Johanna Willett's favorite articles of 2014

Jill Nghiem took her 100th Barre3 class on her wedding day — a goal she set 111 days earlier.

Surrounded by bridesmaids and friends, Nghiem spent 60 minutes shaking and quaking through the fusion of Pilates, yoga and ballet barre.

“It gave me so much energy, and I enjoy it so much,” Nghiem, 30, says. “It was the perfect start to my day, and something that I had been working toward.”

After the morning class, the women celebrated with champagne and a bouquet of flowers, courtesy of the Barre3 Tucson owner Kate Pedersen.

Nghiem moved to Tucson from Vail, Colorado, two years ago, where she attended Pure Barre classes (another barre franchise that recently opened a Tucson location). Every month she would Google “barre, Tucson.” Nothing.

And then the first Barre3 in Arizona popped up at La Encantada — nine months after Pedersen first began teaching “underground” classes in her parents’ garage.

“It’s truly the only thing that I’ve found that I enjoy,” says Nghiem, assistant general manager at Tucson Marriott University Park. “I hate running, and I hate being out of breath.”

Unlike large box gyms, specialized studios like Barre3 and Pure Barre, which opened in Casas Adobes Plaza in September, offer clients niche workouts and tight communities.

Accountability to attend classes and “more of a sense of community and people encouraging you and familiar faces” can contrast a casual gym-goer’s routine “that can get mundane, just going in,” says Briana Acuña, who owns Tucson’s Pure Barre with Vanessa Palestino.

Box gyms offer classes galore to sample, acting as a launchpad for exploration. For some fitness junkies, specialized instruction with its specific focus often supplements a routine already full of hiking, running or cycling.

Evolution Fitness Systems might look like a traditional gym, but initiatives such as the Strong & Healthy Woman’s Program emphasize strength training in workouts that also build camaraderie.

“People think they can go on a treadmill or jump on a piece of equipment and just lift it and they’re going to see results,” says Danny Sawaya, Evolution’s owner. “Those tools are no better than the programming we give it. I can give someone a kettlebell, and they can turn it into nonsense that isn’t going to get results.”

Sure, specialized fitness studios are nothing new to Tucson — think Yoga Oasis with its three locations and Body Works Pilates, the international headquarters for the Fletcher Pilates method — but Tucson still lacks many of the big names that have cities on both coasts in their sweaty embrace.

Those in-the-know call these chic workout spots “fitness boutiques,” and though many do have small areas for merchandise, the boutique part refers more to a “unique workout format which is their specialty,” says Gina Harney, a blogger and instructor who explores fitness trends on her blog The Fitnessista and her book “HIIT It.”

Harney, a Tucson native, moved to San Diego shortly before Barre3 opened here. She travels frequently for her blog, giving her a broad view of popular fitness franchises around the country.

Tucson, with its local-first attitude, has a long way to go (see the box on a few franchises coming soon). A handful of CrossFit gyms are already scattered across the city, and local studios offer options such as kickboxing or dancing, but many staples are still missing.

In 2009, Susan Frank, now the director of health and wellness at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, opened O2 Modern Fitness, a downtown studio with spin and HIIT (high intensity interval training) classes. Although indoor cycling is one of the more popular boutique fitness options nationally, no other spinning studios took O2’s place when it closed in December 2013.

Regardless of the studio type, these spots have a place in Tucson.

“People, especially in the western part of the United States, are hungry for that (connection) because we are such a suburban community and spend so much time in our cars,” says Kyria Sabin Waugaman, the founder of Body Works Pilates in Tucson and an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona School of Dance. “There’s not much human contact in a big city. When people go to the big box health club, it can feel a little anonymous and somewhat lonely.”

Because, after all, those who sweat together, stay together. And even without many of the big national names in Tucson, local studios picked up on this long ago.

“The level of passion that comes from the local studio, where there is that sense that we own this all together and we all get how valuable this is, there is something about that that is really special,” says Darren Rhodes. The Yoga Oasis director opened the studio in 1999.

