Why I Started Turning Corners

Eight years ago, three scrappy Boston-based podcasts decided to try something new. At the Lonely Palette (from producer Tamar Avishai), Ministry of Ideas (from Zachary Davis and Nick Andersen) and Soonish (my show), we got together to see if we could lift each other up through mutual cross-promotion and behind-the-scenes support and collaboration. Over the years Hub & Spoke expanded to a dozen shows, and the community of remarkable producers we built always helped me find the inspiration to keep Soonish going. 

But time passes, projects mature, and new things take their place. In 2023 I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Last fall I wrapped Soonish to make time for a new audio project that’s more rooted in my new surroundings. 

That podcast, Turning Corners, debuted on February 6, and I’m happy to say that it’s also a part of Hub & Spoke. I’m building the new show around all the amazing people I’m meeting here in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. 

At a time when national politics feel brittle and exhausted, I want to point a microphone at people doing the slower, steadier work of building things that last. "A hyperlocal podcast about an underhyped region”—that’s the show’s guiding idea. If it has a central contention, it’s that folks here in the Southwest are…unique. They argue fiercely, and then share a beer. They carry centuries of history in one hand and a shovel or a paintbrush in the other. They are stubborn, inventive, and deeply rooted.

The show is about them, but its voice and sensibility should be familiar to anyone who was a Soonish listener. I’m still getting out into the world, talking with change-makers, and crafting their stories into sonically rich, longform episodes. The difference this time is that I’m constraining myself to a smaller (but still huge!) geography, and privileging stories that teach us something positive and uplifting.

The first full episode is about a daring new exhibit at Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum called “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country." O'Keeffe is probably America's most famous and successful female painter—maybe its most famous painter, period. She had a vision of the Southwest as a magnificent but silent realm, inhabited only by lonely mountains, old bones, and dead trees. 

And because of her fame, that vision came to define all of northern New Mexico. In fact, tourist agencies have often called the region “O’Keeffe Country.” 

But the land was never silent. The new exhibit, born from years of collaboration between the museum staff and local artists from the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico, underscores that truth. It showcases a dozen indigenous artists with their own very different ways of expressing their love of their land. Along the way, it questions the notion that any one artist should be allowed to speak for an entire region. 

I’ve fallen in love with the Southwest in the same way O’Keeffe did—except that I’m as fascinated by the people as by the land. The O’Keeffe episode felt like a perfect way to launch the show, and I have more episodes in the works focused on people trying to make a difference in their communities. I can’t wait to talk with more of them as I travel throughout the region. 

In that sense, the show is meant to embody the spirit of The Listeners, a project spearheaded by my friend and fellow Hub & Spoke member Erica Heilman of Rumble Strip fame. In their manifesto, Erica and her collaborators at the Transom Story Lab call on audio producers to foreground the regular, often unheard people from our communities, and make stories that remind us that we are more alike than we are different. “This is a moment when the country needs, more than ever, to see the individual, quotidian lives of Americans reflected back to themselves,” they write. 

I couldn’t agree more. That’s what I look forward to doing here in New Mexico and the other Four Corners states. And I’m so glad I get to keep making this kind of audio in collaboration with all the beautiful people here at Hub & Spoke. If this sounds like your kind of listening, I hope you’ll subscribe and listen to Turning Corners and come along. And if you know this region and you have story ideas for me, please write to wade@turningcorners.org. Thanks!