Finding Home

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The story below is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

Editor's Note: Our sincerest thanks to The Liberty Trust for sharing their space with us for the seated photo of Lee Hunsaker, below, captured by Ashley Wilson Fellers.

See our Season 2 Episode 3 podcast segment with Lee Hunsaker as we do a cover reveal, learn more about her journey, secret superpower and so much more:

Follow Lee Hunsaker’s inspiring journey from a high-flying career in the film industry to finding a meaningful second act as the creative force behind Roanoke’s beloved live storytelling series, Hoot and Holler.

Lee Hunsaker still remembers the moment she knew that her relationship to Roanoke had come full-circle.

It was January of 2019, and Hunsaker’s live storytelling series, Hoot and Holler, was set to take the stage at the Historic Grandin Theatre, a venue that her mother, Julie Hunsaker, had helped revitalize in the early 2000s. On the night of the show, a sold-out crowd packed into the theatre, the hum of conversation pressing against the walls. And when the house lights fell and a pink glow lit up the stage, Lee stepped into the hoop of the spotlight, the sequins on her silver dress sparkling. The applause hit her in a sudden roar, and Hunsaker realized something: “I thought, ‘I’ve come home,’” she remembers. “No question.”

There’s an old saying, popularized by novelist Thomas Wolfe: you can’t go home again. The idea, perhaps, is that the place you left is never quite as rosy as you remember. But increasingly, Hunsaker’s life tells a different tale: one in which the hometown girl can leave for a whirlwind career in the big city … and then return to Roanoke years later, just in time for a sparkling, deeply meaningful second act. 

And if that narrative feels surprising, perhaps there’s no one more surprised than Lee herself.

“I truly never thought I’d be back here,” admits Hunsaker, who left to attend a Boston arts school when she was a teen. “I [had] started thinking of these mountains as suffocating; I started thinking of this valley as the bottom of a bowl,” she says. “And then, there was no stopping me.”

The life that followed Lee’s departure was a whirlwind of creativity. Hunsaker found work as a costumer in the film industry – a role that let her exercise her storytelling muscles through color, texture and fabric, in well-known projects like “Miss Congeniality” and “Boyhood.” In her long workdays, Hunsaker can remember hemming pants for music stars standing in their underwear, or puzzling over how much dirt and wear should be on a particular character’s jeans. All this fed her constant urge to make change and to keep moving. “The energy was just frantic,” recalls Lee, who used Austin as a home base but says she travelled widely for her work. “I could get a call and have to be in Dallas, or Arkansas, or New Orleans, with very little notice.”

Home was everywhere and nowhere … and as far as Lee was concerned, that was fine: “I didn’t want roots,” she admits. “I was happy living out of hotel rooms, just floating from one thing to another.”

And then, in the late 2000s, life threw her a proverbial left hook. Shortly after her marriage and the birth of her son, Hunsaker received a shocking diagnosis: she had breast cancer. And as the weeks of medical treatments forced her to slow down, Lee began to wrestle with the reality that her freewheeling life was taking a toll – both mentally and physically. 

“I was working myself into the ground,” she confesses. “Working 18-hour days, living out of a suitcase … I’d hit a brick wall, and it was time to truly say, ‘I can’t go back to that.’”

The trouble was, she says, she didn’t know how to stop — at least not while she was living in her Austin film community. “It was almost like being an addict,” she says. “I knew if I answered the phone, I’d take the job.”

But the way out came from an unexpected place: Roanoke.

It was in the spring of 2011 – a time when Hunsaker still felt untethered – that she decided to pay her mother a visit. “My mom was doing costumes for the Hollins theatre, so I flew in and surprised her for the show,” she remembers. “It was in April, and all the flowers were blooming… I remember stepping off the plane and smelling the spring air, and I thought, ‘I need to feel this again…’ It felt very hopeful.”

By the time she returned to Austin, Hunsaker had the first inklings of a plan… and some surprising news for her family.

