Plains Folk

About 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."

Publisher

Prairie Public

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 Sept 2023

Latest episode

3 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

141 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   3 Oct 2026

   Our Best Days Are Behind Us

   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.

2. 

   26 Sept 2026

   Something in the Earth

   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.

3. 

   12 Sept 2026

   The Plains I Love

   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.”

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 60 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

63

Social presence

0

YouTube

63

Engagement

81

Contact Plains Folk

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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