POPULARITY
This week's Difficult Women is the award-winning Turkish author Elif Shafak. Known for her powerful storytelling that explores identity, cultural conflict, and feminism Shafak's work resonates deeply with global audiences, especially in light of recent protests in Turkey. Her bestselling novels like The Bastard of Istanbul and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, she has won numerous awards, including the Prix Médicis étranger and the Lannan Literary Fellowship. An outspoken advocate for human rights and free expression, She continues to challenge oppression through her writing, making her a vital voice in both literature and activism.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial, Yellow Rain, and Afterland. Her honors include th Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Lindsay was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and earned her BA from St. Olaf College and MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Mount Clutter (Grove Press, 2002), Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), and Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).Her honors and awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Carolyn Kizer Prize, and J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize as well as a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she works as a copy editor.-bio via Poetry Foundation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain's Forward First Book Prize. O'Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently the editor of The Yale Review, she began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches. Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
Sabaidee and hello! Welcome to Season 3 of Thip Khao Talk Podcast. Sophia Tran-Vu, Legacies of War Board Member, sits down with Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai! Born and raised in Việt Nam, Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning writer in Vietnamese and English, author of twelve books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Her poetry in Vietnamese have been written into popular songs and has received Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Capital Award for Arts and Literature, as well as First Prize, the Poetry Competition about 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her two novels in English, The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, are both international bestsellers and have been honored with Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the International Book Awards, the BookBrowse Best Debut Award, and the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction. Her writing has been translated into twenty-seven languages and has appeared in major publications including The New York Times. Quế Mai is the Peace Ambassador for PeaceTree Vietnam, an organization that works to remove unexploded bombs in Việt Nam, as well as an Ambassador for Room to Read, an organisation that aims to erase global illiteracy and promotes girls' education, She was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring women of 2021. She has a Ph.D in Creative Writing with the U.K.'s Lancaster University. Theme song by Lao Jazzanova Learn more about Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai Learn more about Legacies of War
Immigration remains a hot-button in American politics, but Javier Zamora tells the story of his own entry into the United States—a journey and a story that put a human face on the issue. Zamora is the author of “SOLITO,” his New York Times bestselling memoir and is the 2024 Reading Across Rhode Island Selection. Born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990, his parents fled the country due to the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War from 1980-1992. Zamora was raised by his grandparents until the age of nine when he began his nine-week odyssey to Arizona. His memoir recounts the perilous journey. He is the author of a poetry collection entitled, “Unaccompanied.” He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, Stanford University and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Poet Layli Long Soldier joins Mira to talk about her transformation during pregnancy, learning to open up to the possibilities of the world, and how she makes a space for ease in order to make a space for creativity. MENTIONED: The Indigenous Language Institute The Real Housewives S.J. Res 14 (111th Congress) Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer's Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com Be sure to subscribe and to leave a review of the show on your favorite podcast platform! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode 167 Notes and Links to Mai Der Vang's Work On Episode 167 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes Mai Der Vang, and the two discuss, among other things, her childhood as bilingual and a voracious reader, formative writers and writing in her life, catalysts to write about Hmong culture, and specifically the towering achievement that is Yellow Rain, with its depiction of an often-dehumanized and preyed upon people and other pertinent issues of empire and colonization. Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State. Buy Yellow Rain Mai Der Vang's Website “Review: YELLOW RAIN – Mai Der Vang (Graywolf Press),” by Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question, November 18, 2021 Interviews/Press for Mai At about 6:40, Pete and Mai Der shout Fresno stars like Lee Herrick, Juan Felipe Herrera, At about 8:00, Mai gives background on her reading and language relationships, starting from childhood, and leading to an overview of her multigenerational family background and Hmong as her first language At about 12:00, Mai responds to Pete's question about representation for Hmong people in the literary world, including the awkward links to Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down At about 16:15, Mai discusses writers and writing that have been “game-changers” for her, including the work of Juan Felipe Herrera, Cathy Park Hong, Solmaz Sharif, and Douglas Kearney At about 19:00, Pete asks Mai about any “ ‘Eureka' moments” that have guided her into writing as a profession; she cites the Hmong Community Writers' Collective as a guiding force At about 21:35, Mai answers Pete's questions about ideas of dialogue and silence in Hmong communities regarding the “Secret War” and its aftermath At about 24:15, Pete outlines Yellow Rain's opening and asks Mai about “following the rains”-she details her research (10 years!) At about 25:05, Pete refers to a review of the book from The Poetry Question saying the book “defies genre”-Pete asks about goals in mind for the book, regarding its unique and diverse styles At about 27:40-34:05, Pete cites the Wikipedia article regarding “Yellow Rain” and asks Mai for a background on it in connection to the Hmong and their lives post-”Secret War” At