We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shara Kay Johnson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shara Kay below.

Alright, Shara Kay thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The two documentary-oriented projects I’m most pleased to have worked on are an ethnographic account of a peasant village in northern China, and facilitating a documentary film, “African Witchfinder,” profiling an inspiring Namibian, Berrie Holtzhausen. But choosing between the two for “the most meaningful” I’d have to go with Berrie.

The China documentation is ultimately a historical account, unfortunately, as the village was changing and being abandoned even as I wrote about it. That was the whole point — to document before it disappeared. But Berrie’s pioneering insights into dementia as a brain disease, and into how persons with dementia in tribal populations are especially vulnerable to accusations of being a witch, are current topics that are dynamically evolving as we speak, which is exciting and very important. My role in Berrie’s life originating in 2016 seems to have been a catalyst for subsequent positive change. The credit for that change is 100% due to Berrie, but I helped connect some of the first foundational dots. As he would say … it’s all about “connecting dots.”

Facilitating the film is meaningful on a few levels. A very personal one is that it was a situation in which I really rose above my comfort zones, which shows me that more is possible than I might otherwise have thought. It’s profoundly outside my comfort zone to reach out to strangers to ask about their work or to pitch unsolicited ideas. Yet I found myself doing exactly this.

After I met a woman while I was just a tourist in Namibia who had recently been freed from a chain tethered to a pole for 20 years by her family because they thought she was a witch, and I learned who was responsible for freeing and providing care for her, I was so interested that I contacted him, Berrie, to learn more. After we struck up a correspondence, I came to realize what a formidable battle he was trying to fight by himself against harmful practices of the heavily ingrained witchcraft culture in southern Africa – wherein innocent people are accused as witches and beaten, chained, murdered, and conned out of their life savings by witchdoctors – and I thought, though I could write an essay about this, a film would be more compelling and reach a wider audience, but I’m not a filmmaker!

After an extremely brief exchange on a Twitter travel chat group with a stranger, I noticed his profile bio said “filmmaker,” and in one of the bravest moves of my introverted life, I messaged him to ask how I could go about making and getting visibility for a film idea. Amazingly, he not only responded but asked me more about the subject of my interest, and yadda yadda, a few months later I met Mally Graveson and Toby Trueman of Cloud Break Pictures in Namibia for them to gather footage for a documentary film of Berrie’s work.

The four of us and a researcher working on her doctorate traveled together for the film. I had no part in the professional film production but I documented the trip and the making of the film, the people we met and what we learned about the witchcraft culture, on my travel blog. Some photos I took were included in a book and exhibit at Kent State University, and most importantly, I began a forever friendship with Berrie. I wrote a profile piece on him for Narratively Magazine, and in the course of many hours of Zoom interviews for that essay, I realized he really needs a full-fledged biography written about his extraordinary life. I’d love to be the person to write it. The work that Berrie does is literally saving peoples’ lives and I’m honored to be a part of it and to have been able to share his story in words and picture.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When asked to categorize myself in the creative fields, I specify, “writer and photographer,” though if I had to choose only one word, I think I would say “documentarian,” which combines the two disciplines into one product, so to speak.

It’s great fun as a writer to get more cerebrally creative, reflective, philosophical, introspective, metaphorical, etc., and my creative nonfiction essays illustrate my fondness for this (and once in a while I have fun with fiction). It’s no small joy to me when I manage to pull together several threads into a whole, as I often combine history, science, or magical realism with my nonfiction experiences.

But what I find the most satisfaction in is documenting and presenting worlds largely unknown. It’s a little strange for me to say that because I’m less fond of that kind of straight-forward narrative writing, but the goal and the final product, I ultimately find more rewarding. And I love including photography in these narratives. My travel blog, SKJtravel, is aimed at the armchair traveler who wants to learn of the world they may never see. Of course, I hope my accounts inspire others to go see for themselves how big and amazing our world is, but many opportunities I’ve had aren’t easily or commonly available, and those are the ones I most delight in sharing with others through narratives and photographs.

I first had the privilege to interact with communities and animals beyond the tourist experience by signing up for a variety of Earthwatch expeditions. These were research-oriented experiences, and in light of my nerdy inclinations, nothing could be more fulfilling than contributing to research abroad. I lived among people who had never interacted with, or in some cases never even seen, a foreigner. I got to walk transects across a Big 5 game park in Africa with only a ranger beside me for protection. Once I realized what opportunities were available outside of the tourist track, I started signing up for other experiences more directly (Earthwatch is a middleman connecting volunteers with researchers seeking volunteers), for example, working in the Uganda Wildlife Education Center and in a refugee camp on Chios Island, Greece.

