Turns out Texas isn’t all bigness and bombast. A new podcast reveals that the Lone Star state also harbors its share of loners in a more low-key firmament of inventors, eccentrics and mystics.
In the episodes of “Texas Overture,” San Antonians Faith Fisher and Camille Sauers convene ufologists, cryptozoologists, train-riding documentarians and rabbit holes of research to explore lesser-known territories of thought and culture in the state.
Curious Texas tidbits are embedded within the talky podcast’s various textures, from its name — the title of a song by 1980s punk band Pere Ubu that lists Texas tropes such as pit barbecue and “loop road tornadoes” — to the melody that opens the first episode, a song by the 1990s indie band Silver Jews and its poet leader David Berman, who once lived in Dallas.
From Blake to Drake
Sauers and Fisher met in an early pandemic-era online book club and realized they shared many obscure interests. Both had studied anthropology in college and held a passion for the paranormal. They also had a knack for finding what Sauers described as “quiet magic that exists in banal contexts,” such as the volunteers who hang out daily with the mannequins of the Texas Transportation Museum on Wetmore Road, whom she once wrote about as a journalist.
A Lone Star beer-fueled conversation at a party first birthed the notion of starting a “traveling anthropology business,” Sauers said, which then morphed into the idea of turning their mutual interests into a podcast.
In seven episodes of the self-described “para-anthropology” series recorded since March, the duo has traversed Texan byways from the Olmos Basin to Brazoria County. They’ve followed the trails of such notables as Whitley Strieber, the author of the extraterrestrial visitation account Communion who grew up in San Antonio, and Forrest Bess, a visual artist, shrimp farmer and visionary mystic who lived on Matagorda Bay.
Fisher and Sauers converse with their expert guests about astral projection, Bigfoot, mythical “Big Birds,” cantankerous spirits, geomagnetic activity, advanced aerospace weapons systems, the chupacabra, and extradimensional owls while remaining grounded with a vast range of historical and popular references, from 18th-century English visionary poet and visual artist William Blake to present-day mopey hip hop hitmeister Drake.
Maintaining curiosity
A given episode might provoke a listener to draw upon their own college-level knowledge, from the writings of ascetic Thomas Aquinas and surrealist author Italo Calvino to the music of 12th-century devotional composer Hildegard of Bingen.
Now age 25 and post-college, Sauers said, “for me, this project is [about] maintaining a sense of curiosity that is very easy to lose.”
In considering their range of subjects, she said they are “building this tapestry of interconnected things to keep learning about more academic subjects, but also trying to find ways that they’re relevant to San Antonio or Texas contexts.”
Fisher is also a voracious reader, has studied art and art history, and makes crisp and evocative line drawings for episode art. She said the human side of their subjects compels her.
“I think we’re just interested in the way that people cope with life,” she said, and its mysteries. Though their conversations span centuries and continents to seek out the sometimes eccentric, sometimes ponderous solutions people find, for Fisher and Sauers it all comes back to Texas.
“Texas specifically has such a wellspring of interesting people,” Fisher said. “And I feel like it doesn’t often get recognized for that.”
After meeting last week at the headwaters of the San Antonio River on the University of the Incarnate Word campus — known as the Blue Hole, a subject of their first episode — under a thick canopy of trees and amid a chorus of cicadas, Fisher and Sauers set off to record another episode.
Its subject? The “mushroom doctor” of San Antonio, Stephen Pollock, who ran a psilocybin mushroom home delivery service and whose 1985 murder remains unsolved.
“There’s a lot of conspiracies and speculation,” Sauers said. “And if you want to hear our theories, you can listen to our episode,” she said with a sly grin.
“Texas Overture” is available on Google, Apple, Spotify and Audible.
