Community Member Spotlight: Meet Beth Volpert-Johansen By Emily Rubin Beth Volpert-Johansen has been interested in storytelling for as long as she can remember. Her parents were natural storytellers, and reading books was huge in her family. “Words always came easy to me,” Beth said. “I have the first story I ever wrote in first grade taped to the wall in my office.” Beth uses the moniker, “Freelance Beth” and says she has been interviewing Gwinnett since 1991, so it’s no surprise she has many connections to the community. She has lived in Grayson since 1978 and knows quite a few people to reach out to when working on a story. “I appreciate all of the relationships that have naturally developed over the years here in Gwinnett County,” Beth said. She started writing for publications as early as 1991 and then founded her own paper, The Grayson Gazette, in 2001. The newspaper originally started as a newsletter while she was working in real estate with her parents, Earl and Marianne Volpert. The paper eventually moved to other ownership, but Beth continued writing pieces for it. In 2007 when the real estate market tanked, Beth began her second venture into teaching. After that, she decided to take a break and stay home with her kids. She coached a hockey team, a soccer team, and was a dedicated band mom. “It turns out they’re much easier to raise when they’re little than when they start getting into things like band and swim team and soccer and hockey,” she said. For six years, Beth experienced new ways of storytelling through her job at NightGlass Media Group. She learned to tell stories through writing scripts, shooting and editing video, and producing. Beth has written for several other local publications and is even a ghostwriter. One experience ghostwriting ended in her co-writing a book called “Still a Soldier” with local civic leader, LC Johnson. A 9th grade English teacher at Berkmar High School, Beth plans to use the summer break to work on her own books. She says she is living her best life by both teaching and writing. “That’s something that will hopefully break for me this summer,” Beth said. “That’s my big goal.” Beth has been with Our Town Gwinnett for about six years and likes to stick to stories that profile people in the community. Her favorite part about the magazine is the positivity, inclusion, and neighborliness.
“For the most part it’s positive,” she said. “It keeps everything happy and joyful and in the past year and a half we need happy and joyful.” Beth loves the publisher/writer relationship at Our Town Gwinnett. She also loves the commitment to positivity, even when something negative may come up. “It doesn’t do you any good to be negative about anything or dig up dirt because eventually you might want to have something positive come out of a relationship you have worked to maintain,” she said. Beth says she could not do what she does without the love and support of her family. Together, she and her husband, Eric, have five mostly “grown and flown” children. Not ones to sit around in an empty nest, Beth and Eric spend free time traveling as he plays keyboards for the Pink Floyd Tribute band, Interstellar Echoes, which performs throughout the southeast. Additionally, her oldest son has also begun to tour with his band, Movers, out of Athens, so there will be even more tune-filled travel in the future. Traveling and working aside, Beth is happiest when she has a house full of kids swarming her kitchen and staging whiffle ball games in the back yard. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by kids, either my own and their friends or my students,” she said. “It is where my heart is.”
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