Features

An off Broadway play made waves last year for being about the most unlikely of subjects…young, intellectual Catholic conservatives. Set in Wyoming, Will Arbery's play Heroes of the Fourth Turning does not reject or promote right wing values.

Instead it lets the viewer interpret the meaning entirely for themselves. The play completed its run at Playwrights Horizons theater in New York last fall, but he hopes to eventually bring the play to Wyoming.

Arbery told Wyoming Public Radio's Megan Feighery that when he began writing, he couldn’t have imagined setting the play anywhere else.

On an unusually warm Saturday at the Antelope Butte Mountain Recreation Area, I'm on top of the ski hill located in the middle of the Bighorn Mountain Range between Greybull and Sheridan, where the elevation is 9,400 feet. An avid skier, I start down a powdery run with evergreens and big boulders surrounding me.

Wyoming Indian High School's team colors are red, white and blue. But at Monday's basketball practice, there was a lot of purple and gold on the court. The Chiefs and Lady Chiefs - who swept last year's 2A boys and girls state championships - wore the LA Lakers' team colors to honor the late NBA legend Kobe Bryant. Wyoming Public Radio's Savannah Maher stopped by practice to talk with the players and their coaches about what Bryant meant to them.

It isn't easy keeping America's folk arts alive, but the Wyoming Arts Council has been doing their best to preserve Wyoming's. Each year, they give out grants to folk artists who pass on their knowledge to the next generation.

Jack Mease braids rawhide to create beautiful horse tack like reins and hackamores, and now has taught numerous students, including Soliana Abernathy. Mease and Abernathy were among last year's recipients of the Wyoming Arts Council's Folk and Traditional Art Mentoring grant. You can see Mease's work at the State Museum in Cheyenne.

Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards visited Mease's workshop in Lander.

Wyoming has been working towards economic diversification and one way to do that is to make Wyoming's culture, arts and humanities programs a bigger part of the effort. Recently the former CEO of the Wyoming Business Council, Shawn Reese, joined Wyoming Humanities to further this effort. The Director of Wyoming Humanities is Shannon Smith and she and Reese explain the idea to Wyoming Public Radio's Bob Beck.

Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone 25 years ago, after intense debate and under serious scrutiny. Park rangers exterminated the last wolves in Yellowstone nearly a century ago, and their return has restored the park's ecosystem to a state not seen in a long time.

Writer Alexandra Fuller has penned numerous memoirs about her childhood growing up in war-torn Africa in a family constantly scrambling to find stability, and now Fuller has released a new book called Travel Light, Move Fast. It chronicles both her father's death in a Budapest hospital and the horror of her son's death soon after.

Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with Fuller at her home in Jackson to talk about how, as she gets older, it's even more necessary to process such trauma by writing about it.

A new novel tells the story of a newly-out transgender Harvard student who has to give everything up when his family and girlfriend reject him. He's broke and looking for a new start—so he heads to Wyoming. Continental Divide is partly based on the real-life experiences of author Alex Myers, who was the first openly transgender student at Harvard. He talked with Wyoming Public Radio's Erin Jones about Wyoming, masculinity, and writing a new kind of fiction.

Winters in Norway usually last from October to late May—sound familiar? Norway also has something called the polar night. For about two months, the sun never rises above the horizon, giving way to some of the longest, darkest winters on earth. But to psychologists surprise, rates of seasonal depression there are extremely low for what one would expect. That's why Stanford Doctoral Student Kari Leibowitz went there to learn more. She told Wyoming Public Radio's Maggie Mullen about what she found in a town called Tromsø.

This is the 22nd year that the Rocky Mountain Dance Theatre in Cody hosted its annual Nutcracker performance. Cody's Nutcracker is all about inclusion and support from the community.

Taylar Stagner spoke with Tiffany Midge a Lakota author about her career as a poet, author, and a columnist for Indian Country Today. Many of her humorist essays have been compiled in her new book Bury My Heart At Chuck E. Cheese. In this new book, she talks about Native representation in movies, pussy hats, and why humor is important in Indian Country.

In her new book Bury My Heart At Chuck E. Cheese, Tiffany Midge combines popular culture with Indigenous humor. Her collection of essays repackages many stories like Fifty Shades of Grey, The King and I, and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. I asked the Standing Rock Lakota author why it's important to indigenize popular culture.

Grady Kirkpatrick spoke with Teton Valley producer and musician, Ben Winship, about his 2019 albums Acorns and Toolshed.

After checking herself in to a psychiatric hospital in 2013, writer Terese Mailhot was given a notebook. The result is her award-winning debut memoir Heartberries, which tells the story of her coming-of-age on the Seabird Island First Nation in British Columbia, sometimes-tumultuous family relationships, and adult struggles with mental illness.

"My book is essentially about how to love when you come from a dysfunctional home and you have these long shadows of shame kind of following you everywhere you go," said Mailhot, now a New York Times Bestselling author, in an interview with Wyoming Public Radio's Savannah Maher. During a recent visit to the University of Wyoming, Mailhot talked about the book's success and what Native writers risk and gain when they choose to put their stories out into the word.

Your phone, your house, your car. It all originally comes from the earth. Artist Nina Elder is fascinated by the complexity of land being at once something beautiful, sometimes sacred, and often extremely valuable - providing resources that the modern world depends on. Through long journeys to mining-based communities, Elder collects found materials and creates intricate drawings that help tell the multilayered stories that lands have to tell.

She's been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Pollock Krausner Foundation. Elder has been features in VICE Magazine, PBS and Art In America. She's also held positions as an Art + Environment Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art and Polar Lab Research Fellow. Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim speaks with Elder about her latest exhibit now at the University of Wyoming's Visual Arts Building called Nina Elder: Accumulations.