In 1989, author John McPhee published his seminal work, “The Control of Nature.” Written in three long but highly informative and entertaining chapters, McPhee tells tales of human hubris, demonstrating conclusively that when humans begin to see themselves as being greater, stronger than, or superior to nature, nature will put us in our place, every time.

In this episode, Natural Curiosity Project host Steven Shepard talks about McPhee’s book in the context of what we’re experiencing today—and shares a few practical things that we can do to set things right.

Episode 203 - The Control Of Nature

S.L. (Sandi) Wisenberg, award-winning author, editor & teacher, and Dr. Joe Kraus, Chair of the Department of English & Theatre at the University of Scranton, speaking about Ms. Wisenberg's latest collection,  "The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of a Home" to be issued on March 31, 2023 by Umass Press. The conversation took place in connection with an author event & reading featuring Sandi Wisenberg on Wednesday, March 22 at 6 pm in Pern Auditorium on the U of S campus.  Admission is free and open to the public.  www.scranton.edu/

Sandi Wisenberg; Joe Kraus; March 21 2023

On this episode of Below the Radar, Charlotte Gill, author of the books Ladykiller and Eating Dirt, sits down with Am Johal to explore her latest book, Almost Brown, which shares her experience growing up as a mixed-race child in a multi-cultural/religious household. Charlotte describes the family dynamics that led her Punjabi father to marry her English mother and become estranged from his father, and in turn, the process that led Charlotte to becoming estranged from her own father.
The episode ends on a meaningful conversation about how mixed identities narratives have changed across generations, and how the language to discuss those identities have evolved.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/219-charlotte-gill.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/219-charlotte-gill.html

Resources:
Charlotte Gill: https://charlottegill.com/about/
Almost Brown: https://charlottegill.com/almost-brown/
Ladykiller: Stories: https://charlottegill.com/ladykiller/
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe: https://charlottegill.com/eating-dirt/

Bio:
Charlotte Gill is the author of Eating Dirt, a national bestseller that won the B.C. National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her previous book, Ladykiller, was a Governor General’s Award nominee. Charlotte is the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre as well as faculty in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College. Her latest book, Almost Brown, a mixed-race family memoir, is published by Penguin Random House.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Almost Brown — with Charlotte Gill.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, September 19, 2023. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/219-charlotte-gill.html.

Almost Brown — with Charlotte Gill

Elizabeth Russell Practice with Audio

Saeeda Wright, Leanne Grabel, Jennifer Perrine, Judy Jiang, and Brian Benson read pieces published in Oregon Humanities Magazine and Beyond the Margins.

Oregon Humanities Live - November 1, 2023

Based on a 2005 news story about a sparrow killed during the World Domino competition in the Netherlands.

Passeridae, or the Fall of a Sparrow

Audio Essay

Elizabeth Russell "On Breaking Up the Band" Audio Essay

Stillman College Asst. Prof. of Music, Dr. Allison Upshaw, discusses her "creative nonfiction" project, "reframing: Narratives of African American Female Landowners in Alabama's Black Belt" that captures more about Black women who own land than what appears in records and produces their stories in a way that makes them fully human.

Links mentioned in the episode:

Stillman College:  https://stillman.edu/ 

Alabama Department of Archives and History Statement of Recommitment:  https://archives.alabama.gov/about/docs/ADAH_statement_recommitment.pdf 

Dr. Allison Upshaw personal website:  https://allisonupshawphd.com/ 

Alabama Humanities Alliance grants:  https://alabamahumanities.org/grants/ 

Alabama State Council on the Arts:  https://arts.alabama.gov/ 

[On Heir Property] J. F. Dyer, "Heir Property: Legal and Cultural Dimensions of Collective Landownership," Alabama Agriculture Experiment Station Bulletin 667, May 2007: https://aurora.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/11200/4107/BULL0667.pdf 

"reFraming: Narratives of African American Female Landowners in Alabama's Black Belt" on Prezi Video:  https://prezi.com/v/view/Es7m9C77MxQoQ4yoLTuD/ 

"OPERAtunities":  https://allisonupshawphd.com/services/ 
"Artivism":  https://allisonupshawphd.com/artivism/ 

Rather read? Here's a link to the transcript:  https://tinyurl.com/bd2ztwbb 

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to be less than 100% accurate.

