Amplify Utah supports and facilitates dynamic journalistic storytelling to celebrate diverse points of view. By partnering with traditional media, we cultivate an environment that encourages stories be shared widely and made easily accessible for our communities to read, hear, watch and engage.
Sandy’s new female speaking club strives to amplify women’s voices
07-06-2025 By Savannah Stacey
These women have entered their public speaking era.
Utah Vipers women’s rugby team takes shot at a national title
05-15-2025 By Elle Crossley
There’s “no choice but to win” for this team, whose members range in age from 18 to 52.
80 Years Later: Student Documentary Revisits Utah's Topaz Camp
05-11-2025 By Jordan Thornblad
"It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug."
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This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism.
High above the barren landscape of Delta, Utah, a drone’s camera scans the footprint of the barracks that once held more than 10,000 Japanese Americans at the Topaz incarceration camp during World War II. One square mile, 42 blocks, 504 barracks—reduced to nothing more than the remnants of barbed wire and gridlines fused into the dirt.
Now, 80 years after the war’s end, students from the University of Utah have come together to produce a documentary film chronicling this chapter of Utah’s past in an effort to prevent repeating history, said Associate Professor Glen Feighery,
(Craig Wirth) Alex Hooper, a University of Utah production student, sets up a camera to film at the Topaz Internment Camp site near Delta, Utah, where some 10,000 Americans of Japanese heritage were incarcerated during World War II. Hooper is part of a class that is making a documentary about Topaz.
The student-led collaborative project, titled “Topaz: A War Within,” aims to preserve the memory of a silenced people and inspire viewers to reflect on the horrors of incarceration said Feighery, who is working alongside veteran documentarian Craig Wirth and 28 students on the film.
“We honor people when we can amplify their stories, so I’m hopeful that that’s going to be one of the takeaways,” Feighery said. “Narrative in any form is critical for that kind of knowledge, preservation and communication.”
The students broke into teams, one half focusing on research and interviews and the other on video production. Over a four-month period, they poured over hundreds of archival photographs, spent more than 40 hours gathering b-roll footage, and conducted interviews with descendants of incarcerees, a Salt Lake City Council member and a curator of Japanese art.
Liliana Anderson, a journalism student and co-writer for the film, said she wasn’t taught about the details of Japanese incarceration until taking this course.
“I never really knew about Topaz, which is crazy because I have lived in Utah my entire life,” she said. “I never even learned about it in school.”
Anderson said she saw the opportunity to tell this story as a huge undertaking that made her hesitant to join the class, but in the end she felt it was something that she could not pass up being a part of.
“It was scary at first, because the story is so big, but having this many people learn about such an important piece of history is really incredible,” she said.
In the course’s first weeks, students faced the challenge of sourcing interview subjects, which proved difficult due to the time that has passed since WWII. Wirth, a long-time documentarian, characterized the project as “one of those 10 years too late documentaries,” emphasizing the arduous task of finding living sources.
“Now that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done, it just means it's going to be more difficult,” Wirth said. “The students have been entrepreneurial in that way.”
Their persistence attracted participation from Jeanette Misaka, a 94-year-old survivor of the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, other second and third generation Japanese Americans, and Salt Lake City Councilmember, Darin Mano.
Anderson said she discovered a source for the documentary through a fortuitous conversation with her mother’s friend, revealing a connection to Shauna Nakagama, a Japanese American who witnessed Topaz firsthand during World War II.
Executive Order 9066 authorized military commanders to enforce the relocation of Japanese Americans, primarily on the West Coast, due to fears of espionage and sabotage following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Anderson explained that Nakagama’s family voluntarily moved to Utah before the order was issued, sparing them from incarceration—but not from the trauma of witnessing what occurred behind the barbed wire.
Anderson described the emotional intensity of interviewing Nakagama, who shed tears recalling her first visit to the Topaz camp.
“After I visited Topaz, I was knocked on my butt. It was like somebody just knocked me out,” Nakagama told Anderson. “There is nothing out there, and I was never the same.”
Students also researched the Friends of Topaz Museum in Delta and documented the 2024 pilgrimage to the site. The pilgrimage began with the opening of the University of Utah exhibit, “Pictures of Belonging,” at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
The collection, curated by Emily Lawhead, celebrates the work of three Japanese American artists: Hisako Hibi and Mine Okubo, who were incarcerated at Topaz, and Miki Hayakawa.
“It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug,” Lawhead said. “The key to that is telling these stories, and if an approachable way to do that is through art, then I think that that is a great tool.”
The students incorporated art from the exhibit and photos of the public’s reaction into the documentary as visual aid, alongside archival photography and videography that provided context for the interviews.
