Each month, host Daniel Grant and guests take closer looks at the vast region we now call the North American West to change the way we see its cultures, histories, stories, and landscapes. In so doing, we consider the wrinkles in the maps we know--or think we know--for the wisdom they might reveal, the eccentricities that make us who we are, and the opportunity to reimagine the stories we tell. Wrinkles in the Map is produced by the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands & Peoples of the North American West at Montana State University.
What does it mean to truly witness a landscape? Journalist and artist Sarah Gilman joins us to discuss the intersection of visual art and environmental reporting. From the Harding Icefield in Alaska to the redwoods of California, we explore developing a "tuning fork" for storytelling, the ethics of representation, and how to narrate ecological resilience in a time of climate doom.
https://sarahmgilman.com/ (https://sarahmgilman.com/)
Alaskan Tribes and Activists Are Ready to Resist Ambler Road, Again (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2025-1-spring/feature/ambler-road-alaskan-tribes-and-activists-are-ready-resist-again)
Studying seabirds, the sentinels of the ocean (https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.hcn.org%252Farticles%252Fbirds-studying-seabirds-the-sentinels-of-the-ocean%252F&data=05%257C02%257Canna.verhaeghe%2540montana.edu%257Ca564f766aa29445caead08df3056a773%257C324aa97a03a644fc91e43846fbced113%257C0%257C0%257C639282820879202971%257CUnknown%257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%253D%253D%257C0%257C%257C%257C&sdata=ZXPNiYbuOWuLGHYCeZhq5%252BQ%252FO8BZS46TEZAk0pvV1OQ%253D&reserved=0)
South America's Otherworldly Seabird (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/storm-petrel-secret-desert-habitat-nests/563687/)
27 Aug 2026
WEST AS PALIMPSEST
In this episode, we announce this academic year's Doig Center theme--"The West as Palimpsest"—and the programs this fall that this theme will entail.
4 Aug 2026
Ben Cosgrove: Landscape as Inspiration for Songwriting
This episode features Ben Cosgrove, the composer of Wrinkles in the Map's theme music. Ben is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist whose work explores the intersection of sound and place. He's drawn to landscapes that aren’t traditionally grandiose and majestic but rather opaque and mysterious–the shadows lurking around a corner, the uneasy way the light falls on a hillside while a storm blows the grass sideways, the ever-changing sand spits of a coastline. It’s here, in these places that resist easy definition, where we are sometimes most attuned and present to the world around us–and to the interior landscapes of our experience of it. In this conversation, we talk about the power of music to say things that words perhaps cannot, the power of witnessing new places as integral to the creative process, and why his songs don’t have lyrics.
https://www.bencosgrove.com/ (https://www.bencosgrove.com/)
Songs heard in this episode:
15:09 Break
24:46 Aubade
33:06 Salt
39:07 Brinckerhoff
43:45 Glass
2 Jul 2026
Zephyr Frank: Revisiting the Rural West Conference
Back in March, we were thrilled to co-host in Bozeman the Twelfth Annual Eccles Family Rural West Conference in partnership with Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. The conference was a kind of microcosm for one of the big takeaways from the day, which was the importance of creating organic opportunities for connection across different identities, cultures, ways of knowing, and belief systems. The day was so packed with insights and conversations that there were all kinds of insights that I wanted to process further so they could be distilled and offer a chance for further reflection from our Wrinkles in the Map audience. So I invited my counterpart Dr. Zephyr Frank, Faculty Director of the Bill Lane Center, on the show today to talk through some of those insights and takeaways.
Rural West 2026 Article by Kylie Gordon (https://west.stanford.edu/news/rural-west-2026-culture-community-and-rural-ties-bind)
Zephyr Frank Migration Maps (https://www.montana.edu/doig/conferences/ruralwestmaps.pdf)
28 May 2026
Alexander Lemons: Restoring Landscapes, Healing from War
In 2010, after military tours at sea and in Iraq as a Marine and sniper, Alexander Lemons returned home to Utah and tried to integrate back into mainstream American society. But he found himself feeling profoundly isolated, and this feeling was intensified by family tragedy and a mysterious chronic illness from his years in combat. When the weight of his burdens felt too heavy, he sought solace in perhaps an unusual place: environmental restoration, nursing back to health ecosystems that had been degraded or chemically polluted. In this episode, our Spring 2026 undergraduate intern Riley Petersen interviews Alex about the seen and unseen tolls of war–and how recovery is both an inside and outside job.
Warbody (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324066330)
High Country News Article (https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-2/a-veteran-transforms-a-legacy-of-violence-into-a-campaign-for-restoration/)
30 Apr 2026
Megan Kate Nelson: New Tropes for Western Histories
In this episode, award-winning writer and historian Dr. Megan Kate Nelson joins us to talk about why certain stories and icons depicting outdated ideas of the American frontier are so persistent in popular culture today despite having been widely critiqued within academia; what kinds of stories might replace such depictions; and why we should care about more honestly accounting for the diverse cast of historical figures whose interwoven lives profoundly shaped the nineteenth-century West.
30 Mar 2026
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain: On Storied Ground
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation, is at once able bring alive the distinctiveness of Blackfeet identity, culture, and what it means to belong to the land, while simultaneously evoking deeper truths at the heart of the human condition. Our conversation covers this dance between the particular and the universal, how language brings landscape into being, storytelling as an aesthetic object, the relationship between oral Blackfeet tradition and written narratives, and the role of art in transcending the self.
4 Mar 2026
Introducing Wrinkles in the Map
In this short introductory episode, host Daniel Grant explains why we titled the podcast Wrinkles in the Map, and what you can expect to hear in future episodes.
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