The Alabama History Podcast's producer is Marty Olliff and its associate producer is Laura Murray.

Founded in 1947, the Alabama Historical Association is the oldest statewide historical society in Alabama. The AHA provides opportunities for meaningful engagement with the past through publications, meetings, historical markers, and other programs. See the website www.alabamahistory.net/

Episode 69 -- Allison Upshaw On Black Women And Land In AL Black Belt

Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre writer, she has published work in New England Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and several journals and anthologies. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was released in March 2023. Selecting her manuscript, Rae Armantrout called it “Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” Daniel’s transcontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022), was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Review’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.  An alumna of Yale University and the University of Michigan’s Writers’ MFA, she turns to her third and fourth books, supported by fellowships from Brown University and Cave Canem. Holding a PhD from USC, she is recalled to California for the third time as the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.

In the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Mary-Alice Daniel confronts culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds. African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals animate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, the poems stray inside speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It engineers an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy—these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime.

The Write Process - Season 6

Mary-Alice Daniel on Mass for Shut-Ins

Brian Fanelli and Joe Kraus, co-editors of 
"Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology,"
released on July 16, 2024, by Belt Publishing.
There will be a book launch event on Saturday,
July 27th at 3:00 at the Albright Memorial
Library, 500 Vine Street in Scranton.
To register: www.albright.org/ 
https://beltpublishing.com/

Brian Fanelli; Joe Kraus; July 16 2024

An essay read by the writer Joe Sacksteder.

Tuesday Night Bieber by Joe Sacksteder

I Was a Teenage Dominatrix is the true story of one woman’s quest for self-education, in academia and beyond. Kenney wrote a sex work memoir before the term ‘sex work’ was commonplace, unwittingly becoming part of what the New York Times dubbed the ‘sex work literati’ of the early 2000s.

Shawna is the author of four books, including the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, and most recently, Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation’s Capital 1988-1998 (Rare Bird Books) Her arts journalism and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Ms., Pitchfork, Vice, Bust and more. She serves as a Contributing Editor with Narratively Magazine and leads international writing retreat Hamlet's Hideaway in Denmark every summer.

The Write Process - Season 7

Shawna Kenney on I Was a Teenage Dominatrix

Lena Nelson is a writer, teacher and citizen historian who has spent seventeen years researching and documenting the story of Samantha Smith and creating www.SamanthaSmith.info, the online archive of news articles and videos about Samantha Smith. She was a nominee for the Allegra Johnson Prize and has worked with numerous news, educational, and humanitarian organizations around the world. She lives with her family in Southern California.

America's Youngest Ambassador: The Cold War Story of Samantha Smith's Lasting Message of Peace, explores how nuclear paranoia that engulfed the US and the Soviet Union in 1982. Samantha Smith, a fifth grader from Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to the Kremlin asking the Soviet leader if he was going to start a war. When Pravda, the biggest Soviet newspaper, published her letter—and Samantha received an unprecedented invitation to visit the Soviet Union—her family embarked on a historic journey that helped transform the hearts and minds of two nations on a collision course. 


Lena Nelson on America's Youngest Ambassador

Blending personal narrative and investigative reporting, Emmy Award-winning journalist Cole Kazdin reveals that disordered eating is an epidemic crisis killing millions of women.

Women of all ages struggle with disordered eating, preoccupation with food, and body anxiety. Journalist Cole Kazdin was one such woman, and she set out to discover why her own full recovery from an eating disorder felt so impossible. Interviewing women across the country as well as the world’s most renowned researchers, she discovered that most people with eating disorders never receive treatment––the fact that she did made her one of the lucky ones.

Kazdin takes us to the doorstep of the diet industry and research community, exposing the flawed systems that claim to be helping us, and revealing disordered eating for the crisis that it is: a mental illness with the second highest mortality rate (after opioid-related deaths) that no one wants to talk about. Along the way, she identifies new treatments not yet available to the general public, grass roots movements to correct racial disparities in care, and strategies for navigating true health while still living in a dysfunctional world.

