Our Teams

 The Flatwater Tales chapter from Charlie’s story book flows naturally from his early experiences. Born into a multi-generational North Florida Cracker family, he worked morning and evening paper routes starting in the 5th grade. By high school he found a knack for technology and won 3rd place in Botany at the International Science Fair.

He followed up in college in Engineering Science and graduate school in Biomedical Engineering and Business Administration, with an interlude in Viet Nam, by invitation.

His work career was predominantly in the Information Technologies in Chicago.

He finally met Emily in mid-1999, they married the following spring, and he moved to Oak Ridge while working remotely for his last Chicago employer for the next 17 years.

In Oak Ridge Charlie joined UT Arboretum Society and the Oak Ridge Rotary Club. He teamed with the City to form the pilot Tennessee Land Bank which quickly became the State model. He served as Chair of the Land Bank Board during its first 10 years before he and Emily moved to St. Louis.

His role for Flatwater Tales included the financial side of the business and the technologies supporting the company operations.

Emily grew up in Miami, Florida, the oldest of three children. She loved to sit on her grandmother’s front porch and listen to family stories. Her mother went back to college and graduated with a degree in English just as the Cuban Missile Crisis brought thousands of Cubans to Miami. Her mother started a 30-year career teaching adults English as a second language. Suddenly Emily’s cultural world expanded and she got to hear stories of dispossessed people making a new life in a new country. 

Emily has a good ear for languages and began studying Spanish in an experimental program in seventh grade. In eleventh grade she won a countywide competition and spent six weeks studying Spanish at the University of Madrid with high school students from across the United States. Now she was able to tell stories in two languages!

She attended Vanderbilt University and majored in Art History, a way of telling stories without using words. She then worked as a research assistant in the Nuclear Medicine Department of Vanderbilt Hospital for three years - they figured she was trainable - until she went into labor with her first child. Emily moved to Oak Ridge in 1981 where she was an active volunteer leader in diverse organizations including the schools, Scouts, the League of Women Voters, the UT Arboretum Society, and WUOT public radio 91.9 board. She wrote and published newsletters for several of those organizations.

In 2005 she joined the Oak Ridge Breakfast Rotary Club, giving her expanded opportunities for fellowship and community service. Emily fell in love with professional storytelling when she and her husband, Charlie, first attended the National Storytelling Festival in 2010. In 2017 she and Charlie, Martha and David Hobson, and Pat Postma started the annual Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival, which she chaired until she and Charlie moved to St. Louis in late 2023. They continue an active though more modest engagement with Flatwater Tales. She has two children and five grandchildren who have all become storytelling fans. 

 Arriving with her parents in 1943, Pat Postma is a real Oak Ridge pioneer. Pat says the bonds formed by a community with the mission of winning the War, an education system as radical as its science, and a commitment to the arts from the earliest days made Oak Ridge an exceptional place. Her graduate degree in regional economics led her to become involved in emerging high-tech companies and a new venture curriculum at UT’s Haslam School of Business. Subsequently, she developed and directed a series of innovative Executive MBA programs there.  After her retirement she has championed a number of initiatives to enhance the future of Oak Ridge. She loves the Flatwater Tales Festival because sharing belly laughs with several hundred people feels like the epitome of community.

 Martha came to Oak Ridge to teach at Oak Ridge High School.  Her children contend that she could not hold a job: she has taught school, worked as a technical editor, been a public relations consultant and finally found her true calling as one of the first female certified financial planners in the region.  She loved financial planning and her clients.  She has been a volunteer for many nonprofit groups throughout the community from being president of Altrusa of Oak Ridge to being chair of the Methodist Medical Center Foundation Board.  She grew up in a family of storytellers and has loved professional storytelling since her first trip to Jonesborough to the National Storytelling Festival in the 1990s.  She shares two adult children and three grandchildren with David, loving the name Nana more than any other moniker.  She has been a member of the Oak Ridge Breakfast Rotary Club for more than 30 years. 

 David came to Oak Ridge with his parents when he was nine years old and loved the freedom he had as a boy to roam all over the safe city behind a fence.  He is a proud graduate of Ok Ridge High School and received his engineering degrees from the University of Tennessee.  He had a long career of 44 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  He is the recipient of two R & D 100 awards.  The reactor safety research that he and three colleagues did in the early 1970s paved the way for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when it was decided that the Atomic Energy Commission could no longer both promote and regulate nuclear power.  He is the proud father of two adult children and the prouder Grandpa Dave to three beautiful grandchildren.  He has loved storytelling since his first trip to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough in the 1990s.