about 34:05, Pete quotes from and asks about some of the collection's early poems and refers to ideas of the Hmong as disregarded; Mai discusses an oft-quoted line about “gardening” At about 36:20, Pete and Mai make comparisons between Roberto Lovato's incredible work with Unforgetting and Mai's work At about 37:10, Pete and Mai discuss a disastrous and racist Radiolab interview regarding the Hmong and yellow rain At about 39:00, Pete and Mai discuss the theme of dehumanization that runs throughout her collection At about 40:40, Mai talks about the ineptitude and missteps that led to an inability to make definitive proclamations about yellow rain's provenance At about 44:05, The two discuss the double meanings of “specimen” and the ways in which a possible chemical weapon used against the Hmong was incredibly destructive and hard to trace At about 45:30, The bees are investigated and discussed-ideas that bee feces may have been the reason for the yellow mist were put forth At about 49:00, Ideas of colonization and American empire are investigated via the book's poems At about 52:35, Pete reads a line that sums up so profoundly ideas of “what if's” and At about 53:50, Mai talks about ideas of resistance and about any possible political and cultural actions-i.e., the future and any advocacy At about 59:00, Mai reads the last poem of the collection, “And Yet Still More” and discusses some key lines At about 1:02:55, Mai gives contact and social media info You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode. Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com. Please tune in for Episode 168 with Dur e Aziz Amna. She is from Rawalpindi, Pakistán, now living in Newark, NJ, her work has appeared in the New York Times and Al Jazeera, among others; was selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022; her standout debut novel is American Fever. The episode will air on February 21.
In this warm and thoughtful program you'll by dazzled by the mystery of Terry's dying mother's request for her to read her journals, but not until after her death. Terry found 3 shelves of journals only to discover all of them were blank. Puzzle about this mystery along with Terry in this far-reaching dialogue about finding one's authentic voice. Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist, environmentalist, and award-winning author. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction and the 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Ms. Williams received the Sierra Club's John Muir Award honoring a distinguished record of leadership in American conservation. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyoming. She is the author of many books including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon 1991), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (Vintage Books 1995) , Leap (Vintage 2001), The Open Space of Democracy (The Orion Society 2004), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon 2008), When Women Were Birds (Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012) and The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) Interview Date: 5/5/2012 Tags: Terry Tempest Williams, Wangari Maathai, voice, speaking, courage, silence, Mother Tongue, reproductive freedom, language, emotional intelligence, Mormon, birth control, abortion, Carden School, teaching children, Utah wildlands, wilderness, storytelling, Wilderness Society, embodied language, uncertainty, questions, questioning, deep listening, journaling, journal, authentic voice, sisterhood, crisis, ecology of the mind, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Social Change/Politics, Writing, Women's Studies, Philosophy
Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist, environmentalist, and award-winning author. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction and the 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Ms. Williams received the Sierra Club's John Muir Award honoring a distinguished record of leadership in American conservation. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyoming. She is the author of many books including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon 1991), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (Vintage Books 1995) , Leap (Vintage 2001), The Open Space of Democracy (The Orion Society 2004), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon 2008), When Women Were Birds (Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012), The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) and Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019) Interview Date: 5/5/2012 Tags: MP3, Terry Tempest Williams, journaling, her mother's journals, grief, Mormon women write, full silence, women's friendships, matriarchal line, Women's Studies, Writing
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative."It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye
"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative."It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye
"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative."It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye
“In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms, the costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized, if not necessarily into the environment, where they often are, they're also externalized into the future, which is to say, yes, there is this huge surge in human population and relative wealth and so on and so on, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that it's sustainable into the future, especially not infinitely. Infinite growth is impossible. It's just not physically possible.”Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative. “In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms, the costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized, if not necessarily into the environment, where they often are, they're also externalized into the future, which is to say, yes, there is this huge surge in human population and relative wealth and so on and so on, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that it's sustainable into the future, especially not infinitely. Infinite growth is impossible. It's just not physically possible.”http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye
The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society
"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative."Capitalism and technological innovation have brought a higher standard of living and greater health to the people of the world. That's inarguable. That's absolutely true. It's a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation that have raised all boats in their way and increased standards of living and so on. People like Stephen Pinker make this argument. There are various kinds of Just So Stories about how we're all better off now because of capitalism and technological development than humans were in 1784. The thing that all these stories ignore, however, is two things. One is that this trendline parallels various other trend lines that measure our devastation and exploitation of the earth. This trendline is real, right? In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms. The costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized."http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye
