When I drive back home to Orangeburg, I exit I-26 as soon as possible. On US 21, passing the winter fields, racing down the giant hill at Beaver Creek, and seeing the cross of St. Matthews Methodist in the distance, something happens to me–my grip on the steering wheel begins to ease while my mind begins to race.

This road is the route to my homeplace, the route to my family, my history. I think of that Pat Conroy line, “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” My family has been in this place for centuries so this geography is, in a very real sense, my anchorage.

But it’s still the South, my South, and that South is always already wrapped up in a brutal history. It’s a messy wound.

After reading yet another story about how Portsmouth, Ohio, is the so-called “Pill-Mill of America” (which makes no sense because the “pill-mills” have been shut down…)I pitched an idea to an editor at 100 Days in Appalachia.

There’s a football stadium in Portsmouth that once once home to an NFL team called the Portsmouth Spartans. The stadium has seen better days, but recently has become a site of renewal for some people in the community. A group is working to renovate the stadium, a rally against heroin was held there last March, and semi-pro football team has been playing games there.

The story is this: here is a place that is facing some serious challenges and not in denial of their existence. But here is also something else: grassroots organizing.

Early July and waiting for the sun to set, on the side of the road somewhere in Ross County, Ohio. My friend Marcus and I were driving back from Portsmouth, down on the Ohio River. I’d hoped to find a field that had been recently hayed. We settled for this road, the one that goes right into the sunset, the one with the best angle.

(orginally published at Between Coasts)

The day after the 2016 election, the New York Times ran a story about how the media got it all wrong.

“No shit,” thought everyone in the world.

In the months before the election, I passed dozens of homemade “Trump for President” signs as I drove my little blue Ranger around Licking, Knox, and Fairfield Counties. It seemed to me then indicative of grassroots support for Trump—perhaps a portent of things to come.

There was one that read “Trump—Best for USA,” with red, white, and blue paint on a large piece of plywood attached to an electrical pole on Highway 33 in Athens County, Ohio. Outside Wolf Lake, Indiana, “Save America from Socialism, Elect Trump-Spence” in spray-painted black letters on the side of a silver trailer. Another read “Trump—Pray for our Nation. Take Our Country Back” on a large piece of plywood painted black, just south of Dalton, Georgia. And just up the road on Highway 62 in Knox County, in the midst of Amish country, “God, Guns, and Coal. Trump.”

Save for a few stories about individual signs, no one put the pieces together. Maybe there was meaning there? Did the signs indicate a kind of grassroots activism connected to the Trump campaign? Maybe. Maybe not. But it didn’t make the headlines.

For the past few months I’ve been pitching stories like that about my corner of Ohio to east coast editors who’ve said, on more than one occasion, “I don’t see the national import of X, Y, or Z story.”

For example, the story of an Ohio woman whose neighbor had recently raised a Confederate flag. She said she was very afraid. She’s black. He’s white. Or the story of how homeless and “marginally housed” people in a Rust Belt city experienced the election cycle and whether or not they planned to vote and for whom.

It’s not entirely the media’s fault. Print newspapers—the traditional realm of shoe-leather reporting—aredying. That’s not . . . news. Nonprofit investigative outfits have picked up some of the slack, but there’s a lot of slack to pick up.

Those homemade Trump signs and the people who took the time to construct them were and are a valuable story.

But I think there are many valuable stories in the places where these signs popped up.

There’s value in stories about Eric Lee, a man who served twenty years in prison, who is in recovery, and who, every day, focuses on helping others. In the past three weeks I’ve watched Eric counsel five different people in Newark, Ohio, help them think through their recovery, help them find housing, help them find work. Eric doesn’t get paid for this work. He just does it.

There’s value in learning about Homer, Ohio, the birthplace of Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president. And it’s not just in the fact that she was born there, but because Homer, Ohio, is a place full of people who care about it. And ten years ago the town lost its public school. Since then it has struggled to find an identity.

And there’s value in learning about unemployment, marginal housing, drug addiction, mental illness, and hunger. There’s value in knowing how people can manage in a culture that mostly praises “bootstrapping” and pities the poor—or, worse, blames them for their poverty. And there’s value in learning about the activists who are taking on these problems.

