Podcasts about experiments emergency press

Today I interview Alexs Thompson about his new memoir, I'll Go: War, Religion, and Coming Home, from Cairo to Kansas City (2020). Let me begin with a moment of honesty. When I first heard about Thompson's memoir, I was skeptical that it was true. The experiences about which Thompson writes seem too remarkable, such as setting out to Egypt right after the 9/11 attacks in America with only a backpack and without a plan to study Arabic among fundamentalist Muslims, even though Thompson didn't know Arabic and isn't a Muslim, to working with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to briefing major intelligence agencies and working with top military officials such as General Petraeus. His life experience seemed more vast and more varied than a person could fit in multiple lives, let alone one. Did I mentioned that Thompson also earned his PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago while many of these events unfolded? And yet I found out: it's true; he's true; and he's here with us today to share some of his remarkable story. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Alexs Thompson about his new memoir, I'll Go: War, Religion, and Coming Home, from Cairo to Kansas City (2020). Let me begin with a moment of honesty. When I first heard about Thompson's memoir, I was skeptical that it was true. The experiences about which Thompson writes seem too remarkable, such as setting out to Egypt right after the 9/11 attacks in America with only a backpack and without a plan to study Arabic among fundamentalist Muslims, even though Thompson didn't know Arabic and isn't a Muslim, to working with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to briefing major intelligence agencies and working with top military officials such as General Petraeus. His life experience seemed more vast and more varied than a person could fit in multiple lives, let alone one. Did I mentioned that Thompson also earned his PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago while many of these events unfolded? And yet I found out: it's true; he's true; and he's here with us today to share some of his remarkable story. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Alexs Thompson about his new memoir, I'll Go: War, Religion, and Coming Home, from Cairo to Kansas City (2020). Let me begin with a moment of honesty. When I first heard about Thompson's memoir, I was skeptical that it was true. The experiences about which Thompson writes seem too remarkable, such as setting out to Egypt right after the 9/11 attacks in America with only a backpack and without a plan to study Arabic among fundamentalist Muslims, even though Thompson didn't know Arabic and isn't a Muslim, to working with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to briefing major intelligence agencies and working with top military officials such as General Petraeus. His life experience seemed more vast and more varied than a person could fit in multiple lives, let alone one. Did I mentioned that Thompson also earned his PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago while many of these events unfolded? And yet I found out: it's true; he's true; and he's here with us today to share some of his remarkable story. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Alexs Thompson about his new memoir, I'll Go: War, Religion, and Coming Home, from Cairo to Kansas City (2020). Let me begin with a moment of honesty. When I first heard about Thompson's memoir, I was skeptical that it was true. The experiences about which Thompson writes seem too remarkable, such as setting out to Egypt right after the 9/11 attacks in America with only a backpack and without a plan to study Arabic among fundamentalist Muslims, even though Thompson didn't know Arabic and isn't a Muslim, to working with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to briefing major intelligence agencies and working with top military officials such as General Petraeus. His life experience seemed more vast and more varied than a person could fit in multiple lives, let alone one. Did I mentioned that Thompson also earned his PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago while many of these events unfolded? And yet I found out: it's true; he's true; and he's here with us today to share some of his remarkable story. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She’s interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann’s book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She’s interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann’s book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She’s interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann’s book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She's interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann's book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She’s interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann’s book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Mary Cappello about her new book, Lecture (Transit Books, 2020). Although I almost hesitate to call it a book. It’s much more—like all great lectures are—a performance, one full of erudition and insight, humor and humanity, profound diversions and wry musings, one asking for your most acute attention and simultaneously inviting you to drift and dream. It’s like a lecture in that it resists summing up and instead leaves you throwing up your hands and saying, “You had to be there.” Fortunately, because it is a book, you can be there. And fortunately for us, the incomparable Mary Cappello is here right now.  Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Mary Cappello about her new book, Lecture (Transit Books, 2020). Although I almost hesitate to call it a book. It’s much more—like all great lectures are—a performance, one full of erudition and insight, humor and humanity, profound diversions and wry musings, one asking for your most acute attention and simultaneously inviting you to drift and dream. It’s like a lecture in that it resists summing up and instead leaves you throwing up your hands and saying, “You had to be there.” Fortunately, because it is a book, you can be there. And fortunately for us, the incomparable Mary Cappello is here right now.  Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “100? I’m not sure how appealing that is.” In our interview, Zaraska has a surprising response for you. And it’s important to say at the outset that Zaraska’s aim isn’t really to show us just how to prolong our years, but to help us understand how every one of our days between now and, if we’re lucky, 100 might be full and rich and immensely gratifying. And she helps us by taking us into the science of human thriving. What she discovers leads us not only into a better understanding of our own nature, but also to a deep connection with one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “100? I'm not sure how appealing that is.” In our interview, Zaraska has a surprising response for you. And it's important to say at the outset that Zaraska's aim isn't really to show us just how to prolong our years, but to help us understand how every one of our days between now and, if we're lucky, 100 might be full and rich and immensely gratifying. And she helps us by taking us into the science of human thriving. What she discovers leads us not only into a better understanding of our own nature, but also to a deep connection with one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Today I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “100? I'm not sure how appealing that is.” In our interview, Zaraska has a surprising response for you. And it's important to say at the outset that Zaraska's aim isn't really to show us just how to prolong our years, but to help us understand how every one of our days between now and, if we're lucky, 100 might be full and rich and immensely gratifying. And she helps us by taking us into the science of human thriving. What she discovers leads us not only into a better understanding of our own nature, but also to a deep connection with one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Today I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “100? I’m not sure how appealing that is.” In our interview, Zaraska has a surprising response for you. And it’s important to say at the outset that Zaraska’s aim isn’t really to show us just how to prolong our years, but to help us understand how every one of our days between now and, if we’re lucky, 100 might be full and rich and immensely gratifying. And she helps us by taking us into the science of human thriving. What she discovers leads us not only into a better understanding of our own nature, but also to a deep connection with one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel’s book. It’s not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts. Israel also wrestles for a future she hopes to make for herself and her young sons, one full of grace and gratitude. “You have to find a gift in every hard thing.” That’s advice that Israel once received. And her book, in which she wrestles with the pain and grief and beauty of life, is her gift to us. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel’s book. It’s not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts. Israel also wrestles for a future she hopes to make for herself and her young sons, one full of grace and gratitude. “You have to find a gift in every hard thing.” That’s advice that Israel once received. And her book, in which she wrestles with the pain and grief and beauty of life, is her gift to us. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel’s book. It’s not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts. Israel also wrestles for a future she hopes to make for herself and her young sons, one full of grace and gratitude. “You have to find a gift in every hard thing.” That’s advice that Israel once received. And her book, in which she wrestles with the pain and grief and beauty of life, is her gift to us. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel's book. It's not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts. Israel also wrestles for a future she hopes to make for herself and her young sons, one full of grace and gratitude. “You have to find a gift in every hard thing.” That's advice that Israel once received. And her book, in which she wrestles with the pain and grief and beauty of life, is her gift to us. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube. Well, they are meant to; if they didn’t they would have been forgotten centuries ago.” In our interview, Shaw invites us to consider the power of myth to guide us not only toward new ways of seeing our current moment—one in which we’re witnessing an unprecedented global pandemic—but also new ways of seeing itself. For Shaw, a mythologist who’s designed courses at Stanford University and who directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the U.K, myths reveal unseen possibilities in our own lives and overlooked chances to reunite with our natural world. The old stories can lead us forward if only we learn how to hear them. Shaw shows us what it might mean to listen deeply and profoundly, with our minds, yes, but also with our souls, our spirits, our very bones. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube. Well, they are meant to; if they didn’t they would have been forgotten centuries ago.” In our interview, Shaw invites us to consider the power of myth to guide us not only toward new ways of seeing our current moment—one in which we’re witnessing an unprecedented global pandemic—but also new ways of seeing itself. For Shaw, a mythologist who’s designed courses at Stanford University and who directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the U.K, myths reveal unseen possibilities in our own lives and overlooked chances to reunite with our natural world. The old stories can lead us forward if only we learn how to hear them. Shaw shows us what it might mean to listen deeply and profoundly, with our minds, yes, but also with our souls, our spirits, our very bones. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube. Well, they are meant to; if they didn’t they would have been forgotten centuries ago.” In our interview, Shaw invites us to consider the power of myth to guide us not only toward new ways of seeing our current moment—one in which we’re witnessing an unprecedented global pandemic—but also new ways of seeing itself. For Shaw, a mythologist who’s designed courses at Stanford University and who directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the U.K, myths reveal unseen possibilities in our own lives and overlooked chances to reunite with our natural world. The old stories can lead us forward if only we learn how to hear them. Shaw shows us what it might mean to listen deeply and profoundly, with our minds, yes, but also with our souls, our spirits, our very bones. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interviewed Stephen Jenkinson. He’s not only an author, an activist, a musician, and the founder of a school, but also an inspired etymologist, a spiritual trickster, and a mythopoetic storyteller cracking sticks and tossing them into a low fire as the spirits in the embers rise with his words. He’s a sorcerer of sorts who disenchants us from some of our most habitual and destructive beliefs about what it means to live and to die, to age and—in the title of his latest book—to Come of Age (North Atlantic Books, 2018). The subtitle of his book is The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, and I spoke to Stephen at a moment when our most imminent trouble seems to be the global pandemic of the coronavirus, one that—on the date of our interview, March 18, 2020—appears as though it will only grow worse and more deadly here in North America and around the globe. Yet Stephen puts this acute trouble into a larger, longer, and ultimately more troubling perspective. He leads us, as he does in his book, into the act of what he calls wondering, “without recourse to certainty or comfort” but with, perhaps the possibility of emerging more clear-eyed and attentive to the world in front of us and what it asks of our living and our dying and our time together. