Ordering Information
$25.00, 6 x 9, PB, 128 pages, 54 Full Color Photographs
Publication date: October 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-942155-97-3
Copies are available through recipesforcommunity.com
Story Seeds
Growing Home At The Farmers Market
by Megan Lovely
Combining personal memoir, scholarship, and more than 200 stories, interviews, and photographs from the 32nd Street Farmers Market, Story Seeds: Growing Home explores the power of storytelling to build a shared sense of community and social responsibility.
Readers’ Comments
“A heartfelt celebration of place, people, and the stories that grow between them… This book offers a practical blueprint for cultivating community—one in which we come to belong not only to a physical place, but to each other.”
—Anthony Medina, Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition, Inc.
“Provides a wonderful insight into the people whose passion got it started and keep it going…. a great read for everybody who appreciates how farmers, food, and a market on a parking lot can bring a neighborhood together.”
—Johns Hopkins, Baltimore Heritage, Inc.
“The 32nd Street Farmers Market is indeed a special place and Megan Lovely comes as close to conveying the comfort, care, and community it fosters as you can get without being there.”
—Renee Brooks Catacalos, The Chesapeake Table: Your Guide to Eating Local
“Through multi-vocal ethnographic vignettes, dialogue, and photographs, we come to understand authentically human themes… Reminds us of the value of Third Spaces in our increasingly disconnected lives…”
—Diane M. Doberneck, University Outreach & Engagement, Michigan State University
“Celebrates the 32nd Street Farmers Market’s enduring legacy as more than just a marketplace but a vital hub of shared experiences and memories.”
—Joan Norman, One Straw Farm
About the Author
Author Megan Lovely is a social practice artist and educator who is passionate about designing and facilitating engagements that foster deeper connections to our local communities. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Denison University in Theatre with a minor in Communication, and her Master of Fine Arts from Towson University in Theatre Arts. Following her time in Baltimore, she joined the Center for Community Engagement as an Instructor and Program Manager for Community-Engaged Learning at the University of Rochester. A throughline in all these homes has been local farmers markets, which have provided containers for community building.
With her community-engaged arts practice, Recipes for Community, Megan aims to create space for intentional communion and reflection on the ingredients that make up our communities, and how these ingredients influence each other. The metaphor of a recipe highlights the reciprocal and adaptive nature of community. She is interested in the stories of these adaptations, and in creating space for people to come together and create new recipes/stories using the given assets of the people and place around them. She has presented about her arts practice at various community spaces, universities, and conferences. Story Seeds: Growing Home at the Farmers Market is her first book.
Of the many places she has been privileged to call home, her favorite is wherever her husband Mike is.
You can read more about Megan’s work on her website, recipesforcommunity.com; and her blog, Kamayan, mlovely.substack.com
Michael Caballes is a food service professional and freelance photographer, specializing in small business startups. He earned his Bachelor’s of Science in hotel restaurant and management from the University of San Carlos in the Philippines, where he developed his passion for gathering and serving people. He started doing photography as a hobby, and launched a start-up web service in the Philippines called Lit Digital Solutions offering small businesses professional media distribution. Since coming to the United States, his photography has focused on the behind-the-scenes operations of entrepreneurs and artists, and community events. His photography is influenced by the wisdom of his mom, who told him, “Your eyes eat first.” He carries forward this appreciation for the aesthetics of communion in his photography, and when setting the dinner table for his wife. Story Seeds: Growing Home at the Farmers Market is his first photography book. To view more of his photography, see kuhaphotography.com/.