Jack Hollis, a student and co-producer, joined the project after completing a documentary about Little Cottonwood Canyon in the fall of 2024. When Wirth proposed one final documentary before his retirement with Topaz as the subject, Hollis said he eagerly joined. He said he was excited to work on a new film and saw it as a powerful medium for historical storytelling.
(Craig Wirth) University of Utah documentary production students prepare a camera to get footage at the Topaz Internment Camp site near Delta, Utah, where some 10,000 Americans of Japanese heritage were incarcerated during World War II.
“When I read, it doesn't have the same impact as when I see it,” he said. “It's almost like you're sitting in the room with them, listening to them tell you a story. It can be a lot more powerful than writing.”
On March 22, Hollis and other production students traveled to Topaz, guided by Topaz Museum President Jane Beckwith. With just one day to film, they worked efficiently with ground cameras and drones, Hollis said.
Hollis said filming at the former camp site offered a unique, creative challenge. The vastness of the field provided little visual inspiration, demanding imagination and careful attention.
“It was just kind of a film as you go, figure out what you need as you go,” he said. “We had to get everything then, so we had to be very diligent and specific and not pass up any shot opportunities.”
Hollis said he felt like he was standing in a graveyard. Cement slabs, rusted nails and barbed wire circling wooden pegs served as the only remaining evidence of the barracks that once housed thousands of people.
“I'm a big World War II buff, so getting to kind of see a piece of history, a pretty big scar on America's past, was interesting in its own right, but it was also very sad,” Hollis said.
The production team worked to capture meaningful footage of a location that appeared to be little more than an empty field stretching for miles. They focused on revealing the historical details hidden in plain sight.
After four hours of filming, the team collected over 100 photo and video assets.
The subsequent editing process involved carefully assembling interview segments with visual materials. Enhanced by thoughtfully selected music, said Wirth, the documentary evolved into a vehicle for commemorating lives forever altered by Topaz.
Misaka, one of the few remaining incarceration survivors, said she’s grateful to the students for their efforts to recognize and amplify her community’s history.
“People forget their history,” she added, “and when you forget your history, you repeat it.”
Anderson believes that as a student who took part in this project, she is taking a significant step toward educating Utahns about a painful chapter in their state's history.
“It is crazy that a film of this magnitude is being produced by students,” Anderson said. “It is mindblowing.”
The class will continue editing through the summer, aiming to release the documentary on YouTube by August 2025. The hope is that it will be a source of awareness for what happened at Topaz and create space for historical remembrance.
“The mark of success is: did you make anyone who watches it reinforce or change their opinion, or get them talking?” Wirth said. “That’s a good documentary.”
Jordan Thornblad wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
Emilly Lamareaux says she was timid and introverted as a child, always struggling to communicate.
“I didn’t speak until I was 3, but I don’t feel like I learned how to talk until 23,” Lamareaux said. “My twin and I— we created a twin language, and that’s typically how I would talk to people, is through my twin."
Now 23, Lamareux is finding her voice in a new way and helping other women do the same. In April, Lamareux launched the Sandy-based club, The Period Speaks to provide opportunities for women in the community to practice using their voices to empower and enable them to speak up for themselves.
Lamareaux said the idea for The Period Speaks came to her in a dream.
“I felt like it was time to not only have this opportunity for me, but for anyone who is like me,” Lamareaux said. “My main mission is to uplift women’s voices.”
She began networking by reaching out to local art community members and promoting through social media, striving to get as many women involved and aware as possible.
A study by professors at the University of Calabria, found that women are 25% less likely to give public presentations in comparison to men. Lamareaux believes that female-focused environments can help build a level of comfort and support.
After three months of planning and preparation, the club finally began meeting.
The meeting location has a stage where members are welcome to share poetry, music, thoughts, or simply speak about what they are passionate about.
Member Andressa Lopes got involved through social media and is currently writing a book about the club and its mission. She says she is grateful for the supportive environment the club provides for women from many different backgrounds.
“Every week we all get on stage and talk about why we are there,” Lopes said. “It’s very inspiring because everyone has a different story. The main purpose is not only to find and be comfortable with our voice but also to listen and let others be heard.”
The Period Speaks meeting location, Athena VII, provides a stage for women to speak in front of other women in their community. Photo: Emily Lamareaux.
While Lamareaux recognizes that the club is still in its early development, she has plans and goals for the future. One goal is to include communication workshops provided by experts in the community to give women the tools and resources to communicate effectively.
In addition, Lamareaux hopes to find opportunities for the club to expand beyond the Sandy and Salt Lake area.
“This is a club that I want to see all across Utah,” Lamareaux stated. “My goal is a franchise. I’ll have the blueprint; I’ll have all the plans for it, and then I’ll pass it on to another female to start a club in her city.”
