Access Utah

Kurt Bestor is a Utah-based composer and performer, known for his Christmas concerts, his film and television scores, and his haunting musical prayer for peace “Prayer of the Children.” He will be leading performances of “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” in Logan on May 21 and 22.

You’ve been hearing about the violence in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and southern Israel. Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah is at his home just outside Jerusalem. He’ll join us for the next Access Utah to give us a report directly from the area. Here’s the Deseret News: “What started as a week of tense clashes in Jerusalem has escalated into violent unrest on the streets of Arab Israeli towns, as well as a deadly aerial conflict. More than 1,000 rockets lit up the skies of Israeli cities, while at least two high-rise buildings were leveled in the Israeli bombardment of the blockaded and impoverished Gaza Strip, home to 2 million Palestinians.”

Part memoir, part meditation on poetry, part conversation with her husband, friends, and the many animals that live with and around her, Katharine Coles’s The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Coles begins this collection of lyric essays with a meditation on walking, and “the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger, estranged.”

Today our guest is Cache Valley resident Maren Johnson. She’ll tell us some fascinating stories from the world of dog sledding. For the past five years she worked for dog sledding businesses in Alaska. She lived on a glacier with 280 sled dogs. She also worked for four-time Iditarod winner Jeff King in his tourist business and assisted him in the 1,000-mile Iditarod race.

In 2019, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The result is “West: A Translation:” a linked collection of poems that responds to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America.

Today Margaret Pettis will join us to talk about her new book of poetry titled “In the Temple of the Stars.” Her previous collection “Chokecherry Rain,” won the Utah State Poetry Society book award.

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade.

Quoting Kristen Munson in Utah State Magazine: “In mid-January, the internet was awash in sea shanty videos on TikTok. A week later, memes of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, bundled in a Burton coat and sweater mittens, made the rounds on Twitter. Within minutes, Sanders, originally photographed at the January 20 inauguration ceremony, was Photoshopped sitting on a subway, perched on the iconic Friends couch, and on the White House lawn near a boy pushing a lawnmower. Where do memes come from and why do we love them so?”

How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first?

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told.

St. Anne’s Retreat, located in Logan Canyon, is well-known to Cache Valley residents due to the folklore of the place: tales of demonic nuns, evil witches, murdered babies, and more. Often referred to as “The Nunnery,” the site is a hub for thrill-seekers who trespass onto the property to see for themselves if the stories are true.

Today we’ll talk with Senator Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, the first Asian American woman and the only immigrant currently serving in the U.S. Senate. Her new memoir "Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter’s Story" is an inspiring account of one woman coming into her personal and political power, a heartwarming homage to the women who raised her, and a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most fraught moments of the Trump administration.

In the span of a single lifetime, light pollution stemming from Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) has severed the connection with the stars that we’ve had since the dawn of time. With the nocturnal biosphere significantly altered, light’s anthropogenic influence has compelled millions of people to seek out the last remaining dark skies.

Every year for Earth Day, we check in with writer and photographer Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America,” and many other books. Next time on Access Utah, Stephen Trimble joins us along with Terri Martin, Intermountain West Organizer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance; and Jesse Prentice-Dunn, Policy Director with the Center for Western Priorities.

In the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, charged in the death of George Floyd the verdict is in: guilty on all charges. Our guests today include Darlene McDonald, of the Utah Black Roundtable and a member of the Salt Lake City Commission on Racial Equity in Policing; Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City; and Rep. Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City.

Something exciting today: a live episode of the podcast DEBUNKED which seeks to dispel harmful myths and stereotypes about people who use drugs, persons in recovery, and evidenced-based harm reduction efforts. Today we’ll debunk the myth; Native Americans only live on reservations. Our guests are: Sandy Sulzer, Director of the Office of Health Equity and Community Engagement at USU; Kristina Groves, LCSW, Ute/Hopi Tribe, Therapist at Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake; and podcast host Don Lyons.

Montana-based writer David Quammen says that Covid-19 is a reminder of viruses’ destructive power, but that life as we know it would be impossible without them. In his latest article for National Geographic titled “How Viruses Shape Our World,” he reviews the evolutionary origins of viruses and how they have helped shape the history of life.

On Thursday’s Access Utah our theme is farming. In the first half of the program we’ll talk about the AgrAbility program, which helps farmers, ranchers and their family members remain in agriculture when facing limitations due to aging, disease, injury, illness, or other disability. In the second half we’ll talk about an exhibit now showing at the USU Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art called “American Farmer,” which features photographic portraits in addition to interviews with farmers from across the United States, telling the inspiring stories of the stewards of this land.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of global climate breakdown. So how might we develop the inner resolve to confront it? Full Ecology, a collaboration between social-cultural psychologist Mary Clare and longtime science writer Gary Ferguson, suggests a path forward. Breaking the modern impulse to see humans as separate from nature, Clare and Ferguson encourage us to learn from the “supremely methodical and highly improvisational” natural systems that touch our lives. True change, they argue, begins with us stopping and questioning assumptions about our place in the world.

Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland. In her new book, “Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America” Judy Kawamoto offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, In the book, she addresses her personal and often unconscious reactions to her parents’ trauma, as well as her own subsequent travels around much of the world, exploring, learning, enjoying, but also unconsciously acting out a continual search for a home.