Conversations from the Barn

Today on the podcast, we are sharing a conversation from the end of our 2025 Artist Retreat season with writer and musician Suzanne Ohlmann and audio producer Julie Censullo. Julie and Suzanne both were deeply inspired by each other during their retreat week — they say they fell into an easy rhythm of wandering, gathering, cooking, and creating stories together. In this conversation, we talk about...

We are kicking off our 14th season with a podcast conversation with James Kennedy and Ross Thorn. While Ross and James work in different mediums, they both spent their retreat week at Everwood engaging in some explorative world building. In this conversation, we talked about trying new things and how the outside world influences their art. Learn more about James at jameshkennedy.com and more about...

Geoffrey Lamar Wilson , also known by his stage name LAAMAR , is a Minneapolis based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. After spending his 20's studying and performing music in New York, and working the craft coffee cafe circuit in Brooklyn, he returned to his hometown in 2016 to "settle down". He emerged on the local music scene in 2023 with his song Home to My Baby, a song which reso...

Chris  Stedman  is a writer, podcaster, and professor who teaches in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of the books  IRL ,  Faitheist , and the forthcoming  Nothing in Particular , as well as the writer and host of  Unread , named one of the best podcasts of 2021 by the Guardian, Vulture, HuffPost, Mashable, the CBC, and others, a...

Kurt Robert Engh is a theater-maker with the goal to expand the framework of what "theater" is in order to adapt the art form to a twenty-first century audience. He transposes experimental practices to narrative stories, addressing how contemporary audiences consume live performance. He is specifically interested in exploring Midwestern identity, creating characters as complicated as real people,...

This is a special conversation with Em Haas, Everwood Farmstead's 2025 Artist Retreat Administrator. Em joined us at the farm this summer to support the 34 artists who traveled from all over the country and Canada to work in the Retreat. Em is a recent graduate of St. Olaf College with a Bachelor of Arts degree focused on English, Creative Writing and Ancient Greek. Em was also a Senior Admissions...

Nissa Nordland Morgan is a playwright, actor and musician in Minneapolis, MN. She is a member of the Twin Cities' Playwright Cabal and Artistic Director of Twin Cities Horror Festival. Her plays "The Fae", "Incarnate", "Stabby Stab Stab" and "Kin" were performed as part of the Twin Cities Horror Festival; "The Fae" was nominated for Best Original/New Work through TC Broadway World. Her Minnesota F...

Sarah Elstran is an independent musician that bridges the gap between bright-eyed pop composition and hands-on atmospheric live layering of voice. Her vocal loops give us the kind of detail and wide multi-octave range that we might come to expect from a marquee pop star, while her production decisions continually keep us guessing as to what rabbit holes her tracks might fall into next.  thenunnery...

Originally from Colorado,  Genevieve Waterbury grew up in the mountains and in the ballet studio at Boulder Ballet and eventually studied dance at Colorado State University. She then joined Nevada Ballet Theatre in Las Vegas where she collaborated annually with Cirque du Soleil. One of her favorite moments from NBT was working intimately with Cynthia Gregory on character portrayal for the company'...

Nichole Gronvold-Roller is a painter who received a BFA in Art Education from Minnesota State University of Moorhead, an MA in Art Education from Boston University, MA, and an MFA in Painting from Bradley University. In addition to being an artist, Nichole is a full-time high school art teacher in Tremont, IL, where she has been teaching for the past twenty-six years. Furthermore, she is a contrib...

Cori Nakamura Lin (she/her) is a Japanese, Taiwanese, Okinawan-American multimedia visual artist based in Chicago. By painting, documenting, and weaving, Cori is finding her way to a world that prioritizes ecological and community care. Descended from East Asian island peoples and born and raised in the midwest, Cori's art practice is an ongoing self-archive where she examines her own multiple ide...

LESLIE VINCENT is a prolific songwriter and jazz vocalist. Equally at home singing the Great American Songbook, musical theater, and contemporary rock and pop, she has quickly become one of the most notable voices to emerge in the vibrant Minneapolis music scene, being hailed for her joy-filled performances and her "fun, human, beautiful interpretations" (Levi Weinhagen).  Born into a military fam...

