Wyoming Public Radio’s award winning podcast, The Modern West, has a new season coming out starting April 9, and we thought our listeners might want to get a sneak peak. The show’s host, Melodie Edwards, talked about what she’s been cooking up for the podcast’s tenth season, called The Gray In Between, with Kamila Kudelska.
Kamila Kudelska: For those who don't know much about it, what's The Modern West podcast and why should people give it a listen?
Melodie Edwards: We're really interested in rural identity, and we're looking at subjects like ranching, nature, culture. And we're kind of interweaving all of that with history and really great storytelling.
Every year, we have a season of the podcast when Wyoming Public Radio reporters get to contribute an episode, building on the reporting that they have been doing all year. We have one of those reporter seasons starting to roll out, coming up this week, and we're really excited about it.
KK: I am really excited about it, definitely one of my favorite things about the Modern West. But you have an intriguing title that you came up for this season. Why is it called The Gray in Between?
ME: I came across that phrase when Caitlin Tan pitched me her idea for her episode. It was this language that really kind of stuck with me and thinking over the themes of all of the episodes as they started rolling in and putting them together. I could see that there was a uniting thread throughout all of these episodes that were all about finding nuance and people who are steering clear of black and white thinking.
Caitlin's story was an absolutely perfect example of that. She tells a really poignant story of her hometown of Pinedale that's torn apart when a local man ran over a wolf with a snowmobile and he brought it injured into a popular bar. The town ended up rallying around him, and there was international outrage. Caitlin actually ended up interviewing the woman who reported the animal treatment to Wyoming Game and Fish in the first place. Here is the woman, explaining why she didn't confront the guy on the spot that night in the bar.
Source: So at the time, I'm not thinking it’s animal cruelty or torture, because he just kept calling it a good dog, and it was just so bizarre. I had just moved to Wyoming. Wyoming is legendary. It is notorious. It is the wild West. It is the mountains. It is the people who [say] ‘Don't tell me what to do.’
ME: As you can hear, the story that Caitlin is telling is really complicated.
The same thing is happening in Hannah Habermann’s episode, where she looks between the lines of a breaking story last year that was about the Episcopal Church and how they returned 200 artifacts to the Northern Arapaho Tribe. She got to go to the ceremony where these objects were officially returned to the Northern Arapaho and one woman told the story of seeing all of these boxes in a dark room at a church in Laramie, and this was decades ago.
SOURCE: I was just looking around and I was touching the boxes and I was wondering, ‘What am I supposed to do about this? How did I get these back home?’
ME: The woman ends up finding a photograph of her grandfather in those boxes. So that's the kind of stories and voices that we wanna bring to our listeners.
KK: What's happening in episode one of this new season?
ME: The first episode, it's an interview with Samuel Western, who is an author right here in Wyoming. He has a new book out called The Spirit of 1889, Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and the Northern Rockies, and it perfectly sets up this theme about “the gray in between” and the need for more nuance in our dialogue.
Western is an economist. He used to teach right here at the University of Wyoming, and he's also a historian. And when he was doing research for his book, Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River, he noticed that several Western states, including Wyoming, had really egalitarian constitutions that had all been ratified in the year 1889.
Samuel Western: They were poor. They did not have enough people, and they really put ideology on the back burner. Because of that, they were relatively inclusive.
ME: But Western says as waves of boom and bust hit these states, they pretty much lost their inclusive vision. So in this week's episode, he goes into detail about that history and where these states are right now.
KK: Wonderful. You almost always produce an episode for one of these reporting seasons. Can you tell us a little bit about the one that you reported on?
ME: Sure. And, of course, you know all about this episode because you were my editor! But for our listeners, it is an episode that builds on Caitlin's story about the wolf incident in Pinedale. I follow up her story from the point of view of Cali O'Hare, who's the editor of the Pinedale Roundup.
The wolf story blew up in O'Hare's face mere months after her publisher, News Media Corporation, laid off her entire staff that left her all alone to cover this international breaking story. My episode is about the plight of local news and how this one woman is fighting to keep her paper from turning into what's called a ghost paper. That's when a newspaper still appears to be covering the community, but it really isn't. It's slowly but surely getting filled up with press releases and national news, and it leaves the community disconnected and more reliant on the divisiveness of social media.
In the end, it's a really uplifting episode, though. Even after everything that O'Hare goes through, she's still a very firm believer in a free press.
Cali O’Hare: There's such great power in journalism to do good and there's not enough good in this world, and I just keep clinging to that.
KK: Sounds like this is gonna be a really fantastic season. What else do you have up your sleeve?
ME: Yeah, it really is a stellar roundup of stories this season. We also have Hanna Merzbach coming back with a part two from her reporting last year on how people in Jackson are dealing with a lack of affordable housing there.
This year, she's gonna tell us about people who are getting really creative about what kind of houses they put up. Some people are buying modular homes that are actually built in factories and some are opting for straw bale homes. Here's a gal who's a true believer.
Lindsey Love: It's like, kind of my soul has a connection to these materials. I don't know really how to explain it.
ME: We'll also get an episode about how chronic wasting disease is banging on the door at Wyoming's elk feed grounds. Dante Filpula Ankney actually takes us to visit one of them, and we get to see the science behind managing that problem.
KK: Awesome, I can't wait to hear what you've got in store. When is all this happening and where can people find it?
ME: That first episode with Samuel Western it's coming out this Wednesday, April 9. Then we're gonna be releasing episodes every other Wednesday.
After that, we have a podcast tab on our website. You can find all of our seasons there, plus all of these new episodes that we're rolling out. You can also download those episodes on your Apple Podcast app on your phone, or on Spotify or any of those apps that you prefer. You can just look up the Modern West and you'll find us there.
