Outside/In: Where The Wild Things Grow

Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant

WNET

Science, Pets & Animals, Nature, Kids & Family, Natural Sciences

4.9 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sign up for Nature's newsletter: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/newsletter/ Growing up, Kiese Laymon thought of himself as a city kid. But he spent his childhood with a foot in two worlds: his mom’s house in the capital city of Jackson, Mississippi and his grandma’s house in a rural country town. It wasn’t until Kiese left Mississippi that he came to understand that this question of city vs. country meant a lot more. It carries a lot of baggage: the tensions between north and south, tectonic historical forces, and the contradictions of life in Mississippi. In this episode from Outside/In, a podcast where curiosity and the natural world collide, producer Justine Paradis sits down with author Kiese Laymon, for a conversation on this question of country versus city, what that has to do with the history of Black life in this country, and the story of Kiese’s first children’s picture book, his latest in a lifelong exploration of a complicated love of Mississippi. To hear more episodes from Outside/In, follow them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide.
0:05.0	I'm Nate Hedgy.
0:06.1	There's a saying out there that goes like this.
0:09.0	There are two kinds of people in the world.
0:11.5	The ones who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and then the ones who know better.
0:18.9	Anyway, perhaps one of the easiest and most common ways of dividing up the world is this.
0:26.1	There are city people and country people.
0:31.0	Sometimes these are labels that we adopt ourselves.
0:33.4	I'm more of like a country, rural mountain boy, if I'm being honest.
0:36.7	And sometimes these are labels that we use to describe others.
0:40.3	This divide is even the basis of an ancient children's story.
0:44.6	Town Mouse, Country Mouse, from Aesop's Fables, literally thousands of years old.
0:52.9	But some people live with a foot in both worlds.
0:57.6	All right.
0:57.9	My name is Kiasse-Layman.
0:59.7	I'm a writer born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi.
1:03.5	Jackson isn't a massive city, but the metropolitan area is home to 20% of the state's
1:09.4	entire population.
1:11.1	And to someone growing up in that part of Mississippi, it was big.
1:14.7	Did you think of yourself as a city kid growing up?
1:17.3	That's our producer, Justine Paradise.
1:19.5	I love that question.
	...

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