social fabric of the watermen, their families, and the evolving culture of the region. “It’s an archive of emotion,” McCown said. “It tells a lot about the inner feelings of the watermen, the landscape, and the life along the bay.”

This fall, McCown and his collaborators will bring Chesapeake Scenes across the bay with a performance at the Annapolis Maritime Museum on October 9. The event will feature a rotating cast of Eastern Shore artists including Sue Matthews, Bob and Pam Ortiz, Meredith Hadaway, and Rebeka Hock.

Listeners can find both volumes (35 tracks) of Chesapeake Scenes by searching the title on their preferred digital music platform (Spotify, etc). All are free.

This video is approximately five minutes in length.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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