Molly Beth Griffin is the author of four picture books:  Ten Beautiful Things , The Big Leaf Leap, Rhoda's Rock Hunt ,  and  Loon Baby.  She has also published a young adult novel,  Silhouette of a Sparrow , two chapbooks of poetry, and a series of beginning readers. Two more picture books are forthcoming in 2024:  Rings of Heartwood: Poems on Growing  and  Just Us . Silhouette of a Sparrow (winne...

Carlisle Evans Peck (they/them) is a genderqueer composer and singer-songwriter of Northern European settler descent based in Minneapolis. Their work is focused on the power and magic of song and the human voice, rich with queer narratives, magical realism, and mythic symbolism. As a singer-songwriter and a music-theater composer, they consider songs as vessels for forgotten stories, landscapes of...

As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Vinnie has dedicated the majority of his life to making sense of the world through melody, rhythm, and verse. From, picking up the violin at age 12 and later busking on the streets of France, to learning to play the upright bass to set out on the road with the Last Revel, to finding the guitar as a tool to reimagine his process and find joy in playing wit...

Ondara offers a unique take of the American dream on Tales of America, his debut album. By Eric Danton   Ondara grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, listening to American alt-rock and making up his own songs for as long as he can remember. After moving to Minneapolis in 2013, he began making his way in the local music scene, continually writing songs about what he saw, felt and experienced in a place far di...

Ben Noble is a Minneapolis-based artist and producer. Noble's serene, innocent melodies drift lithely along sonic textures that range from sleepy-time folk to intrusive, experimental hyper-synth scapes. Through any aural difference, the heart is the same: Noble wants to embody his truth and experiences in his music. bennoblemusic.com Chris Bartels is a producer, musician, husband, and father from...

Allison Vincent is a performer, director, writer, and teacher known for devised work, physical theatre, and gender-bending performances. She has been honored to collaborate with companies and theaters across the Twin Cities, including The History Theater, Jon Ferguson Theater, WLDRNSS, Theater Forever, The Four Humors, Mainly Me, The Illusion, The Guthrie, Frank Theatre, Sod House, Strike Theatre,...

Rachel Moritz is the author of two poetry books, Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017), and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), as well as five chapbooks. She's also the co-editor of a collection of personal essays, My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (The Experiment, 2019), which won the Foreword INDIES Award in Silver. Rachel's work has appeared in  American Le...

John Noltner is a freelance photographer based in Minneapolis. For 25 years, he has created images at home and around the world for national magazines, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations. His images have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Forbes, Health, Midwest Living, New York Daily News and more.  He is the author of two award-winning books from his series  A...

Debra J. Stone 's poetry, essays and fiction can be found in Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, Wild Age Press, Gyroscope, Tidal Basin , and forthcoming in other literary journals. She's received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New Yo...

Sam Kalda is an illustrator and artist based in Saint Paul. His commissioned works include editorial, book, advertising and pattern illustration. In 2017, he received a gold medal in book illustration from the Society of Illustrators in New York. His first book, Of Cats and Men: History's Great Cat-loving Artists, Writers, Thinkers and Statesmen , was published by Ten Speed Press in 2017. He recen...

KRISTI COLE kristicole.com Kristi Cole (she/her) is a Queer, Queens-based performer and choreographer with a Bachelors of Arts in Dance and Political Science from The George Washington University where she received the Elizabeth Burtner Theatre & Dance Award for her excellence as a performer, as well as a Luther Rice Research Fellowship. In 2019, she founded Kristi Cole & Guests with the mission o...

In this podcast, we sit down with artists Kim Gordon and Melanie Johnson to hear about their week at the Everwood Artist Retreat. KIM GORDON www.kimgordonfineart.com "Art has been at the core of my life since early childhood. Making art is as inherent and important to me as speaking, allowing exploration of the exterior/natural world and of my place in it. I work with landscape because it encourag...

David Huckfelt has shared stages with a staggering diversity of artists: from Mavis Staples, Emmylou Harris & Greg Brown, to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire & Gregory Alan Isakov, and more recently an impressive array of Native American musicians including John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, and Annie Humphrey. In thousands of shows across the United States, Canada & overseas, Huckfelt's grassroots follow...