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interviewed Stephen Jenkinson. He’s not only an author, an activist, a musician, and the founder of a school, but also an inspired etymologist, a spiritual trickster, and a mythopoetic storyteller cracking sticks and tossing them into a low fire as the spirits in the embers rise with his words. He’s a sorcerer of sorts who disenchants us from some of our most habitual and destructive beliefs about what it means to live and to die, to age and—in the title of his latest book—to Come of Age (North Atlantic Books, 2018). The subtitle of his book is The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, and I spoke to Stephen at a moment when our most imminent trouble seems to be the global pandemic of the coronavirus, one that—on the date of our interview, March 18, 2020—appears as though it will only grow worse and more deadly here in North America and around the globe. Yet Stephen puts this acute trouble into a larger, longer, and ultimately more troubling perspective. He leads us, as he does in his book, into the act of what he calls wondering, “without recourse to certainty or comfort” but with, perhaps the possibility of emerging more clear-eyed and attentive to the world in front of us and what it asks of our living and our dying and our time together. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At the same time, Grass tries to reckon with what it meant for them to grow up, as Grass puts it, “queer and trans in such a toxic environment.” The result is a book that’s dazzling in its variety and steadfast in its vision: to see clearly how the white dominant culture of the Midwest obscures the land to which it laid claim and the nature of who and what it is, all in the hope of a clearer and truer vision of who we are and how we might, in the end, be accountable to ourselves and one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At the same time, Grass tries to reckon with what it meant for them to grow up, as Grass puts it, “queer and trans in such a toxic environment.” The result is a book that’s dazzling in its variety and steadfast in its vision: to see clearly how the white dominant culture of the Midwest obscures the land to which it laid claim and the nature of who and what it is, all in the hope of a clearer and truer vision of who we are and how we might, in the end, be accountable to ourselves and one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At the same time, Grass tries to reckon with what it meant for them to grow up, as Grass puts it, “queer and trans in such a toxic environment.” The result is a book that’s dazzling in its variety and steadfast in its vision: to see clearly how the white dominant culture of the Midwest obscures the land to which it laid claim and the nature of who and what it is, all in the hope of a clearer and truer vision of who we are and how we might, in the end, be accountable to ourselves and one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At the same time, Grass tries to reckon with what it meant for them to grow up, as Grass puts it, “queer and trans in such a toxic environment.” The result is a book that’s dazzling in its variety and steadfast in its vision: to see clearly how the white dominant culture of the Midwest obscures the land to which it laid claim and the nature of who and what it is, all in the hope of a clearer and truer vision of who we are and how we might, in the end, be accountable to ourselves and one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Martín Prechtel, whose work ranges from painting and drawing to overlooked histories and living languages to farming and blacksmithing and cooking to the six books he’s written, which cover topics so vast in genres so varied that all the short descriptions I’ve tried to give of them feel like an injustice. Let me just say that the vision in his books reaches out toward the very nature of the cosmos while it also attends to nature’s smallest spirits, to what’s holy and alive in the stones and the seeds. And running throughout this work is Prechtel’s powerful and lush talent for storytelling. In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun (North Atlantic Books, 2005), Prechtel introduces the unique stories he heard when he lived among the Tzutujil Mayan people in the village of Santiago Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands. He writes that these stories “are alive, and being alive they are not just told at any time, but only in the dark. Though everyone by a certain age knows a version of these living stories, only certain people, those accepted storytellers, can tell them and will admit to knowledge of them, for it is in the telling only that these stories live, and being ancient, big and hungry, they must be brought to life as well.” And that, perhaps, is the best way I can introduce Martín Prechtel: he brings to life stories that live and, through them, he reveals the rich, beautiful, abundant possibilities of what it might mean for us to live the stories of our lives. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Martín Prechtel, whose work ranges from painting and drawing to overlooked histories and living languages to farming and blacksmithing and cooking to the six books he’s written, which cover topics so vast in genres so varied that all the short descriptions I’ve tried to give of them feel like an injustice. Let me just say that the vision in his books reaches out toward the very nature of the cosmos while it also attends to nature’s smallest spirits, to what’s holy and alive in the stones and the seeds. And running throughout this work is Prechtel’s powerful and lush talent for storytelling. In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun (North Atlantic Books, 2005), Prechtel introduces the unique stories he heard when he lived among the Tzutujil Mayan people in the village of Santiago Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands. He writes that these stories “are alive, and being alive they are not just told at any time, but only in the dark. Though everyone by a certain age knows a version of these living stories, only certain people, those accepted storytellers, can tell them and will admit to knowledge of them, for it is in the telling only that these stories live, and being ancient, big and hungry, they must be brought to life as well.” And that, perhaps, is the best way I can introduce Martín Prechtel: he brings to life stories that live and, through them, he reveals the rich, beautiful, abundant possibilities of what it might mean for us to live the stories of our lives. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I’m speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That’s right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra. Adams’ muse is surprising, because she lives, like many of us, in North America—Orange County, California, to be exact. That’s not the place where you’d expect someone to develop a deep fascination and a deep respect for camels. And yet this improbability makes Adams’ new book Camel Crazy (New World Library, 2019) all the more intriguing, as she becomes, by turns, a smuggler, an activist, a scientist, a world traveler, and, in the end, an advocate, not just for camels, but for our public health, our environment, and for her son. He’s a child on the autistic spectrum, and Adam’s love for him becomes a beautiful and passionate engine that ultimately leads her to start a movement that may just transform how we see camels and how we see and treat autism. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I’m speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That’s right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra. Adams’ muse is surprising, because she lives, like many of us, in North America—Orange County, California, to be exact. That’s not the place where you’d expect someone to develop a deep fascination and a deep respect for camels. And yet this improbability makes Adams’ new book Camel Crazy (New World Library, 2019) all the more intriguing, as she becomes, by turns, a smuggler, an activist, a scientist, a world traveler, and, in the end, an advocate, not just for camels, but for our public health, our environment, and for her son. He’s a child on the autistic spectrum, and Adam’s love for him becomes a beautiful and passionate engine that ultimately leads her to start a movement that may just transform how we see camels and how we see and treat autism. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I'm speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That's right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra. Adams' muse is surprising, because she lives, like many of us, in North America—Orange County, California, to be exact. That's not the place where you'd expect someone to develop a deep fascination and a deep respect for camels. And yet this improbability makes Adams' new book Camel Crazy (New World Library, 2019) all the more intriguing, as she becomes, by turns, a smuggler, an activist, a scientist, a world traveler, and, in the end, an advocate, not just for camels, but for our public health, our environment, and for her son. He's a child on the autistic spectrum, and Adam's love for him becomes a beautiful and passionate engine that ultimately leads her to start a movement that may just transform how we see camels and how we see and treat autism. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Today I'm speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That's right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra. Adams' muse is surprising, because she lives, like many of us, in North America—Orange County, California, to be exact. That's not the place where you'd expect someone to develop a deep fascination and a deep respect for camels. And yet this improbability makes Adams' new book Camel Crazy (New World Library, 2019) all the more intriguing, as she becomes, by turns, a smuggler, an activist, a scientist, a world traveler, and, in the end, an advocate, not just for camels, but for our public health, our environment, and for her son. He's a child on the autistic spectrum, and Adam's love for him becomes a beautiful and passionate engine that ultimately leads her to start a movement that may just transform how we see camels and how we see and treat autism. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Usually on the New Books Network we do exactly what our name says: we talk about new books. Today, however, we’re doing something a little different. I’m interviewing Donald Morrill about his very not-new book of essays Impetuous Sleeper (Mid-List Press, 2009). It was published a decade ago. However, it offers us an interesting opportunity to talk about a part of publishing world that we often don’t talk about: what happens when your publisher closes and your book goes out of print? How does that alter your perception of a book, of its purpose and its potential audience? And yet Morrill’s essays offer us so much more than a look at the publishing lifespan of a book. He’s crafted beautiful work that reimagines what the essay can do and be. His is a collection of startling insights and careful observations that gather to a lyrical abundance. It’s a generous gift of a book, one that masterfully demonstrates an essay needn’t be new to be apt, to be beautiful, to be, in the largest sense, newsworthy. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Usually on the New Books Network we do exactly what our name says: we talk about new books. Today, however, we’re doing something a little different. I’m interviewing Donald Morrill about his very not-new book of essays Impetuous Sleeper (Mid-List Press, 2009). It was published a decade ago. However, it offers us an interesting opportunity to talk about a part of publishing world that we often don’t talk about: what happens when your publisher closes and your book goes out of print? How does that alter your perception of a book, of its purpose and its potential audience? And yet Morrill’s essays offer us so much more than a look at the publishing lifespan of a book. He’s crafted beautiful work that reimagines what the essay can do and be. His is a collection of startling insights and careful observations that gather to a lyrical abundance. It’s a generous gift of a book, one that masterfully demonstrates an essay needn’t be new to be apt, to be beautiful, to be, in the largest sense, newsworthy. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver’s eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see into lives and loves and struggles we might otherwise never see. But Dear Current Occupant is also a letter to Knight’s younger selves, to the girl and eventually young woman who lived in these places and who struggled to discover who she was and who she could be. The result of this correspondence is a rich and multifaceted account of what it means to become a strong writer and, in Knight’s words, “a strong black woman.” Knight’s book combines poetry, prose, maps, photographs, and other media to tell a singular story that could be told in no other way, to make visible what she calls “the cracks in the narrative,” which, in the end, hold the truth of her story and perhaps her very self. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I'm talking with Chelene Knight. She's written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it's a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver's eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see into lives and loves and struggles we might otherwise never see. But Dear Current Occupant is also a letter to Knight's younger selves, to the girl and eventually young woman who lived in these places and who struggled to discover who she was and who she could be. The result of this correspondence is a rich and multifaceted account of what it means to become a strong writer and, in Knight's words, “a strong black woman.” Knight's book combines poetry, prose, maps, photographs, and other media to tell a singular story that could be told in no other way, to make visible what she calls “the cracks in the narrative,” which, in the end, hold the truth of her story and perhaps her very self. