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In March 2023, The Canadian Record — the weekly newspaper of rural Canadian, TX, population 2,300 — suspended publication after 130 years in print. Ryan’s guests this episode are Laurie Ezzell Brown, longtime editor and publisher of The Record, and Heather Courtney, the award-winning director and producer of the 2023 documentary short For the Record, which streams online from May 6th to July 31st as part of PBS’s “Reel South” series, as well as airing on Panhandle PBS at 1PM on Sunday, May 12th. Beginning in 2019 and ending in 2022, the film follows Brown, reporter Cathy Ricketts, business manager Mary Smithee, and other staff members as they hustle to keep the paper afloat during an oil bust, a global pandemic, and a contentious presidential election.
Currently, The Record continues in a scaled-down form online, but — as Brown and Courtney stress in the documentary and in these interviews — the print version’s demise reflects a broader trend, as the country has lost a fourth of its newspapers in the past 20 years. Ryan speaks first with Laurie, who updates us on the status of The Record and her role in covering the March 2024 wildfires; describes her experience being in front of a documentarian’s camera; and reflects on the challenges of sustaining a family-owned business in the Panhandle (where young people are hard to attract and often eager to leave). She also shares her views on how distrust of journalists has been intensified by the erosion of the boundary between news and opinion, and discusses the causes, consequences, and possible solutions to the growing news deserts in rural America.
Next Ryan speaks with Heather, who explains why her last two films (including 2023’s Breaking the News) have focused on the work of reporters; discusses the difference between news-writing and documentary filmmaking; and describes the logistics of filming journalists in the middle of a pandemic and an election year. Finally, she discusses some of her artistic decisions in For the Record and why she has never made a “true vérité film.” At the end of the interview, Heather issues a call to action and describes how listeners and civic organizations can get involved in the broader effort to support community-oriented news.
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Before he was a MacArthur Genius or a Booker Prize-winner, George Saunders was a songwriter, an oil-field worker, and a slaughterhouse “knuckle-puller,” not to mention an MA student at what was then West Texas State University. In this in-depth interview, Amarillo College’s Chris Hudson joins me, Ryan Brooks, as we speak with the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and many other books. We chat with Saunders about his roots in the Texas Panhandle and how his fascination with Custer has stretched from his first published story (written in Amarillo) to his latest novella, “Liberation Day.” We also discuss his attitudes about work, capitalism, and ghosts; whether the Panhandle is best understood as Steinbeckian or Trumpian; his time as a young musician in the Amarillo Songwriters Association; which of his writing students we should be paying attention to next; Flannery O’Connor; Lucky Hank; and much more. At the end of the interview, Saunders describes the impact three WT English profs – Richard Moseley, Charmazel Dudt, and Sue Park – had on life and his career, including teaching him to have faith in his own responses to literature.
Cover Image: Michael Tomlinson, George Saunders, Pat Pacino, mid-1970s. Photos courtesy of Buddy Squyres. -
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The history of public media is the history of fidelity to an idea: access to public education is “not only a service but a right.” On this episode we’re joined by Dr. Josh Shepperd, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Josh describes how this democratic ideal evolved, clumsily, into the material and institutional practices we’ve come to associate with NPR, PBS, and other public media. We discuss how the Communications Act of 1934 fundamentally changed the trajectory of this movement, the impact of the Rockefeller Foundation and early communications research, and the pioneering role of Midwestern and Western university stations. We also chat about Josh’s work as director of the Library of Congress Sound Submissions Project. Make sure to tune in to catch a special cameo by Theodor Adorno…
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Ryan’s guests this episode are Dr. Timothy M. Foster, former WT prof and currently a Spanish teacher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and Dr. John Beusterien, Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Tim and John come on the podcast to discuss their article, “The Thirsty Llano Estacado: The Manuel Maés Ballad Corpus,” published in 2022 in The Great Plains Quarterly. This piece includes a thorough appendix of transcriptions, translations, and recordings — several of which can be heard in this episode — of the Nuevomexicano ballad of Manuel Maés, a real-life, twenty-one-year-old cibolero (buffalo hunter) who was killed while hunting in 1873 and buried somewhere in the Llano Estacado of Texas. Tim and John argue that examining the ballad’s environmental vision can shed light on the contemporary problem of water scarcity, awakening “the spirit of water as a force of renewal and, in so doing, raise consciousness toward ecologically sound and sustainable water practice.” After a brief introduction in Spanish, the interview covers topics like Priscilla Ybarra’s concept of Chicana/o “goodlife writing” and the challenge it represents to Anglo-American environmentalist movements rooted in settler colonialism; the role of groups like the comancheros, pastores, and ciboleros in the pre-Anglo history of the Llano; and the Maés song’s status as indita, corrido, and ballad, three complexly interrelated genres. We also discuss the thematic role of canyons, rivers, and water-collection points, and how the song functions as a kind of tombstone, not only for Maés but also for the Panhandle playa where he was likely buried, a lake that “is almost certainly plowed under, built over, or trenched for irrigation, unable to fulfill either its cultural or ecological function.”
