Humanities on the High Plains

Ep. 20 The Conservative Frontier

In 1980, when he was a high-school freshman in Canyon, Texas, Jeff Roche opened up his school newspaper and saw he was one of only seven students out of about 500 who voted for Carter rather than Reagan in that year's mock Presidential election. This was the moment that Roche – now a history professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio – first began to realize that the Texas Panhandle is truly different, with a conservative political culture that distinguishes it even from the rural areas in New Mexico and Oklahoma where he also spent time as a child. That political culture is the subject of Roche's new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right [https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477332641/], published in 2025 by the University of Texas Press. Roche joins the podcast for a conversation with WT's Tim Bowman, who notes that the book is not just a political history but an "all-encompassing, sweeping narrative" of the region since permanent settlement began in the late 19th century. Roche and Bowman discuss how this early, frontier period shaped the region's eventual "anti-statist, highly individualized" political commitments; how Roche was able to achieve the incredible level of historical detail in his text; and how Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis" was not only used to explain life in the Southern Plains, one of the last places to be settled in the U.S. (and therefore, according to the thesis, home to the most American of all Americans), but also internalized by generations of local educators, who used the thesis to promote a specific vision of West Texas identity itself. The conversation also touches on the influence and backstory of figures like J. Evetts Haley and "Pappy" O' Daniel (who suggested in 1941 that labor unions were more dangerous to the United States than the Nazis); the role of West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in shaping the region's culture; and the past, present, and future of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum [https://www.panhandleplains.org/] in Canyon, the state's largest historical museum, which has been closed to the public since early 2025. Roche has been involved in grassroots efforts to re-open the museum, and his own work, as Bowman puts it, is a "clear testament" to the importance of the institution as a resource for those looking to preserve and understand West Texas history.

Ep. 19 The Bomb Cloud

Our guest this episode is Tyler Mills, an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College's Writing Institute and an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in – among many other publications – The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Kenyon Review. She joins us to discuss her new mixed-media memoir, The Bomb Cloud, published in 2024 by Unbound Editions Press [https://www.unboundedition.com/product/the-bomb-cloud-tyler-mills-literary-nonfiction/]. The book takes its title from an "unauthorized" photograph of the mushroom cloud spreading over Nagasaki after it was bombed in World War II, a photo Tyler found in an album belonging to her late grandfather, who served as a pilot during the war and who claimed to have been secretly involved with the mission to drop the bomb. Our interview covers a range of topics, including: how Tyler came to spend several years living and working in New Mexico, near the sites that constitute ground zero for the Atomic Age; the challenges of researching in an archive defined by secrecy and erasure; the ekphrastic nature of The Bomb Cloud, and Tyler's technique of collaging photos from the Trinity nuclear-test explosion to capture the violent "gaze of the perceiver who witnesses an act of harm and knowingly keeps those nearby away from this knowledge." We also chat about how authoring this book changed Tyler's perception of what she can do as a writer; the differences between the "I" of lyric poetry and the "I" of memoir; the role of literary form and aesthetic beauty in the nuclear era; and how people living in "atomic communities" like Los Alamos – or like Amarillo, TX, located 20 miles from the nation's largest nuclear disassembly plant – can come to terms with the possibility of disaster and violence "so terrible, so deeply imprinted into our collective consciousness that we don't want to see it." *** To read some of Tyler's poetry and essays – and to sign up for her monthly poetry prompt – you can visit her website, tylermills.com [https://tylermills.com/]. You can also read some of her work at poetryfoundation.org [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tyler-mills].

Ep. 18 For the Record

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 [https://www.pbs.org/video/for-the-record-npiwmd/] 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 [https://www.canadianrecord.com/], 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 [https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/report/] 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 [https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/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.

Ep. 17 George Saunders

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.

Ep. 16 Shadow of the New Deal

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 [https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/about-this-program/radio-preservation-task-force/current-projects/sound-submissions/]. Make sure to tune in to catch a special cameo by Theodor Adorno…