MSU Press Podcast

You can find out more about MSU Press at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Catherine is on Twitter @catherine_msup and Caitlin is @ctredits. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.Resources mentioned in the episode include #ASKUP, the UP subject grid, Furnace and Fugue, located at https://furnaceandfugue.org/, and Cut Copy Paste located at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/cut-copy-pasteThe MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Bkejwanong means “where the waters part,” but the waters of St. Clair River are not a point of separation. The same waters that sustain life on and around Bkejwanong—formerly known as Walpole Island, Ontario—flow down into Chippewas of the Thames, the community to which author Monty McGahey II belongs. While there are no living fluent speakers of Anishinaabemowin in this community, McGahey has fostered relationships with fluent speakers from nearby Bkejwanong. Bkejwanong Dbaajmowinan is a collection of stories from these elders, who understand the vital importance of passing on the language to future generations in order to preserve the beloved language and legacy of the community. Like the waters of St. Clair River, the relationships between language speakers and learners have continued to nourish Anishinaabe communities in Bkejwanong and Chippewas of the Thames, particularly in language revitalization. With English translations, this resource is essential for Anishinaabemowin learners, teachers, linguists, and historians.Monty McGahey II is of Anishinaabe and Oneida descent and was raised in Chippewas of the Thames, where he currently works in language revitalization. He is a second-language speaker of Anishinaabemowin and holds a master’s of professional education in Indigenous educational leadership from Western University in London, Ontario. Monty McGahey’s Bkejwanong Dbaajmowinan/Stories of Where the Waters Divide is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Monty and his wife have a podcast about the challenges of raising their kids in Anishinaabemowin called Enweying (Our Sound) which is available wherever you get your podcasts. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

An avid high school debater and enthusiastic student body president, Craig Smith seemed destined for a life in public service from an early age. As a sought-after speechwriter, Smith had a front-row seat at some of the most important events of the twentieth century, meeting with Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon, advising Governor Ronald Reagan, writing for President Ford, serving as a campaign manager for a major U.S. senator’s reelection campaign, and writing speeches for a contender for the Republican nomination for president. Life in the volatile world of politics wasn’t always easy, however, and as a closeted gay man, Smith struggled to reconcile his private and professional lives. In in his revealing memoir, Confessions of a Presidential Speech Writer, Smith sheds light on what it takes to make it as a speechwriter in a field where the only constant is change. While bouncing in and out of the academic world, Smith transitions from consultantships with George H. W. Bush and the Republican caucus of the U.S. Senate to a position with Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. When Smith returns to Washington, D.C., as president and founder of the Freedom of Expression Foundation, he becomes a leading player on First Amendment issues in the nation’s capital. Returning at long last to academia, Smith finds happiness coming out of the closet and reaping the benefits of a dedicated and highly successful career. Craig Smith’s Confessions of a Presidential Speech Writer is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Craig on the History Rated R podcast and @the_rhetor on Instagram. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Andrés Espinoza Agurrrrto’s new book, Salsa Consciente: Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio, explores the Salsa consciente movement, a Latino movement of music, poetry, and political discourse that exploded in the 1970s. Largely linked to the development of Nuyo latino popular music, Salsa consciente was brought about, in part, by the mass Latino migration to New York City beginning in the 1950s and the subsequent social movements that were tied to the shifting political landscapes. Defined by its lyrical content, its unique sound, and the political and social issues facing U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans, Salsa consciente evokes the overarching cultural-nationalist idea of Latinidad (Latin-ness). Analysis of over 120 different salsa songs spanning sixty years, the book draws on lyrical and musical perspectives to argue that the urban Latino identity expressed in Salsa consciente was constructed largely from diasporic, de territorialized, and at times imagined cultural memory. From this perspective, Latino / Latin American identity is in part based on African and Indigenous experience, especially as it relates to Spanish colonialism. A unique study of the intersection of Salsa and Latino and Latin American identity, Salsa consciente appeals to scholars of ethnic studies and fans of salsa music alike.ANDRÉS ESPINOZA AGURTO serves as assistant professor in the Department of Music at Florida Atlantic University. He studied Afro-Cuban percussion at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (Cuba), graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music with a degree in jazz composition, and holds an MA in music from the University of York (England). He received his PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology from Boston University. He is also a composer, musical director, and percussionist for his own group, Ayé, an also a consecrated drummer in the lineage of Añá Ilu Kan and is currently conducting research on the lineage, performance practice, and aesthetics of Afro-Cuban batá drummers and drumming. He is an active participant in the Percussive Arts Society where he serves as the cochair of the World Percussion Committee. Andrés Espinoza Agurto’s Salsa Consciente: Politics , Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Andres online at aespinozaphd.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