The Great Plains Quarterly Cover Image: The Killing of Manuel Maés, courtesy of the artist, Ronald Kil.
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Our guest this episode is WT history professor Dr. Chelsea Ball, author of “‘I Oppose the ERA, but I Do Approve of Equal Rights for Women’: Gender and Politics in the Aftermath of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the U.S. West.” This piece can be found in The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink and published by the University of Nebraska Press. In our talk, Ball explains how the ERA came to symbolize more than just “equality” and how this symbolism prompted resistance among ‘70s-era conservatives, especially in the West. She also describes the aftermath of the ERA’s defeat in 1982, when the broader backlash against feminism intensified and Western activists turned their attention to state- and city-level equality campaigns. Finally, we discuss the current, uncertain status of the drive to ratify the ERA — recently reignited in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, and Nevada — and how studying these developments can help us rethink traditional histories of both Western women and contemporary feminism.
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Ryan’s guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Schleck, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Schleck joins us to discuss her book, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, published in January 2022 as part of the University of Nebraska Press’s “Provocations” series. The book critiques traditional defenses of academic freedom, which tend to be based on the idea that universities serve the public good by being separate from the public, producing knowledge that is therefore “clean,” or, other words, apolitical. In reality, Schleck contends, the university is a place where what counts as public good gets debated and contested, and therefore knowledge is always “dirty.” By virtue of these very debates, she argues, universities can serve as a “seed bank” for potential future public needs, and academic freedom should be defended, materially and ideologically, in order to ensure the “biodiversity” of this seed bank.
Our interview covers these arguments and a range of topics, including: how the book was inspired by the termination of a UNL lecturer who went viral while protesting a conservative group on campus; the rise of “academic capitalism” and its impact on the notion that universities serve the common good; the contemporary tendency to define academic freedom in terms of free-speech rights, and why this is a problem; why faculty unions are necessary but not sufficient when it comes to defending academic freedom; how recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic have underscored the importance of historical knowledge produced in the humanities; and the possibility of solidarity between academics and other kinds of workers. Schleck also describes how her approach, which stresses the importance of ideological diversity, may serve to build bridges with conservative critics of the academy. For more coverage of her work, see this news story and this editorial, which appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star; for a review of Schleck’s book and two other recent books on academic freedom, see this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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In this episode, Ryan speaks with his WT colleague Dr. Timothy Paul Bowman, historian and author of You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservativism, published in 2022 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Bowman’s book tells the story of Wayne Woodward, who in 1975 was fired from his job as an English teacher at La Plata Junior High in Hereford, Texas for founding a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Bowman argues that Woodward was fired because both he and the ACLU — with its reputation for fighting for workers’ rights — were seen as threats by the Anglo power structure in Hereford. The book also traces the historical roots of Panhandle conservativism, which, Bowman argues, run deeper than is often assumed in conservative historiography. The interview also touches on what the rural version of this ideology contributed to the rise of the New Right more generally, as well as what Woodward’s decades-old legal battle has to tell us about contemporary political polarization.
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On this episode, Ryan is joined by two of his WT colleagues — Dr. Nathan Howell, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Erik Crosman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences — and Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld, executive director of the nonprofit organization, Ogallala Commons. We discuss anthropologist Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, a National Book Award finalist published in 2021. Running Out concerns the High Plains’s most important source of water, the Ogallala Aquifer, which for decades has been depleted by agricultural irrigation at a rate faster than it can be replenished. To explore the causes and consequences of this depletion, Bessire returns home to his family farm in southwest Kansas, and his account mixes memoir, history, and ethnography. Our panel discussion touches on a range of topics, including: the politics (and aesthetics) of depletion; what it means to think of water as something other than a commodity; the relationship between depletion and global warming; the importance of democratizing groundwater management; and the role of humanities scholarship in responding to ecological crises. For more information on this topic, see also the Ogallala Commons website; the USDA’s Ogallala Aquifer Program; and the website for WT’s Southern Plains Conference, which includes a link to the proceedings for the 2020 conference on local groundwater.
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In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay “The South-by-Southwest Borderlands’ Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas.” The piece emerged out of Zapata’s involvement with the groundbreaking Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project and appears in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, published in 2021 by the University of Texas Press. The interview covers a range of topics, including: the social contradictions of the Jim Crow and Juan Crow systems in West Texas (as exemplified by the public cemetery in Lubbock); the role of police brutality in sparking the Chicana/o movement in Lubbock, Odessa, and Midland; the 1971 “March of Faith” and the 1978 beating death of Larry Ortega Lozano, both crucial turning points in the history of this movement; how these events helped lead to collaborations between Black and Brown social-justice organizations in the region; and the police brutality experienced by members of the white working-class in Amarillo in the 1970s. Zapata also discusses his other research in Mexican-American history, including his digital history project, “Chicana/o Activism in the Southern Plains through Time and Space,” which maps the events described in the article and outlines the role of student organizers at places like Texas Tech in Lubbock and West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in Canyon.