"Capitalism and technological innovation have brought a higher standard of living and greater health to the people of the world. That's inarguable. That's absolutely true. It's a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation that have raised all boats in their way and increased standards of living and so on. People like Stephen Pinker make this argument. There are various kinds of Just So Stories about how we're all better off now because of capitalism and technological development than humans were in 1784. The thing that all these stories ignore, however, is two things. One is that this trendline parallels various other trend lines that measure our devastation and exploitation of the earth. This trendline is real, right? In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms. The costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized."Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative."It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye
"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We're Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info
Join Deborah Eisenberg and David L. Ulin for a conversation on Eisenberg's work and the craft of writing. A short story writer who crafts distinctive portraits of contemporary American life with precision and moral depth, Deborah Eisenberg is the author of Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes, and Your Duck Is My Duck. Writer and editor David L. Ulin is Professor of the Practice of English at the University of Southern California and a former book critic for the Los Angeles Times. Speakers: Deborah Eisenberg is the author of five collections of short stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes, and Your Duck Is My Duck. She is a MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She is a professor emerita in the writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. David L. Ulin is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was short-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, and Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. A former book editor and book critic for the Los Angeles Times, he has written for Harper's, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His essay “Bed” appeared in The Best American Essays 2020. He is a Professor of the Practice of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the literary journal Air/Light. Most recently, he edited Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s and Joan Didion: The 1980s and 90s for Library of America. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This event is a partnership between Lannan Foundation and Haymarket Books. Lannan Foundation's Readings & Conversations series features inspired writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as cultural freedom advocates with a social, political, and environmental justice focus. We are excited to offer these programs online to a global audience. Video and audio recordings of all events are available at lannan.org. Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left. Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity through projects that support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, inspired Native activists in rural communities, and social justice advocates. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/OVPRslmLgLk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
In conversation with Geoffrey Dyer Tessa Hadley's many ''strange, unsettling-eerily beautiful, discomfiting, stay-up-late-addictive, sometimes hair-raising'' (San Francisco Chronicle) novels about the complexities of family relationships include Clever Girl, Accidents in the Home, The Past, and Everything Will be All Right. Two of her short story collections, Sunstroke and Married Love, were New York Times Notable Books and her fiction regularly appears in The New Yorker. A creative writing professor at England's Bath Spa University and a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books, Hadley has twice been longlisted for the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year. Free Love tells the story of a compliant homemaker's intellectual and sexual awakening in a vibrant 1960s London. Geoffrey Dyer is the author of four novels and numerous works of nonfiction. Writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, the Somerset Maugham Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. (recorded 2/16/2022)
Episode 109. Wayétu Moore discusses her journey as a writer, influences as a mother, and new discoveries in her writing process. Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King, released by Graywolf Press in September, 2018. Her memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women was also released with Graywolf on June 2, 2020. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. She Would Be King was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. The novel was a Sarah Jessica Parker Book Club selection, a BEA Buzz Panel Book, a #1 Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award. The Dragons, The Giant, The Women was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence in nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She's a graduate of Howard University, University of Southern California and Columbia University. She lives in New York. https://www.wayetu.com/
Doireann Ní Ghríofa has published in both Irish and English and has written six acclaimed collections of poetry. Her most recent, To Star the Dark was described by The Irish Independent as ‘playful, serious, joyful, and moving'. Her book of prose called A Ghost in the Throat received Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and had phenomenal reviews across the word. Doireann has also received many other awards and accolades including a Lannan Literary Fellowship, Italy's Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.A Ghost in the Throat dives into all manner of subject from bees and breastfeeding to anatomy and what happens to bodies when they're given over to science. Many scenes are grounded in the minutiae of a woman's life, as Doireann both celebrates and documents motherhood, rearing children and the joy and messiness of it all. At the heart of the story is one of Ireland's great poets, a woman named Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and her iconic poem or keen of lament. A Ghost in the Throat is part obsession, part honouring and it is not actually classifyable, which is also part of the appeal. To use Doireann's own term, this is a female text.
