Plains Folk

Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."

Plains Folk is a society podcast hosted by Prairie Public, with 20 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Prairie Public hosts Plains Folk, a society show with 20 episodes published.

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  Plains Folk

  Our Best Days Are Behind Us

  Oct 3, 20265 min

  You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-beater in the state semifinals of 1970, because that was a long time ago and a lot of miles, too, and was not necessarily the apex in the trajectory of local history. Or maybe it was, and everything since then has been downhill. This actually is a thing among Great Plains historians, the assumption of inevitable decline, such that scholars have adopted the term, declensionism, to describe it. Scholars devised the term, but the phenomenon is real, we feel it at the grassroots in prairie communities.

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  Plains Folk

  Something in the Earth

  Sep 26, 20264 min

  One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring overhead, eagles huddling over carrion on the road.

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  Plains Folk

  The Plains I Love

  Sep 12, 20264 min

  So I think the main reason my friends in McIntosh County invited me down to speak at their chokecherry festival this year was that a few years ago, I wrote a little ballad called “The Chokecherry Song.”

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  Plains Folk

  Chokecherry Adventures

  Sep 5, 20265 min

  I’ve been describing the community culture of berry-picking that emerged during the 1880s, focusing first on juneberries and then on chokecherries. Wagon caravans carried townsfolk, particularly young people, into the countryside to pick. Every community had its known thickets that were transformed into ritual places; press reports referred to them with affectionate familiarity.

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  Plains Folk

  Young Folks Are Busy Picking

  Aug 29, 20264 min

  Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years the Grafton Farmers Market and the McIntosh County Heritage Center have initiated folk festivals focusing on these black pearls; I’m on my way soon to speak at the 2nd Annual Chokecherry Festival in Ashley. Even though my personal crop, generally so dependable, is meager in this parched summer.

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