Charles Martin writes in a dimly lit office of his home in Jacksonville, Florida. In that room, Charles weaves stories for a world inundated with bad news. This week, the New York Times best-seller’s latest novel, Unwritten, will vie for the attention of readers distracted by deadly headlines, cynical social media and tabloid gossip. His words carry a very different message.

“We live in a culture where we’re fed a daily dose of hopelessness,” Charles told us. “They say, ‘Here, you eat this; this is your allotment for the day,’ and you’re supposed to like it. I react strongly to that. I don’t think we should just accept that. I think hope is worth raising to the surface.”

Charles roots Unwritten’s genesis in despair, but doesn’t leave it there for long. In an early scene, a beautiful, renowned actress, Katie Quinn, prepares to jump off the side of her penthouse suite, her neck noose-wrapped. From that dark moment, Katie takes her first steps toward redemption. That’s what keeps Charles writing – not his perfect characters, but his broken ones.

“How do you get her off that railing?” Charles asks. “That arc, from broken to not broken, that’s what charges me.”

But in writing as in living, there are no step-by-step guides on how to find the hopeful ending. No paved roads, no easy answers. For each of us, imperfections and struggles can lead to despair or dynamic change. Brokenness can lead to the noose or to the next chapter. It’s what makes life an inexorable page-turner.

And after all, we have the pen in hand. If we try to write someone else’s story, we’re just wasting our own time.

“There are six billion people on the planet, and you’re the only one with your voice,” Charles says. “Don’t try and be someone else, just because you think ‘oh he’s made it, he’s successful; I’ve got to do what he’s does if I want to be there.’ That’s counterfeit. That’s a lie. That’s not true. Find what your voice is, and write that. Because otherwise you’re just a copycat.”

The “pop-up” movement continues to thrive in Nashville with this weekend’s launching of Joint, which aims to take the concept beyond retail and dinners with an art-focused approach.

Joint is the brainchild of Susan Sherrick, an art dealer who recently moved to Nashville after stints in San Francisco and New Orleans, and fashion and media consultant Libby Callaway, a Tennessee native who previously worked as the fashion editor at the New York Post.

Fitting, then, that their first pop-up happening will revolve around an exhibition of fashion photography. But Libby stresses that each iteration of Joint will be about more than one thing. For example, this weekend’s will also feature a Saturday morning breakfast supplied by pop-up restaurant Buttermilk Road Sunday Supper.

“Joint will be a mash-up of different things each time we do it. It’s totally about our whims,” according to Libby, who says the goal of Joint is to build community throughout the city. “We’re just trying to showcase things we believe in locally. I want to make it as broad as possible all over town. The sky’s the limit.”

“It’s called Joint because it’s a joint project between friends and also because of its transient nature,” Libby says. “It will always be at different people’s joints.”

Joint’s first event tomorrow through Sunday will be appropriately held at the home of one Nashville’s expert community builders: architect Nick Dryden.

“Basically we’re taking over the first floor of their new house on Caruthers in 12South,” Libby says. “We’re bringing in photographers, some local and some of whom have never been exhibited in the South, let alone Nashville. People are just going to be able to cruise around their home and look at great art. We want as many people to come as possible. It’s just a really good mix of artists and styles.”

Libby says we can expect Joint events to be held about once a quarter. Plans for the next one in June are already in the works, and it will feature vintage motorcycle and car photography.

Photo by William Klein, “Smoke + Veil” 1958 courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

It’s back-breaking work that requires late nights, early mornings and a whole lot of faith that your effort won’t prove to be in vain. Throwing pottery – seen by many as a hobby reserved for art classes with pre-fabricated kilns – is more than just a craft. For Alex Matisse, a 28-year-old traditional potter based in Asheville, North Carolina, it’s his life’s calling.

Inspired by traditional Southern potters, Alex not only molds pots, but he also creates the clay and glazes by hand, using all local ingredients. “I like that you’re doing different things different days, and I like the challenge,” he says. “I’m pretty hard on myself, and I don’t ever foresee a point where I say I’m good enough at this. I always feel myself getting better, improving, struggling and working through problems.”

Constant improvement is the mark of any great craftsman – and Alex would know. Though he may not say it up front, he’s the great-grandson of renowned French painter and cutout artist, Henri Matisse, and the product of a family tree of painters, artists and curators. But creating underneath someone of that stature can be a heavy burden.

“It’s a tremendous blessing,” Alex says about his legendary surname. “It’s there, and that’s fine, but I knew that if I was going to make craft work, the name would only go so far. I would still have to do the work, and people first and foremost look at the work.”

When it came time for college, Alex left his family in New England for a new start in North Carolina – a land that’s full of pottery experts. Three years ago, Alex began his professional journey after he dropped out of college and finished a three-year apprenticeship under notable potter, Matt Jones.

Today, Alex is committed to an arduous, sometimes monotonous, process that only happens four times every year. He spends nearly three months fashioning and glazing about 1,000 pots of varying sizes, style and design, before loading the kiln – a 7-foot-wide, 35-foot-deep, 18-foot-tall structure that he made by hand. The wood-firing process takes three days and requires someone to be on-site at all times, stoking the wood every five to ten minutes, and bringing the temperature up to the maximum 2,350 degrees. Then, after the temperature is brought carefully down, the unloading process begins. And that part, he says, gives him nightmares.

