Access Utah

Carrie Newcomer's songwriting has impressed the likes of Billboard, USA Today, and Rolling Stone, which wrote that she "asks all the right questions". Newcomer speaks and teaches about creativity, vocation, activism, and spirituality at colleges, conventions and retreats. She has shared the stage with performers like alison Krauss and writers like Parker J. Palmer, Jill Bolte Taylor, Philip Gully, Scott Russell Sanders, Rabbi Sandy Sasso and Barbara Kingsolver. Newcomer has written two collections of essays and poetry as companion pieces to recent albums: A Permeable Life: Poems and Essays, and The Beautiful Not Yet: Essays, Poems and Lyrics. In 2016, Goshen College awarded her with an honorary degree of Bachelor's of Music in Social Change during a ceremony in which she delivered the college's commencement speech. Newcomer lives in Indiana and joins Access Utah to talk about her album, The Beautiful Not Yet.

Lily Hoang’s latest book is “A Bestiary,” In this genre-transcending work, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum as the winner of the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection, Hoang teases apart mythology, familial memory, and investigative essay into searing fragments, then weaves them into a dazzling swarm. Hoang models her postcolonial bestiary on the Chinese zodiac—“A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats./ You desire the human equivalent”—and uses it to represent such concepts as fidelity, beauty, and “the disgust of desire.” In doing so, she confronts such topics as feminine subjection, familial suffering due to assimilation (“‘Vietnamese women suffer better than all other people,’ my mother used to tell me”), and a sister’s addiction and death with a precision that is by turns vulnerable and justly incensed. Hoang subverts the moralizing tendencies of folklore to form a new hybrid mythology that, like all belief systems, reassures the believer—and the reader—that human vulnerability is undergirded by a sense of mutual care. “In order to join the collective, you must un-become, lose your face and skin, eject your identity,” she writes. “This is called belonging.” In Hoang’s mutinous cosmos, time warps and dilates to link ruptures between games and reality, the living and the dead, pain internalized and sickness expressed.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is Pulitzer Prize winners, and we have Utah Humanities' Cynthia Buckingham with us to revisit our discussions with Annette Gordon-Reed, John Luther Adams, Ken Armstrong, and Pat Bagely.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is fun and music, and we have Dr. Lynne McNeill with us to revisit our episodes on Sherlock Holmes, Mormon naming practices, and the band Evening in Brazil.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is current events, and we have Teri Guy and Candi Carter Olson with us to revisit our episodes on the designation of Bears Ears National Monument, fake news and journalism, and Donald Trump's first executive order on refugees.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is race relations, and we have Dr. Jason Gilmore with us to revisit our episode on the Colin Kaepernick controversy and our discussions with Angela Pulley Hudson and Paul Reeve.

Historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was recently on the USU campus to give a talk presented by the USU History Department and sponsored by the Tanner Talks Series in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Public radio’s Dr. Zorba Paster is in Logan for several events presented by UPR and he’ll join us for the hour today to talk about healthy living, the latest medical science, and to answer your questions.

We’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, a day early, with folklorist Lisa Gabbert, who says “Over time, St. Patrick’s Day has become a very American holiday; today, it is largely a festive rite of spring—green being the appropriate spring color—characterized by the performance of “Irishness” through the use of (often stereotyped) symbols. Many people, not merely those with ancestral connections to Ireland, enjoy “being Irish” for the day, as it is a way to celebrate Irish music and culture, along with better weather.” We’ll ask why is this unofficial holiday so popular in the U.S. And we want to know your St. Patrick’s Day traditions. Do you wear green? Do you eat corned beef and cabbage? What else do you do?

Republicans in Congress are attempting to keep their long-standing promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They say the ACA is a disaster and likely to implode. Democrats warn that millions of people will lose access to affordable health care if the repeal passes. We’re going to talk about it on Access Utah today. What should our health care system look like? Is healthcare a right? Is the ACA a massive deficit-busting entitlement program? If you prefer a more market-based system how would that work? How do we promote a system that reduces costs and expands coverage?