Ep. 19 The Bomb Cloud
Humanities on the High Plains
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 . 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...
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Ep. 18 For the Record
Humanities on the High Plains
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 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,...
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Ep. 17 George Saunders
Humanities on the High Plains
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...
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Ep. 16 Shadow of the New Deal
Humanities on the High Plains
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...
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Ep. 15 The Thirsty Llano Estacado
Humanities on the High Plains
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, 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...
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Ep. 14 The ERA in the West
Humanities on the High Plains
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...
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Ep. 13 Dirty Knowledge
Humanities on the High Plains
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,...
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Ep. 12 You Will Never Be One of Us
Humanities on the High Plains
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...
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Ep. 11 Running Out
Humanities on the High Plains
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...
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Ep. 10 Chicana/o Uprising
Humanities on the High Plains
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 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...
info_outlineOur 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. 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.”
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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. You can also read some of her work at poetryfoundation.org.