As a tourist, I’ve chosen places to visit that many others wouldn’t, and I’ve learned from feedback on my travel blog that those are also very popular topics for my armchair-traveler readers. Examples of those places include Antarctica, Iran, and Tunisia. My husband and I typically travel independently so we can go places and see things group tours don’t.

I also write (and photograph) quite a lot about my area of Colorado on my blog. Perhaps I get a little mired in relaying historical facts but I can’t help myself because I find it interesting. The good thing about presenting photos with narratives is a viewer can always skip the text and still learn from the photos, so I can suit all types of attention spans! Currently I’m working on a series of posts about some of the old mountain cemeteries containing graves of the earliest pioneers and miners to settle the area.

So I started my narrative travel blog in 2010, though it hardly seems longer ago than yesterday. I’ve written well over 400 posts on there. My first creative nonfiction essay was published in 2005. Since then my essays have been published in a number of literary journals, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and recognized in the “Best American Essays” anthology. I’ve been a finalist and winner in several writing competitions, and was accepted to two artist residencies. But writing to submit to literary magazines is a tough road that requires inordinately thick skin and an ungodly amount of patience as you wait to hear from them. I absolutely love the writing part; I absolutely loathe the submission part. I would like to have a fairy godmother who does all that latter work for me and just tells me when there’s good news. And then buys me a six-pack to celebrate.

My interest in photography really took hold about the time my essays started getting published, and I started exhibiting photography a couple years later. Photography has given me a greater, more disciplined eye for noticing and focusing on detail in landscape, and in all of my surroundings, which is a helpful eye to have in writing, as well.

So I mostly exhibit pretty straight-forward travel photography including all types of subjects – wildlife, portraits, landscapes, architecture. My most unique series is called Kaleidoscope Eye, which is a technique I came up with one winter’s night while procrastinating on a writing deadline. (Procrastination truly is the mother of invention.) It involves, as you might deduce, taking photos of things through a kaleidoscope.

Because of my years of experience writing and submitting to journals, working with editors and with peers in numerous writing groups, because I love to show off the beautiful nook of Colorado I live in, and because I find it difficult to relate the trials and tribulations of “the writing life” to most people not living the same life, I’m currently pursuing an idea I’ve been nurturing for a while to establish a writing retreat, Black Bear Writing Retreat, to meet and connect with other writers while we explore my area of the Rocky Mountains.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I guess for an introvert who feels she has a lot to share, creative outlets like writing and photographing are a way to share without having to be social in person. If I have more than two social engagements in a month, I feel overwhelmed. But I’m very chatty at a distance (online) and I love when people interact with my posts on social media or reply to my travel blog newsletters that I send whenever I make a new post.

I have sometimes felt deflated in the past when something gets very little engagement, but my husband pointed out that if one single person has seen and liked what I shared, that should be rewarding enough to have touched one person. And I’ve taken that to heart. I especially love when somebody tells me I made their day or made them happy with a photo I shared or a post I wrote.

So, touching one person is enough. Though touching one hundred is even better! It can be a lot of work sometimes in normal life to bestow happiness on another, but I can take a photo, put it online, and voilá, one happiness point. That’s rewarding. When one person tells me they learned something new from one of my blog posts, that’s rewarding. If fifty people tell me, that’s even more rewarding … I can teach people without being at the head of a classroom! And when somebody tells me I inspired them to travel to a particular location, I feel especially satisfied. I’m not internationally renowned for anything; I don’t have 50,000 followers online; but touching even just a few lives is pretty cool.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Here’s a little thing. Obviously the BEST way to support local artists is to buy their goods and services, choose them over a big national brand. So this is just a little thing, but when I go to art fairs or farmer’s markets where there are artist booths, or beer or distillery festivals (small brewers are also craftsmen of a type), I always make a point to spend time talking with people manning their booths. Especially a booth that is currently empty.

Engage with the artist, ask questions about their work. Artists like to talk about their creations, it also helps attract other people to their booth when passersby notice engagement going on, and you will likely learn some very interesting things you never even knew you wanted to learn. Sometimes I ask one question and intend to move on after the answer, and find myself still there 10 minutes later chatting in an unexpectedly interesting conversation.

I’m always thanked for stopping to chat, I can’t think of a time ever regretting it. So, instead of just shuffling past all the booths and only stopping at something you want to buy, stop at a few other places, too, invest a little time with artists themselves, not only with the art in your shopping bag. This might sound weird coming from me being that I just told you what an introvert I am, haha, but I make a point to put myself out there, as I figure the artists are putting themselves out there, and it’s nice to meet them in the middle. Plus, if I get overwhelmed with too much socializing, it’s easy to stop talking, unlike at a party or something.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://skjtravel.net / https://skjphotography.net / http://blackbearretreat.com / https://sharasinor.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skjtraveler/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/skj.traveler