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver’s eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see into lives and loves and struggles we might otherwise never see. But Dear Current Occupant is also a letter to Knight’s younger selves, to the girl and eventually young woman who lived in these places and who struggled to discover who she was and who she could be. The result of this correspondence is a rich and multifaceted account of what it means to become a strong writer and, in Knight’s words, “a strong black woman.” Knight’s book combines poetry, prose, maps, photographs, and other media to tell a singular story that could be told in no other way, to make visible what she calls “the cracks in the narrative,” which, in the end, hold the truth of her story and perhaps her very self. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver’s eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see into lives and loves and struggles we might otherwise never see. But Dear Current Occupant is also a letter to Knight’s younger selves, to the girl and eventually young woman who lived in these places and who struggled to discover who she was and who she could be. The result of this correspondence is a rich and multifaceted account of what it means to become a strong writer and, in Knight’s words, “a strong black woman.” Knight’s book combines poetry, prose, maps, photographs, and other media to tell a singular story that could be told in no other way, to make visible what she calls “the cracks in the narrative,” which, in the end, hold the truth of her story and perhaps her very self. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Nina Boutsikaris. Her new book is called I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). And if you’ve ever said those words—I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry—you know they usually come at some crisis point in a conversation that’s already underway. A misunderstanding has happened or some confusion has started to mount, and so you try to reset and make things clear: “Hey look, I’m trying to apologize!” Boutsikaris makes this gesture throughout her book, yet the “you” to whom she’s speaking is not as simple as any one person. She speaks to friends and former lovers, artists and theorists, members of her own family, and, ultimately, to her younger self. Nor is she carrying on one conversation. She’s trying to describe what it means to be a self, a female self, one living through illness, loneliness, desire, and the aspiration to make art. And finally, her book is no simple apology. It’s more of a reckoning, an attempt to understand who we are in our brokenness and in our hopes. So if it is an apology, it’s an apology in the classic sense of the genre, like the one Socrates gives in Plato’s famous dialogue where he defends the value of philosophy or like the apology that Sir Philip Sydney gives in defense of poetry. In this classic sense, an apology is not merely apologizing, merely saying, “I’m sorry.” It’s offering a full account. It’s showing why, whatever the charge, whatever the crime, the case is more complex than those charging you could ever imagine and that not only are you perhaps not guilty and not only are those who accuse you perhaps not innocent, but also that guilt and innocence are too simple as categories to make sense of our complex and messy lives. It takes an apology like Boutsikaris gives to reveal that complexity and help us live with it and in it rather than reduce it to some simple—and false—truth. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Nina Boutsikaris. Her new book is called I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). And if you’ve ever said those words—I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry—you know they usually come at some crisis point in a conversation that’s already underway. A misunderstanding has happened or some confusion has started to mount, and so you try to reset and make things clear: “Hey look, I’m trying to apologize!” Boutsikaris makes this gesture throughout her book, yet the “you” to whom she’s speaking is not as simple as any one person. She speaks to friends and former lovers, artists and theorists, members of her own family, and, ultimately, to her younger self. Nor is she carrying on one conversation. She’s trying to describe what it means to be a self, a female self, one living through illness, loneliness, desire, and the aspiration to make art. And finally, her book is no simple apology. It’s more of a reckoning, an attempt to understand who we are in our brokenness and in our hopes. So if it is an apology, it’s an apology in the classic sense of the genre, like the one Socrates gives in Plato’s famous dialogue where he defends the value of philosophy or like the apology that Sir Philip Sydney gives in defense of poetry. In this classic sense, an apology is not merely apologizing, merely saying, “I’m sorry.” It’s offering a full account. It’s showing why, whatever the charge, whatever the crime, the case is more complex than those charging you could ever imagine and that not only are you perhaps not guilty and not only are those who accuse you perhaps not innocent, but also that guilt and innocence are too simple as categories to make sense of our complex and messy lives. It takes an apology like Boutsikaris gives to reveal that complexity and help us live with it and in it rather than reduce it to some simple—and false—truth. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I speak with Hilary Plum. She’s the author of Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016), which isn’t so much a book as an exploratory biopsy of our body politic and our collective psyche. Plum examines our moment at the cellular level—whether that’s a cancerous cell or a terrorist cell—with the aim of understanding what’s happened to us in the Iraq War, in the attacks on 9/11, at the Boston Marathon bombings, or in the time-out-of-time we experience when we suffer from chronic illness. How do we make sense of a global world where drones, autoimmune disease, migrants, suicide, and mass violence all feel interconnected? That’s exactly what Plum sets out to do. In prose as keen and incisive as a scalpel, she locates and exposes the malignancies of our time. She doesn’t offer us a cure—who could?—but she gives us a brilliant diagnoses of how deeply the disease and diseases from which we suffer run. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I speak with Hilary Plum. She’s the author of Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016), which isn’t so much a book as an exploratory biopsy of our body politic and our collective psyche. Plum examines our moment at the cellular level—whether that’s a cancerous cell or a terrorist cell—with the aim of understanding what’s happened to us in the Iraq War, in the attacks on 9/11, at the Boston Marathon bombings, or in the time-out-of-time we experience when we suffer from chronic illness. How do we make sense of a global world where drones, autoimmune disease, migrants, suicide, and mass violence all feel interconnected? That’s exactly what Plum sets out to do. In prose as keen and incisive as a scalpel, she locates and exposes the malignancies of our time. She doesn’t offer us a cure—who could?