If you're searching the web for info on mixed-media collages, try googling the keywords "contemporary," "experimental," or "quirky." You might find works by Andrea Fuhrman, MEd'79. She describes her postcard-sized creations as a mélange of "candy-wrapper bits, old dictionaries, home-decorating magazines, paper sunglasses from the eye doctors, biology texts, thrift-store items, fabric remnants, and things I find on the street."

Plus a dash of whimsy. "They're a little tongue-in-cheek," says Fuhrman, who sometimes sews objects onto 4-by-6- or 6-by-8-inch landscapes elaborately framed with gold leaf.

The tiny works are making big waves. Fuhrman has shown widely and earned numerous artist-in-residencies. At the 2003 Postcard Art Competition and Exhibition, Fuhrman made the winners' circle for "You Forgot Your Purse," which features a Michelangelo-like hand of God reaching for Adam.

Many of her intimate pieces are borne of a childhood spent looking at pharmaceutical specimen slides. "I spent hours squinting through the eyepiece of my father's microscope," she says.

Other early influences? The New London, Connecticut, native was one of a handful of thirteen-year-olds who had a job at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, where she mixed tempera paint and prepared art clay for the Saturday classes the museum hosted.

"My parents worried I would not earn a living," Fuhrman says, so the onetime English major earned a master of education in counseling at Northeastern. Encouraged by an NU playwriting professor who recognized her creative spirit, she went on to get a BFA and an MFA, then paid off her student loans through a directorship at the Arts as Healing program at the Washington University School of Medicine's Siteman Cancer Center, in St. Louis.

She's no starving artist now. But she does recycle.

- Katy Kramer, MA'00

It’s the Money, Honey

Brett Graff, AS'92, is not your typical economist. Sure, she writes articles for the Miami Herald about such trends as the decline of flextime in the workplace. She's also a wife and mom, with a little standup comedian thrown in. Now she's managed to parlay all those roles into one: guru of home finance.

Graff is appearing regularly on PBS's Nightly Business Report in a segment called "Home Ec with Brett Graff," which explains how economic indicators affect families. The national spotlight may be bright today, but as a Northeastern student Graff didn't exactly have a solid career forecast.

"Actually," she says, "I knew I'd graduate, and they told me I'd graduate, but I never really pictured the day. Once it was there, I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have to get a life.'" First, she landed a job as a federal economist in Washington, D.C. Then she headed to South Florida, where she still lives, to work as a journalist at the Daily Business Review.

All was not sunshine at the beginning. "After the first story I'd written," Graf recalls, "the editor came out of her office and said to me, ‘What'll we do?' So I got a writing coach. I won't say there wasn't crying. There was crying."

Despite the tears, Graff and the Review won an award that year for her piece on an unscrupulous accountant who had eviscerated a family business. The following year, Graff became a correspondent for Reuters in its Miami bureau.

Graff has spent plenty of time in print. Currently the editor in chief of Key Biscayne Magazine, she's also penned numerous pieces for American Baby, Glamour, and Redbook, and written a food column for a Miami glossy.

On television, her "Home Ec" pieces profit from the everyday details of her domestic life. Graff draws on stories inspired by her two girls, ages seventeen months and three years. She also works husband Bob Einhorn in occasionally.

"He gets a kick out it," she says. "He's proud."

- Katy Kramer, MA'00

Sweet Home Appalachia

"It's not This Old House," says Bruce Kilgallon, CJ'81. "We have to budget materials, people, and resources carefully. We don't want to waste anything, so we measure at least twice."

For the past five years, Kilgallon and his nineteen-year-old daughter, Katelin, have spent the week after Independence Day repairing and building homes for families in rural Appalachia. They jack up houses to shore up foundations, put on roofs, and dig ditches for plumbing.

As volunteers for the Appalachia Service Project (ASP), the Kilgallons-along with approximately eighty-five others from Massachusetts's South Shore-drive vans to Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, or Kentucky to renovate homes in low-income areas. Father and daughter typically work on one project for five days before making the two-day trek back home.

ASP, based in Johnson City, Tennessee, was started in 1969 in association with the United Methodist Church. The organization annually hosts about 15,000 volunteers from numerous states and denominations. Some, like the Kilgallons, offer one week of summer service. Others volunteer year-round. The handyfolks don't need special skills: ASP provides a crash course in construction at mandatory pre-trip workshops.

Specializations, however, sometimes emerge. "I'm pretty good with roofs," says Kilgallon. "All kinds of roofs." He also assumes responsibility for the handful of college and high school kids assigned to his work team.

Houses aren't the only things that change. "Many of [the students] can't believe this is the U.S.A.," says Kilgallon, who is a claims supervisor for a medical-malpractice insurance group. "They come back with a better appreciation of what they have."

And Kilgallon's community service doesn't end with home improvement. He fundraises for ASP year-round. A one-week trip "costs about $475 per person," he says, "which pays for transportation, housing-often the high school gymnasium-and materials." Despite the spartan accommodations, he and Katelin keep going back.

"It's a fulfilling week," Kilgallon says. "I like meeting new people, and I'm impressed with the kids. And you help a less-fortunate family have a better home."

- Katy Kramer, MA'00