DETOURS

In this episode of DETOURS , James and Jordan are joined by Baton Rouge Chef Yvette Bonanno to discuss the ins and outs of Louisiana's challenging 2024 crawfish season. 

In this episode of DETOURS , Jordan, Alex, and contributor John Wirt sit down with host of NPR's nationally-syndicated  American Routes  Nick Spitzer to discuss his career chronicling American music, particularly Louisiana's. Nick shares his tips for cultivating intimacy and trust in interviews with the three journalists, as well as countless tales from his conversations with Americ...

In this episode of DETOURS , Jordan and James are joined by Eva Szyszkoski, a wildlife technician with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries who specializes in the state's efforts to reintroduce the endangered whooping crane population to the landscape. One of the rarest birds in the world, the whooping crane's population in North America was down to only twenty-one birds in the wild...

In this episode of DETOURS , James is joined by contributor Chris Turner-Neal for a conversation with Maida Owens, the director of the Louisiana Folklife Program —a position she has held for nearly forty years now. The three discuss the definition of “folklife” and its iterations in Louisiana, as well as some of Owens’s biggest projects, including the ten-year culmination of folktales collected th...

In this season's "Well-Read" special episode—in which contributors and local personalities read some of our favorite stories from recent issues—Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot reads aloud her story on Hitachi rice cookers from our July 2023 Cuisine issue. In the article , which has been shared far and wide across social media by Louisiana residents who have memories of the rice cooker, she...

In this episode, the DETOURS team is joined by Founder/Creator of Exit Strategy Jody Ray to discuss his experience traveling to Benin, West Africa and making gumbo's predecessor, West African okra stew, which he wrote about for our July 2023 Cuisine Issue . In the conversation he walks us through what it was like purchasing ingredients for the stew in Dantokpa Market, the largest op...

In this episode, the DETOURS team is joined by Country Roads magazine's Creative Director, Kourtney Zimmerman, to discuss the less-than-precise process of choosing covers for our monthly print publication. James reminisces on days of cutting-and-pasting (with scissors and wax), everyone shares some of their favorite covers over the last 40 years, and we discuss the tensions of story vs. iconic ima...

For this episode, Jordan meets with three Lafayette-area creatives working in the realm of Louisiana French preservation : Jonathan Olivier, a writer ; Drake LeBlanc, a filmmaker and media artist ; and Jourdan Thibodeaux, a musician. From the starting point of Thibodeaux's groundbreaking song "La Priere" (2023, Valcour Records)  we discuss the ways that music, art, content creation, and humor...

Kicking off Season 2 of DETOURS, Jordan and Alex meet with Country Roads contributor Nina Flournoy—author of the series "Strange True Stories of My Louisiana Ancestors" —and New Orleans genealogist Jari Honora. From the riveting launchpad of Nina's extensive investigation into her family history, we discuss the importance of researching one's own genealogy—especially here in Louisiana—and strategi...

Each season of DETOURS , we plan to include a "Well Read" episode—where we present a reading of one of our favorites stories from our recent issues. For our first, we present Charlotte Jones and Marshall Blevins' collaborative Mississippi Delta road trip adventure, "I Believe in the Delta: A Tour Guide and an Artist Drive Up Highway 61," read by Charlotte Jones and Delta farmer David Wiliford. For...

Jordan, Alex, and James are again joined in the studio by 64 Parish 's Senior Managing Editor and Country Roads'   former Arts & Entertainment Editor Chris Turner-Neal —this time, to unpack the gory facts (and lore) surrounding three historic Louisiana serial killers: Euzebe Vidrine of Acadiana, The Axeman of New Orleans ; and Southwest Louisiana's Clementine  Barnabet . For more inf...

James and Alex are in the studio to discuss one of Alex's favorite eras of theatre and literary history: Tennessee Williams' life in New Orleans. Learn how the playwright came to discover himself, his sexuality, and many of his iconic characters and settings during his multiple periods spent in and just outside the French Quarter—first as an impoverished and repressed young aspiring writer, and la...

For this episode, Jordan, James, and Alex are joined in the studio by Baton Rouge actor and stuntman Michael Papajohn. Papajohn played baseball for LSU under Skip Bertman's coaching 1986–1987, the first two years the team made it to the College World Series. His life changed forever when he was randomly asked to audition for a small part in a feature film while leaving LSU's weight room one day—wh...

Introducing the first of our "Between the Lines" episodes, where the Country Roads editorial team invites DETOURS listeners in on conversations we're having about all things magazine-making. In this episode, James, Jordan, and Alex sit down to talk through the daunting beast that is social media: what their personal relationships with it are like, how it has evolved,  and how Country Roads ca...

For this unexpectedly wholesome episode, we're joined in the studio by 64 Parish 's Senior Managing Editor and Country Roads'  former Arts & Entertainment Editor Chris Turner-Neal, to ask him about his day spent getting the full experience at Louisiana's only nude campground, Indian Hills near Slidell. For more information and related reading from this episode, visit countryroadsmagazine....

In this episode, we join Grandmother’s Buttons founder and designer Susan Davis upstairs in the red historic bank building during the business’s final days in St. Francisville, to reflect on the alchemy of transforming antique buttons into jewelry and the many lives the brand has touched since Davis started it in 1985. For more information and related reading from this episode, visit countryroadsm...

In our very first episode, we marvel at how surreal it feels to actually have started a podcast and how we got here, tease a bit of the cultural storytelling that's to come, and trace the history of Country Roads magazine from its inception forty years ago in a deer stand leading up to the 1984 World's Fair in New Orleans. For more information and related reading from today's episode, visit countr...

After forty years of southern storytelling in the form of the written word, the Country Roads magazine editorial team is turning on microphones to share compelling stories from Louisiana and Mississippi in a new format.