If you Google “Marfa, Texas,” Marfa Public Radio’s executive director likes to joke, the results are like an exquisite corpse poem, each link building into something strange and fascinating.
So I tried it. Elise Pepple was right.
I could build something writerly out of “cowboy cool,” “a battle for the soul,” unlikely art oasis,” “ultimate road trip” and “otherworldly.”
As someone who lives in Marfa, Pepple said, there are these phenomena about the place she lives, and there are things that are actually interesting. Those things don’t come up on search.
So Marfa Public Radio decided to make a podcast that tells new and better stories for locals and the tourists who flock here. “Marfa For Beginners” was created by a team outside the newsroom that focuses on creative and community engagement. That includes Pepple; Zoe Kurland, the station’s first podcast producer; and Sally Beauvais, a freelance producer and former engagement reporter at Marfa Public Radio.
“The hope was that it could be therapeutic for people living in our town to get to listen to this version of stories about Marfa,” Pepple said.
Those stories include episodes on the pilgrimage site people probably don’t know about, what it’s like to date in a small town, gentrification and the celebration of one local woman who serves as “West Texas’s unofficial ambassador.”
Since moving to Marfa from Portland, Maine in 2016 and getting past the surface, Pepple has asked herself about the role of the public radio station itself. These are smart questions from someone who brought StoryCorps to Alaksa and co-produced a public memory project in Portland, Maine.
“In what way is a radio station a narrative think thank? What responsibility do we have to publish or share narratives about a place when so many other people creative narratives about a place?”
Especially when those narratives were pretty thin?
“Narrative is power,” Pepple said. “We determine senses of truth and senses of imagination with the narratives that are broadcast about a place.”
Marfa Public Radio has a staff of 10, and a year and a half ago launched Marfa Public Radio Studios “to deepen the station’s commitment to telling stories, creating engagement opportunities, and training new voices,” according to the studio’s description.
That work includes “Marfa For Beginners.”
The guiding principles for the podcast include: “thicken the narrative, build better myths, make people laugh and cry,” Pepple said, and “elicit a sense of wonder.”
The feedback for the six-episode series has been positive from locals and tourists, including, from a local, “this is my favorite thing the station has done,” Pepple said.
Check out “Marfa For Beginners” here.
It’s a great listen. And check below for a few tips from Pepple. As someone whose book motto is “don’t let the tourists have all the fun,” I really love this concept. (And I’m for sure stealing “build better myths.”)
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