University of Minnesota Press

If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your summer and considered (1) making history, (2) spending the whole thing on a wild 2,000-mile canoe trip, and (3) putting your relationship with your best friend to the ultimate test, then you know exactly what author Natalie Warren has experienced. In the summer after graduating college, Natalie and Ann Raiho set off on the banks of the Minnesota River with the ultimate goal of reaching the Arctic waters of Canada’s Hudson Bay in 90 days or less. Natalie writes all about their journey in her book HUDSON BAY BOUND, and is here today to chat with another history-making explorer, Ann Bancroft, who, along with Liv Arnesen, were the first two women to cross Antarctica. This conversation was recorded in October 2020. More on Hudson Bay Bound: Two Women, One Dog, Two Thousand Miles to the Arctic: z.umn.edu/hudsonbaybound. More on Ann Bancroft's historic journey across Antarctica: z.umn.edu/nohorizon

TIMESCALES is a book that explores how time has seemed to shift in the Anthropocene and examines the human inability to see and to witness time as an element of environmental catastrophe. The volume brings together humanities scholars, scientists, and artists to develop new ways of thinking about the world with its human and nonhuman entanglements and diverse systems of knowledge. Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is co-editor, along with Bethany Wiggin and Patricia Kim, of Timescales. Fornoff is joined here by three volume contributors: Jen Telesca, assistant professor of environmental justice in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute; Wai Chee Dimock, editor of PMLA, who teaches at Yale University; and Charles Tung, professor of English at Seattle University. This conversation was recorded in December 2020.REFERENCES:-Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities. z.umn.edu/timescales-Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna (Jen Telesca)-Modernism and Time Machines (Charles Tung)-Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (Wai Chee Dimock)-’Salmon’ by Jack Scoltock: https://www.firstpeople.us/native-american-poems/salmon.html-Black ‘47: Native American Poetry (Jack Scoltock)-”Irish support for Native American Covid-19 relief highlights historic bond”: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/09/irish-native-american-coronavirus-historic-bond-Salmon in the Trees (Amy Gulick)-Beyond Settler Time (Mark Rifkin)-“How the Covid-19 pandemic has been curtailed in Cherokee Nation”: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/17/how-covid19-has-been-curtailed-in-cherokee-nation/-”The Amazon Is on Fire—Indigenous Rights Can Help Put It Out,” by Naomi Klein: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/26/amazon-fire-indigenous-rights-can-help-put-it-out-“Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene” by Kyle Whyte. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2514848618777621-The Human Planet (Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis)MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES:-Ep. 17: Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment. With Patricia Eunji Kim, Kate Farquhar, and Marcia Ferguson: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-17-Ep. 12: Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change. With Bethany Wiggin, Frankie Pavia, Jason Bell, and Jane Dmochowski: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-12

“Historically, women have had to frame their own intellectual advancement in alternative terms.” When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. WHAT A LIBRARY MEANS TO A WOMAN is a book by Sheila Liming that examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America. For Wharton, a library meant a home, a school, a sense of independence, a place of solitude but not loneliness, and a place where she set rules for herself as a writer and as a reader. Liming is joined here by Nynke Dorhout and Anne Schuyler of The Mount in Lenox, MA, and by Wharton scholar Donna Campbell. This conversation was recorded in December 2020. For more information: z.umn.edu/whatalibrarymeans edithwhartonslibrary.org edithwharton.org whartoncompleteworks.org

When talking about climate change, what do an oceanographer and a literary scholar have in common? How might these distant disciplines begin to speak to each other? TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES is a volume that includes frictive chit-chats from scholars from far-flung disciplines and explores what they have to teach each other about the timescales of environmental change. Bethany Wiggin is one of three co-editors of this volume, along with Carolyn Fornoff and Patricia Kim. Wiggin is director of the first established academic program in environmental humanities at a major research university: the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. She is joined here by oceanographer Frankie Pavia, law student Jason Bell, and geophysicist Jane Dmochowski. This conversation was recorded in November 2020. More information: z.umn.edu/timescales. MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES: -Ep. 17: Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment. With Patricia Eunji Kim, Kate Farquhar, and Marcia Ferguson: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-17 -Ep. 14: Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history. With Carolyn Fornoff, Jen Telesca, Wai Chee Dimock, and Charles Tung: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-14

