Humanities on the High Plains Ryan M. Brooks

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.