Amber Blais, the impresario behind Raconteur Denver, persuades people she believes have stories to tell into getting her bi-monthly evenings rolling with a 10-15 minute story each centered around a given theme. After the opening session, Amber hopes members of the audience will be inspired to share three-minute stories.

I’m not much on public speaking. Amber got me to participate with a combination of charm and flattery. I was one of the openers on Nov. 7 around the theme “lost – and/or found.”

Amber asked me to take part more than a year ago. When I saw the theme on her schedule for November, I thought of losing my mother. I think of her so often. I calculated that a year would give me time to think of a story about her I could tell without tearing up.

I wear “I voted” stickers in celebration. I also wear them in memory of those who struggled and died so that I can cast a ballot.

And I wear them as a plea to others to willingly suspend the cynicism that is at the heart of so much of our disengagement from politics.

We’re often asked to marvel that slaves and their descendants held onto their humanity despite the violence they have endured in America. But what of slave-owners and their descendants? How did they hold onto their humanity while committing atrocities? Or turning a blind eye to brutality? Or growing up casually accepting the lie that fellow citizens were less than – even if they were raised to be polite to their “inferiors”? Those, too, are questions we should consider.

Flyover country. The world beyond the bubble. A red corner of a purple state. Those are the kinds of labels that offer simple answers.

I found people, not stereotypes, in Montrose, an isolated small town that I first visited in 2012. I was on a Stars & Stripes assignment to write about this western Colorado community's grassroots effort to help war vets reintegrate into civilian life. Montrose later became the setting for my book, "Home of the Brave."

Montrose gave me glimpses of what collaboration can accomplish even in times of bruising rancor and division. I went there with questions and returned with evidence of the human capacity for generosity, resilience and healing.

When I’d asked my 13-year-old daughter whether she wanted to join us for “Appropriate” at Denver’s Curious Theatre, she said yes immediately. I started to tell her more about the play, but she stopped me, saying, “I trust Curious.”

Curious, which is celebrating its 20th season this year on Denver’s version of Off Broadway, traffics in the ambitious and the complex, which is certainly what you would expect of a play about race a black artist wrote for an all-white cast.

“Appropriate” was hard to watch, but worth watching. We trusted Curious to challenge itself as a company and its audiences. It delivered.

Americans are taking another look at the Vietnam War. It has, for example, attracted the gaze of acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns. A 10-part, 18-hour documentary series directed by Burns and Lynn Novick airs in September on PBS stations nationwide.

Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, ending the war. The 2008 National Defense Authorization Act authorized the Secretary of Defense to mark that 50th anniversary with commemorations that began across the country in 2012 and are to culminate on Veterans Day in 2025.

All this talk of Vietnam has me thinking of the veterans of that conflict I had the privilege to meet as I worked on a book that I initially thought would be only about our current war, the one set into motion by the 9/11 attacks. 

In 2008, Natalie Wilson, who works in public relations in Washington, and her sister-in-law Derrica Wilson, a veteran law-enforcement officer, founded the Black and Missing Foundation to help African-American families in DC and across the country find missing loved ones. The Wilsons, who are black, were inspired by a 2004 case in South Carolina in which a family struggled to draw attention to the disappearance of a young black woman whose boyfriend later confessed to murdering her.

National crime statistics show that in 2016, African-Americans made up 38 per cent of missing Americans under the age of 18, despite only making up about 15 per cent of the nation’s youth population. So, black children go missing at a disproportionate rate, while the media focuses on missing whites.