Switchyard

This very special episode of the Switchyard Podcast was recorded live in the “big room” of Leon Russell’s historic Church Studio in Tulsa. The program leads off with a performance by Casii Stephan of “These Hard Days,” her song about working through the challenges of Covid lockdown but it is also about the big themes of loneliness and how we weather difficult times. Next, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips reads a few shorter poems and then delivers the entirety of his essay, "The Fog Lifted," from the special Food Issue of Switchyard magazine. It's also a meditation on Covid lockdown, the respite he found in being in the kitchen and the sense of connection he discovered by sharing his cooking routine on Instagram. Many people who knew him only as a poet saw a new side of Carl, a private side full of joy and hope in the midst of uncertainty and fear. And yet, the real pleasure of cooking is one of sharing family and home, creating community and a place around a literal table, something that no social media platform could provide. After a brief Q&A between Phillips and Switchyard editor Ted Genoways, Casii Stephan returns to the piano for a performance of Leon Russell's "A Song for You." Listen now!

In this episode, Switchyard editor Ted Genoways talks with writers Jori Lewis and Siddhartha Deb whose stories were published in the new Switchyard magazine special food issue (Winter 2024) in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Lewis and Deb joined us in Tulsa on November 30, 2023, for the Switchyard Food Fest, and we recorded this conversation with a live studio audience at The Church Studio. Jori Lewis is the author of Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History (New Press, 2022), winner of a James Beard Foundation Book Award. Siddhartha Deb is the author of three novels, most recently The Light at the End of the World (Soho, 2023), a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice selection, as well as the nonfiction book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, winner of the PEN Open Book Award. You can read their essays and subscribe to the magazine at switchyardmag.com.

In this episode, we speak with Tom Colicchio, chef, activist, and contributor to Switchyard magazine's special Winter 2024 issue on food. Colicchio is arguably the best known chef on the planet. He is a five-time James Beard Foundation Award winner, including the award for Outstanding Chef. For twenty-one seasons, he has been the lead judge of the Emmy Award-winning TV show, Top Chef. He is also the author of three books, including the James Beard Foundation Book Award-winning classic Think Like a Chef. He spoke with host Ted Genoways in New York City in the midst of a torrential downpour that was threatening to disrupt the evening service at his restaurant, Craft.

For the Winter 2024 food issue of Switchyard magazine, we teamed up with the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN). In this episode, guest host Theodore Ross, Editor-In-Chief of FERN, speaks with Chef Sean Sherman. Sherman's Minneapolis restuarant Owamni won the 2022 James Beard Foundation Award for Best New Restaurant. It’s a whole menu made from ingredients used by Indigenous Peoples in North America, before the arrival of white settlers. Sherman, who is Lakota and bills himself as the Sioux Chef, calls this decolonizing the kitchen.

In this episode, award-winning author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho speaks with host Ted Genoways about his lifelong passion for storytelling, his journey from journalist to fiction writer, learning to write in a second language, and how all of these experiences shape the characters in his stories. You can read Antonio's short story "The Search Zone" in the first issue of Switchyard magazine and hear it performed as a radio play in a previous podcast episode.

In this episode, author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho portrays Daniel Proust, a young journalist covering a flood in the remote mountain village of Motozintla, Chiapas, in far southern Mexico. Proust comes to the aid shelter late at night in hopes of seeing the condition of the survivors and has a chance encounter with the leader of the disaster relief effort, General Martínez, portrayed by Oscar Cásares. Proust is hoping to get information from Martínez but soon discovers that the general has some secrets of his own.

In this episode, Ted Genoways speaks with Dimiter Kenarov about his transformation from snowboarder poet to journalist, and his return to Bulgaria where he has been observing a slow transformation that he describes as “the closing of the Bulgarian frontier." He wrote about this in the inaugural issue of Switchyard magazine. We had the opportunity to speak in person at the Church Studio in Tulsa, during the first annual Switchyard Festival in June.

In this episode, Ted Genoways speaks with Maia Kobabe about eir book Gender Queer—how the book explores eir gender and sexual identity during eir childhood and teen years, eir discovery of non-binary identity, the book’s early positive reception, and how Kobabe has navigated the challenges of the last few years, as eir memoir became the most banned book in America. We had the opportunity to speak in person at the Church Studio in Tulsa, during the first annual Switchyard Festival in June where Kobabe was a keynote speaker.

In this Switchyard poetry exclusive, hear Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Poet Laureate of the United States, read her stunning and deeply felt sequence of poems that she wrote for the inaugural issue of Switchyard magazine about the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

In this episode, Ted Genoways speaks with Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Poet Laureate of the United States, about a stunning and deeply felt sequence of poems that she wrote for the inaugural issue of Switchyard magazine about the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Those poems are available unabridged as an exclusive Switchyard poetry episode. We encourage you to listen to them in their entirety.

In this episode, Ted Genoways, editor of Switchyard magazine, speaks with legendary comic book artist and writer Art Spiegelman about the attempt in Tennessee to ban his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, about a legislative bill in Oklahoma that was designed to defend the book, how he became a free speech absolutist, and how he found his way back to the drawing table after a year consumed by controversy and outrage.