In conversation with Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go and three previous collections of poems. Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and she teaches at the University of California, Riverside. Bestselling memoirist Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child, an exploration of her childhood as an amputee and March of Dimes spokesperson; The Still Point of the Turning World, an account of her young son's diagnosis and death from a rare congenital disease; and Sanctuary, a reflection on the meaning of ''resilience'' in the midst of grief and new love. Her essays, stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in periodicals such as the New York Times, Vogue, and The Boston Globe, and she is the nonfiction editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. A former Fulbright scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow, Black teaches Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Black's new book holds a mirror up to the art, disability, and experiences of Frida Kahlo and explains how Black's connection with Frida Kahlo helped her better understand her own life. Books with signed book plates available through the Joseph Fox Bookshop (recorded 6/17/2021)
Natalie Diaz is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec, an ''ambitious . . . beautiful'' (New York Times) American Book Award–winning poetry collection that ruminates on her sibling's drug addiction. A former professional basketball player, an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community, and an English professor at Arizona State University, she is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. In her National Book Award nominated sophomore collection, Diaz transcends the horrors committed by America upon Indigenous people to find sublimity amongst vistas of words, the reversal of erasure, and the choice to love. Acclaimed for celebrating identity, lineage, and the subversion of traditional notions of power, poet Denice Frohman has performed at the Obama White House, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Apollo, among a multitude of other venues. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she has published work in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, and the Acentos Review, among many other places. Frohman is a former director at the Philly Youth Poetry Movement, has received fellowships and grants from numerous arts institutions, and has been prominently featured in BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, and Refinery29. Natalie Diaz's and Denice Frohman's books may be purchased through the Joseph Fox Bookshop (recorded 4/21/2021)
Wayétu Moore is the author of The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, which was released in June 2020. Her debut novel, She Would Be King, was released in 2018 and named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. The novel was a Sarah Jessica Parker Book Club selection, a BEA Buzz Panel Book, a #1 Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. Moore is also the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organization that creates and distributes culturally relevant books for underrepresented readers. Her first bookstore opened in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Guernica, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications. She has been featured in The Economist Magazine, NPR and Vogue Magazine, among others, for her work in advocacy for diverse children’s literature. She’s a graduate of Howard University, University of Southern California and Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yooo we did it! Another week, another episode. In this one, the one-and-only Aria Aber brings in Solmaz Sharif's "The Master's House" to binge and revel and geek and play and laugh and pray. And oh did we— ARIA ABER was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. For Spring 2020, Aber will be the Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College. She is at work on a second book of poems and a novel. Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, SOLMAZ SHARIF holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan's Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and an NEA fellowship. She was most recently selected to receive a 2016 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the 2017 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is currently an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Stephen Sexton joins us on this month's episode of the Stinging Fly podcast, to read and discuss two poems by Sinéad Morrissey. Stephen Sexton's debut collection, If All The World And Love Were Young, was published in September 2019 by Penguin, and won The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in October. Sexton's first pamphlet, Oils (Emma Press), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; he won the UK National Poetry Competition in 2016 with 'The Curfew'; he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He lives in Belfast, where he teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown in 1972, grew up in Belfast, and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. In January 2014, she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax, and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance. In 2007, Morrissey was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, while her poem 'Through the Square Window' took first place in the UK National Poetry Competition the same year. She is lecturer in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. The Stinging Fly Podcast invites Irish writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast's theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes', by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available for subscribers to read – subscribe now and access 20 years of the best new writing.
