American Mosaic is weekly half-hour radio program offered on the Pacifica Network, featuring stories by men and women from all walks of life and all regions of the country, reading their own stories. Farmers and ranchers, commercial fishermen and towboat captains. The homeless. People living in small towns and great cities.
We have stories by the Lakota Sioux on Pine Ridge Reservation, Iowa high school kids bored with small town life, Texas cowboys and cowgirls, Hispanics who grew up in New Mexico mountain villages, Chicago actors. Stories of cross-country freight train rides and murder on the Arizona/Mexican border.
Samples:
Farm Crisis I: https://soundcloud.com/user-23204857/ep-05-farm-crisis-i-redux-mixdown
THE NEED
Our nation is fragmenting. We are no longer the country whose motto was “E Pluribus Unum”—“Out of Many, One.” We are now a deeply divided people whose political and religious divisions may seem unbridgeable. It is imperative that we see the humanity of the person across the street, across the state, across the nation. Without that, the American future becomes ever more insecure.
THE IMPACT
When we hear the voices of men and women, speaking in their regional accents or dialects, telling us of their work, their families, their failures and successes, we can identify with them. We need that identification. This is what American Mosaic provides.
WHO PRODUCES AMERICAN MOSAIC?
American Mosaic is a project of Free River Press, a non-profit publisher, and is produced by former Chicago Tribune columnist and Free River Press director Robert Wolf. For 25 years Wolf has traveled America, getting people without literary ambition into writing workshops. Their stories are the content of American Mosaic. We are produced and engineered entirely by volunteers. We are distributed by Pacifica. And you can hear selected episodes by clicking on any of the boxes below.
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