I Was Never There

Hey listeners! We've sharing the first episode of another podcast we think you'd love: As She Rises. On the latest season, we're traversing the Colorado River Basin – understanding water through a new lens and centering stories of resilience in the face of the drought...

We're bringing you another podcast from Wonder Media Network that we think you'll love: White Picket Fence. White Picket Fence interrogates the structures of inequity affecting women since America’s founding. On the newest season, host Julie Kohler investigates mothers as a political force — how motherhood has been utilized for political gain and why the identity of “mother” remains so politically potent. In the fall of 2020, a group of mothers gathered around a kitchen table...

Karen and Jamie sit down with Zayd Ayers Dohrn and his mom Bernardine Dohrn of Crooked Media’s Mother Country Radicals to look back at the process of making a show so deeply rooted in personal family history. Jamie and Zayd interview the moms to learn how they felt reliving their radical pasts and what it was like to make a podcast with their children. And in a time that feels so similar politically to the turbulent decades Karen and Bernardine lived through - how do they find hope?

In 1961, Norma and Mel Gabler were a quiet couple living in Longview, Texas. One day, they noticed some factual errors in one of their sons’ textbooks. What began as a small complaint morphed into a multi-decade crusade to shape what children of Texas ​​— and therefore the country — read in their textbooks...

Karen and Jamie sit down to sift through everything they’ve heard and all they've learned in the process of trying to get to the bottom of Marsha's disappearance. At the end of the journey, Jamie and Karen consider the most important question of all: Where do they go from here?

When it came to living on the edge, Marsha wasn't just a big talker; she really did walk a vanishingly thin line between fearless and reckless. We consider Marsha’s complicated and ultimately unsettled legacy, speaking with those whose politics she shifted and shaped, those whose artistic trajectories she launched, and those she left in the emotional — and financial — lurch.

Karen helps us understand the mindset that helped Marsha and Karen both live life unafraid of consequences. To explain, we head back to Karen’s back-to-the-land world in Braxton County where Karen and her lover Patty grew pot right out in the open, protected by what they called “The Magic Veil.”

In a swirl of partial truths and murky theories, Jamie and Karen find one person who believes he knows exactly what happened to Marsha. What Jamie and Karen find out sounds like a plot line from an action movie, not what they expected to hear about someone Karen considered a close friend. Did Marsha really just get in over her head?

Marsha’s bar was much more than a place to grab a drink. It was ground zero for a cultural revolution, a haven of progressive politics, free expression, and creativity. In an episode brimful of music, we hear recollections from the musicians, teens, and bartenders of two extraordinary community projects that would ultimately be Marsha’s swan song and establish her as a folk hero.

We go back to Marsha’s early days as a suburban housewife and independent bookstore owner in New Jersey. We follow her and her cohort of Back-To-The-Landers to rural West Virginia, where she built a commune called the Mudd Farm, and gained a new name: Marsha Mudd.