Nothing Gold Can Stay

Recent months have been a lesson in loss.

Through a series of Executive Orders issued by President Donald Trump, enforced by the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency, and upheld by a compliant Supreme Court, we have witnessed one of the most profound shifts in our government—and in the philosophy of what government should do—in our history. In a few short months, Trump has terminated the employment of hundreds of thousands of government employees, zeroed out funding for climate studies and lifesaving medical research, ended Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants here on humanitarian visas, attacked cultural institutions from the Smithsonian to Harvard, and undertaken military action against Iran without Congressional approval or even much in the way of an explanation. Many pundits have openly wondered: Is this a Constitutional crisis? Which is really just a veiled way of asking: Are we losing our nation and all we hold dear?

To begin to address that question, Switchyard gathered dozens of writers, radio producers, nonprofit leaders, educators, and thinkers at our headquarters in Tulsa for a summit on January 24—just days after the inauguration. A number of the talks delivered that day have been collected as a package of mini-essays in this issue. Others have spun out into longer essays.

Merrill Feitell has written a heartbreaking account of losing her home and entire community in Altadena, California, to the fires that immediately preceded Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office. She focuses on the intimate details of such destruction, but lurking in the background are the strained resources of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the specter of tariffs sending building costs too high to cover with insurance payouts, and the implications of defunding the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and other climate-focused government entities seeking to prevent future disasters.

Beth Nguyen tells the story of her family’s arrival in the United States as refugees from Vietnam—under the very status that Trump has recently revoked. Her family has found comfort by confronting the realities of displacement and loss directly, via an obsession with Hollywood disaster movies and then real catastrophes of the ancient past. Meteor strikes. Mass extinctions. But reminding herself that loss is all around—and at a scale that dwarfs our individual grief—is little comfort when Nguyen’s sister has a stroke and loses her ability to communicate. Here, then, is not just the question of what will happen to future generations of refugees who are barred from entering the United States but also the threat that all Americans could face losing their medical care, due to planned cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

Esther Honig tells that story from devastating personal experience. While delivering her first-born child, Honig lost consciousness—and awoke days later to discover that doctors had found a massive cancerous tumor in her brain. She reflects on how she coped with facing mortality precisely at the moment that she expected to be embarking on a new life as a mother, but she also hints at the hard choices ahead if cuts to medical research and medical care go into effect and if regulations on medical insurance are rolled back.

These writers—and so many others in this issue—explore what it means to stare down the prospect of an end to all we’ve known and loved.

It’s sadly appropriate, then, that while we were completing this issue, the University of Tulsa’s president Brad Carson resigned. Switchyard was Brad’s idea and vision. He hired Mary Anne Andrei and me to move to Tulsa to found the magazine and join the faculty at TU in 2022. Our first issue featured artwork by Art Spiegelman on the cover. This issue also features Spiegelman’s work—and (barring last-minute support from elsewhere) will be our last. When Art sent the image for the cover—featuring a husband and wife pushing a baby stroller off a cliff but momentarily remaining suspended mid-air, so long as they don’t look down—I told him about the situation at TU and our pending closure. “We’re all Wile E. Coyote now,” he wrote.

I didn’t expect such a swift and sudden end to Switchyard, but I’m enormously proud of what we accomplished in just five issues. We have been nominated for two National Magazine Awards, the top distinctions in magazine publishing. We have been nominated for three James Beard Awards—and won one for Best Food Coverage in a General Interest Publication. Thanks to the brilliant work of our designer, Taylor Le, the magazine has won two Small Press Design Awards and been nominated for four ASME Design Awards. Work from our pages has been included in the Best American series and appeared on the Longreads list of the year’s best magazine stories.

Mary Anne Andrei has produced more than two dozen episodes of our podcast, short films and social media videos, and a radio play. We have also played host, largely under Mary Anne’s management, to the Switchyard Festival (featuring Art Spiegelman, Natasha Trethewey, Maia Kobabe, Ilya Kaminsky, and others), Food Fest (featuring Tom Colicchio, Sean Sherman, Jori Lewis, and Siddhartha Deb), Switchyard at Mayfest (featuring Bill McKibben, Timothy Egan, Andrea von Kampen, and many others), and more intimate events featuring Sterlin Harjo, Carl Phillips, Ted Conover, George Black, Anne Nelson, Elliott Woods, and others. Mary Anne also supervised the creation of two exhibits—one, telling the history of Route 66; the other, spotlighting the art and writing of women inmates in Oklahoma’s prisons—in collaboration with the Oklahoma Center for Humanities.

Through partnerships with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, we have reached larger audiences beyond our own community. We have been featured on the Ali Velshi Show on MSNBC, on NPR’s All Things Considered, and in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In fact, Kevin Dettmar, writing for the Chronicle, delivered high praise to Switchyard on our launch. “Switchyard’s platforms appear ready to embrace the historical role of the university as truthteller,” he wrote. “Whatever topics the magazine, podcast, and festival decide to feature in coming iterations, one can only hope that they will be as courageous and timely as the conversations they’ve tackled in their auspicious inaugural year.” I regret that those conversations were not allowed to continue longer.

It has been an honor to work with Taylor Le, Rebecca Bauer, Charles Lipper, Kais Ali, Kyle Bell, Mike Prado, Gary Laney, Teresa Knox, Ronnie Carlson, Autumn Worten, and all the amazingly gifted writers, artists, and multimedia producers who have contributed their time, energy, and talent to this shared effort. Special thanks to Brad Carson. We did cool stuff.

Before Mary Anne and I moved to Tulsa—or had ever been here—we reported together on immigrant groups in the meatpacking industry across the middle of the country. In Nebraska, one son of Sudanese immigrants told me he had been reading The Outsiders (the quintessential Tulsa novel) in his high school class and had found himself suddenly crying uncontrollably. I asked if he had sometimes felt like an outsider himself. No, he insisted. It was the larger human story that got him. He had never felt anything but at home in the United States.

I think I speak for Mary Anne and myself both when I say that we have never felt like outsiders in Tulsa. Stay gold. —Ted Genoways

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