—but she gives us a brilliant diagnoses of how deeply the disease and diseases from which we suffer run. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I speak with Hilary Plum. She’s the author of Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016), which isn’t so much a book as an exploratory biopsy of our body politic and our collective psyche. Plum examines our moment at the cellular level—whether that’s a cancerous cell or a terrorist cell—with the aim of understanding what’s happened to us in the Iraq War, in the attacks on 9/11, at the Boston Marathon bombings, or in the time-out-of-time we experience when we suffer from chronic illness. How do we make sense of a global world where drones, autoimmune disease, migrants, suicide, and mass violence all feel interconnected? That’s exactly what Plum sets out to do. In prose as keen and incisive as a scalpel, she locates and exposes the malignancies of our time. She doesn’t offer us a cure—who could?—but she gives us a brilliant diagnoses of how deeply the disease and diseases from which we suffer run. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It's called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What's it? What's this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen's book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're talking to Janelle Adsit about her book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2017). In it, Adsit takes a hard look at the way American colleges and universities teach creative writing. What do students who enter creative-writing classrooms encounter as these young men and women hope to discover who they are and can be as writers? Does the teaching they receive help or hinder them? As Adsit’s title suggests, one of the problems she’s found with writing instruction in our institutions is that it’s too exclusive, too centered on limited and limiting ideas of what counts as good writing and, by extension, who can be good writers. Too often, in writing classrooms across the country, students encounter models that are predominately male and predominately white. How, Adsit asks, can we foster the writing of students who don’t identify with these models? How can we guide our students to write from and give voice to their own diversity? At stake in these questions is not merely the experience of students in the classroom, but, in the long run, the future of American literature, for in these classrooms are our authors-to-be, those writers who will go on to write the books we’ll read in the coming decades. Adsit hopes to lead us forward into a brighter literary future, one in which our literature is as rich and diverse as the Americans who read it. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're talking to Janelle Adsit about her book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2017). In it, Adsit takes a hard look at the way American colleges and universities teach creative writing. What do students who enter creative-writing classrooms encounter as these young men and women hope to discover who they are and can be as writers? Does the teaching they receive help or hinder them? As Adsit’s title suggests, one of the problems she’s found with writing instruction in our institutions is that it’s too exclusive, too centered on limited and limiting ideas of what counts as good writing and, by extension, who can be good writers. Too often, in writing classrooms across the country, students encounter models that are predominately male and predominately white. How, Adsit asks, can we foster the writing of students who don’t identify with these models? How can we guide our students to write from and give voice to their own diversity? At stake in these questions is not merely the experience of students in the classroom, but, in the long run, the future of American literature, for in these classrooms are our authors-to-be, those writers who will go on to write the books we’ll read in the coming decades. Adsit hopes to lead us forward into a brighter literary future, one in which our literature is as rich and diverse as the Americans who read it. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're talking to Janelle Adsit about her book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2017). In it, Adsit takes a hard look at the way American colleges and universities teach creative writing. What do students who enter creative-writing classrooms encounter as these young men and women hope to discover who they are and can be as writers? Does the teaching they receive help or hinder them? As Adsit’s title suggests, one of the problems she’s found with writing instruction in our institutions is that it’s too exclusive, too centered on limited and limiting ideas of what counts as good writing and, by extension, who can be good writers. Too often, in writing classrooms across the country, students encounter models that are predominately male and predominately white. How, Adsit asks, can we foster the writing of students who don’t identify with these models? How can we guide our students to write from and give voice to their own diversity? At stake in these questions is not merely the experience of students in the classroom, but, in the long run, the future of American literature, for in these classrooms are our authors-to-be, those writers who will go on to write the books we’ll read in the coming decades. Adsit hopes to lead us forward into a brighter literary future, one in which our literature is as rich and diverse as the Americans who read it. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto mechanic, a woodworker, and a host of other trades. It’s called Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018). From this fascinating view, Parsons gives us a highly unusual and highly moving memoir about what it means to be a father. He writes with the precision of an engineer and the lyrical sensibility of a poet, and this combination marks his keen viewpoint, one that allows him to bring remarkable precision to the messy emotions and dense experience of fatherhood. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto mechanic, a woodworker, and a host of other trades. It’s called Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018). From this fascinating view, Parsons gives us a highly unusual and highly moving memoir about what it means to be a father. He writes with the precision of an engineer and the lyrical sensibility of a poet, and this combination marks his keen viewpoint, one that allows him to bring remarkable precision to the messy emotions and dense experience of fatherhood. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto mechanic, a woodworker, and a host of other trades. It’s called Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018). From this fascinating view, Parsons gives us a highly unusual and highly moving memoir about what it means to be a father. He writes with the precision of an engineer and the lyrical sensibility of a poet, and this combination marks his keen viewpoint, one that allows him to bring remarkable precision to the messy emotions and dense experience of fatherhood. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto mechanic, a woodworker, and a host of other trades. It’s called Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018). From this fascinating view, Parsons gives us a highly unusual and highly moving memoir about what it means to be a father. He writes with the precision of an engineer and the lyrical sensibility of a poet, and this combination marks his keen viewpoint, one that allows him to bring remarkable precision to the messy emotions and dense experience of fatherhood. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump's assessment, like so many of his statements, isn't quite the fact he'd like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA's impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press, 2018). She is this person. She approaches NAFTA with a wide and precise lens, examining not only the economics of the agreement, but also its impact on public health, social welfare, agricultural practices, migration patterns, government policy and so many other considerations that get overlooked when the focus gets narrowed to economics. She looks across the border and at the border itself, so we can understand how the lives of the Mexican people have changed in the twenty years since NAFTA began. Gálvez shows us that NAFTA is indeed a terrible deal, but in all of the ways that Trump doesn't and seemingly can't. She offers us an analysis guided by rigor, insight, thoroughness, and, above all, compassion for the lives of very people that NAFTA has destroyed. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r's' as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowing only that little bit of language. Then this play would fold the paper and pass it along. On the story or poem would go, jumping from topic to topic, from style to style, depending on how the next person added to it, until it’s done. That’s it. The result is usually highly fragmented and often fascinating. Things that aren’t normally put together are suddenly combined. Poems, stories, and, in the case of drawings, images that seem impossible are suddenly on the page in front of you, asking you to consider them as a connected whole. The name of the game purportedly came from a phrase one of them wrote the first time the surrealists played it: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” I’ve played it numerous times, and it’s always fascinating to see what emerges, but I’ve new understood why it’s so fascinating until I had the pleasure of reading Erin Edwards’ new book, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). In her insightful study, Edwards examines the presence of the corpse in modernist literature and changes the ways we understand what a corpse is and even who and what counts as being fully alive. I finished Edward’s book with the startling insight that “Exquisite Corpse,” far from being just an odd surrealist experiment, might be a more accurate way for art to capture our world and the things that live in it with us than more traditional stories, poems, and paintings. To say it another way, Edwards shows us that, in the work of modernist artists, the corpse, whether exquisite or not, might be the best way to show us what it really means to be alive. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowing only that little bit of language. Then this play would fold the paper and pass it along. On the story or poem would go, jumping from topic to topic, from style to style, depending on how the next person added to it, until it’s done. That’s it. The result is usually highly fragmented and often fascinating. Things that aren’t normally put together are suddenly combined. Poems, stories, and, in the case of drawings, images that seem impossible are suddenly on the page in front of you, asking you to consider them as a connected whole. The name of the game purportedly came from a phrase one of them wrote the first time the surrealists played it: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” I’ve played it numerous times, and it’s always fascinating to see what emerges, but I’ve new understood why it’s so fascinating until I had the pleasure of reading Erin Edwards’ new book, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). In her insightful study, Edwards examines the presence of the corpse in modernist literature and changes the ways we understand what a corpse is and even who and what counts as being fully alive. I finished Edward’s book with the startling insight that “Exquisite Corpse,” far from being just an odd surrealist experiment, might be a more accurate way for art to capture our world and the things that live in it with us than more traditional stories, poems, and paintings. To say it another way, Edwards shows us that, in the work of modernist artists, the corpse, whether exquisite or not, might be the best way to show us what it really means to be alive. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowing only that little bit of language. Then this play would fold the paper and pass it along. On the story or poem would go, jumping from topic to topic, from style to style, depending on how the next person added to it, until it’s done. That’s it. The result is usually highly fragmented and often fascinating. Things that aren’t normally put together are suddenly combined. Poems, stories, and, in the case of drawings, images that seem impossible are suddenly on the page in front of you, asking you to consider them as a connected whole. The name of the game purportedly came from a phrase one of them wrote the first time the surrealists played it: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” I’ve played it numerous times, and it’s always fascinating to see what emerges, but I’ve new understood why it’s so fascinating until I had the pleasure of reading Erin Edwards’ new book, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). In her insightful study, Edwards examines the presence of the corpse in modernist literature and changes the ways we understand what a corpse is and even who and what counts as being fully alive. I finished Edward’s book with the startling insight that “Exquisite Corpse,” far from being just an odd surrealist experiment, might be a more accurate way for art to capture our world and the things that live in it with us than more traditional stories, poems, and paintings. To say it another way, Edwards shows us that, in the work of modernist artists, the corpse, whether exquisite or not, might be the best way to show us what it really means to be alive. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowing only that little bit of language. Then this play would fold the paper and pass it along. On the story or poem would go, jumping from topic to topic, from style to style, depending on how the next person added to it, until it’s done. That’s it. The result is usually highly fragmented and often fascinating. Things that aren’t normally put together are suddenly combined. Poems, stories, and, in the case of drawings, images that seem impossible are suddenly on the page in front of you, asking you to consider them as a connected whole. The name of the game purportedly came from a phrase one of them wrote the first time the surrealists played it: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” I’ve played it numerous times, and it’s always fascinating to see what emerges, but I’ve new understood why it’s so fascinating until I had the pleasure of reading Erin Edwards’ new book, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). In her insightful study, Edwards examines the presence of the corpse in modernist literature and changes the ways we understand what a corpse is and even who and what counts as being fully alive. I finished Edward’s book with the startling insight that “Exquisite Corpse,” far from being just an odd surrealist experiment, might be a more accurate way for art to capture our world and the things that live in it with us than more traditional stories, poems, and paintings. To say it another way, Edwards shows us that, in the work of modernist artists, the corpse, whether exquisite or not, might be the best way to show us what it really means to be alive. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The next time you head to the beach or settle in for a long plane ride, you may not want your imagination filling with images of rogue operatives planting traps or terrorist organizations plotting against unsuspecting victims. You wouldn’t want to imagine explosions, assassinations, or .50 caliber rounds ripping through steel. No way. We get enough of those worries from the news. And yet there is an experience where these things go from worrisome to worry-free, where watching men and women fight for their lives is—yes—fraught and nail-biting, but also a lot of fun. And that experience happens when you’re reading a good military thriller. Today I chat with Matthew Quirk, who’s written a great one. It’s entitled Cold Barrel Zero (Mulholland Books, 2016), and I’m afraid I can share with you much of its plot. It’s so full of twists and turns, reversals and surprises, that just about any description of it will result in a spoiler, so I’ll just ask Quirk to take on that descriptive challenge himself. What I can say is that Quirk takes us inside the genre and shares with us how a writer goes about mixing cutting-edge military technology, political intrigue, and haunted characters to create a plot with all velocity of an Apache Assault helicopter and all the intelligence of a Black Ops mission behind enemy lines. One quick thing: about a fourth of the way into the interview, there’s some low-level background noise that goes on for a few minutes. Given Matthew’s book, I’d like to say it’s the result of NSA surveillance or a drone hovering nearby, but I’m afraid it’s not that glamorous. However, please don’t let an unwelcome and unexpected lawnmower throw you off. It’s over soon enough, and, odds are, you’ll be too engaged with Quirk’s insights for it to bother you. My apologies. One of the many things I learned from Quirk’s thriller is that I certainly don’t possess the techno-prowess to make it as a military operative. Nope, I’ll stick to reading about them on the beach. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The next time you head to the beach or settle in for a long plane ride, you may not want your imagination filling with images of rogue operatives planting traps or terrorist organizations plotting against unsuspecting victims. You wouldn’t want to imagine explosions, assassinations, or .50 caliber rounds ripping through steel. No way. We get enough of those worries from the news. And yet there is an experience where these things go from worrisome to worry-free, where watching men and women fight for their lives is—yes—fraught and nail-biting, but also a lot of fun. And that experience happens when you’re reading a good military thriller. Today I chat with Matthew Quirk, who’s written a great one. It’s entitled Cold Barrel Zero (Mulholland Books, 2016), and I’m afraid I can share with you much of its plot. It’s so full of twists and turns, reversals and surprises, that just about any description of it will result in a spoiler, so I’ll just ask Quirk to take on that descriptive challenge himself. What I can say is that Quirk takes us inside the genre and shares with us how a writer goes about mixing cutting-edge military technology, political intrigue, and haunted characters to create a plot with all velocity of an Apache Assault helicopter and all the intelligence of a Black Ops mission behind enemy lines. One quick thing: about a fourth of the way into the interview, there’s some low-level background noise that goes on for a few minutes. Given Matthew’s book, I’d like to say it’s the result of NSA surveillance or a drone hovering nearby, but I’m afraid it’s not that glamorous. However, please don’t let an unwelcome and unexpected lawnmower throw you off. It’s over soon enough, and, odds are, you’ll be too engaged with Quirk’s insights for it to bother you. My apologies. One of the many things I learned from Quirk’s thriller is that I certainly don’t possess the techno-prowess to make it as a military operative. Nope, I’ll stick to reading about them on the beach. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all. According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.”  So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own.  LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning. Montaigne asked, “What do I know?”  But what if we what we know is nothing?  In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing.  It’s really something. NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all. According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.”  So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own.  LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning. Montaigne asked, “What do I know?”  But what if we what we know is nothing?  In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing.  It’s really something. NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all. According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.”  So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own.  LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning. Montaigne asked, “What do I know?”  But what if we what we know is nothing?  In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing.  It’s really something. NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all. According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.”  So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own.  LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning. Montaigne asked, “What do I know?”  But what if we what we know is nothing?  In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing.  It’s really something. NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices