She founded a nonprofit at 22. Now, Anna Littman is going back to the land.

by Melanie McGee Bianchi . photos by Naomi Johnson

Anna Littman’s face is markedly heart shaped. It’s the first thing you notice, before you see her feline eyes and feel her wiry energy, and it’s fun to think that her altruism started there, as an inevitable extension of her earnest, angelic appearance.

But that would belie the decade of hard labor she poured into her nonprofit Arts For Life, a hospital-based creative outlet for seriously ill children, which she started when she was just 22. Perhaps worse, at least in Littman’s eyes, it might diminish the influence other people have had on her projects. She grew up on the Ballard Branch land trust in Weaverville, a communally-owned 90-acre nature preserve and agriculture operation. “If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that you need community to accomplish anything,” she says. “I have no illusions about having gotten anywhere without help.”

And she had plenty. First, there was her neighbor, raku sculptor Steven Forbes deSoule, who for years gave Arts For Life 10 percent of his show earnings and also inspired her to take up his trade. Littman learned pottery and, at 22, became the Southern Highland Craft Guild’s youngest member in 2001. Then there was the philanthropist at Kodak who sent her 2,000 rolls of film and 30 cameras when she started Arts For Life. And before that, there was Dale Roberts, a teacher who, when Littman might have gone to a splashier school, seconded his pupil’s choice of small Marlboro College and School for International Training in Vermont. Her scholarship-funded time there led her to the Guatemala-based group Foto Kids, which introduces photography and other visual arts to kids living in brutal poverty. “I think getting a kiln out of customs in Guatemala is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Littman says with a laugh.

Well, relatively speaking. After college, she returned south to Winston-Salem, where her 11-year-old sister Katy had just been diagnosed with a pernicious form of bone cancer that she eventually (indeed, almost miraculously) survived. Littman gave her sibling a camera to ease her pain and fear, and she began to notice just how many other kids on the hospital ward were in a similar fix. So she built a small visual-arts station. And they came.

At an age when most young adults are renting their first apartments and doing shots of Jägermeister, Littman became the founding executive director of an organization that now claims four flourishing pediatric art units in children’s hospitals in Asheville, Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Durham. Weaverville-based Arts For Life has more than a dozen employees and is edging toward 100 volunteers. Their job is to set up art stations in hospitals so that young patients can concentrate on making clay sculptures instead of, say, their chemotherapy treatments. “Our job,” says Littman, “is to be there every single day. Instead of thinking about the spinal tap or blood transfusion they have to get, kids come to see what art project is happening.” The alternative, she says, is TV—which is a horrible alternative. Kids who are bed-ridden can have projects brought to them. “I know if I watch TV all day, I feel sick,” she says.

Now, after a youth spent tunneling tirelessly toward one goal, wearing every conceivable administrative hat, Littman, who’s 32, left her position this month to turn to another all-consuming interest: farming. With her husband Paul, she tills 38 acres of pristine Barnardsville property that the couple rescued from a failing subdivision project. The Littmans grow more than 50 varieties of produce that they sell through CSA subscriptions. Anna enjoys getting her hands in the dirt, reconnecting with the mountain land she was raised on. She’ll be getting out in the field when she can, harvesting berries or garlic or beets. “It’s hard, hard work,” she says. “It makes you a better person because it kicks your butt.”

She tears up when she talks of leaving behind the daily operations of Arts For Life. But she was simply spending too much time on the road. “It was time for me to turn my focus back to my immediate community,” she says. She’s also taking on a program coordinator role for the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Program, which should dovetail nicely with her farm work. She’ll be leading farm tours, organizing volunteer groups and overseeing the Chefs to Schools program, which brings Asheville restaurateurs into area classrooms.

The Littmans are under no romantic impressions that farming is easy. Even experience in gardening and landscape architecture didn’t preclude a steep learning curve for the couple, both in their 30s. But once again, a little help from willing friends set them on the right path. With a small, roughened hand, Anna gestures to a vase she made herself and muses: “I love working. I love doing things, and I love making things,” she says. “But more than anything, I love people. You can’t do it alone.”