Climate-driven flooding destroyed Tony Calhoun’s home in 2022. But as the water receded, his despair only grew. His fiancee, Edith Lisk (left), hopes to bring attention to the mental health toll of extreme weather. Edith Lisk If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. Tony Calhoun was unique. Anyone who knew him would tell you that. On one hand, there was his artistic life. Calhoun was an actor and a screenwriter who was drawn to stories of mystery, horror and redemption. He wrote screenplays about cursed artifacts and murderous guns for hire. He dreamed of someday playing a notorious Kentucky outlaw, Bad Tom Smith, and even maintained Smith’s handlebar mustache for years in preparation. Tony Calhoun was deeply creative. He was an actor and screenwriter who pursued multiple film projects over the years, many of which were inspired by the history of his home Eastern Kentucky. Here, he appears in character as the local outlaw Bad Tom Smith. “He didn’t like to be like anybody else,” remembers Edith Lisk, his fiancee. “He wanted to be his own person.” And the person that Tony Calhoun wanted to be could only exist in his hometown. Calhoun was raised in Jackson, Ky., a small community in the rural eastern part of the state. He was an only child, raised by his parents and grandfather in a house that went back three generations, and that was tucked in a quiet neighborhood that, like most places in that part of Appalachia, had a creek running through it. The effects of climate change on that creek – which sat largely out of sight and out of mind for decades – would become the catalyst that would lead Calhoun to take his […]