Kristin Horton and Chelsea Lucas, the owners of Session Yoga, a hot power studio at Broadway Village, do as much locally as they can. They host karma yoga sessions to raise money for Tucson charities and teach classes for eating disorder clinics and girls from group homes. Occasionally, regular clients stop in to say, “Hi” if they see Lucas or Horton’s car out front.

This is community.

Ideally, niche fitness means picking how you plan to workout and then doing it with the friends you make along the way, whether you’re a yogi or a CrossFitter. In exchange, you lay down a pretty penny, with prices nudging $20 for one class in some cases. Waugaman says the personalized service increases with the price.

“In Tucson, we have a lot of cyclists and runners, so we have people who do our part (Pure Barre) and other specialized workouts,” Acuña says. “You can see a trend. People are picking the activities and fitness realms that they enjoy the most and investing in that.”

And the options abound. Connect with your inner yogi or lift and tone at the ballet barre. We talked with owners of just a few of our city’s specialized fitness studios. See what they have to say on Page 24.

The day Joan Lionetti started swiping Arizona Highways from her son’s orthodontist office in Old Lyme, Connecticut, was a good day for Tucson.

Before returning the magazine at subsequent appointments, Lionetti — now the 80-year-old executive director of the environmental nonprofit Tucson Clean and Beautiful — would pore over the pictures, enchanted by a beauty so unlike her East Coast upbringing. She decided to move to Arizona — and definitely not to Phoenix.

In 1978, she swapped tree-dense New England for the Sonoran Desert, where she would start the nation’s first program for recycling phone books, develop landscaping and vocational training for at-risk youth and spearhead the planting of more than 100,000 trees through her 25-year-old program, Trees for Tucson.

LIVING LEGACY

The Quercus fusiformis “Joan Lionetti,” a live oak tree bred by Civano Nursery specifically for the Southwest, will line streets and fill backyards with the story of Lionetti’s work for a greener Tucson.

The Shipley family at Civano Nursery began cultivating this new selection of oak tree about 12 years ago. When it came time to name the tree for its currently pending patent — around Lionetti’s 80th birthday in July — the family decided to honor their friend.

“I was flabbergasted, when I got a call from Les (Shipley) telling me that I was going to be patented,” Lionetti said, laughing in her Tucson Clean and Beautiful office. “Only a tree could get me patented.”

LIFE’S BRANCHES

When Lionetti moved to Tucson, her conservation conscience — first planted during a childhood spent at an Episcopal convent in Kingston, New York — flourished.

In love, she blames the nuns for everything.

“There was this ingrained ethic about caring about people and the environment and sharing all the time,” she said. “I mean, we didn’t wash our hair every day. We washed our hair once a week with Ivory soap. I still wash my hair with Ivory soap. And you ate all the food on your plate, and you didn’t waste.”

Lionetti doesn’t waste office furniture, and she doesn’t waste clothes. She shops secondhand, drawing on her experience in New England with the family antique business.

Raising her daughter and two sons first in Manhattan and then Connecticut, Lionetti passed on that frugal philosophy.

“She was a toilet paper Nazi,” said daughter Joanne Gerow, 56, by phone from Swan Lake, New York. “We were always taught as children to respect the environment. She was very fanatical about littering, and I can tell you that to this day, if I chew a piece of gum, the wrapper goes in my pocket.”

Lionetti’s off-the-grid, solar-powered home on 40 acres of land in Cochise County reflects that passion. She built it with life partner Thor Jorgensen, who died in 2008 and kept her “evergreen.”

“The desert is in her heart, and I don’t know why,” Gerow said. “It just is.”

SPROUTING SEEDS

Trees for Tucson begins with a tree cheer.

When Lionetti started the program in 1989, those first meetings began standing up, hands in the air waving like leaves with multiple shouts of “Trees! Trees! Trees!” said Greg McPherson, an original Trees for Tucson co-chair who is now a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service in Davis, California.

