The Detour

In this episode, we asked young people at Slater Elementary School in Burns and Highland Elementary School in Grants Pass about how their schools, their towns, the state of Oregon, and the United States shape who they are. In the process, they told us about other places—other countries, states, towns, and schools—that have contributed to how they understand themselves and who they are becoming. Yo...

Sheila Liming is the author of the recent book "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time." In both her book and this episode, Sheila argues that hanging out—being with other people, being open to the unscripted and surprising, and taking time back from default expectations about productivity and predictability—is important for our mental health, our relationships, and even our demo...

In this episode, we share a conversation with Enrique Bautista, a writer and 2024 Community Storytelling Fellow, and Alexis Tadeo, an illustrator and tattoo artist. Both Enrique and Alexis recently moved from the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem back to the relative freedom of civilian life. Much of what they talk about here is their lives in prison, and more specifically, about their efforts to...

What was the last thing you were wrong about? How did you come to know you were wrong? And how did it feel to come to know this? This episode of The Detour explores these questions with Sarah Marshall, who for several years has hosted a podcast called You're Wrong About. Sarah and her guests often talk about pop culture: Britney Spears, Tonya Harding, O.J. Simpson, satanic panics. Here, we ex...

In this episode, we talk with Father Greg Boyle, who is, in the eyes of many people, a holy person—a person whose presence elevates those nearby and revivifies the world with meaning and hope. He is a Los Angelino, a Jesuit priest, and founder of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. In this conversation, Father Greg reflects on some of the highest a...

Eliot Feenstra is a theater artist, teacher, and organizer who has lived in Takilma, an unincorporated community in Josephine County, since 2012. In this episode, Eliot shares the hopes that drew him from very urban Chicago, Illinois to the very rural Illinois Valley and how those hopes play into the work he does in Takilma and across Oregon in performance, community conversation, and civic engage...

For the final episode of our series on belonging, we talked with students at Fern Hill Elementary School in Forest Grove and Crestview Heights Elementary in Waldport about where they feel they belong and how to help others feel like they belong. You'll also hear from a few adults who work at these schools about how they create a welcoming community inside and outside of the classroom.

In this episode, the third in our series on belonging, we talk with two people who do a lot of work to help us see a fuller, more accurate, and more racially diverse picture of Oregon: Zachary Stocks runs Oregon Black Pioneers, and Kellen Akiyama teaches African American Studies and other subjects at a small high school in Southern Oregon. We also hear from two of Kellen’s students, Monique and Ja...

Stacey Rice is a speaker, educator, and storyteller who grew up in the rural South and now lives in Portland. In this episode, part of our series on belonging, Stacey shares with us the pivotal role that stories played throughout her journey as a sixty-six-year-old transgender woman and what it has meant for her to gather and share the stories of other elder LGBTQ+ adults in Oregon as a 2023 Commu...

In this episode we talk about home, family, and belonging with Putsata Reang, a journalist from Cambodia and Corvallis who has lived and worked in more than a dozen countries. In her book, "Ma and Me," Reang writes with candor, emotion, and insight about the displacement and emotional exile she experienced as a child of refugees and as a gay person.

In this episode of The Detour, we're thinking about civic love: love for society, expressed through a commitment to the common good. This phrase, "civic love," comes from the people at the National Public Housing Museum, including our first guest, Lisa Yun Lee. We'll also hear from JR Rymut, of Enterprise, Oregon, who talks about Haunt Camp, a project that brings teenagers in W...

In this episode, Anis Mojgani, Oregon’s poet laureate, talks about the informal performances called Poems Out a Window at Sunset that he has presented from the window of his office in Southeast Portland—and also about community and art and politics, and how those things go together.

In this episode, host Adam Davis discusses risk and comfort with Lieutenant Colonel Kim Wilton, a helicopter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force and his friend of over three decades. In addition to flying in missions around the world, Kim has also been a long-haul trucker, a college radio host, and is currently a farmer, a baker, and a biker who spends a good amount of time teaching other people...

In this episode, Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, talks about home, race, and the Portland Trail Blazers. Hear him reflect on his loyalty to and criticism of Mississippi, his jaded allegiance to the United States, and what it means to speak about our hometowns with tender honesty.

Do you remember when you last talked to someone whose beliefs or opinions about important stuff were different from your own? Current research shows that Americans are less and less likely to live with and talk to people who hold different opinions about politics, God, gender, education, guns, democracy, and so on. In this episode we talk with Mónica Guzmán and Ryan Nakade, two people working to g...

In this episode of The Detour we explore memory. Paul Susi and Sallie Tisdale wrote pieces for the Memory issue of Oregon Humanities magazine, and they read from these essays here. We also talk with Paul and Sallie about memory, about civic memory and personal memory and how much we need it and how unreliable it is and what it all means. Paul Susi is a community activist, educator, and performing...

Oregon Humanities' collaborative approach to programming and publications is possible thanks to the support of donors like you. In this special message, hear from Rozzell Medina, program manager, about the kind of intentional relationship building he's engaged in and how much time it takes. As part of our spring campaign, will you make a gift to support wonder and curiosity—one person, o...

This episode of The Detour explores what kids think about success and where their ideas about success come from. The way we explore this is pretty simple: we talk with kids—second, fifth, and sixth graders from Vose Elementary in Beaverton and Yoncalla Elementary—who have some really helpful, clear, thought-provoking, and moving stuff to say.

In this episode we talk with Erica Heilman, creator of the podcast Rumble Strip. Erica's conversations with the wide range of people she talks to all sound unusually real—sincere, unvarnished, funny, regular, important, and humble all at once. So much of Oregon Humanities' work, including The Detour, revolves around conversation and trying to understand other people and ourselves, so we...

For a significant stretch of our lives, most of us spend a whole lot of time working. In this episode of The Detour—the third in our series on organizing—we'll explore what it means to organize at work with the help of Vanessa Veselka and Gordon Lafer. We'll think about unions and labor and solidarity and power, and we'll also ask what unions are for. Are they primarily a tool to im...

In this episode, the second of our three-part series on organizing, we talk about intergenerational organizing with Adah Crandall, a sixteen-year-old organizer focused on transportation and climate justice; Danny Cage, a youth organizer advocating for racial justice, education reform, and LGBTQ+ rights; and Suzanna Kassouf, a teacher at Grant High School and a cofounder of Sunrise Movement PDX. Th...

In this episode, the first of a three-part series on organizing people and communities, we talk with Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University who studies civic and political participation. We also hear from Bruce Poinsette, Marcus LeGrand, Joy Alise Davis, and Keith Jenkins, four Black Oregonians who have been working on community organizing in different parts of th...

Few conversations are as polarizing as the ones that appear online between Black native Oregonians and transplants. It's a discourse that brings Oregon's history of anti-Black exclusion laws and redlining into the present, along with the frustrations that arise in a small community where so many people know each other. But are these tensions based more in perception than in reality? To e...

The Pacific Northwest has long been a hospitable home to conspiratorial thinking—often with dangerous results. What leads a person down these dark paths and what might it take to come out the other side? In this episode, we talk with Leah Sottile and Eli Saslow, two Oregon journalists who have gone deep into the world of conspiracy theories, about some of the conditions and patterns that lead peop...

In this episode, we talk with David Harrelson and Clint Smith about monuments, memorials, and statues—and also about culture, understanding, and hopes for the future. Talking about memorials, as Harrelson and Smith make immediately clear, you can't help but talk about values, and also about people and peoples. And, recently, talking about monuments, memorials, and statues has also meant talki...