Reissued: “Intermountain Histories,” the Podcast “Writing Westward” and More: A Conversation with Brenden Rensink (S1, E9 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Welcome to the second segment of Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. Today's guest is Brenden Rensink.
Hello again, Brenden. So glad to have you back.

**Brenden Rensink** (0:16)
Good to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (0:17)
So in our previous segment, we were talking about the Intermountain Histories website, and we also spoke about your most recent book. I want to also just as we begin this segment to talk about your podcast.

**Brenden Rensink** (0:35)
Yeah, it's called Writing Westward. I was trying to make a pun, you know, like riding on a horse.
But it's spelled writing because it's about authors. I don't know if it's a very good. It's a bad dad joke, probably. But it's really a good.

**Brad Westwood** (0:51)
I mean, you all together, there's I think you have more than eight episodes.

**Brenden Rensink** (0:57)
I think actually tomorrow, I think I'll be publishing the 17th one. So it's a monthly podcast. Each month, I put out one episode. It's a one man show. I'm the host producer, sound engineer and everything. So I can't handle much more than an episode a month.
But in each episode, I pick someone, a writer. A lot of them are academics, professors who are writing books. But I've also done some episodes with journalists, with literary scholars.
But each episode, we talk with them about something recent they've published and what it tells us about the West broadly, not just the Intermountain, but the West quite broadly conceived.

**Brad Westwood** (1:38)
Well, and I think of the mission of the Red Center. I mean, now 50 years coming, it has been such a strong commitment to getting Western history out there, publications and conferences, workshops, awards that are money that's given to further research across the West. To me, I think this is the next generation of work that the Red Center will be doing.
Thank you for doing this. Do you have a few highlights that you'd like to talk about in writing?

**Brenden Rensink** (2:13)
I mean, all of the episodes are great, just spectacular. I've been able to speak with some really interesting people. One of my recent favorites, I did an episode with Leah Satili, who hosted the Bundyville podcast. It was on long read. It was a piece of long form journalism, two seasons worth, and then she turned each season into a podcast about the Bundys.
And that was fascinating, and that was a fun one. We did a recent one on Bears Ears, about a really great book on the Bears Ears region and controversy. We've done ones about fire history.
We did a book on Hawaii, because, you know, that's part of the West. Absolutely. Yeah, it's just it's been a lot of fun.

**Brad Westwood** (3:02)
Well, and to me, I just love the way you're interacting with the public. These are really wonderful public history products, and it makes history accessible to the general public.
And you get kind of a, I don't know, open the lid and really get the kind of great, spontaneous thoughts from historians that in some ways, if you don't read their books, go to this website, go to this podcast and get your dose of Western history.

**Brenden Rensink** (3:32)
Yeah, the idea is I wanted to try to bridge that kind of academic and public world. And I want this podcast to be interesting to academics who, you know, are interested in these books and they've heard of them, but they haven't had time to read them.
But then I try to balance it or kind of walk that line with also making it interesting to the general public. So I don't, we don't get too deep into the weeds.
We try not to at least on really nitty gritty things that only academics would find interesting. And so far, my wife has listened to many of them and said she found them interesting. And so if I can get her on board, Good change of its accessibility to the public. Yeah. And for that also, there's a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, or a website, you can go to writingwestward.org and kind of get updates for when there's new episodes.

**Brad Westwood** (4:19)
So what I want to spend the measure of our time is talking about some of the tours that are available in Intermountain Histories.
And you're not only just reading histories, but you're out there in the geographical landscape setting. You're reading, interacting with this website, and really kind of getting to see things, what remains of the landscape or the towns or cities. Let's talk first about the tour on the Utah home front during World War II.