The Period Speaks is free for women over the age of 18. The club meets every Friday at 4 p.m. at the Athena VII located at 111 W. 9000 South in Sandy.
For more information, follow the club’s Instagram page @theperiodspeaks or RSVP for a meeting here.
Salt Lake City — known as the hub of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a crossroads for world-class outdoor attractions — has become the focal point for a burgeoning drag scene.
Drag performance has exploded in Salt Lake City in the past few years, much of it credited to the mainstream cultural acceptance of it. But it hasn’t been without some pushback.
Protests have happened at many shows billed as “family-friendly,” most recently at a back-to-school drag show hosted by BYU students in Provo. Video from a Salt Lake City tea shop’s all-ages drag event went viral and drew complaints nationally. Earlier this summer, a drag group called Quorum of the Queens hosted an all-ages event at the Gallivan Center, which also was met with protests.
Drag performer Trey McEuen, known professionally as Hysteria, said the drag scene has “grown immeasurably” in the last three years. Some of the credit goes to new venues, like the drag bar Why Kiki, which opened last year.
“Now, you go to Why Kiki on a Saturday night, you’ve got three drag shows there earlier in the day that all have 12 people in them, and there’s four new queens showing up who look better than half of you,” McEuen said.
McEuen, an interdisciplinary performance studies major at the University of Utah, is working on a thesis focused on using drag as a means of promoting social change.
For McEuen, drag is as much of an art as it is a science. They are interested in the gender performance of drag just as much as the unconscious gender performance everyone plays a role in on a daily basis.
“We look at strangers on the street and their identity expressions, and we suddenly garner from that unconscious performance aspects,” McEuen said. “We can pick up on things like masculinity, femininity, race [and] gender, and we make assumptions.”
McEuen said they take conscious and unconscious performance in communication and use both in drag to teach about social change, “whether that is something completely ridiculous or a more serious conversation about violence, or about protest.”
(Trey McEuen) Salt Lake City drag performers Skigh Copier (aka Sky Faux) and Trey McEuen (aka Hysteria), pose backstage at a drag show.
In order to broadcast social change to wider audiences, performers at the Quorum of the Queens event in July took precautions to ensure the show would be family-friendly.
The event’s organizers warned that protests might turn violent, and that the performers needed to be extra cautious in preparing their stage numbers.
“There was a lot of communication upfront with us performers who were at the event that there may be danger,” McEuen said. “When we did the show, we had to be so aware of this that we had to do 3-minute numbers. They had to be non-explicit, there had to be no sexual themes.”
Often, McEuen explained, performers will do a “reveal,” where they remove an article of clothing to reveal a new, exciting element of their outfit. For instance, a queen might take off a pair of black slacks to reveal a sequin skirt.
“Those were not allowed,” McEuen said. “You were not allowed to take off any articles of clothing.”
Sky Faux, a junior resident performer at Why Kiki, also performed at the Gallivan event. Sky Faux is the stage name of Skigh Copier, who is nonbinary and was assigned female at birth.
Though Salt Lake City has many women who perform drag, few of them adopt a feminine character onstage. Faux recognizes that people, even within the queer community, struggle to understand why women and femme-presenting people would adopt hyper-feminine personas onstage.
However, they said they’ve been welcomed with open arms, save for a few exceptions, by the Salt Lake drag scene.
“Drag is just like any other mainstream art form,” Copier said. “We’re not going to show up to an all-ages drag show in the same look and with the same performance that we would for an over-21 show.”
Copier said drag queens are just like anybody else when it comes to taste and theatrical sensibilities. “We know what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate,” they said, noting they felt so confident in the age-appropriateness of the Gallivan show that they brought their 8-year-old sister to dance along with them.
But no matter how discerning queens are when constructing acts for audiences of all ages, some people are still opposed to the idea of drag, McEuen said — and a threat of danger continues to exist.
“At Gallivan we had to have double security, and then because it got so elevated, the Salt Lake City Police Department showed up,” they said, adding that the city protected the performers and made sure kids had access to see the performances.
Both McEuen and Copier became interested in drag when they were young, and it helped them discover their identities outside of the gender binary.
McEuen secretly watched “RuPaul’s Drag Race” at age 12, and faced their father’s disapproval for it. Copier said they wished they were born male, so that they could be a drag queen.
“Just seeing people happy, and loving themselves, and putting on a celebration of identity, a celebration of grandeur, opulence, spectacle, and self is major for someone, especially when they’re going through puberty and developing a sense of identity,” McEuen said.
McEuen said they believe drag can help young people who are struggling with their identity amid societal expectations of binary gender.
Copier said they gravitated to the gender expression of drag, but also the importance of drag as an art form. Drag, Copier said, encompasses many hobbies they love — dance, music, performance, style and fashion.
