COVID finished her position, like so several many others. Now she collects stories about the pandemic.
Jan. 13—Michelle Fishburne didn’t fret way too considerably right after shedding her public relations position last spring in a pandemic-induced firm downsizing. She experienced a good deal of practical experience and a broad expert network.

But immediately after sending out 86 fruitless deal with letters in look for of a new career, she began to feel her willingness to relocate for do the job was likely to be her finest asset.
Encouraged by the operate of Brandon Stanton, author of “People of New York,” Fishburne allow her Chapel Hill lease expire very last July, moved into her 29-foot Jamboree motor household and set out to travel the place interviewing people along the way.
At 1st, Fishburne was seeking at her travels as a way to make a portfolio so that, once COVID-19 is below command and she can satisfy potential employers experience to deal with, she would have some clean do the job to present. But right after a handful of months on the highway she recognized her operate had documentary price, and she began presenting it on the web as an oral background task she calls, “Who We Are Now.”
It options stories that emphasize the way COVID-19 has altered Americans’ lives.
“”Storyteller’ is a work,” Fishburne claims she has found out, and she’s savoring turning out to be one particular.
Touring in her genes
What may have been the most daunting portion of the journey for some — the environment out — was effortless for Fishburne.
If wanderlust is a gene, it travels in her family her grandparents lived for two decades in a 22-foot trailer they moved close to the city of Plainfield, N.J., all through the Great Despair in the mid-1930s right after Fishburne’s granddad lost his occupation as a salesman. Escalating up, Fishburne took long camping excursions with her parents.
She and her two children spent months at a time on the road far too, in the early 2000s, with a pop-up camper and sights together the way serving as a classroom. Later on, Fishburne and her then-partner acquired the Jamboree, and Fishburne took it on numerous very long journeys with various family configurations.
Fishburne however had the motor home when she misplaced her task previous spring. Though it can be just a very little smaller than a school bus, she’s at simplicity at its wheel. She resolved to get started with a journey she had created from North Carolina quite a few situations: She headed west for Wyoming and Yellowstone Countrywide Park.
Fishburne, 57, describes herself as intensely curious. She examined political science at UNC, graduating in 1984, and went to the College of Virginia for a law diploma. In addition to her PR careers, she has labored on the strategies of both of those Republican and Democratic candidates.
She thinks everyone has a story, and she would like to listen to it and share it.
By December, Fishburne stated, she had gathered 130 of those people stories, dozens of which presently are edited and posted on her site. (www.whowearenow.us/) She took a Christmas split to check out with her young children and is setting out once more this thirty day period, with a plan to gather a whole of 450 interviews by March, a year following the arrival of COVID-19. She programs to attribute inhabitants from every single point out.
Different ideologies, comparable hopes
Placing out, Fishburne said, in the midst of a pandemic and all through a person of the most politically divided eras of the nation’s background, she puzzled, “Am I likely to know my nation?”
She expected uncomfortable encounters, she stated, but uncovered none, only persons who had vastly disparate political sights but very similar hopes for their life and for those of their families.
Fishburne reported the essential to success has been pursuing the map from 1 smaller city to a different. She achieved men and women at a kite festival in Wyoming, a bed-and-breakfast in New Mexico, a Kiwanis Club meeting in Alabama. She uncovered a person in Valdosta, Ga., who begun a cellular ax-throwing enterprise as a way to make a living throughout the pandemic.
A number of North Carolina people are involved in the job so far: a comedian, a hairdresser, a musician, a restaurant operator and Eryk Pruitt, who owns a bar in Hillsborough with his spouse, Lana Pierce.
The few experienced expended years running bars and eating places for other entrepreneurs ahead of opening their very own put, Yonder, in downtown Hillsborough in June 2019. Factors had been heading great, Pruitt mentioned, right until COVID-19 hit and Gov. Roy Cooper requested bars to shut down in mid-March.
Pruitt stated he and his spouse experienced to absolutely shift gears, switching their pondering from looking for approaches to entice as numerous men and women as achievable to their bar to figuring out ways to entertain fewer, a lot more distanced customers in a way that could maintain the enterprise.
It was his wife’s idea, Pruitt said, to occur up with a very good recipe to make a “frose,” or frozen rose, and market it in a takeout Mason jar shoppers could decide up at the doorway.
The beverages were being tasty, Pruitt reported, and Yonder’s consumers arrived in droves to get them and other products to help the business and assist it alive.
The story of Yonder bar’s survival through the pandemic has features of American ingenuity, perseverance, feeling of community and the worth of addressing grievances to the governing administration, since Pruitt was a single of quite a few bar owners who complained that Cooper’s procedures about bars had been illogical and unfair.
He’s happy Fishburne involved it in her job because, he reported, it could encourage other individuals.
“Maybe some other business enterprise owner who thinks he’s attempted every thing will see it and think, ‘Wait, we haven’t tried using anything. Let’s test this,’ and probably it would preserve them alive.
“Hopefully that’s what Michelle is undertaking. She’s showing some stories of hope that will spark something in somebody’s head.”
Not an easy occupation
Though it may sound to some like a vacation, Fishburne claimed the task will involve a lot operate around times that start off at 7 a.m. and finish at midnight. Journey time is only section of it. Fishburne spends hours scouring news sites and speaking with resources in cities she options to check out in search of people today to job interview for the project.
She stays mainly in professional campgrounds, she claimed, to be certain she has entry to the net so she can get the job done by means of interview transcriptions, post the profiles and program her subsequent go.
She’s not confident in which the venture will lead, but Fishburne stated she has talked about what she’s accomplishing with e-book publishers, oral historians and documentarists. In the long run, she explained, she however hopes to parlay the expertise into a further job, probably with a non-revenue, telling the tales of the men and women it performs to aid.
Like many of the persons showcased in “Who We Are Now,” Fishburne reported, she has observed her existence significantly transformed by the pandemic even while she has not been sick.
“This has set up a distinctive path for me.”