Friday at its annual meeting and dinner, Tucson Clean and Beautiful will celebrate 25 years of Trees for Tucson. As of Tuesday, the program had planted 102,570 trees, said program director Katie Gannon.

Trees for Tucson provides low-cost, drought-tolerant shade trees to customers of Tucson Electric Power and Trico Electric Cooperative, schools and community groups.

Lionetti started Trees for Tucson in affiliation with the American Forests Global ReLeaf campaign. The goal: Plant 500,000 trees by 1996. That was before they started digging into caliche, Lionetti said.

With similar programs sprouting nationwide and President George H.W. Bush’s America the Beautiful initiative, Lionetti found kindred spirits such as lifelong friend Suzanne Probart, the executive director of Tree New Mexico.

As Probart tells it, the friends bonded after a series of tree-related meetings, drinking a bottle of champagne at an indoor pool with a group one evening.

“There was some challenge ... something about jumping in the water,” Probart said by phone from Albuquerque about her race with Lionetti to kick off shoes and remove jewelry.

“I beat her, and we jumped in that pool together, ... and that was our defining moment. We talk about it still. It was like the baptism of our friendship. After that, we were best buddies. I challenged her, and you never challenge Joan.”

GROWING STRONG

Betsy Bolding, a friend and TEP manager of consumer affairs, occasionally likens Lionetti to a Gila monster: “She gets her teeth into it and won’t let go until she ends up successful.”

That zeal brought much to Tucson — recycling programs, commemorative tree parks to honor deceased loved ones and YARDS, the landscape and maintenance training program for at-risk youth in the Pima County Juvenile Court System.

Often acting as a go-between for government and bureaucracy to accomplish these and other programs, Lionetti envisions more: infrastructure planned with trees in mind, a city policy on replacing removed trees, and tree parks along The Loop.

She isn’t retiring yet.

“The first time I met her, I think I was running for office at the time,” said Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. “She came in, and everybody comes with a different approach, and her approach was, ‘Young man, this is something that is important, and when you get elected, I expect you to help.’ She wasn’t treating me differently than anyone else.”

In the last year, Roths-child has led a successful push to plant 10,000 trees in one year. Not too long ago, Lionetti said, she made him lead an elementary school assembly in the tree cheer.

Twenty-five years later, that cheer — like Lionetti and Trees for Tucson — still has oomph.

Mused Lionetti, “It’s amazing how when you start things, how they keep growing when they’re coming from the ground up, up from the community, not down, but up from the people.”

Reid Park Zoo's pachyderm princess entered the world on Wednesday night to fanfare from her herd.

When 24-year-old African elephant Semba gave birth at 10:55 p.m. in a pen outside of her barn, adult female Lungile and the calf’s 7-year-old brother Punga watched from an adjacent paddock. Sundzu, now the 3-year-old middle child, was with mom for the arrival of his sister, said Vivian VanPeenen, the zoo's education curator.

“They could see the birth and were smelling and trumpeting and reaching through and caressing the baby,” VanPeenen said. “It was lovely. They were very interested in what was happening.”

After almost two years of pregnancy, on Tucson's 239th birthday, Semba delivered a little miracle — no, not a flying elephant — but the first elephant calf born in Reid Park Zoo and the state of Arizona, VanPeenen said. 

The calf's father is the zoo's bull Mabu, who also fathered Punga and Sundzu. The baby joins the three males, her mother and another adult female, Lungile. The herd moved from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park to the renovated Expedition Tanzania habitat in 2012.

A name for the bundle of joy will come after zookeepers have spent several days getting to know her. The rest of the herd have names reflecting their African heritage.

“Right now we’re calling her, ‘She’s here! The baby! The calf!’ ” VanPeenen said.

For the next 48 to 72 hours, keepers are giving mom and baby space to bond in the Click Family Elephant Care Center. Only essential staff have access.

On Thursday, the calf weighed in at 245 pounds. Typically, elephant calves weigh between 200 and 250 pounds.