“It can be horrible,” Alex explains, describing how the fire can obliterate the colors and opacity of pots he created so carefully. “I have some control, but you cannot have all control. You have to let go of them during that time. It can really get messed up in the fire, and I lose a lot of work. But the pots that come out well, I really cherish.”

When we spoke with Alex, he was in the midst of the anxiety of a firing. This time, the pots he unloads (for better or for worse) will be on display and for sale at the American Craft Council Atlanta Show, March 15 -17 at the Cobb Galleria Centre. And while he stokes the fire and sweats it out waiting for the final results, Alex continues to appreciate the impact that the South has had on his craft.

“I found this community here,” he says. “It was completely serendipitous to find myself in North Carolina, and I opened my eyes and looked around and saw that I was in this land made of clay, quite literally. I stayed here for the community of potters and collectors that is here in great abundance.”

When Jacob Henley moved to Nashville in 2010, he settled far from the city’s more gentrified and glorified zip codes, in a neighborhood called Salemtown. Just south of the Cumberland River’s northwestern curve, the area is home to our city’s largest housing project and lowest-performing elementary school. Now, thanks to Jacob, it’s also home to Nashville’s first handmade skateboard workshop, Salemtown Board Company.

Henley is a tall, tattooed, bearded man with straight teeth and a crooked grin. He grew up in Memphis, where he launched his career in the hip-hop music industry and grew accustomed to a culture of absent fathers and prevalent drug abuse. And he wasn’t just an innocent bystander. “I was an addict. I was selling drugs. I was partying and depressed and lonely and suicidal, and I hit what people call rock bottom,” Jacob says, as he’s bent over a dimly lit work bench, smoothing painters’ tape on a well-sanded skateboard. At that “rock bottom” moment in 2006, he says, “there was a radical life change.”

After recovering from his addictions, he moved to Nashville and found a home in Salemtown, where high school dropout rates have long rivaled infant mortality rates. But he was on a mission to mentor young men who were immersed in the culture that almost stole his life. Nearby, Jacob had access to a woodworking shop, and had already started playing basketball with kids in the neighborhood like 16-year-old Kendrius – a young man in desperate need of a role model and job training.

That’s when Jacob formulated the idea to start a company with the intent to hire, train, equip and mentor kids like Kendrius – and skateboards were the perfect product. Serendipitously, Jacob’s longtime friend Will Anderson had just moved to Nashville, and had a background in carpentry, surfing and skating. Will was already volunteering in after-school programs for inner-city kids, so when they discussed the idea of creating skateboards with a surfer aesthetic from scratch, things progressed quickly.

Today Will is standing near a stack of solid red oak lumber – the locally sourced wood they cut into 70s- and 80s-style short and longboards, then paint and lacquer for each individual customer. He won’t use grip tape on the boards, since that would cover up the natural wood and one-of-a-kind designs. Instead, he developed a unique chemical blend that is painted on top of each board for a poly tread. The finished cruisers range from loud to refined, from retro to classic.

By December 2012, Salemtown Board Company had fashioned its first seven boards and had secured a spot at a local coffee shop for a display. Within one week, all of the boards were sold, and the pair knew they had a viable business model. Throughout the Christmas season, the shop was filled with sawdust, paint fumes and Salemtown Board Company’s first employee – Kendrius.

“The vision is for us to have this entire warehouse filled with young workers becoming artisans, learning a trade that they can take with them,” Jacob says. “We want them to see that it’s not as hard to make a living as they’ve been told. The hood is not a trap. Anybody can have a dream and an idea and make it a reality.”

In an age when more and more of our “books” have on-and-off switches, and we delete correspondence by a click or a tap without a second thought, physical objects and other tangible links to our memories and heritage are increasingly hard to come by and, thus, all the more meaningful.

With its handsomely crafted products, Thornwillow Press reminds us of the importance of such connections, and, in particular, why there’s just no substitute for a quality hardback book to pass on to the next generation. After all, while a notebook-sized device that can hold thousands of books is a technological marvel worth celebrating, for those books that are truly meaningful, you want something you can hold, smell, leaf through, display and give as an heirloom.

“As the book is no longer the commodity vehicle to communicate ideas from one place to another, it now takes on a relevance in this age of technology,” says Thornwillow founder Luke Pontifell. “It becomes a way of holding and preserving something that is special. The book, if well made, becomes a work of art.”

Luke says his mission is to make books that last and that enhance our relationship with the written word. The company is an independent publisher of handmade, limited edition books, but also provides custom binding services to consumers as well as engraved stationary, gifts, library accessories and other beautiful and limited offerings.

“In a complex of 19th century brick factory buildings, we’ve pulled together a series of related artisanal crafts around the written word: letterpress, engraving, envelope making, leather work, gold tooling, bindings, box making,” says Luke. “Everything we do, we make ourselves here in our own workshops. While many companies are sending things overseas, we have collected these crafts around the written word where we perpetuate the crafts and try to get better at them everyday.”

Thornwillow’s customers include someone who has the company find then bind copies of their favorite childhood books to give to their grandchildren. For another family, Thornwillow collected and scanned the letters written by a patriarch who died in World War II. The original documents went to a historical society while family members received an striking, leather-bound collection of them.

“It becomes a wonderful way of dealing with family history,” Luke says. “It will become an heirloom unlike almost anything else can.”

Thornwillow also creates photo albums and custom “memory boxes” to hold photographs, important documents, letters and other mementos.

“They become tangible links that help you remember personal moments in time.”