MARFA — On Monday, Marfa Public Radio closed a chapter of the venerated station’s history as longtime Director Elise Pepple celebrated her last day on the job. She served for eight and a half years, guiding the local media organization through two presidential administrations, a global pandemic and thousands of local stories big and small.
A number of important changes were implemented under her leadership: the nonprofit’s budget grew by 70%, allowing for a bigger and more diverse team. The station launched a podcast studio producing titles like Marfa for Beginners and So Far from Care, which have since been streamed around the world. The team won seven Murrow awards recognizing their journalism on a national scale and launched the “Desert Dispatch,” a fun and engaging multimedia newsletter that brings local voices to far-flung inboxes.
The news comes at a major turning point for the station’s parent organization. Last Wednesday, Pepple traveled to D.C. to attend a hearing called by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia. Over the past few weeks, Greene has urged the federal government to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides free programming to millions of Americans through the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Greene insists that NPR — accessible to 99% of the country’s population through their radio turner — is a biased organization, at best incapable of producing nonpartisan news and at worst pushing a harmful agenda of “brainwashing and transing [sic] children.” She told the House floor on Wednesday that most of her rural constituents get their news from other sources. “NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical, left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives, who generally look down on and judge rural America,” the congresswoman said in her opening remarks.
That NPR listeners “look down on and judge rural America” was news to Pepple, who managed one of the smallest and most remote stations in the country. While bigger stations in urban areas may be able to weather funding cuts, Marfa Public Radio takes a quarter of its budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, meaning that Greene’s efforts could be a death sentence for one of the Big Bend’s most prolific news outlets — and for dozens of others in rural communities across the country. “Access to information is something that everyone in this country deserves, no matter where they live,” Pepple said. “One of the pillars of our country is a free press.”
For now, she’s choosing to stay positive, predicting nothing but a bright future for the small and tenacious Far West Texas crew. “The motto of Marfa Public Radio is, ‘Radio for a wide range,’” she said. “Whether it’s serving Presidio or Marfa or Alpine or Midland or Odessa, it does really reflect a wide range, which I think is a pretty remarkable thing.”
The Big Bend Sentinel sat down with Pepple to reflect on her time at the station.
When did you start your job at the station?
My first night was election night 2016. I literally arrived as the sun was setting in West Texas. I had never run a radio station, and with the new [Trump] administration, news was breaking at a speed that was — well, new. Both that night and my anniversary this past year, what that really does highlight to me is simply how important access to public media and reliable information is.
How did you first get acquainted with the station?
April 1st of that year I came to Marfa with a friend as a visitor. I’m not very good at being a tourist. It makes me uncomfortable. So I put on a live storytelling event with Marfa Public Radio when I came to visit, and one of the first people I met was Lonn Taylor, [a historian whose show The Rambling Boy brought local and state history to life.] He was going to tell a story about history, but I told him it was actually personal stories. He wanted to know, “Well, why wouldn’t I tell a story about the history of Texas?” But then we started talking, and he was like, “Well, there was that one time I lived next to Janis Joplin…”
I remember walking into the station. I’m in the desert, I walk into the station, and I am just struck — this station is a lifeline. I had this vision — my background relates to interviewing people and making radio. I thought, what if this station could be an oral history center for the region? What if this station could produce podcasts about this place that reflect the stories that happen here, not from an outside perspective? It was all these “what ifs,” and less than six months later, I was running the radio station.
What are some of the meaningful moments that stick out to you from that time?
The team was really small when I got to the station. There were four people other than me. Half our team were interns and the people who had been reporters had just left. To arrive at this important moment in our country to a station with very few staff members and reporters and then ultimately that leading to many national Murrow awards is a pretty incredible thing to look back at.
I think one of the really special things about West Texas and Marfa Public Radio is that people are open to experimentation, and so being at the station and getting to celebrate love, honor the dead, host block parties, report when there’s a wildfire — times that feel most meaningful at the radio station is when it is a community service and when it is a literal lifeline.
Sometimes the simplest job the radio station has is to say, “We’re here with you.”
There’s something about the spirit of West Texans that’s curious, “never met a stranger,” often up for a good time. That’s really meaningful to me.
I’m curious if you can tell me more about the station’s foray into podcasting.
It was one of the original goals that I had when I got to the station, but it was kind of like a crush — you see all the possibility and then you confront the reality. We didn’t have transmitters that were up to date or a generator, so we had to fix that. And then we were in multiple crises. What was important was reporting.
Three years ago, I finally got to invest in realizing this vision of creating other ways to tell stories at the station. For me, the studio initiatives are kind of twofold, and one is that it’s not simply information that connects people to a place — it’s people’s lives. We keep a document that’s all the New York Times, Vogue, etcetera travel articles about Marfa. As a station, I feel like part of our job is to help shape the narratives about this place to reflect more of the realities.
It’s also on a different level strategic because it’s true that we live in a sparsely populated area. Something I’ve had to figure out every year is, how do we fundraise to support this station? Seeing that there’s an influx of people who visit West Texas — and there are people across Texas who really think of West Texas as part of the soul of the state — I wondered if there was a way to reach an audience beyond our immediate region.
What’s next for you?
Part of my decision was that it has been nonstop for eight and a half years, everyday. The radio station never closes, so it’s kind of like being on call every day for eight and a half years. Then getting to be a part of NPR’s board — that’s getting to look at the large scale.
What I’ve been thinking about is this time where I see a lot of polarization and how to shape media in ways that foster connection and belonging. What that looks like is a little TBD.
There is a book called The Decameron, and it was a fictional work that came out after the plague in Italy, and it was a story about people fleeing the city and telling stories for 10 days and 10 nights to laugh and make meaning and let loose a little bit. When I read about this during the pandemic, I thought, “Oh, we need a Decameron for our times.” Not to flee, but to face our times together.
I’m going to leave Marfa the way I came, and I’m going to host a live storytelling event that’s a pilot for this idea. I don’t know about you, but since the beginning of the pandemic, I feel like it’s been one long year. We didn’t have a funeral for the million lives lost. We didn’t have a dance party for three months to shake it off. There’s so much that went unwitnessed.
To me, it’s not a coincidence that those things happened and that we are where we are now as a country. Part of what I’m interested in the future is: how do we create experiences where we come together and connect in person with each other so that we can face living in our world together?