The pandemic continues to inspire more people to go outside. One result? They’ve found more baby animals. This week on Inside Appalachia, we’ll hear how everyday folks have helped rescue a record number of baby owls.

And we’ll meet a woman who moved from L.A. to rural West Virginia. “It’s very wild here. It’s like the Wild West except we’re east of the Mississippi,” said Margaret Bruning, who’s now learning to raise and shear sheep.

June is Pride month. We’ll listen back to a fabulous story from 2019 as With Good Reason producer Cass Adair takes us on an audio tour through the history of Roanoke’s Queer scene with those who lived it.

Over Memorial Day weekend, airports across the country reported the highest numbers of people flying in more than a year. As more of us are dreaming once again of flight, we thought this would be a good time to listen back to an episode of Inside Appalachia that originally aired last summer. We’ll hear stories about flight: legendary aviators, fighter pilots, and a plane ride that didn’t quite go as planned.

Our Inside Appalachia team recently won several awards for our reporting. This week, we’re listening back to some of these stories, including one about the John Denver classic, “Take Me Home Country Roads,” which was first recorded 50 years ago in 1971.

“There was this overall mood of homesickness, not just for West Virginia but for our country. The song was born into that,” said Sarah Morris, an English professor at West Virginia University who is writing a book about “Country Roads.”

And we’ll learn how indie pro-wrestling in Southern West Virginia was able to keep going through the pandemic — with drive-in shows. We’ll also hear about two Welsh storytellers and their fascination with Appalachia. We’ll listen back to those stories, and more, in our special awards episode of Inside Appalachia.

This week we're revisiting an episode of Inside Appalachia that features children's authors in and from our region. We'll hear Cynthia Rylant, who wrote "When I Was Young In The Mountains," David Perri, author of "Messy Larry," and Bil Lepp reading from his recent children's book "The Princess And The Pickup Truck," and Lyn Ford, a professional storyteller and children's educator, telling a story she wrote called "The Old Woman and Death." And while these stories were written for children, like many children's stories, these stories have messages for all of us, including grown-ups.

Many oil and gas workers come into contact with a fracking byproduct called brine. The gas industry says it’s safe. But is it really? This week on Inside Appalachia, we’ll talk with reporter Justin Nobel, who says some workers are being exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity, which could be making them, and their families, sick. And, as we head into garden season, we’ll check in with an update on a mystery about mortgage-lifter tomatoes.

West Virginia native Anna Sale is host of the popular podcast “Death, Sex & Money.” It's a podcast that talks about, as she says, “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” Sale’s new book, “Let’s Talk About Hard Things,” is about having frank conversations about topics that can make us uncomfortable, including relationships and death.

“If you are ill, what are the kinds of last conversations you want to have with the people you love? And not try to act like it’s not happening,” Sale told Inside Appalachia co-host Caitlin Tan.

We’ll be talking about some hard things ourselves in this episode. We’ll hear two difficult conversations—one with a person locked in prison, and another with teenagers who lost a friend to gun violence. 

We’ll also hear stories that are about lighter topics, like the history behind Mother’s Day, and we’ll go on a nature hike with biologists who are restoring wetlands for frogs and salamanders.

In this era, kids spend so much time looking at screens. This week on Inside Appalachia, we’ll meet a storyteller and songwriter who inspires kids to get outside and explore nature. And we visit a former strip mine where Elk are being reintroduced. This episode explores stories about humans and nature, and what experiencing the outdoors means to different people.

Lots of rural communities in Appalachia also have unsafe drinking water. This week on Inside Appalachia, we’ll hear from people in Appalachia who are trying to bring clean drinking water to their friends and neighbors. President Joe Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” includes billions of dollars that would go to fixing water systems, but will it be enough to fix the underlying issues? And will it make a difference in the lives of the poorest, most vulnerable people?

This week's episode of Inside Appalachia is a mix of rich storytelling and cross-cultural collaborations. What happens when a musician from Belarus gets together with Appalachian folk musicians? And we’ll talk with Affrilachian writer Crystal Wilkinson, who has just been named Kentucky’s Poet Laureate. You'll hear these stories, and more, in this episode.

We’ll hear an interview with historian Bob Hutton, who recently wrote an article about the Baldwin-Felts gunmen, who did the dirty work of Appalachia’s capitalists, even against their neighbors.

We’ll also meet instrument-makers who are determined to find a way, even if it’s using the remnants of a refrigerator box, and women who are using poetry to undercut the wrong ideas people have about mountaineers. And author Robert Gipe has just completed his trilogy, which concludes the turbulent story of several generations of an eastern Kentucky family. At the center of his first book “Trampoline” is Dawn Jewell, a spitfire whose mother struggled with addiction. Gipe’s new book “Pop” follows Nicolette, the daughter of Dawn Jewell. Nicolette struggles to cope with her environment, and her family, while working to make something for herself. In this case — an artisanal soda pop business.