Interesting Humans Christian Ward

April Sawicki is a 19 year old woman from New York who lived during high school in a broken down motor home in a vacant lot at the edge of town her father won in a poker game. Her mother left her father when she was young, then her father left April at 16 to fend for herself when he went to live with his girlfriend and the woman’s son. April, a budding singer-songwriter, ran away by stealing a neighbor’s car, and went on adventures up and down the east coast playing in bars and coffee sh...

I met singer-songwriter Reese Mayfield here in Raleigh last fall. Friends had invited me to what has become known as the Five Points Music Festival. It's a gathering of local musicians performing on an impromptu stage set up in the driveway of someone's garage. it's a fundraiser for a local school.Reese was one of the musicians performing that day. As the various musicians worked through their sets of covers and original music, I became intrigued by Reese, the youngest of the musicians.She's ...

What I know about trauma is that nearly all of us carry something in our psyches. Almost everyone you know has some part of their past that overwhelmed their emotional capacity to understand and process it and became trauma. Not all trauma is the horrific kind of rape or shooting or a tragic accident. These are the kinds of events plastered across the news that garner the most public attention. Sometimes the experiences are more subtle but no less hurtful. I've known today's guest,...

Trailer for Gordon Darr, a victim of Dr. Robert Anderson, the doctor at the University of Michigan who allegedly sexually molested hundreds of students and student-athletes as head of the UM's University Health Services. Anderson was never prosecuted but the University has proposed a $490 million settlement to more than 1,000 alleged victims of Anderson, who died in 2008. Gordon tells his complete story and weaves the thread of how his experience of being sexually molested affected his e...

Andrew Lafferty is a 20-year-old stand-up comedian learning the craft. He wants to become a comedy writer. After graduating from high school during the pandemic, he now the University of Pittsburgh, where he studies political science. Now three years into his journey as a comedian, Andrew has made people laugh everywhere from basements in the dorms at Pitt to tents, to clubs from Ann Arbor to Maine to LA. He has appeared at the Gotham Comedy Club in Manhattan and at improvs and Jazz...

When Kassondra and Will Lambert’s son Ethan was about two he was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic disorder referred to as KAND. The couple had noticed early in their son’s life that he wasn’t progressing physically as expected. Ethan was unable to hold a bottle himself and wasn’t starting to verbalize took them more than two years to finally get a diagnosis of this disease so rare only about 300 people worldwide are affected. Uncovering Ethan’s condition set the couple on a nearl...