Veronica House, "Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact" (Utah State UP, 2025)

Dec 20, 2025

Dr. Veronica House, an Associate Professor at Boston College and director of the Writing Center, dives deep into her book, exploring how writing influences food systems and community engagement. She emphasizes the importance of aligning writing curricula with local issues. House shares her personal journey connecting with her ancestral roots in Boulder and highlights transformative student experiences through community projects. She also discusses the complexities of defining 'local food' and argues for humility in community research to foster meaningful connections in food justice.

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ADVICE

Teach What Matters Locally

Identify what matters where you live and shape your curriculum around those local issues.
Get involved with community conversations to make classroom work relevant and impactful.

ANECDOTE

Ancestral Tie to Boulder Farming

Veronica discovered a great-great ancestor who homesteaded in Boulder and taught locally in the 1870s–80s.
That ancestral tie deepened her sense of responsibility and spurred reflections on being a descendant of settlers.

ADVICE

Get Students Into The Community

Use community-engaged projects to show students writing's real-world impact and counter semester-only work.
Bring students to farms, food banks, and nonprofits so they see embodied practices and feel empowered to act.

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This episode features a conversation with the inspiring Dr. Veronica House, whose book Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (Utah State University Press, 2025) explores how writing takes shape within community networks. House brings a generous scholarly voice to questions of writing, community partnership, and meaningful collaboration, and this episode offers a chance to hear how her ideas grew from years of work alongside the people who shaped the project.

From Dr. House’s faculty bio:

Veronica House is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Writing Center at Boston College. She is the author of Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (2025) and Medea's Chorus: Myth and 20th Century Women's Poetry Since 1950 (2014). Veronica's recent teaching, community work, and scholarship focus on food movements, community-engaged writing, and writing as a force for social change.

Veronica is Founding Director of the Conference on Community Writing and Founding Executive Director of the Coalition for Community Writing. She consults with faculty at colleges and universities across the country to design community-engaged courses and programs. Veronica is recipient of Campus Compact's Engaged Scholar Award; University of Colorado's Women Who Make A Difference Award; and numerous teaching awards. She serves as Consulting Editor of the Community Literacy Journal.

ABOUT THE BOOK: In Local Organic, Veronica House explores ways to collaboratively build resilient local food systems and coalitions across disciplines and communities. Framed by a study of language, power, and food both nationally and in Boulder, Colorado, the book offers teachers, organizers, activists, and scholars ideas and examples for building interdisciplinary and intercommunity coalitional ecologies through writing in a methodology for engagement that the author calls ecological community writing. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, writing, and project-building with undergraduate writing students and project partners, House theorizes how work to encourage local community-based writing becomes an ecological thread connecting things, ideas, and people. Local Organic is a book about collaboratively building community-derived definitions for resilient local food systems and how faculty and students can work to ethically partner with local communities using distributed definition building.
Local Organic offers writing and rhetoric faculty and graduate students an ecological methodology to produce, teach, and theorize writing to help communities engage with a wide array of social issues and to work toward individual and community-level impacts.

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