LIVING NOW was inspired by the epic documentary survey of the American people made by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers during the 1930’s and 1940’s.

In 2002,the writer and historian, Michael Lesy, and the photographer, Jacqueline Hayden, created a course at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts that used the FSA as a model for a fresh survey of people and places in their region.

Hampshire College has been devoted to cross-disciplinary teaching and learning since it was founded. From the day the College opened its doors, it has attracted students who are creative mavericks, intellectuals, and social reformers. What better place, thought Lesy and Hayden, to teach writers to see, and  photographers to listen.

Students enrolled in Lesy and Hayden’s course were given a semester long assignment: Go out into the world, meet people, listen and learn from them. Turn everything you’ve learned into stories and photo sequences.

The “world” the students entered was the Connecticut River Valley. The Valley runs, north south, from Vermont to Connecticut. It has been a “gateway” and a “melting pot” for centuries. Anything and everything, anyone and everyone who lived and breathed in the Valley was a worthy subject for the students’ survey.

The web site livingnow.hampshire.edu was created as a venue for the very best work made by the survey’s writers and photographers. Empathetic, articulate, and engaged work, work with an edge, work that asked more questions than it answered—this was the work that LIVING NOW began to publish on its site.

Local schools and colleges, community groups, and grass root organizations began to use LIVING NOW to promote discussion of their own work and their own goals.

As LIVING NOW’S writers and photographers graduated from Hampshire and moved beyond the school and the Valley that had been their home,LIVING NOW began to publish the work they made as they came into their own.

As successive groups of writers and photographers move out into the world, they send back dispatches, and LIVING NOW publishes them.

LIVING NOW has these goals:

First: We want to break the stereotypes that “above ground” media use to fill the empty space between ads and commercials. Electronic and print media call such empty space ”news’.

Second: We want to deliver what we publish to as broad and diverse an audience as possible. We intend the narratives we publish—stories and pictures—to be as pungeant, humbling, and maddening, as complex and contradictory, as the very lives of the people who let our writers and photographers portray them. We want what we publish to serve as a mirror for some—and as a window for others.

Third: We intend LIVING NOW to be a venue for the very best work of emerging nonfiction writers and documentary photographers. We are committed to the work of artists who are not only articulate and expressive, but who feel compelled, by their imaginations and their consciences, to make the art they make.

LIVING NOW has no interest in publishing work that embodies one party line or another. The ‘best work” we publish has a spark of life in it. It wakes people up. It allows us—all of us—to see strangers as friends, the distant as if it were near, the familiar as if it were strange.