Wayne Gudmundson featured on BBC’s The Strand

Wayne Gudmundson featured on BBC’s The Strand

Wayne Gudmundson, Mass Communications, was featured in a radio program called Travels with Mike, which aired Jan. 17-21 on BBC’s The Strand. The series will also be coming soon on PRI’s Studio 360, and a one-hour special, hosted by Al Letson of State of the Re:Union, to be distributed in the spring by PRX

Here’s how the series started:

“In the fall of 1960, the writer John Steinbeck climbed into a pickup truck with a makeshift camper on top, and started driving. He and his Standard Poodle, Charley, roamed for three months and ten thousand miles, completing a circuit from one coast to the other and back again. Steinbeck’s account of the journey, Travels with Charley In Search of America, was published in 1962, the same year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“A half-century later, radio producer and CDS audio program director John Biewen visited some key locations on Steinbeck’s itinerary, traveling not with a dog but with a microphone — Mike, that is. In each location, he collaborated with an artist who lives and works in that place. Travels with Mike comprises a series of conversations, across time, between a great American writer and a diverse array of contemporary artists — conversations about place and the spirit of the country.

“Having imagined Fargo as remote and exotic, Steinbeck found the town disappointingly ordinary. He drove on to camp near Alice, North Dakota, where he encountered an itinerant Shakespearean actor. We retrace Steinbeck’s path with Wayne Gudmundson, a Fargo native who has photographed the region’s eerily flat landscape, and the man-made marks on it.”

You can find the audio on the BBC’s International Radio Station.

The audio will also be posted on the Travels with Mike website in early 2011.

Travels with Mike is a production of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.