On this episode, we’re taking a look at how farmers and gardeners are helping maintain the region’s biodiversity. Our first stop? A seed swap.
With the summer gardening season at its end, many growers throughout Appalachia are turning their attention to seed saving. It’s a practice where gardeners select the seeds from their best crops, and then save them over winter to plant the following spring. This past April, we visited the annual Appalachian Seed Swap in Pikeville, Kentucky. We learned how important seed saving and swapping are for maintaining Appalachia’s biodiversity. And for creating a tasty meal.
Next, we travel to Richmond, Kentucky where Brian Chadwell is growing something unexpected. He’s a fourth generation farmer and he’s using his family's land to grow rice.
In this episode of Beyond the Clock, our hosts Ash Hanson from Department of Public Transformation and Anna Claussen from Voices for Rural Resilience engage in deep conversation with rural Texas-based artist, Viktor le. Ewing Givens, aka Southern Android, who weaves poetry and ritual into his place-based creative work. Through unspoken language, layered memories, exploration of death and release, ancestral play, and acts of repair, Viktor invites us to examine our relationship with time and place and call in our past, present, and future kin to rematriate our connections to place. Find out more about Viktor's work at http://www.southernandroid.com.
Ginny Hawker is a singer and mentor in the Primitive Baptist tradition, an acapella style with roots in Appalachia. This style of singing inspired bluegrass legends like Ralph Stanley, along with country stars like Patty Loveless and Ricky Skaggs. Hawker is passing this music tradition on to a new generation.
The final episode Routes to Roots, Better Together, explores feelings of loneliness common to the rural immigrant experience and illuminates tried and true strategies for immigrant inclusion. The stories featured in this episode offer a pathway away from policies and practices of exclusion toward cultures of belonging that strengthen the whole community.
Episode Four, Lost In Translation, surveys the different kinds of language barriers that immigrants encounter as they try to adapt to rural American life. The stories featured in this episode show how, when you add language to the access issues that almost all rural Americans deal with, the challenges of living intensify. These stories also provide insights around the strength that is possible in multilingual communities.
Episode Three, The Cultures We Carry, explores the process of adapting to life in a new place, while keeping hold of the customs that help you feel at home. The stories featured in this episode consider the challenges of assimilation, and offer examples of a better way–preserving personal cultures while also learning about others, and finding interesting opportunities to combine the old with the new.
Learn more here.
This episode, Making A Living, discusses immigrant involvement in rural economics. The stories featured in this episode explain the influence industries have on determining where new immigrants settle, and offer insights about the cost of pursuing the American Dream as a newcomer.
The first episode of Routes to Roots, Movement Across Time and Place, pushes back on common misconceptions about immigration in rural America. The stories featured in this episode outline the patterns of immigration to the US over time, the factors that influence an immigrant’s difficult decision to leave home, and highlight the vital contributions that immigrants make when they find new homes in America’s rural places.
Our final episode goes beyond the silver screen to talk about real-world aliens – or at least, how people think about aliens in the real world. How have tales of UFOs and abductions been transformed into modern-day folklore? And how have rural communities been shaped by the search for extra-terrestrial life, both real and fictional?
Films discussed include: Roswell (1994), Roswell (1999 television series, rebooted 2019), Small Town Universe (2024).
Learn more here!
This episode looks at rural alien movies through an ecological lens. Aliens can function as both extractive forces and as symbols of nature’s raw power. How do aliens both embody nature and battle with it? And how can alien invasions in films warn us of our own environmental degradation?
Films discussed include: Avatar (2009), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Nope (2022), The Faculty (1998), Signs (2002)
Honoring ancestors is a human tradition that crosses all cultures. In the southeastern United States, this often takes the form of Decoration Day. That’s when families come together in specially decorated cemeteries to celebrate their roots—sometimes with music and prayers, and almost always with storytelling and a feast.In rural Pickett County, where Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau and Highland Rim collide, one family maintains one of Decoration Day’s oldest traditions: a swept graveyard. Reporter Lisa Coffman takes us to the 200th anniversary of their Decoration Day.