Both mother and daughter appear healthy. Mom is eating, drinking and, well, taking care of business, and baby is nursing, though she is still trying to figure out the finer points.

“It takes a calf a while to figure out where to nurse,” VanPeenen said. “She nursed within the hour. She walks up to mom and fumbles. ‘Do I nurse here or there?’ But she’s doing great.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Semba spent time on exhibit with the rest of the herd, chowing down but moving slowly. At about 10:35 p.m., this pregnancy pro began demonstrating signs of active labor — stretching, walking backward, laying down and extending her tail. Twenty minutes later, with no human help, the zoo welcomed Semba’s third little one, who stood up within minutes.

The gender of the calf was unknown until her birth, but there was some girl talk. At a baby shower in June, both a Plinko-style game played by guests and Mabu's pick of a pink stick instead of a blue one predicted a girl. 

There will be another celebration when the calf goes on exhibit for the public, which could be in roughly two weeks. That depends on the strength and health of calf and mother, VanPeenen said. 

In future days, keepers will give the two elephants additional space in a behind-the-scenes area and eventually introduce the rest of the herd. 

For Sundzu, who VanPeenen calls, “a bit of a mama’s boy,” zoo staff have gradually increased his time away from mom to help him adjust to his new role as big brother, and he recently gave up nursing. Young, male elephants typically stay with mom for eight to 15 years, and females never leave.

The zoo plans to keep mother and daughter together, and there are still several years before Punga and Sundzu begin showing bachelor-pad-worthy tendencies that make them suitable for mating at other zoos.

The Expedition Tanzania habitat was built to support breeding elephants. The three adult elephants were rescued in the wild from culling in Swaziland and were transported to San Diego in 2003. 

“We are doing this for the future of elephant population and conservation worldwide,” VanPeenen said. “We are thrilled to have one more baby elephant in the world instead of one less.”

Nox Kitchen + Cocktails is the kind of place where you can pretend to be someone glamorous.

Not that pretentious, nose-in-the-air sort of glamorous, but the interesting kind — the kind that jabs typewriter keys in the wee hours of the morning and regales friends with tales of exotic travels.

That’s a little of the flavor you get at Nox. The restaurant opened in February and is tucked into the former Jasper Neighborhood Restaurant and Bar space at the southeast corner of Campbell Avenue and Skyline Drive.

Drawing inspiration from the writings and travels of Ernest Hemingway, Nox poses as a nostalgic, hidy-hole for those who want to wine, dine and slow down a bit.

Under Ryan Feldman, the chef de cuisine, Nox’s summer menu features Latin and occasionally Asian twists to its upscale American choices.

Think tacos, sandwiches, seafood and salads, all with a snazzy flair.

For a moment, escape with us.

Your getaway spot

With several high-backed, cozy booths facing the wraparound bar and a handful of smaller tables with chairs and booth seating, Nox is nothing if not intimate.

Inside, there are plenty of treasures to look at — if you can peel your eyes away from the anachronistic flat screens mounted above the bar.

The dark, wood paneling in the rest of the restaurant enhances that romantic, getaway feeling. At dinner the lighting was dim, and tea light candles flickered on our table.

A wall full of framed photographs and another of shelves stuffed with books, glassware and other knickknacks allude to stories of adventure.

The covered patio outside is a breath of fresh air.

Cushy chairs and benches invite you to settle in and take in the view of the Catalina Mountains. The bar opens onto the patio, and a perimeter of misters and ceiling fans made it bearable even on a Sunday afternoon in June. We imagine the fireplace would do the same for cooler nights.

Into the night

We would call this fancy food, meaning that even your house burger comes on a pretzel bun.

For a dinner appetizer, we started off with the lamb lollipops ($13) served with a yogurt sauce and a grilled lemon. New with this summer menu, the four, juicy hunks of meat at the end of each bone are bathed in an herb marinade that gives them enough flavor that you can skip the yogurt and the squeeze of lemon. We were told that the flavor in the yogurt comes from a chile sauce, but we thought it tasted more like sour cream. Not bad, but not spicy. Don’t worry about keeping up proper pretenses with this one — it would be a shame to leave any meat on those bones.