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On this episode, Ryan is joined by Mark. A. Lause, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West (Verso, 2017). Taking its title from a major strike led by ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle in 1883, the book traces the broader history of post-Civil War labor radicalism and third-party insurgency in the American West. Lause discusses this under-explored history and touches on topics like the criminalization of “mavericking” (the branding of unbranded calves, a way for cowboys to start their own herds); the ideological function of violence in the Old West; the idea of turning Fredrick Jackson Turner “on his head”; and the continued relevance of rural and Western populism in imagining alternatives to the two-party political system in the U.S. Lause also introduces us to colorful historical figures like “Broncho John” Sullivan, an American cowboy radical enough to impress Eleanor Marx Aveling (Karl’s daughter) when they met at a Wild West show in 1886. For more on Broncho John, “a different kind of Western hero,” see also Lause’s profile at LAWCHA, the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
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Ryan sits down with two of his WT colleagues, Dr. Amy Von Lintel, Professor of Art History, and Dr. Bonnie Roos, Professor of English, who join him to discuss their new book, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West, forthcoming in February 2022 from Texas A&M University Press. The book seeks to “recenter” Abstract Expressionism by examining how this NYC-based movement flourished in the Texas Panhandle in the 1960s and ‘70s, as Amarillo art dealer Dord Fitz helped create a network of patrons and students for Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Jeanne Reynal (whose 1974 mosaic portrait of Nevelson is the image accompanying this episode). The book also explores how the work of these artists was shaped by their time in the “Middle American West”; considers the role of gender performance in defining and re-defining Ab Ex; and makes the case for why Reynal’s mosaics and Nevelson’s wall sculptures should be considered part of this painting-centric movement. The interview touches on what being a part of this artistic community meant for queer and Black artists in this deeply conservative region, and it ends with a consideration of Fitz’s legacy here in the Panhandle. (Who, if anyone, is the modern-day Dord Fitz?) For more information on “The Women: Tops in Art,” the 1960 show that helped create the art scene explored in this book, see Von Lintel and Roos’s article in the Fall/Winter 2021 edition of Woman’s Art Journal, available for order here.
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In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Di Stefano is the author of The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era, published in 2018 by the University of Texas Press. The Vanishing Frame shows that as Latin American culture has become increasingly influenced by the politics of the human-rights movement, contemporary writers, visual artists, and critics have sought to “eliminate the division between art and life…so that the pain of the victim [of dictatorial violence and torture] can somehow become that of the reader or the spectator.” Rather than promoting freedom or justice, however, this “vanishing” of the artistic frame is – the book contends – compatible with the logic of neoliberalism, and therefore complicit with a system that intensifies economic inequality, injustice, and un-freedom. To identify alternatives to this free-market consensus, the book points to recent works by figures like Fernando Botero and Roberto Bolaño, works that insist on the autonomy of the work of art, and therefore on the importance of the artist’s intention, meaning, and political ideology rather on than the experience of the audience. Here Di Stefano unpacks these provocative claims, as well as describing the genesis of his latest collaborative project, the online Latin American cultural journal FORMA.
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How can educators cultivate self-cultivation in their students? How can they maintain an intimate connection between their scholarly research, what they teach, and how they teach? How can they encourage students to find common ground in a period of intense political division? In this episode, Ryan discusses these and other challenges with Dr. Laura J. Mueller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Texas A&M University. Mueller’s provocative answer to these questions is “Modern Socratic Dialogue,” a pedagogical approach she explores in her recently published article, “Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung.” In this conversation, Mueller describes the historical roots of MSD and provides a step-by-step explanation of how to implement this method in the classroom, drawing on examples from her own courses. She also unpacks her argument that — because American identity is distinctive — we need a distinctly Americanized version of German Bildung. As the conversation turns to contemporary political questions, Mueller describes how her commitment to consensus-oriented teaching methods has been informed, in part, by her experience growing up in a rural and conservative part of Southern Illinois. She also explains the ways in which similar methods have been used in settings like the Highlander Folk School Workshops, the social-justice leadership school (pictured in the image accompanying this episode) that helped train civil-rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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In 2019, after a nearly 40-year absence, affiliated minor-league baseball returned to Amarillo with the debut of the Sod Poodles, a Class AA Padres affiliate who won the Texas League title and drew over 400,000 fans in their first season of play. (This despite a team name that infuriated many locals — reportedly it’s obscure pioneer slang for “prairie dogs.”) As Brian M. Ingrassia suggests, however, the Sod Poodles are likely to face some of the same challenges that faced the city’s first affiliated team, the Gold Sox, whose history serves as “a case study illustrating how minor-league ball often only tenuously thrived in a mid-sized city.” An associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University, Ingrassia tells this tale in “The Yellow City’s Tenuous Hold on the Gold Sox: Affiliated Texas League Baseball in Amarillo, 1959–1982,” forthcoming in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review. He joins Ryan on this episode to discuss the complex interplay between postwar urban development and minor-league baseball, as well as to share stories about the legendary players who have passed through Amarillo on their way to the majors. The interview also touches on the relationship between Ingrassia’s first book, The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (2012); his more recent research on baseball; and his current scholarly project, a book-length examination of auto racing, urban planning, and the “good roads” movement of the early 1900s.