In the penultimate episode of the second series, Ilya Kaminsky and Sophie Robinson join Jack and Rachael in the studio to discuss, among other things, poems with ‘big dick energy’, the blurring of poetry with other literary forms and the tension between metaphor and the denial of metaphor. Audio postcards are from Daisy Lafarge, Anthony Anaxagorou and Hugo Williams. Listen to this episode and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss forthcoming episodes from the new season. Show notes Studio guests ILYA KAMINSKY was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dancing-Odessa-Ilya-Kaminsky/dp/1908376120) , and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. Deaf Republic (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571351411-deaf-republic.html) has been shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. @ilya_poet (https://twitter.com/ilya_poet) SOPHIE ROBINSON teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is the author of A and The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair. Her third collection, Rabbit (https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/rabbit) , was published by Boiler House Press in 2018 and was chosen for the winter PBS Wild Card Choice. Recent work has appeared in n+1, The White Review, Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Ploughshares, BOMB Magazine, and Granta. @sophiepoetry (https://twitter.com/sophiepoetry) Audio postcards featured in this episode ‘the willows on the common are still on fire’, written and read by Daisy Lafarge. Her pamphlets understudies for air (https://sadpresspoetry.com/our-books/) and capriccio (https://shop.spamzine.co.uk/product/capriccio) were published by Sad Press in 2017 and Spam Press in 2019 respectively. @janepaulette (https://twitter.com/janepaulette) ‘Cause’, written and read by Anthony Anaxagorou. Anthony’s most recent collection, After the Formalities (http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2019/08/after-the-formalities/) , is out now from Penned in the Margins and is shortlisted for the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. @Anthony1983 (https://twitter.com/Anthony1983) ‘Tara Browne’, written and read by Hugo Williams. Lines Off (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571349753-lines-off.html) , Hugo’s latest collection, was published by Faber in June 2019. About the presenters RACHAEL ALLEN is the poetry editor at Granta, co-editor at the poetry press Clinic and of online journal tender. A pamphlet of her poems was published as part of the Faber New Poets scheme, and her first collection, Kingdomland (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571341115-kingdomland.html) , was published by Faber in January 2019. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory award and New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse award. @r_vallen (https://twitter.com/r_vallen) JACK UNDERWOOD is a poet, who also writes short fiction and non-fiction. A recipient of the Eric Gregory Award in 2007, he published his debut pamphlet in 2009 as part of the Faber New Poets series. His first collection Happiness (https://www.waterstones.com/book/happiness/jack-underwood/9780571313617) was published by Faber in 2015 and was winner of the 2016 Somerset Maugham prize. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College and is currently writing a non-fiction book about poetry and uncertainty. Two pamphlets, Solo for Mascha Voice and Tenuous Rooms were published by Test Centre in 2018. @underwood_jack (https://twitter.com/underwood_jack) The Faber Poetry Podcast is produced by Rachael Allen, Jack Underwood and Hannah Marshall for Faber & Faber. Editing by Strathmore Publishing. Special thanks to Anthony Anaxagorou, Ilya Kaminskyi, Daisy Lafarge, Sophie Robinson and Hugo Williams.
photo: Ola Kjelbye Roy Scranton is the author of I ♥ Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019), Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019), We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016), and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, the New Republic, The Baffler, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013). He grew up in a working-class family in Oregon, dropped out of college after his freshman year, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army and served four years, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army at the rank of sergeant, he completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then earned a PhD in English at Princeton. His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. He currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his partner and daughter, and is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches creative writing.
Join us as professors and students from UC Riverside’s Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts MFA read from their work. Readers include: Tom Lutz, Charmaine Craig, Katie Ford, Robin Russin, Bernardita Garcia, Ashanti Anderson, Alicia Mosely, Lorelei Baughman, and Emily Margaret Wells. Tom Lutz is the author, most recently, of And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life of Travel and Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World: Wandering the Globe from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar. He is the founding editor of Los Angeles Review of Books. Robin Uriel Russin is a professor of screenwriting and playwriting in the Department of Theatre, Film & Digital Production at the University of California, Riverside. He has written, produced and directed for film, TV and the theater, including the box office hit On Deadly Ground; America’s Most Wanted; and Vital Signs on ABC, where he was Senior Producer. Robin is co-author of the books Screenplay: Writing the Picture, now in its second edition, and Naked Playwriting. His stories, articles and reviews have been appeared in Script Magazine, Verdad Magazine, Connotation Press, Harvard Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The American Oxonian, Shofar, and elsewhere. A Rhodes Scholar, Robin has degrees from Harvard, Oxford, Rhode Island School of Design, and UCLA. His play, The Face in the Reeds, recently premiered in an extended run at the Ruskin Group Theatre, where he initiated and leads a workshop for emerging and established local playwrights. His original one-hour pilot script about King David, Beloved, was adapted by ABC TV as Of Kings and Prophets. Robin is currently directing the indie feature, When I Sing. Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review and The Norton Introduction for Literature, and she is currently serving as a judge for the 2016 National Book Awards. Her fourth book is forthcoming from Graywolf Press is 2018. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program. Charmaine Craig is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, and the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history. A former actor in film and television, she studied literature at Harvard University and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her first novel, The Good Men (Riverhead), was a national bestseller translated into six languages. Bernardita García is a twenty-nine year-old Chilean journalist who is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at UC Riverside. For the last two years, she has worked as a ghostwriter. In 2016, her children’s book “La Ballena Jorobada” (The Humpback Whale) was given an award by the Municipality of Santiago, Chile. She's a paws-and-tails lover and was the coordinator of Chile’s largest animal rights campaign: #NoSonMuebles. Her writing is influenced by Latin American social changes, women’s struggle and her generation’s quest for its own identity. Lorelei Baughman has spent her life in California, with interludes in France and the San Juan Islands. She’s been in sales, driven a taxi, and owns a business. Now that she’s writing, she looks back most fondly on driving the taxi. She writes short stories, and graduated from UC Riverside in 2015 with a BA in Creative Writing. She loves teaching almost as much as she loves writing, and has conducted a Creative Writing class at the Chino Women’s Correctional Facility. She has been published in Bravura and Mosaic. Her stories are about ordinary people in Las Vegas and Nebraska, but she secretly wants to write about angels and genii wielding scimitars up in the ozone, inflicting their whims on the grocery clerks and civil engineers below. She lives in Temecula, California with her husband and dogs. Ashanti Anderson earned her B.S. in Psychology from Xavier University of Louisiana. Before officially deciding to pursue her goals as a writer, she was a research assistant in a lab that studied the effects of music on the cognition of individuals with dementia. She has published poetry, creative non-fiction, essays, and research articles through various print and electronic publications. Her interests include psychology, theology, cooking, and nature, and she usually (sometimes unintentionally) incorporates at least two of those into every piece that she writes. Alicia Mosley was born in Santa Cruz, California and spent most of her life with one foot in Northern California and the other in Southern. In her writing, she is interested in exploring the ways people straddle the intersections of place, culture, and time. Alicia currently lives in Riverside with her four children and is working on her first novel. Emily Margaret Wells writes true stories (journalism) and obliquely true stories (fiction). She is working on a novel about art, family and religion, which she plans to complete during the MFA at UC Riverside. Formerly a newspaper reporter, fashion model and ballet dancer, she lives and works with a nameless cat.
Out of the dark of the Moon Dark of the Year Cauldron of despair, Coyote ladles out Bears Ears Triumphant, (still needing us all to protect what is sacred and precious). Sane Reverent Indigenuity Spiraling into the Memosphere. Hosting Bill Hedden and Terry Tempest Williams. Bill Hedden is Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Trust, under his leadership the organization has led in developing ecologically sensible forest restoration programs and is partnering with Colorado Plateau tribes to win designation of the first-ever Native American national monument at the Bears Ears in southeast Utah. The wild lands of our collective soul in Utah have assumed human form to come tell us its story. “Today, the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Uintah and Ouray Ute, and Ute Mountain Ute tribes have formally united to secure a presidential proclamation establishing a 1.9 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument… The five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition have developed a visionary and workable plan for America's first national monument that will be collaboratively managed by the tribes and the federal government. Their proposal envisions a world-class center for the integration of Native American traditional knowledge and western science at Bears Ears. The Coalition's proposal has been favorably received by the White House and appointees in the Obama Administration at the departments of Interior and Agriculture.” (From August 11, 2016 Interview) And now – Victory! Obama has designated Bears Ears as a national monument (Article from The Guardian). We will be interweaving with Terry Tempest Williams – author, activist, naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. “So here is my question,” she asks, “what might a different kind of power look like, feel like, and can power be redistributed equitably even beyond our own species?” In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. In 2009, Terry Tempest Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series on the national parks. She is also the recipient of the 2010 David R. Brower Conservation Award for activism. The Community of Christ International Peace Award was presented in 2011 to Terry Tempest Williams in recognition of significant peacemaking vision, advocacy and action. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Ms. Williams received the Sierra Club's John Muir Award honoring a distinguished record of leadership in American conservation. · Bill Hedden www.GrandCanyonTrust.com · Terry Tempest Williams www.CoyoteClan.com The post The Visionary Activist Show – Bears Ears Victory appeared first on KPFA.