The seared ahi salad ($14) brought the Asian flair to this meal.

The sweet, miso ginger dressing keeps at bay any bitterness from the mixed greens. Slivers of carrots, cucumbers and radishes are tossed in with chunks of avocado. The crown jewel of this salad is the bright pink tuna. Drizzled with eel sauce and speckled with sesame seeds, the sushi-grade fish is not too mushy.

We accompanied the salad with the 11-ounce New York steak ($32). The most expensive thing on the new summer menu, this steak is served with a butternut squash puree and roasted mushrooms and cauliflower. The sweet squash flavor seeps into everything, but in a good way. It goes well with the brown butter sage sauce on the meat. We think it’s a more delicate palate cleanser between bites, than, say, potatoes. We ordered it medium, and the tender meat came out just right, though we aren’t sure the flavor says $32 when there are other memorable finds on the menu.

For dessert, we went with the flourless chocolate cake ($5), one of the more standard items on the restaurant’s rotating dessert menu. Two small but decadent layers of cake sandwich a mound of whipped cream. Another fluffy dollop on top, a raspberry, a blackberry and a sprig of mint make this classic treat dinner’s sweetest finale.

Rise and shine

For Nox’s Sunday brunch, we wanted to go sweet and savory. The menu offers breakfast favorites as well as some items from the usual lunch menu.

We started with a more traditional choice — the Nox French toast ($9). Two slabs of soft ciabatta bread (who knew?) are slathered with raspberry and mango compote and sprinkled with granola. Butter is swapped out for a generous scoop of mascarpone, and though the dish comes with maple syrup, you hardly need it. The flavors are enough, as is.

But if you want to talk flavor, order the chilaquiles ($12), a stack of three, fried corn tortillas smothered in a tomato-guajillo salsa and your choice of chicken or chorizo. We went for the chorizo. An additional $2 will get you a fried egg on top. Pair that with the hidden pockets of mozzarella and queso fresco cheeses and the garnishing of avocado and refried beans, and even the wimpiest taste buds can handle the slight kick.

Finally, we added a side of Brandon’s Mom’s banana bread ($3). Yep, that light and moist banana bread with the chewy walnuts mixed in and a dusting of brown sugar comes from a real mom. General manager Brandon Katz grew up on the bread and filched the recipe from his own mom, who came in to demonstrate the first batch. He says the Nox version isn’t exact, but it’s close.

The service

We almost didn’t make it to brunch. We called earlier in the week to make sure the restaurant still served the meal on both Saturday and Sunday and were told it did. A follow-up call to make reservations on Saturday informed us that several weeks ago, Nox moved its brunch to Sundays only.

We did make it Sunday for brunch, and service was leisurely. A meal for two took about one hour, not bad and not rushed. At dinner, though, time between courses seemed to lag, especially after we finished our main course. Still, the restaurant was busier at dinner, and the servers remained cheerful and generally attentive at both meals.

Nox really isn’t the kind of place you want to rush out of anyways. It beckons you to sit down, eat up and stay a while.

Appearing on televised Afghan morning shows wearing her U.S. Air Force uniform and a headscarf, speaking Dari, former Capt. Felisa Hervey broke down walls in the war-torn country.

A natural-born linguist and a poet at heart, Hervey spent two years deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, most of that time directly engaged in the battle for hearts and minds.

In “Letters to War and Lethe,” her soon-to-be published collection of 20 poems now available for preorder, the 30-year-old daughter of missionaries works through her experience of war, both as a civilian and veteran. In a collection that extends an invitation for peace, Hervey explores not just the damage that many veterans bring home, but also the wisdom.

“There is a part of my soul that really resonates in Afghanistan because of the value they place on poetry,” Hervey said. “Of the arts, poetry is the most sought after, the most treasured and the most ancient, and it’s accessible to everyone because you don’t have to be literate to be filled with poems.”

