In Site
Stories and interviews addressing the intersection of the creative process, community, and place. Welcome to In Site, a podcast from the Zion Canyon Mesa, a nascent arts and humanities residency center in Springdale, Utah, surrounded by Zion National Park. One of the primary drivers for these podcasts is concern for our times. To paraphrase Yeats, the center feels besieged. So we’ll consider the many crux issues we face, with an eye towards how creative thinking can play a role. We will engage a wide spectrum of artists, writers, musicians, and thought leaders, and hopefully enjoy the journey. As our name implies, we also want to root firmly within our community, our home in southwest Utah on the Markagunt Plateau. We will give backstory and context for controversial, regional issues here in Utah. We’ll also try to act as an honest broker for dialogue, seemingly a lost art. But our concept of home also radiates out from here to the Colorado Plateau, the Intermountain West, the U.S. in general and on from there. Our name sounds out four different ways, and we identify with each: to get it in sight, to gain insight, and perhaps to incite. There is an additional aspect embedded in the idea of In Site that we will continue to explore: the intersection of vision and place. Very often an artist’s inspiration entwines with or emerges from their chosen landscape. At times they are simply one in the same. We believe creativity is crucial to imagining the future we want to see, especially in these uncertain times, and for us to nurture this creativity, perhaps we should examine and embrace this relationship more deeply. http://zioncanyonmesa.org/podcast
Episodes
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a friend is “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy. Not ordinarily applied to lovers or relatives…a boon companion.” It first appears in “Beowolf” in 1018 A.D. as “freondum.” Though the opposite of “fiend,” both words root in the same Germanic word soup for “love” and “hate,” so therefore inextricably intertwined.
Here, two old friends, Teresa Jordan and ...
We’ve podcasted about the Lake Powell Pipeline, so we thought, as the drought continues and water levels continue to drop, let’s go have a look. We told our board about the idea and it turns out that board member Catherine Smith rafted the Colorado River through Glen Canyon as a teenager in 1955. We were so pleased that she insisted on coming along. We included David Petitt, a well-known photographer now painter, and ...
For anyone concerned about the current global state of Democracy, which should be everyone, Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, may be our greatest hope:
“I’m not here to make citizens transparent to government, I’m here to make government transparent to citizens.”
She has flipped Big Brother, proving that this very same unprecedented internet connectivity can be harnessed to cultivate and manifest the very best of ...
In Part 3, we continue searching for that special something that no one can quite put their finger on; whatever it is that is drawing people to Helper like a magnet.
Gary DeVincent made his way to Helper because he has an eye for quality. He has been restoring old motorcycles and cars his whole life, giving him a penchant for recognizing things that were built with care and intention. So, several years ago when he saw...
In her new book Gender(s), a new volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender. Stockton argues for gender's strangeness, no matter how normal the concept seems; gender is queer for everyone, she claims, even when it's played quite straight. And she explains how race and money dramatically shape everybody'...
With the downturn of the coal mines in the 70s and 80s came a period of economic decline for Helper, Utah. The town was starting to look a little shabby, so proud residents Neida Garcia and Lois Giordano took it upon themselves to spruce things up a bit. They started planting flowers on Main Street with a hunch that caring would beget caring. They were right. Every business on Main Street wanted to be a part of it, an...
What constitutes a community? What do they form around, the seed? What makes them persist over time?
Helper, Utah was founded as a “helper engine” town in 1881. Here trains would pick up an extra engine to help them up the steep, relentless grade of Price Canyon and over Soldier Summit. At the beginning of the 20th century, Helper was a booming railroading and coal mining community. It was also the most diverse place i...
The American West somehow still maintains its foothold in the global subconscious, its raw and alluring brew of archetypes, wide-open dreamscapes of canyons and mountains, cowboys and Indians, grizzly bears and buffalo. As such, quote/unquote “Western Art” continues to make coin by milking these fantasies.
But of course, that West is long gone, if it ever really existed. What remains? What really happened here? Whe...