Chris Abani’s books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian and Serbian.
Chris Abani' reads from his novel The Secret History of Las Vegas. Cristina García reads from her novel King of Cuba. The discussion took place on April 1, 2014, and was moderated by Elena Creef, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Cristina García is the author of six novels: King of Cuba, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, A Handbook to Luck, Monkey Hunting, The Agüero Sisters, winner of the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize; and Dreaming in Cuban, finalist for the National Book Award. García has edited two anthologies, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature(2006) and Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (2003). She is also the author of three works for young readers, Dreams of Significant Girls (2011), a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s; The Dog Who Loved the Moon, illustrated by Sebastia Serra, (Atheneum, 2008); and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox (Simon and Schuster, 2008). A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death (Akashic Books), was published in 2010. García holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Barnard College, and a Master's degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into 14 languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has been a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and The University of Miami. She teaches part time at Texas Tech University and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14 Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames,Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne's Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He holds a BA in English (Nigeria), an MA in Gender and Culture (Birkbeck College, University of London), an MA in English and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing (University of Southern California). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize & a Guggenheim Award.
Readings and Lectures from the Port Townsend Writers' Conference
We are pleased to present a reading by Chris Abani, recorded at the 2009 Port Townsend Writers' Conference. Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, received a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria, an MA in English, Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has resided in the United States since 2001. He is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize and a Guggenheim Award. Abani's fiction includes The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin 2014), Song For Night *(Akashic, 2007), *The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems *(Peepal Tree Press, 2010) *Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004),Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003) and *Kalakuta Republic *(Saqi, 2001). --- The Port Townsend Writers' Conferece began in 1974 thanks to novelist Bill Ransom, who envisioned an egalitarian, non-hierarchical conference where the emphasis was on the craft of literary writing. Such writers and welcomers as Jim Heynen, Carol Jane Bangs, Sam Hamill, Rebecca Brown, and many others continued this emphasis on the writing craft over the next few decades, and the Conference has become an annual pilgrimage for many. Whether you’re seeking to create or revise new work, find writing community, or simply desire a writing retreat in an inspirational location, Centrum is at the heart of the thriving Pacific Northwest literary scene.
Terry Tempest Williams When Women Were Birds: A Reading Terry Tempest Williams has been called “a citizen writer,” a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. “So here is my question,” she asks, “what might a different kind of power look like, feel like, and can power be redistributed equitably even beyond our own species?” Williams, like her writing, cannot be categorized. She has testified before Congress on women’s health issues, been a guest at the White House, camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses, and worked as “a barefoot artist” in Rwanda. Join us for a reading by Terry from her latest book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Terry Tempest Williams In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. In 2009, Terry Tempest Williams was featured in Ken Burns’ PBS series on the national parks. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.
With his first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengestu made one of the most impressive literary debuts of recent years. Translated into more than a dozen languages, it garnered awards from around the world, including a "5 Under 35" award from the National Book Foundation.In How To Read the Air, Mengestu tells an even richer, more complex story of two generations of an African immigrant family and the America which they seek to make their home. Mengestu has drawn on his own background as an Ethiopian immigrant, as well as that of his family, to produce this compelling, multi-layered tale of identity, love, family, revolution, and reconciliation.Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa in 1978 and came with his mother and sister two years later to join his father in Peoria, Illinois. He graduated from Georgetown University and received an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the receipient of a Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.An excerpt from How to Read the Air appeared in the July 12, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, after Mengestu was selected as one of their "20 under 40" writers of 2010.Recorded On: Sunday, October 24, 2010
Terry Tempest Williams Finding Beauty in A Broken World Terry is one of the most exquisite and powerful voices for healing ourselves and the earth. Terry has been called “a citizen writer” who speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A gifted naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, Terry has shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. “So here is my question,” she asks, “what might a different kind of power look like, feel like, and can power be redistributed equitably even beyond our own species?” Join Michael Lerner in conversation with Terry about her book, Finding Beauty in A Broken World. Terry Tempest Williams Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books. She is a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. In 2009, Terry Tempest Williams was featured in Ken Burns’ PBS series on the national parks. She is also the recipient of the 2010 David R. Brower Conservation Award for activism. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.