“ Everybody has a story. If you have a pulse you’re inside one now.”

For as long as I can remember I loved to read personal interviews. I liked the inevitable surprise of one question leading to another and what happens when two people drill down. It doesn’t take long before the conversation sharpens into a particular and original shape. You understand something about them, and hopefully they feel understood.

My work happens to be all about people in a moment of major change and how they feel about it informs everything. What happens depends on perspective and the skill in your response. I think change is something you build your way into. One decision supports the next and it all comes together, like a story, in a way that makes sense.

Everybody has a story. If you have a pulse you’re inside one now. Who you are and the story of that is an aggregate of specific events and a thousand decisions you made over the course of time. How you got where you are today depends on your state of mind and what you were willing to do, or not. Sometimes it’s luck, and it’s always a matter of timing.

So much useless information flashes before our eyes and floods the brain it makes sense to crave conversations that feel real and require some depth. Scrolling might tell you what happened in a single moment but it seldom shows what’s behind that and why it matters. In order to understand people we have to ask questions. How did it all go down? Why did it fall apart? At one point could you feel it was coming together? The answers to questions like that are important.

Those are stories. Stories inspire other people.

That would be a good way to describe The Franklin Hills Project. We are collecting stories, including yours.