Troubadours and Raconteurs with E.W. Conundrum Demure - Conversation, Essays, Poetry & Music.

Episode 585 Featuring Amy Reid - Filmmaker, Educator, Continent Trekker

·59 min·5 clips

Senior women in Queens rejected Amy Reid's idea to reenact their pasts, insisting they focus on who they are right now.

Episode 585 of Troubadours and Raconteurs features an interview with filmmaker Amy Reid, conducted by host E.W. Conundrum Demure. Reid joins from Oakland, California, and provides background on her education, including a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from UC San Diego, and her current PhD candidacy at UC Santa Cruz. The conversation begins with Reid's personal history of moving along the East Coast as a child of divorced parents, which she connects to her interest in regions and mobility in her work. She mentions a formative high school art teacher in Baltimore, Terry Shovlin, who encouraged her to use art for community building. Reid details her project 'Games,' a collaborative video made during a six-month residency at a senior center in Jackson Heights, Queens, where she worked with women in their 70s to 90s. She describes how the women rejected her initial idea to focus on their pasts, leading to a playful exploration of their present lives through invented games. Reid then discusses her feature documentary 'Long Haulers,' which follows three female truckers, examining the male-dominated trucking industry and its ties to American identity. She explains her interest in the intersections of gender, national identity, and labor, noting how trucking is romanticized as a modern cowboy lifestyle. Reid transitions to her current project, 'Grandmother's Garden,' which investigates quilting and women's histories in the U.S., linking cotton textiles to slavery, immigration, and westward expansion. She describes her filmmaking process as starting with curiosity rather than a strict agenda, allowing projects to evolve through relationships with participants. Reid reflects on broader themes, questioning who American women are and emphasizing the diversity of experiences among the people she has worked with, including Indigenous women on Montana reservations. She discusses the political climate, noting how fear drives divisions in the U.S., and her role as a filmmaker in listening across differences to foster understanding. The host praises Reid's focus on substance over commercial success, and the episode concludes with Reid's poetic piece 'Quilted' and musical tracks, including 'Big Yellow Taxi.'

As heard by us

Amy Reed connects documentary art, travel, quilting, and curiosity about people beyond easy assumptions.

Amy Reed gives the episode its center as she talks about Long Haulers, a film shaped by curiosity about truckers rather than easy assumptions about them. From there, the conversation opens onto Grandmother's Garden, her broader project on quilting, U.S.

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Why you'd press play

Press play when a filmmaker's cross-country miles open into curiosity about truckers, women, work, and the ways Americans imagine one another.

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