This episode explores alien movies set in the Western United States and the mythology of the American West. Through deep dives into a variety of fascinating films, the spectacle, intrigue, and vastness of this unique landscape is analyzed (Nope, 2022; Asteroid City, 2023). The West’s violent history of expansion and colonization is also highlighted as aliens can become symbols for both colonizers and the oppressed (Cowboys & Aliens, 2011; District 9, 2009).
Welcome to Crop Circle Cinema. This episode discusses the paranoia embedded in rural alien movies. What do aliens reveal about our anxieties around the government, neighbors, strangers, and friends? Who do we believe? And who can we never trust?
Films discussed include: Signs (2002), Independence Day (1996), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Faculty (1998), The Vast of Night (2019), World’s End (2013), Cowboys & Aliens (2011).
In our latest episode, we talked with Tiffany Joy and Shiloh Delaronde of the Appalachian Rekindling Project. The Appalachian Rekindling Project is based in southeast Kentucky and southwest Virginia. Its mission is to restore Indigenous relationships with the land, support cultural revitalization, and foster ecological care in Appalachia. In the interview, Joy and Delaronde share about their work around seed saving and other growing practices.
In the pottery world, there’s lots of different ways that makers can fire their work. Thanks to modern technology, most kilns can be fired by just one person over the course of a day. And some kilns don’t even need human supervision. But other, older methods are still around. And for those, it takes a village. In the mountains of western North Carolina, around a dozen potters recently gathered for 10 days for a wood firing, a method that’s been used for millennia.
In this episode, Anna Claussen (Voices for Rural Resilience) and Ash Hanson (Department of Public Transformation) talk with Central Iowa muralist and organizer Siricao “Siricasso” Garcia about the power of art to bring visibility to diversity in rural communities. Siricasso shares how he turned to the canvas to process personal hardship and express experiences too often judged or silenced because, as he says, “the canvas always talks back.” His vibrant work highlights the beauty, resilience, and rich diversity of rural Iowa in bold and healing ways -- with projects like “Middle of Nowhere Festival”-- and challenges systems of oppression by encouraging us to claim our stories as our own brand -- creating space for others to feel seen, connected, and not alone.
Cherokee people have been making pottery in the mountains of western North Carolina for nearly 3,000 years. But after centuries of colonization and targeted, cultural oppression, there are relatively few Cherokee potters carrying on the art form today. Thanks to a community-led pottery workshop, a new generation of Cherokee potters is emerging. They’re sustaining age-old traditions, while building a contemporary practice of their own.
For most studio potters, making a new piece starts with opening a fresh bag of commercially produced clay. But Naomi Dalglish and Michael Hunt of Bandana Pottery have a different process. They produce their own clay bodies out of local clay dirt from their community in Bakersville, North Carolina. “A really wonderful side effect is our connection to the place and people where we live. Not just to the geology, but also to the community,” Hunt said.
In the week of July 4th Rural Remix takes a look at the first amendment via Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez visit to the Appalachian town of Fleming-Neon, Kentucky. On June 18, 2025 Gomez went to the rural stop on her nationwide tour to protect the First Amendment. The event was hosted by the Center for Rural Strategies, which publishes the Daily Yonder, and featured a panel of experts who spoke to the five First Amendment freedoms: speech, religion, press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government.
In this episode we travel to Westel, Tennessee, home to fiddle maker Jean Horner. For more than seventy years, Horner built instruments that traveled across the country—Carnegie Hall to California, the Grand Ole Opry to the Smithsonian.
Two factors shaped Horner’s fiddles. The first was his deep roots in the Cumberland Plateau. The second? His fascination with great Italian violin makers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Jean died this past January at age 91, an acknowledged master of his craft. Reporter Lisa Coffman interviewed him at his workshop in 2023. Recently, she attended his memorial service in Westel, and brings us this story of how he came to be known as the Stradivari of the Cumberlands. All fiddle tunes in this piece are played on Jean Horner fiddles.