Hervey’s fluency in Dari (a Persian dialect) and her ability to connect with people took her constantly into the midst of Afghan society — most often covertly, without armed escort — to communicate the anti-corruption mission of the International Security Assistance Force. The idea was to support the people in their efforts to secure a better future.

She influenced social and political leaders, including the president of Afghanistan, according to the citation that accompanies the Bronze Star Medal she received in 2012.

She also organized events such as a 5K run through Kabul to give Afghans a place to say, “Enough, corruption sucks, and we hate it, and we won’t stand for it,” Hervey said. The next year, without any help from her team, the 5K run expanded to five cities, and women ran.

When her deployment ended in 2012, Hervey closed six years of active-duty military service and turned her attention to earning a doctorate in Persian literature from the University of Arizona. A Pat Tillman Foundation military scholar, Hervey is now researching the contemporary poetry of Afghan women for her dissertation.

“In a way, she is also giving voice to the unheard poets in cities of Afghanistan,” said her academic adviser, Kamran Talattof, a UA professor of Near Eastern studies.

Hervey also helped found Civil Vision International, a Tucson-based nonprofit that uses social media to continue the global dialogue she began in the military. The Facebook page has more than 94,000 likes.

CHILDHOOD ABROAD

Hervey’s decision to join the Air Force had stunned her family.

“We were surprised because Felisa has always been unique and individual, so to imagine her fitting into a regimented situation where everyone would look and act the same and talk the same did not seem that it would be easy for her to do,” said John Hervey, Felisa’s father.

The integrity of service had attracted her.

The second-oldest of six children, Hervey grew up in a missionary family — her father was a pastor, her mother, Debbie, a midwife — first in Chile and then Kazakhstan as a teenager.

In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, she lived in a culture newly embracing certain freedoms and discovered her own love of language. As her family introduced Christianity to a community exploring religious freedom, they began to hear about a growing danger from the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist political movement in Afghanistan that would shape her future.

As a teen yearning for friends, Hervey immersed herself in the Kazakh language, more difficult to learn than the Spanish and English she grew up speaking. She opted to attend a Kazakh school in addition to her English schooling at home and on the Internet, her father said.

“Some days I would spend five hours language learning, and I had recordings and I would be washing dishes or in the shower and I would just be playing these recordings,” said Hervey, who now speaks English, Spanish, Kazakh, Persian and Russian fluently. Arabic is next. “I think that was transformational in my life because I realized that it was possible to connect across this divide of culture and language, and the effort meant something.”

WHEN THE WORLD SHIFTED

Hervey finished her last two years of high school in California, but she had not seen the last of Central Asia. She received her appointment to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in June 2001.

And then everything changed.

“We were not at war anywhere in the world, and that was a bit of a shock to all of us in September of that year,” Hervey said of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “Our world was changing before all of our eyes, and for those of us entering the military at that time ... and actually going into active duty, that was very real to us and very sobering to us. None of us really knew what that would mean. We just had a sense that it would involve us.”

Hervey felt she would eventually be deployed to Afghanistan, but she wanted to go immediately to experience the country first as a civilian. She and two classmates took a leave of absence from the academy to work in Kabul, teaching English in an orphanage from 2003 to 2004. There, she became fluent in Dari.

She thinks her poetry from that era lacks the depth she later developed through military service, but in that time she came to be known as Farzana Marie, the pen name she writes under today. Farzana means “wisdom” in Dari, and Marie, her middle name, blends her past with who she is today.

That person continued to mature. She returned to the academy, graduating in 2006 with her commission as a second lieutenant.

“She is so optimistic and makes me even hopeful,” said Zarifa Hamidi, one of the primary school students Hervey taught at the orphanage. The two reunited during Hervey’s deployment, and Hamidi keeps up with her friend’s writing. Now 20, she attends Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island.

THE TWO-YEAR TOUR

Hervey was stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in 2008, and deployed to Afghanistan in 2010.