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For this episode, Ryan is joined by Justin A. Joyce, Research Director for President Dwight McBride at the New School in New York City, Managing Editor of the James Baldwin Review, and the author of Gunsligning Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law. The paperback edition of the book, originally published in 2018, is now available from Manchester University Press. Gunslinging Justice argues that Westerns work together with legal discourse to legitimate certain forms of gun violence, establishing norms for who is allowed to engage in this violence - and why - and thereby helping to construct Anglo masculinity. In telling this story, Joyce traces the evolution of American self-defense doctrine and the history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. He shows how this evolution is also visible in the evolution of the Western as a literary and film genre, and he explores how the distinctive “firearm iconography” associated with the rifle, the pistol, and the machine gun works in classics like High Noon, Winchester ’73, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch, and many more. In its final few chapters, Gunslinging Justice brings this story into the present, tracing connections between more recent film and TV Westerns - including Unforgiven, Justified, and Django Unchained - and contemporary social developments like neoliberalism and the effort to rethink the concept of “self-defense” in cases of domestic violence.
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In this episode, Ryan is joined by four of his WT colleagues: Dr. Alex Hunt, Dr. Tim Bowman, Dr. Ashley Pinkham, and Dr. Christopher Macaulay. Together we discuss Sarah Smarsh’s bestselling 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Smarsh was born in 1980 and grew up poor in southern Kansas, the daughter of generations of wheat farmers on one side and generations of teenage mothers on the other. Her memoir, a National Book Award finalist, reads as a corrective to the mystification of the struggles of the rural working-class in America. It is also a rhetorically complex work of literature, written as a letter to the unconceived daughter Smarsh promises herself she will never deliver into a life of poverty. The episode begins with a discussion of the panelists’ initial reactions, both critical and celebratory, followed by a more focused discussion in which they draw on their unique perspectives as scholars of literary studies, history, developmental psychology, and political science. Over the course of the conversation, we talk about a range of issues, from where the book fits into the tradition of Great Plains literature, to what it says about rural America’s ambivalent relationship with the two-party political system, to how we might imagine using this book in a college classroom in the Texas Panhandle.
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Ryan's guests for this episode are Heather J. Allen, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi, and Andrew R. Reynolds, Professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. Allen and Reynolds are co-editors of the collection Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media, published in December 2018 by the University of Arizona Press. The collection provides a venue for scholars working in the emerging field of "textual studies," with essays on cultural artifacts ranging from grammar manuals and newspaper articles to (as the editors put it) "items we might consider newcomers or even interlopers in the textual world," including phonographs, "costume books," postcards, publishing catalogs, and virtual databases. In the collection and in the interview, Allen and Reynolds make the case for what a Latin American perspective can bring to this (still Anglo-centric) field; discuss how textual studies can open up new ways of thinking about colonization, modernization, and globalization; and describe the pedagogical possibilities and challenges created by the digitization of archival texts.
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In this episode, Ryan speaks with Christopher R. Martin, Professor of Communication Studies and Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa. Martin is the author of No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell University Press /ILR Press), named one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles of 2019. No Longer Newsworthy traces the decline of the “labor beat” in local and national newspapers, as — beginning in the 1960s — these publications became less concerned with serving mass audiences and more concerned with targeting upscale consumers. As Martin shows in vivid detail, this shift in focus has distorted the mainstream media’s coverage of labor issues and prompted many rural and working-class readers to turn to other, more conservative sources of news. The book provides a useful framework for thinking about the decline of the newspaper industry, including here in the Texas Panhandle, and it points to ways that publications can revitalize their labor coverage so as to better fulfill the democratic function of an independent press. For more information and video links for news stories, useful for teaching, visit Martin’s No Longer Newsworthy website. For an application to the labor-journalism workshop described in the interview, visit the CUNY Graduate School for Journalism’s “Reporting the U.S. Workplace” page.