The middle, the vast spaces between New York and Los Angeles, the flyover country, is full of people who are very much in touch.

So, for all y’all who were surprised by the outcome of this year’s presidential election (and those who weren’t), for those of you who recognize that you might be out of touch with what’s going on in “Flyover Country” (beyond the echo chambers of Los Angeles and New York or your Facebook feed), for those of you looking to connect with progressive people in these places, this will be your place.

Between Coasts is about original, thought-provoking, and empathetic narrative nonfiction. Between Coasts is a new model of community-based but nationally and internationally focused journalism that will produce stories from and about Trumpland.

These are our core principles:

• Micro journalism with a macro perspective: What’s happening locally is linked to bigger things. The soybeans grown in Licking County, Ohio, are more than likely exported to China, Japan, or Taiwan.

• No parachuting: We want journalism that’s rooted in a place and written by the people who live there. We’ll look for writers based in the places they’re writing about or who know them well and can write about them with a national audience in mind. There will be no writers based out of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, or our nation’s capital. Apologies. If Between Coasts writers do report on something happening in places other than their hometowns, they’ll let the locals do the talking. They’ll let them tell us about their place, their lives, not the other way around.

• Slow journalism matters: We’ll spend time with a story, a subject. Every week people like Eric Lee do something interesting. We’ll write about that.

• Empathetic journalism: We’ll value nonfiction writing and research that tries to understand the lives of other people—however impossible that may be. We want to cover stories about the lives of people living in counties that voted for Trump. This administration will create policies that will affect people’s lives. And as with most things coming from the top down, it’s a good guess that women, people of color, the poor, and LGBTQ+ will suffer the most. To counter this, people are organizing and protesting. What does that look like? What will that look like?

• No Shouting but…: Because we’ll privilege narrative and slow journalism we’ll avoid shouting if at all possible. But when politicians try to cover up violence with lies, with euphemisms, we will shout. George Orwell writes in “Politics and the English Language” that official policy can disguise the truth: “A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

The general atmosphere is bad, friends, but language need not suffer. It must get tough.

We must get tough.

The first time I went there, two men wearing neon green t-shirts that read “Repent or Perish” were pacing on the sidewalk in front of the church thumping Bibles and shouting about the wicked sin of homosexuality.

A few weeks later, they came into the church, commandeered a mic, and said the same things. The pastor at the time calmly sent the men packing.

That was August 2007.

I’m thinking about that moment right now after having consumed a steady diet of news from Orlando over the past few days. And I’m struck by how brave the people are who are gathering there and around the world to support and remember the dead but to also stand up for human rights and human dignity.

And I just can’t help but think of my fierce little church in Ohio, the United Church of Granville, a church that walked in the local Pride parade and became welcoming and affirming decades before it was cool to do so.

I think about the teenagers from the church who—just a few months ago—helped foster a conversation about how to promote inclusivity in the local high school. This after someone scrawled homophobic graffiti in a bathroom.

I think about how a few months ago when some people were flipping out because Target decided it really didn’t care where people chose to pee, the pastor of my church wrote an opinion piece in support of transgendered people for the local newspaper.

I think about how on the Monday after forty-nine people were massacred in Orlando, a city council person and fellow church member introduced legislation in Newark, Ohio, to protect the civil rights of LGBTI people.

I know excessive pride is unbecoming, but I’m damn proud to be connected to these people. I’m proud to tell folks that in tiny Granville, Ohio, the place I now call home, there’s a group of people fighting the long fight against fear and hate.

But mostly, I’m just humbled. I’m humbled by the very active presence of love in this community—engaged love, persistent love, brave love.

Love is patient and kind, for sure, but in this world, it’s also brave. It’s brave to say you don’t want to “bomb the bastards.” It’s brave to say you want to promote right relations and justice for all people. It’s brave to say you’re willing to sacrifice your life to do the work of promoting dignity and seeking understanding where there is little.

There are many who do this work and have done this work for years in my community and around the world. They are brave activists for love. They are brave in places where the threat of violence is real: the streets of Russia and Uganda; middle schools in California; city council chambers in Ohio. Indeed, the fight for human rights requires people who exude this kind of bravery.

But I want a world where we don’t have to be brave—where we don’t have to fight in order to love.

I want a world where we just love.