This reflection explores how artist Tim Z Hernandez’s creative practice embraces art as an offering rooted in healing, memory, and release, inspiring readers to trust the creative process with humility and curiosity. It also includes a hands-on "Recipe: The Permission of Maybe," inviting artists to embrace uncertainty as fertile ground for new ideas and creative growth.

In this episode of Beyond the Clock, Ash and Anna are joined by Tim Z. Hernandez, an award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker whose work has spent decades recovering stories that history tried to forget.

Nikiko Masumoto explores how memory, storytelling, and everyday rituals act as living practices that carry culture forward and help shape more hopeful futures.

In this episode of Beyond the Clock, Ash and Anna are joined by Brigid Reedy, musician, poet, storyteller, and artist from southwest Montana whose work is deeply rooted in the rural American West. In this conversation, they explore what it means to be of a place in a time of mobility, polarization, and cultural fragmentation, and how place lives not just in geography, but as something carried within us.

“Let the Light In” highlights how openness and vulnerability invite clarity, connection, and transformation. Even in difficult moments, choosing to let light in can spark renewal and meaningful change.

In this first episode of the 2026 Beyond the Clock (BTC) season, Anna and Ash are joined by Nikiko Masumoto, this year’s BTC Resident Artist, farmer, and memory keeper who invites us to explore memory as a living practice. In this episode, we reflect on the quiet rituals (personal and public) that carry culture forward and how, across rural communities, artists and cultural workers are tending something essential: memory and imagination.

Beyond the Clock Resident Artist Eliza Blue reflects on November 2025’s Beyond the Clock with Kyle Mesteth.

Beyond the Clock Resident Artist Eliza Blue reflects on September 2025’s Beyond the Clock with Viktor le. Givens

Beyond the Clock Resident Artist Eliza Blue reflects on June 2025’s Beyond the Clock with Siricasso.

Beyond the Clock Resident Artist Eliza Blue reflects on April 2025’s Beyond the Clock with Lacy Hale.

Beyond the Clock Resident Artist Eliza Blue reflects on February 2025’s Beyond the Clock with Nancy X. Valentine.

Beyond the Clock Co-Host Anna Claussen reflects on her time with Beyond the Clock Co-Host Ash Hanson and 2025 Beyond the Clock Resident Artist Eliza Blue during the Offal Fashion Show at the Denver stockyards.

In addition to our regular virtual learning exchanges with rural rockstars, Beyond the Clock is introducing... A PODCAST!!

For each Beyond the Clock season, we invite a Resident Artist to capture high-level themes in a creative format; this year we are elated to be welcoming Eliza Blue as Beyond the Clock's 2025 Resident Artist! 

Nhatt Nichols is a poet and graphic journalist living on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. She uses drawing, poetry, and comics to explore human/animal relationships and how they fit into bigger political and environmental issues. You can find her work in High Country News, Edible Magazine, Civil Eats, and The Daily Yonder. Nhatt is a 2023 Literary GAP Grant recipient. Her first book, This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves, 2022), is in its second printing, and Morels, an illustrated novella, is forthcoming from Bored Woles. 

Erika Nelson is an independent artist and educator, exploring contemporary art forms in the public realm. She investigates the nooks and crannies of the United States seeking out the odd and unusual, gathering stories of people who build immersive elaborate art environments, as well as roadside vernacular architecture known as World’s Largest Things.

Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013.

In this conversation with Melissa, we explored themes of archiving the stories of one's community and the trust and reciprocity required to do so, considering questions like: in rural communities, where humility often reigns, how do we invite humble leaders to document their stories and archive their own journeys?

Donna Neuwirth is the co-founder and executive director of Wormfarm Institute in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin, a nonprofit dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture through public programs and artist-led initiatives.

And, we were reminded, yet again, no matter where you are, if you pause the rush of life to be present (and stick around for a bit after the “main event!”), you’ll likely find cosmic magic with the people that call that place home.