At a recent JFP/BOOM staff retreat at the Mississippi Museum of Art, each attendee wrote his or her superpower on a big paper leaf to form our collective-strength "Orien" tree (thanks, Kellogg Foundation, for the idea). Then, staff photographer Trip Burns and investigative reporter Anna Wolfe—who enjoy writing poetry—took the words and turned them into this staff poem that reflects our shared purpose and individual strengths, and then read it at our next staff meeting—blowing us all away. As we celebrate the paper's 12th birthday this week, we offer this as our gift to Jackson. Thank you for inspiring us all these years. And cheers to Trip and Anna for this amazing poem that reflects your talents and the staff's shared passion for our community.
—Donna Ladd, CEO and editor-in-chief
Present Leaves
We're connecting our paper, printed with ink and bound with metal staples, from our fingers to our readers' eyes.
We're conversing with words and thoughts and ideas—strung together in our own unique order, using language that our readers understand.
We're exploring ideas with designs and plans, with reflections of study, with displays of life, for our audience to see.
We're observing what goes on around us, what we filter in, what we recognize, what we reveal—to be our truth, the truth, so that people can pick up our paper and have a look.
We're explaining things we've seen and heard, places we've been and yet to enter, people we've met and yet to meet—words yet recorded, pictures yet taken, interviews yet given—pressed and polished, sent out, beamed out—to make something we've yet created.
We're seeing shapes in the ordinary, symbols in the complex, humor in the absurd, drama in the everyday—our truth is intertwined with our stories collected and organized, hand-made if you count all the typing and mouse-clicking.
Mouse-clicking and mama-ducking. Our leaders have a cool, motherly calm. Our leaders hone creativity, let it thrive. Our leaders are in each of us as we raise each other up, cultivate the eclectic.
Our empathy sets each and every one of us into individual persons. Where did you come from? Who do you think you are? How have you made your way to this day—this day now? Thousands of days? Millions of hours? A multitude of sunsets and closing hours—and here you are, with your stories and experiences—of what you've seen, what you've heard, what you've been taught, what you've learned—on your own, to this moment, unfolding now.
Your curiosity gets you there. Sets you off, gleans the right questions. Sometimes tough ones, never answered 'til now—only due to your tenacity, persistence, resourcefulness.
Your intuition is yours and yours alone, built up time after time, at once born with and discovered—from danger and caution, from fear and anxiety, from mystery.
Our collaboration is achieved by meeting each other in the areas of our work, sending messages back and forth, coming to agreements, submitting to responsibilities, adding and subtracting, adjusting the size and scope of our assignments, and finally, when the equation has been balanced, and all the parts are fused together, to make what comes in from many go out as one.
Your imagination is yours and yours alone, created with your own feelings, from your own emotions, from your own life—so that you can project an idea into the future and meet it there.
The reader's perseverance in the day-to-day routines of living is our perseverance. We travel all over though dispatches and journeys on the ground—these are our interactions with the outside world, the world we are a part of, the city we reside, the state we live in, the streets that surround us.
All the people we know—strangers, customers, readers, owners, artists, politicians, leaders, elders and youth—these make up the real diversity.
A problem-solver can be described as any one of us here—how will this work you'll ask? How can we get this done? How will it all turn out?
Popular speech tells us that we must find a solution. You don't reach a solution, you reach a compromise because there's room to meet. You find a solution. Not that it's lost, but that it's yet to be seen.
With passion for words and pictures, for stories and histories, for colors and shades, we make not only a physical copy of our collected pieces of the week, but transferred into digital markers of this time and place—with these we make something.
Something that is read at a table, or in a restaurant, in a museum, and a bar, in houses and apartments, at schools and offices, in bathrooms, on phones, on tablets, on lighted screens—in their hands, at their fingertips.
We're personable as a group and look out for the one person it takes to look at our work. The intimacy of it, the publicity of it.
What comes in from many goes out as one. We do that by connecting people and inspiring them to action.
We do that to make it better.
—Trip Burns and Anna Wolfe, based on Orien Leaves, created by staff members, Sept. 3, 2014
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