“WOOOOO! To see the beauty. To see the beauty. It feels like you want to put all that beauty on top of you like that in the morning when the sun comes up and everything, you know?...and then at night, to be able to stand on Mother Earth to look out among the stars…so then things have changed and I’ve been baptized a bunch of times you know, but all that has gone…”
- Henry Real Bird on Zion National Park
H...
“I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.” C. Thi Nguyen
This podcast is the first of a series on “The Anthropology of Truth.” Today in the U.S., truth, facts, and science are under unprecedented assault. What is happening? Is this just old news for us, perhaps forever stuck in Plato’s Cave, mesmerized by the shadows? Or is there something about ou...
It’s impossible. A horn section in Burkina Faso backs a string quartet in Lyon, France, together with guitarists in Nepal and Madrid while a choir in Manila supports the singer in Haiti and an African kora soloist, and we aren’t halfway through the video. Everyone plays outside, in city streets, courtyards, in front of temples, in marketplaces, train yards, beaches, jungles and deserts, visuals that immediately impart...
Join Teresa Jordan and Kim Stafford in an ongoing conversation about practice. They talk about the benefits of cultivating a daily practice, not just for the purpose of becoming a better artist or writer, but also because it can improve one’s life. As Kim puts it, you may not write something good every day, but if you write every day “it will be a better day.”
Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writ...
Craig Childs makes a point of going to the very places he’s writing about and immersing himself in them. In The Secret Knowledge of Water, he traces his very being into the rock itself by mapping waterholes in the Cabeza Prieta. In House of Rain, he follows the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert, walking in their footsteps to gain a particular kind of understanding. In Virga and Bone, he immerses himself in aridnes...
Having created historical context for the pipeline in two previous podcasts, In Site now explores the pipeline itself. Jane Whalen, board member of Conserve Southwest Utah and Coordinator of the Lake Powell Pipeline Coalition, was the primary architect of their collective, incredibly thorough and detailed one hundred and eighty-six page objection to the pipeline (see link below). Quite simply, nobody involved with t...
“A map of the American West is a Rorschach test; people see what they want to see as reflections of who they are.” Betsy Gaines Quammen
Betsy’s conservation work in Mongolia with Buddhist monks on fisheries and in Bhutan for snow leopards centered on finding common ground between religion’s ancient roots and the modern precepts of conservation. After continuing such work with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in th...
Today we talk with Daniel Kemmis. Daniel studied both philosophy and political science, and names Plato, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Gandhi as his primary influences. He was minority leader and speaker of the house in the Montana State Legislature during the ‘80s, when the Sagebrush Rebellion was at its height. Later, he served as Mayor of Missoula. The intense dysfunction of those times, together with the fiercely conte...
The Spanish enslavement of Indigenous peoples across the Southwest was an immense market in humans, second only to that of African Americans. Severed from their lands and cultures, how did some of them create a path forward? Who are the Genízaro? How can Catholicism and Indigenous traditions coexist, perhaps even synergize, in one community? And how can photography act as medicine?
Here we explore the ongoing repercussions of slavery, observed through the microcosm of Natchez, Mississippi, with Richard Grant, in his fifth book “The Deepest South of All.” Moving from England to Mississippi, Richard brings this distinct perspective and keen, compassionate eye to try to understand the “sleight of mind” that America still maintains about our greatest original sin. In Natchez, he found a town that ...
Eric digs into how politicians ignored drought data to create the 1922 Colorado River Compact, and how that intentional myopia continued for almost a century. Today, the entire basin must finally reckon with what has been true all along; that the allocated water just is not there. He busts two foundational myths along the way, one about the science and data, and the other about water use. He then situates the Lake ...
“No one can miss the alarm now in the air.” Barry Lopez, “Horizon”
He was born on the Epiphany of 1945 and died this Christmas. During a reading years ago, he created a spell of silence over the crowd with a particularly compelling piece. He could have taken a personal bow, but instead simply said; “English is a beautiful, powerful language, isn’t it.” He kept a “piece of eight” from a 17th century Spanish shipwreck ...
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