April

[00:00:00 ] April: [00:00:00 ] Okay,

[00:00:00 ] Brett: [00:00:00 ] Hi, I’m Brett Terpstra and you’re listening to systematic. My guest this week is April Herndon, a professor of English. How’s it going April?

[00:00:10 ] April: [00:00:10 ] good. I mean, as well as it can be in a pandemic. Thanks for asking.

[00:00:13 ] Brett: [00:00:13 ] I feel like there’s a lot more to your introduction. You are in my mind a lot more than just a professor of English, but I wasn’t sure where to go with it after that.

[00:00:22 ]April: [00:00:22 ] It could go a lot of different places. I appreciate you sort of letting me be all of the different. Things I am. You know, in addition to teaching English, I have an interdisciplinary degree. So I’ve taught science and technology studies. I was a director of a non-profit organization called the intersex society of North America, where I did medical advocacy.

[00:00:42 ] For children who are born with mixed reproductive and or sexual anatomy I’ve been on a steering committee, started a union at Michigan state, or help start that union. That certainly wasn’t a solo effort. So yeah, I’ve done a lot of different things and have finally settled here in Winona as a professor of English.

[00:01:00 ] [00:00:59 ] Brett: [00:00:59 ] Did you go to Michigan state?

[00:01:01 ] April: [00:01:01 ] I did.

[00:01:02 ] Brett: [00:01:02 ] And why did I assume you had gone to school in the South?

[00:01:05 ]April: [00:01:05 ] Well, because I’ve still got a really, really strong accent, even though I haven’t lived in Appalachia since I was 18. So I was a Michigan. Let’s see, how long was I in Michigan? I was in Michigan for seven years and then came to Minnesota and I’ve been at Winona state for 15 years and still the accent lingers.

[00:01:25 ] So yeah, you think if I’d gone to school in the Midwest a little bit more of this would have faded, but, uh, it’s got some pretty good sticking quality.

[00:01:31 ] Brett: [00:01:31 ] So you are, we’re going to talk a lot about how I know you through Facebook, because that is where I, I learned the most about you and you are a, you. Frequently use colloquialisms, but you never use the same one twice. Are the colloquialisms you use? Are they real or are you just really good at making up Southern sounding colloquialisms?

[00:01:56 ]April: [00:01:56 ] A mix of both. Um, I do have my own phone [00:02:00 ] for things. There’s no doubt about that. That’s a family inherited trait. My dad was incredibly quick with it, but a lot of them really are Appalachian sayings. And I think one of the things that people really forget about when they think about that part of the country and the poverty comes to mind, um, the coal mining industry comes to mind.

[00:02:20 ] But they forget that for a very long time, Appalachia has had an incredible oral tradition. These were people who, although they were not formally educated, love to tell stories, passed on all kinds of really important ideas and skills and all of that was done through language. And so from an Appalachian perspective, you know, why would you say that the road outside is slippery?

[00:02:43 ] When you could say it’s a slickest, greenhouse, not. Right. I mean, it’s waving more vivid people. Remember that, you know, that makes an impression. I mean, somebody says that to you. You think I better get my ice cleats on you? Don’t just go run out there, like to check it out. You already know it’s rough. [00:03:00 ] So yeah, I do have a lot of those.

[00:03:01 ] And like I said, that that’s part of the Appalachia that I wish people knew more about.

[00:03:06 ] Brett: [00:03:06 ] Did that kind of a fascination with the oral history play into your, uh, eventual education and English and professional life in English.

[00:03:18 ]April: [00:03:18 ] For sure. Um, one of the things that was really interesting to me is I didn’t really have an incredible appreciation for Appalachia when I was still in high school. Um, you know, for me it seemed like a place to get out of. I looked around. I saw people who were living in poverty and I loved my family, especially my maternal grandparents and my maternal grandmother, like huge influence on my life, taught me more stuff than I can even start to count up, but I wasn’t sure what I would do if I stayed there.

[00:03:50 ] And that was sort of my main impression was. Leave when I got to college and I started taking English classes and had professors who were teaching Appalachian literature. [00:04:00 ] And I really started to understand that we had our own culture. We had our own dialect. Um, we had this really rich tradition of telling stories.

[00:04:12 ] It really made me want to learn more about it. And I do think that’s one of the biggest reasons that. I went as far as I did in terms of my education. And in terms of studying English, is that for me, the literature was a window onto a place where I had actually lived and it still made me see a different, and that’s.

[00:04:33 ] That’s a really a powerful statement about the effect that words and storytelling can have on someone to take somebody that grew up there and show them a different set of stories and help them see that thing that they’re so familiar with in a different way. That’s amazing.

[00:04:50 ]Brett: [00:04:50 ] Yeah. That’s awesome. So one of the topics that, uh, that I know you post on frequently and have even written a [00:05:00 ] book about is fat advocacy. Is that the right word for it?

[00:05:04 ] April: [00:05:04 ] Yeah. That’s one way to say it. There’s a, if you want to think about it from a medical perspective, there’s a movement called health at every size. Um, and most of us who are in the health at every size movement and that’s more medical professionals. And then folks like me who publish in a field that we call fat studies.

[00:05:21 ] Um, we’re all people who are trying to help other folks understand that fatness very much like gender or race or class or disability that these are constructed social categories. And although there are things about people’s bodies that underlie all of those, the meanings that we attribute to those things, those are social constructions and we choose.

[00:05:44 ] How to construct those meanings. And so we’re all working for a world where, when we talk about fatness, we’re talking about it, not as a stigmatized trait, but more, just a neutral descriptor of how people’s bodies happened to be in the world.

[00:05:58 ] Brett: [00:05:58 ] Yeah. So [00:06:00 ] the, uh, the title of the book is fat blame. The war on obesity, victimizes women and children. Um, so first of all, let’s define, there’s been how, how long has this idea of, uh, the, um, PA UPenn and not pandemic

[00:06:17 ]Epidemic! I got pandemic on the brain.

[00:06:20 ] April: [00:06:20 ] We all do, which is an interesting thing to think about just that term. Right. Um, and maybe part of the reason, like it’s hard for you to recall it tied to obesity is that that’s normally a term that we use to refer to something that’s contagious. So rhetorically the war on obesity is a really interesting moment when we’ve taken language that we would normally only use.

[00:06:41 ] If we were talking about a virus or a bacterial infection and we’ve actually applied it. To the state of people’s body that is not contagious. So in and of itself rhetorically, you know, we can sort of see already that we’re stretching. A little bit, when we talk about, um, the [00:07:00 ] current rhetoric around obesity and referring to it as an epidemic, um, in terms of when people started talking about it as an epidemic, you can go all the way back to the seventies and find references to it.

[00:07:12 ] But really in the eighties and ninetie