Col. Tim Kirk, now retired, met Hervey toward the end of her initial six-month deployment in which she had been assigned to a base job that kept her from authentic Afghan interaction.

Struck by her proficiency in Dari, Kirk, 43, asked Hervey to extend her deployment and lead an outreach team focused on changing Afghan perceptions about local corruption and U.S. military efforts. She agreed to an 18-month extension, forgoing an assignment teaching ROTC at the University of Arizona.

“I knew this would change my life, but I said, ‘Yes, there is nothing I would rather be doing than this,’” Hervey said.

During her unusually long two-year tour, she carried out more than 300 tactical missions “outside the wire” — off post, earning the Bronze Star Medal, which is the fourth-highest individual military award, Kirk said, noting that most people leave the base 100 to 200 times.

While she never saw direct combat, her base was attacked and transport flights saw rocket fire. Undercover missions can be even more dangerous, Kirk said.

“The other kind of mission, you’re going out with guns and drones overhead, and people are there to bail you out,” he said. “If you go out on a clandestine mission, it’s just you by yourself. If you get in trouble, all you have is a tiny pistol in your backpack.”

As Kirk worked with Hervey on the task force, he let her lead, presenting to Afghan citizens the deference of a higher-ranking male officer to a younger female officer. He continues to work with her as executive director of Civil Vision International.

“It was so much more than language,” Kirk said. “She was connecting with people on an emotional level. She was by far the most important secret weapon that we had going for us, because she immediately disarmed everyone she came into contact with.”

That included a high-ranking Afghan official, a former warlord known for his disapproval of American attempts to speak Dari, Kirk said.

An American adviser encouraged Kirk and Hervey to stick to English, warning them that “he will rip you apart by exposing what you don’t know about the language,” Kirk said.

He encouraged Hervey to go for it. “Not only does he not throw her out, but he is enamored with her and wants to have her over to his house for dinner and introduce her to his family,” Kirk said. “It was just really powerful and that was the level of connection she was able to make instantaneously with any Afghan.”

In those years, poetry surfaced more as a conversation topic than a craft. Working long hours seven days a week, Hervey wrote primarily to process intense emotions dealing with deaths of friends killed in combat.

“It was vivid moments like that where it seems like only poetry will do,” she said.

POETRY AND PURPOSE

Always a writer, Hervey uses poetry to connect, both in Tucson and Afghanistan.

“Everywhere we would go, she would talk poetry with the Afghans and the conversation immediately revolved around that for the rest of the time,” Kirk said. “It was a really vital part of her ability to connect to people and understand the significance of poetry and that she knew Afghan poetry and could recite it just meant so much to the people. We were lucky as could be to have her on the team.”

Hervey talks about some of her experiences in “Hearts for Sale! A Buyer’s Guide to Winning in Afghanistan,” which she published in March 2013 through Worldwide Writings. The book, written from insights she shared in a military report, expresses Hervey’s hopes for Afghanistan. In recommending the book, Army Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster writes in the foreword that Hervey “clearly identifies important ways for us to continue our support for the Afghan people in this latest phase in their long struggle for peace and justice.”

John Hervey remembers the yurt, or Central Asian tent, his daughter set up in her Tucson backyard. For a time, she hosted diverse gatherings, inviting people of all religions, ethnicities and nationalities to drink tea, read poems and tell stories. He called those meetings “magical.”

“Everywhere she goes, she seems to bring people closer to each other and to God,” the 60-year-old Hervey said.

The Herveys served in Chile under the Episcopal Church, but today Hervey — who religiously identifies herself as a follower of Jesus Christ — meets with both Christian and Muslim families in a small home church that explores the differences and similarities between the faiths. She sees Jesus as someone who broke cultural boundaries to love people.

“I want to live my life in a way that refuses to forget that every single person, regardless of how different in faith, background and ethnicity is a precious human being and one worth fighting for and one worth defending and one worth connecting with,” Hervey said.