On this podcast, Mindy Greiling, a mental health advocate and former state representative, has hosted a series of conversations around mental health care in Minnesota: the first was with Alisa Roth on the state’s criminal treatment of mental illness, and the second with Dr. George Realmuto on mental health and substance abuse. In this third and final installment in the mental health series, Mindy talks about recovery with John Trepp, who she calls a “maverick” and wishes there were more like him in the mental health system. Trepp is author of Lodge Magic: Real Life Adventures in Mental Health Recovery and is former executive director of Tasks Unlimited, Minnesota’s Fairweather lodge program, which provides housing and recovery services for people with mental illness. This conversation was recorded in September 2020. References: -Fix What You Can by Mindy Greiling: http://z.umn.edu/fixwhatyoucan -Lodge Magic: Real Life Adventures in Mental Health Recovery by John Trepp -Surviving Schizophrenia by E. Fuller Torrey -Tasks Unlimited: https://tasksunlimited.org/ -National Alliance on Mental Illness: https://www.nami.org/ -NAMI Minnesota: https://namimn.org/

Consumption is on pause for a lot of people during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Whether that's given you cause to clean out your stuff or become closer with your stuff, we're here to talk about meaning we assign to the objects around us. Christine Harold is a professor of communication at the University of Washington. Her new book THINGS WORTH KEEPING: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World, investigates the attachments we form to the objects we buy, keep, and discard, and explores how these attachments might be marshaled to create less wasteful practices and balance our consumerist and ecological impulses. Nicole Seymour is a professor of English based in Southern California whose book BAD ENVIRONMENTALISM: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age seeks out a new way to talk about environmentalism that is less performance and self-righteousness and embraces irony and humor. This conversation was recorded in October 2020. For more information about their books, visit z.umn.edu/thingsworthkeeping and z.umn.edu/badenvironmentalism. References/further reading and watching: Hyerim Shin Wildboyz Rich Doyle’s Darwin’s Pharmacy Jeff Nealon’s Plant Theory Fantastic Fungi, a 2019 documentary

Mindy Greiling was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives for twenty years. She has served on state and national boards of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and is on the University of Minnesota Psychiatry Community Advisory Council. George Realmuto is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Both George and Mindy are parents of children with brain disease. Mindy’s son, Jim, is 42 and was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in his early twenties. George’s daughter, a mother and an award-winning creative, passed away in 2019 as a result of chemical and mental illness. She would be 38 today. Both are here to share their experiences, their expertise, and their hopes for the future of caring for loved ones facing mental and substance use disorders. This conversation was recorded in September 2020. Resources: -National Alliance on Mental Illness: https://www.nami.org/ -NAMI Minnesota: https://namimn.org/

In the era of climate change, how can we imagine better futures? AN ECOTOPIAN LEXICON is a collaborative volume of short, engaging essays that offer ecologically productive terms—drawn from other languages, science fiction, and subcultures of resistance—to envision what could be. The book connects thirty authors and fourteen artists from a range of backgrounds and locations, and three of them are here in discussion today: anthropologist and herbalist Charis Boke, visual artist Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, and Sam Solnick of the University of Liverpool.For more information, visit ecotopianlexicon.com. Works and writers referenced in this episode in order of appearance: David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants Carolyn Fornoff The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt bell hooks Evelyn Reilly Karen Barad Donna Haraway Climate Changed by Philippe Squarzoni Thanks to the conversants: Charis Boke, charisboke.com Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, michelleksfung.com Sam Solnick, @LitSciHub on Twitter

In his early twenties, Mindy Greiling’s son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state’s inadequate mental health system. Her book FIX WHAT YOU CAN is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate. Greiling is joined here today by Minnesota Public Radio’s mental health reporter Alisa Roth, author of INSANE: AMERICA’S CRIMINAL TREATMENT OF MENTAL ILLNESS. This edited conversation was recorded in August 2020. For more information, please visit z.umn.edu/fixwhatyoucan.

The Anthropocenic condition gives us “a sense of the proximity we have to things we might otherwise have thought very distant from us.” David Farrier, author of Anthropocene Poetics, discusses deep time, extinction, and intimacy, asking how poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time. David is professor of literature and the environment at the University of Edinburgh, and he is joined here in conversation by Adam Dickinson, who is the author of four books of poetry including Anatomic. Adam is a professor in the English department at Brock University in Ontario. For more information, please visit z.umn.edu/poetics. Topics discussed include diffraction-based poetics; Donna Haraway's reminder that we are kin-making beings; the concept of the Clinamen; Evelyn Reilly; Elizabeth Bishop; Seamus Heaney; Deborah Bird Rose; Karen Barad; Alfred Jarry. Additionally, David and Adam recommend poets whose work addresses the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman Angela Rawlings Harryette Mullen Juliana Spahr Jen Bervin Alexis Pauline Gumbs Liz Howard Dea Antonsen and Ida Bencke Morten Søndergaard Karin Bolender Amanda Ackerman Craig Santos Perez Sean Hewitt