University of Minnesota Press

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

Miscarriage and infant loss are experiences that disproportionately affect Indigenous women and women of color. WHAT GOD IS HONORED HERE? is the first book of its kind, a literary collection of voices of these women coming together to speak about the traumas and tragedies of womanhood. "We are talking about equity. We are talking about racism. We are talking about all of the things that we’ve been needing to talk about. This work is only still beginning," says co-editor Kao Kalia Yang, who is joined here by co-editor Shannon Gibney and writers Michelle Borok, Soniah Kamal, Jami Nakamura Lin, and Seema Reza. This edited conversation was recorded in July 2020. More about the book: z.umn.edu/wgihh A transcript of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-wgihh

Once a pregnant sixteen-year-old incarcerated in the Minnesota juvenile justice system, now a celebrated writer, arts activist, and teacher who helps others unlock their creative power, Carolyn Holbrook has heeded the call to tell the story of her life. Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify is a memoir in essays in which Holbrook summons untold stories stifled by pain or prejudice or ignorance, and ultimately demonstrates how creative writing can be a powerful tool for challenging racism. Holbrook was founder of the literary arts organization SASE: The Write Place and now leads More Than a Single Story, a series of community conversations for people of color and indigenous writers and arts activists. She is joined here by Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, a writer based in the Twin Cities and the author of Soft: A Memoir. This edited conversation was recorded in July 2020. More about the book: z.umn.edu/holbrook A transcript of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-holbrook

Digitize and Punish is a comprehensive study of the use of digital technology in American criminal justice. Brian Jefferson shows how the technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment. After examining how the criminal justice system conceptualized the benefits of computers to surveil criminalized populations, Jefferson focuses on New York City and Chicago to provide a grounded account of the deployment of digital computing in urban police departments. This conversation between Jefferson and University of Minnesota Press senior editor Pieter Martin was recorded in July 2020. More about the book: z.umn.edu/digitizeandpunish A transcript of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-digitizeandpunish

Isherwood in Transit is a collection of essays that considers Christopher Isherwood as a transnational writer whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s. We are here today to talk about Isherwood’s reception and history of publication in the US, as well as what we mean by the title ‘Isherwood in Transit’, which is open to interpretation and refers to the writer’s movement on a personal and spiritual level as much as geographic. Here we have book editors Jim Berg and Chris Freeman, who have coedited several volumes on Isherwood including The Isherwood Century and The American Isherwood. Berg is associate dean of faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City. Freeman is professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California. They are joined by University of Minnesota Press director Doug Armato. This conversation was recorded in June 2020. More about the book: z.umn.edu/intransit. A transcript of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-intransit

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020. More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold