KFAI's MinneCulture Presents

This program is an endearing, yet unsentimental, 30 minutes of radio. Created by Radio Netherlands International , producer Dheera Sujan interviews an interracial, international 30-something couple. He's from Brooklyn. She's from Banja Luka. In this quasi-documentary, the couple talk bluntly about what attracted them to each other and what they now love and hate about each other. I first heard this program in Berlin, at a radio festival called Prix Europa . It had dozens of Europeans (and a few Americans) laughing and loving it.

Dare I say it? Autumn isn't too far away. (Here in Minnesota, one is usually a realist.) With the harvest upon us, we thought it would be nice to take a break from documentaries and learn how to prepare a nutritional, hearty meal. That's why we're airing Cooking with MOMbo by Nance Olesen in Minneapolis. Olesen knows seemingly everything about parenting; she's the long-time host of the MOMbo radio show, which has morphed into a great radio enterprise. Its mission: "MOMbo broadasts the everyday truth about motherhood (in order to change the world)."

This week, we start off with two Hurricane Katrina stories. The first, Katrina Photojournalist , is an interview with Times-Picauyne photographer John McCusker, one of the few staffers to stick around and cover New Orleans throughout the hurricane and subsequent flooding. In Rebuilding NOLA , Adeline Goss records an audio diary of building homes in New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity for musicians. We follow up those pieces with Residence Elsewhere , a story of urban nomads contemplating staying or leaving, produced by Joan Schumnan. Finally, we take a minute to really slow down and listen to a man as he builds his mother's casket. It's a short piece from the Salt Institute's pause series, Bringing the Work into You by Megan Martin.

In this hour-long documentary from Radio Netherlands, Dheera Sujan brings us back to her native Australia with two deeply moving stories. Both are personal accounts of Aboriginals, who - like many older generation Native Americans in the US - were taken from their homes at an early age and 'relocated' to be schooled and molded into mainstream white culture. Part 1 is the story of the Collard family, whose children were separated. While one suffered abuse and neglect, another was brought up in the white way. Today the children and their parents are trying to come to terms with being worlds apart. In Part 2, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter met on the streets when they were both teenagers and they’ve been together ever since. They’re amongst the “lucky ones” as they’ve managed to channel their pain into their music. The programme is liberally sprinkled with the songs that Archie wrote and sings together with Ruby.

Way out in Montana, at a little radio station called KGLT, independent producer Barratt Golding produces some very fine work. It's also a bit strange and that's why I like to air it. He's fond of quirky, creative producers. In this show (his new series is called "The Plan"), Golding focuses on the life of Him. (That capital "H" is intentional.) Him, of course, is our Lord and Savior, Jesus . This piece includes an excerpt from the band King Missle and a song called "Jesus Was Way Cool." Sample lyrics: "He turned water into wine. And if he wanted to he could have turned wheat into marijuana or sugar into cocaine or vitamin pills into amphetamines." You get the idea. This show also includes a story from the legendary Scott Carrier .

Many radio and print stories on environmental issues are tough to relate to for nonscientists. (And that includes me, I worked my butt off just to get a C in a college course called "Physics for Poets.") This show features stories from GLRC, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium that are far from typical. Reporter Rebecca Williams ponders a question many of us have faced: How Long Do You Keep a Polluting Heap? In this story, we ride along with Rebecca as mechanics and other experts tell her about all the environmental damage her piece-of-crap rust bucket is inflicting on the environment. This show also includes Prairie Burn Audio Postcard, a great aural experience produced by Mark Brush . GLRC does a lot of great work. If you want to track environmental issues on a regular basis, listen to their stories. A list of stations can be found here .

If you've ever driven through Chicago's South Side on the Dan Ryan Expressway, you've seen the towers. The high-rise public housing that dominates neighborhoods and imprisons people. What's it like to live there? This documentary takes you there. Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister of Long Haul Productions produced this piece, which won an Edward R. Murrow award a few years ago. The story is narrated by a man who lives there. His name is Andre Williams. When you listen to his story, you'll get closer to the people who lived in the place that gangbangers call The House of Pain, also known as Stateway Gardens. This piece originally aired in 2002. One year later, the producers returned to Stateway to find out what happened to people forced to leave. That doc is called Movin' Out the Bricks and also originally aired on Chicago Public Radio.