“I came back from that trip and said, ‘I need to be done here,’” she remembers. Lee says her husband was quick to support the move, even though it meant uprooting his own life and traveling long-distance for work. And that sacrifice was pivotal: “For whatever reason, Roanoke called me back,” she says. “I missed the mountains, and I needed to fall into the bosom of that… I needed the cocoon.”

And so, determined to begin again, Lee was back in her hometown by August.

The great surprise of Hunsaker’s life, perhaps, is that Roanoke was right where she’d left it … but a little more colorful and creative this time. 

“Roanoke felt like a different place,” she says. “There was cool food, the greenways, the breweries, the beer revolution … And I could feel the arts part of it coming back to life.”

Lee settled in quickly, enrolling her son in the same school she’d once attended. She met fellow moms, and she joined a writer’s group at Hollins University. It was that final move that provided Lee with the first clues as to what role she might inhabit next – this time as a storyteller. But she wasn’t sure what that looked like until she took a trip back to Austin, and chance — Lee might prefer the word “magic” — provided the answer. During her trip, she says she stumbled on a posting about a live storytelling show in a pizza parlor, in the style of “The Moth Radio Hour.” On a whim, she decided to attend, and she’ll never forget what happened next:

“I walked in the door, and I burst into tears with the energy of it and how present everybody was, how leaned-in everyone was,” she says. “It was an electric feeling to be sitting there … And I thought, there is no reason not to do this in Roanoke.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Back home, Lee reached out to friends who owned Sweet Donkey Coffee, booked a time for a show and put out her first call for storytellers. The response, she says, was overwhelming: “It was right place, right time. I could tell the people submitting stories were ready for it.”

One repeat storyteller, Tom Landon, deftly describes the appeal that brought people out to Hoot and Holler, and that kept them coming back: “[Lee’s] events are such great examples of both individual empowerment and community. The crowds are the nicest, kindest audiences you could ever perform in front of,” he says. “They really do, as Lee asks them to, ‘lean in’ and lift up nervous storytellers.”

And on that first night at Hoot and Holler, there was some uplift for Lee, too. Standing before her audience, “it felt like a rebirth,” she remembers. “All the fractured pieces of who I’d been came back together in a bolt of lightning.”

Since that first lightning strike, Hunsaker has hosted dozens of storytelling events, writing workshops and gatherings to help tellers find their voices. To accommodate the swelling crowds, Hoot and Holler has moved several times – most recently to The Grandin — and last fall, Lee took the show on the road to Bristol, where tellers performed at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum before a sold-out audience. But perhaps what’s most meaningful is the opportunity Hoot and Holler has given Lee to nurture the stories of others. She coaches every teller, honing the tales until they reach their final form.

“My ultimate goal is for them to walk off that stage transformed in some way,” Lee explains. “And I can say that happens, I dare say, 100% of the time.”

Hailey Hendrix, another repeat storyteller, says she was initially terrified of speaking onstage, but Lee’s knack for the nurturing process gave her confidence … and helped change the kind of stories she told: “For me her input has been transformative,” Hendrix says. “Lee has pushed me to be vulnerable in stories where I just want to be funny and helped me see the humor in moments I would sooner gloss right over.” With that encouragement, Hendrix went on to share seven times. “Lee has created magic,” she says. “I know her pixie dust is what made me fly all seven times I performed.”

These days, true to form, Hunsaker is already dreaming about what’s next — a mobile recording studio, in the style of “Story Corps,” that would allow two storytellers to share their histories with each another by following prompts. Meanwhile, she’s also dreaming about how to bring Hoot and Holler into its next chapter:

“I want to go deeper, wider,” she says. “I want all of the people in the room together, busting down those stereotypes, busting down what we think we know about other people and getting real.”

Which is, perhaps, just another way of saying that Hunsaker wants to create the kind of community she craved when she first left home … and the safe space she found in the making on her return.

“I think this town saved my life again,” Hunsaker says, perhaps with a touch of surprise. “Or maybe it’s that the community gave me the space to save my own life … and I’m incredibly grateful.” 

The story above is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!