“I think drag at any age can be a really cool way of play, of putting on a character,” Copier said. “Just like kids play dress-up, I think it’s the same thing. I think it’s a very welcoming form of entertainment, artform and community.”
McEuen said Salt Lake City’s drag performers will not stop doing what they do, and will not stop hosting all-ages events.
“The future is now, and the future is big,” McEuen said. “Drag in Salt Lake is revolutionary — it’s punk, it’s counterculture, and it’s something that is a force to be reckoned with in the waves of making change. Open your eyes and come to a show.”
Jude Macher wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text:
This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism. Jude Macher wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
The pandemic persists and its effect on mental health continues to rise.
A recent study published by Science Direct revealed an increase in depressive symptoms in U.S. adults from 27.8% in 2020 to 32.8% in 2021. Depression, anxiety and stress can impact academic performance, which experts say explains why the transition back to in-person learning for many college students has felt awkward, difficult and draining.
People can’t control the pandemic, but they can control how they cope with it. Using cognitive strategies, emotional coping skills and mindfulness-based exercise can make the transition back to in-person learning and normal social interactions a smoother one.
“There’s been a college student mental health crisis over the past 10 years, and it seems like the pandemic has exacerbated that,” said Scott Kadera, a psychologist and counseling manager at Salt Lake Community College.
Kadera said the need for mental health services has increased since the pandemic, although utilization of services at SLCC has dropped. The Center for Health and Counseling, Kadera said, is providing more counseling sessions to fewer clients.
“There are more people in distress,” he noted. “A confounding factor is that our enrollment dropped, so there is less demand. If we had the same [enrollment], my impression is that more would be coming in.”
In 2020, SLCC saw its enrollment drop by 2,000 students. In the fall of 2021, the number was down, but only slightly, another 68 students. The college has an overall enrollment of 27,225.
He said depression can cause people to experience a decrease in energy, motivation, attention and resilience. That makes returning to activities we once did more difficult, even if it’s a positive change.
“There have been a lot of studies in the last few years that demonstrate when a system is stressed or under a lot of pressure, there can be physiological changes to the brain and it has a significant impact on an individuals function,” said Mark Fox, a speech-language pathologist specializing in cognitive rehabilitation at Intermountain Healthcare.
This, Fox said, explains why the transition back to in-person learning has been difficult for so many college students. Isolation has caused social skills to atrophy when it comes to interpreting environmental stimuli, body language, social cues and complex environments. He noted people might feel awkward when socializing in-person, distracted by the unfamiliar environment around them, and feel much more drained at the end of the day compared to interacting virtually.
“As people start re-engaging, there’s going to be discomfort and some feelings of, ‘what am I doing?’” Fox explained. “Communication is a skill, and social interaction has a myriad of components. Just like any other activity, if you don’t practice it to a certain extent, you can lose it.”
Being on campus requires more energy and engagement with surroundings, as well as thinking about social responses in real-time. When communicating via text or email, there is an opportunity to perfect a message before hitting send.
“It gives a sense of distance when you communicate virtually. In person we have to manage our body language,” Fox said. “It’s spontaneous communication, which is more difficult.”
Under conditions that cause the brain to be stressed or alerted, the brain hyper-activates primitive portions focused on survival, fight and flight, Fox explained.
Being in primitive states makes it harder to think, pay attention and process information. If the nervous system is constantly activated like this, it affects cognition and executive function, leading to struggles with academic performance and anything involving cognition.
“A lot of the things that stimulate primitive responses aren’t necessarily life-threatening,” Fox said. “We have to learn to be able to go through a process of using our higher-level cognitive functions to decide the stimulus is or isn’t something to worry about.”
He said things like stress about school, relationships and the constant stimulation from technology can activate these responses. For higher-level cognitive functions to work, the nervous system needs to be calm. Here are some strategies that could help:
“Mind-body exercise helps put a pause on your thoughts and consciously choose a different direction to go in,” said Paula Nielson-Williams, SLCC recreation manager. Using tools like the Insight Timer app helps establish or continue a meditation practice, and Yoga Journal offers free, on-demand yoga videos for all levels.
The connection between the mind and body is distinct, and one has a great effect on the other, Nielson-Williams said.
“If the body is moving and healthy it can help the mind be clear,” Nielson-Williams said. “It’s an infinite circle of mind-body connection. One affects the other and vise-versa”
While these exercises can help you cope, it’s important to know when to seek professional help.
“People think they need to have extreme symptoms in order to seek help,” Kadera said, “But if you’re just unhappy and it’s not how you want to be feeling, then that’s a good reason to come in and get some services.”
SLCC offers individual, couples, and crisis counseling to students and staff. There is also the 24-Hour Community Crisis Line at 801-587-3000.
Juliana DeMay wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Juliana DeMay wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