What's Eating Us is an urgent battle cry coupled with stories and strategies about what works and how to finally heal—for real.

Cole Kazdin is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety (St. Martin's Press 2023). Selected as a Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read, the book blends personal narrative and investigative reporting to reveal disordered eating as an epidemic crisis killing millions of women. Cole has written for TIME, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast, MEL Magazine, and more, and was a regular contributor to VICE. She has produced television for Good Morning America, Nightline and World News Tonight. Cole has told stories live on The Moth's Mainstage across the country, The Moth Radio Hour on NPR,, and has performed storytelling all over Southern California where she is a proud, three-time Moth GrandSLAM champion. Her solo performances have garnered national praise and been optioned for film. A contributing author to the bestselling book, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, she coaches and teaches writers all over the world, as well as leading workshops and classes for corporations and universities and currently teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. 


Cole Kazdin on What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety

You learn a lot about a person when you live together, some things you’d be OK never knowing. But what does living with someone teach you about yourself? This essay arose out of that question and helped to put on paper the strange experience that is cohabitation.

Derek Maiolo is a writer and photographer based in Pittsburgh.

Derek Maiolo, Impressionable, nonfiction

An absolutely packed episode this week with poet, pilgrim and now prose writer Jake Morris-Campbell. We delve into his new book Between the Salt and the Ash, his involvement in editing Marratide: Selected Poems of William Martin and how his pilgrimage from Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral revealed more of the North than he could have ever bargained for.

Find out more:
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526175373/
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/marratide-1377
https://www.durhamminers.org/
X:
https://x.com/jakecampbell88
https://x.com/ManchesterUP
https://x.com/BloodaxeBooks
BlueSky
https://bsky.app/profile/jakecampbell88.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/manchesterup.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/bloodaxebooks.bsky.social
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/jakemorriscampbell
https://www.instagram.com/manchester_university_press
https://www.instagram.com/bloodaxebooks

Music credit: 'Water of Tyne' performed by Edinburgh University Brass Band (2009) arranged by Jack Stobbs, edited and scored for Brass Band by David Dye. Used with kind permission of the publisher, arranger and performers.

Episode 70: Jake Morris-Campbell

Exploring the blurred lines between technology, emotion, and human connection, this podcast dives into the stories and questions shaping our digital lives. Artificial Love weaves together narrative, philosophy, and real-world cases to provoke, unsettle, and inspire.

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lWKQ37W5WO9X9hDOcUuNHzXzmMSvmagESTIty_BlW4Q/edit?usp=sharing

Artificial Love

Northern Voices explores Northern writers (published and unpublished), storytelling and publishing. The podcast is hosted by Jen Bowden, a writer, editor and journalist with a PhD in Creative Writing from Curtin University exploring biases against the North in the UK book industry.

I photograph, record, and write about the natural world. I see, I listen, I write. I fundamentally believe that curiosity can save the world—so I publish stories to make people curious. Ultimately, curiosity leads to discovery, discovery leads to knowledge, knowledge leads to insight, and insight leads to understanding. Please enjoy!

Amplifying ideas that fly below the radar. We talk environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community-building and urban issues with featured guests.

This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement as a part of our Knowledge Democracy Project @ 312 Main — encouraging the meaningful exchange of ideas and information across communities.

Hosted and currently produced by:
Am Johal
Joey Malbon
Julia Aoki
Kathy Feng
Samantha Walters

Visit our website for archived audio and video recordings of our public events: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/library.html

Jami is a media and communications student exploring the space between philosophy, technology, and sound.

All writing is a tightrope walk from where the idea originates to the moment a book, movie, or TV episode emerges in the world. In The Write Process, Charles Jensen, director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, asks writing instructors and students who’ve walked the tightrope and come out the other side to talk about their process. Each episode tells the story of how one writer took one project from concept to completion, showcasing the various—and varied—paths we take when we follow one good idea all the way home.

New tracks tagged #Creative Nonfiction