When Consumers Power’s plan to build a nuclear power plant in Midland, Michigan, was announced in 1967, it promised to free Michigan residents from expensive, dirty, coal-fired electricity and to keep Dow Chemical operating in the state. But before the plan could be completed, the facility was called an engineering nightmare, a financial disaster, a construction boondoggle, a political headache, and a regulatory muddle. Most locals had welcomed nuclear power eagerly. Why, after almost twenty years and billions of dollars, did this promise of a high-tech, coal-free, prosperous future fail? And what lessons does its failure offer today as Americans try to develop a clean energy  economy based on renewable power? To answer these questions, energy consultant and author LeRoy Smith carefully traces the design and construction decisions made by Consumers Power, including its choice of reactor and its hiring of the Bechtel Corporation to manage the project. He also details the rapidly changing regulatory requirements and growing public concern about the environmental risks of nuclear power generation. An examination of both the challenges and importance of renewable energy, this book will be of value to anyone interested in grappling with the complexities of our ongoing efforts to eliminate fossil fuels in favor of clean renewable energy. LEROY (LEE) SMITH served in the U.S. Navy as an engineering officer and then earned a master of science degree in geology. After leaving graduate school, he spent his entire career in the energy industry. He started as an exploration geologist and subsequently gained business experience serving as a corporate officer in a publicly traded company, a privately held company, and a limited partnership. Smith left his job as vice president of Energy Supply and Marketing at Midland Cogeneration Venture in 2004 to start a consulting firm, Optimal Value Energy. He now lectures and writes on energy topics. He has testified before the Michigan Public Service Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the National Energy Board (since 2019 the Canadian Energy Regulator). He has written articles on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and carbon dioxide sequestration in Michigan. He lives in Midland, Michigan, with his wife, H. J. Smith. LeRoy Smith’s Nearly Nuclear: A Mismanaged Energy Transition is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Remixing is essential to contemporary culture. We see it in song mashups, political remix videos, memes, and even on streaming television shows like Stranger Things. But remixing isn’t an exclusively digital practice, nor is it even a new one. Evidence of remixing even appears in the speeches of classical Greek and Roman orators. Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix, by my guest Scott Haden Church, is the first book to address the remix from a communicative perspective, examining its persuasive dimensions by locating its parallels with classical rhetoric. Church identifies, recontextualizes, mashes up, and applies rhetorical tropes to contemporary digital texts and practices. This groundbreaking book presents a new critical vocabulary for scholars and students to use as they analyze remix culture. Building upon scholarship from classical thinkers, such as Isocrates, Quintilian, Nāgārjuna, and Cicero, as well as contemporary luminaries like Kenneth Burke, Richard Lanham, and Eduardo Navas, Scott Haden Church shows that an understanding of rhetoric offers innovative ways to make sense of remix culture. SCOTT HADEN CHURCH teaches courses in media studies, communication theory, and popular culture at Brigham Young University, where he is an associate professor in the School of Communications. He has been awarded the Phyllis Japp Scholar award from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Ruth S. Silver Research Fellowship in Mass Media Ethics from Brigham Young University. Scott Haden Church’s Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about the book at scotthadenchurch.com and Scott is on Twitter @scotthchurch. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Louise Erdrich is one of the most important, prolific, and widely read contemporary Indigenous writers. In Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts, edited by my guests Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson, leading scholars analyze three critically acclaimed recent novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—which make up what has become known as Erdrich’s “justice trilogy.” Set in small towns and reservations of northern North Dakota, these three interwoven works bring together a vibrant cast of  characters whose lives are shaped by history, identity, and community. Individually and collectively, the essays in this volume illuminate Erdrich’s storytelling abilities; the complex relations among crime, punishment, and forgiveness that characterize her work; and the Anishinaabe contexts that underlie her presentation of character, conflict, and community. The volume also includes a reader’s guide to each novel, a glossary, and an interview with Erdrich that will aid readers as they navigate the justice novels. These timely, original, and compelling readings make a valuable contribution to Erdrich scholarship and, subsequently, to the study of Native literature and women’s authorship as a whole.CONNIE A. JACOBS is professor emerita at San Juan College and the author of The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. She is also a coeditor of Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich and a coeditor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. NANCY J. PETERSON is professor of English at Purdue University and the author of Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory and Beloved: Character Studies. She is also the editor of Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches and Conversations with Sherman Alexie.Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers, including Louise Erdrich’s own Birchbark books in Minneapolis, Minnesota, or online at birchbarkbooks.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender. MARY MORRIS is the author of two previous books of poetry, Enter Water, Swimmer and Dear October, which won the New Mexico Book Award. She is a recipient of the Rita Dove Award (2008), Western Humanities Review’s Mountain West Writers’ Prize (2019), the New Mexico Discovery Award (2005), and the National Federation of Press Women’s Communications Contest Award (2021).Mary Morris’s Late Self-Portraits is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find her online at water400.org where you can find events, poems to read, interviews, and more. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. In We Kept Our Towns Going, Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century all the way into the 1970s. As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor. PHYLLIS MICHAEL WONG has held roles as a historian, an educator, and thirty-year member of the university level academic world, including as First Lady at Northern Michigan University (2004–12) and San Francisco State University (2012–19). We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Phyllis will be speaking in Gwinn, Michigan, on April 12. On April 13 at 6:30 PM at the Marquette Regional History Center in Marquette, Michigan. On Thursday, April 14, in the afternoon at Northern Michigan University. Please see the show notes for more information about these talks in the show notes. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

In Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia my guest Paul Bleakley asks, Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? A question that remains urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. As a historical criminologist, Bleakley addresses this question by examining an intersecting series of cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia. The protection and extortion of illegal gambling operators and sex workers were only the most visible features of a decades-long, pervasive culture of corruption in the state’s law enforcement agency. Even more dangerous—and far harder to prosecute—was a corrupt bargain between the police and the state’s conservative government, which gave law enforcement free rein to profit from criminalized vice in return for supporting the government’s repression and persecution of its political enemies, such as punk music fans to gay men to left-wing protestors. While intimidating members of the political opposition, the police also protected friends and allies from criminal prosecution, even for offenses as serious as child sex abuse. When journalists and investigators revealed this corrupt bargain in 1987, the premier was forced from office and the police commissioner went to prison. But untangling politics from policing proved—and continues to prove—far more difficult in societies around the world. This true crime story goes beyond the everyday violations of law and ethics to underscore the centrality of honest, equitable policing to a truly democratic society.PAUL BLEAKLEY is a historical criminologist and former journalist from the Gold Coast, Queensland. He is currently Assistant Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut, where he teaches a variety of courses focused on policing and theories of criminal behavior. Paul Bleakley’s Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find him @Drbleaks on Twitter, and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

In The Call: Eloquence in Service of Truth, my guests Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde offer a rare examination of a rhetorical phenomenon referred to as “the call,” which is closely linked to eloquence. They explore this linkage by examining various components of eloquence, including examples of its misuse by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. The case studies here, include examples drawn from addresses by Barack Obama, Daniel Webster, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Chase Smith, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney. Smith and Hyde examine religious rhetoric, too, including the Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Augustine, and the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. Finally, the book explores eloquence in films and in communication between artists and writers, concluding with a study of how Annie Dillard evokes the sublime with eloquence and awe.CRAIG R. SMITH is the director emeritus of the Center for First Amendment Studies at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught for twenty-seven years. In 2010 he received the Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association for his contributions to rhetorical theory.MICHAEL J. HYDE is professor and University Distinguished Chair in Communication Ethics at Wake Forest University. He is a distinguished scholar of the National Communication Association, a fellow of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and a recipient of national, state, and university research grants for his work in “the rhetoric of medicine.”Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Craig on the History Rated R podcast. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

As I said in the intro, this will be the fifth season of the MSU Press podcast, and I’m excited to share new interviews with MSU Press authors on subjects such as remix culture, nuclear energy, and life in a small town in Michigan’s upper peninsula. We’ll also have native American stories, Australian politics, eloquence in public speech, and plenty of poetry. I hope you’ll come along for the whole season.Today, we’re discussing Coffin Honey. Todd Davis’s seventh book of poems and his sixth with MSU Press. In the book, Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share this planet. Davis dramatizes racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young victim of sexually assault struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. The poems in Coffin Honey illuminates beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking along here in the twenty-first century. As in his previous prize-winning books, Davis names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”TODD DAVIS is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry as well as a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, & Snow. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards.Todd Davis’s Coffin Honey along with his other poetry collections are available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about Todd and his work at todddavispoet.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Collaborative applications of a variety of modeling methodologies have multiplied in recent decades due to widespread recognition of the power of models to integrate information from multiple sources, test assumptions about policy and management choices, and forecast the future states of complex systems. However, information about these modeling efforts often is segregated by both discipline and modeling approach, preventing folks from learning from one another. Innovations in Collaborative Modeling addresses the need for cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological communication. To enhance a shared understanding of systems problems, scientists and stakeholders need strategies for integrating information from their respective fields, dealing with issues of scale and focus, and rigorously investigating assumptions. The chapters in this edited collection first explore modeling methodologies for enhanced collaboration, then offer case studies of collaborative modeling across different complex systems problems. Edited by Laura Schmitt-Olabisi, Miles McNall, William Porter, and Jinhua Zhao, this volume will be useful for experienced and beginning modelers as well as for scientists and stakeholders who work with them. LAURA SCHMITT OLABISI is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Sustainability and the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.MILES MCNALL is the Director of the Community Evaluation and Research Collaborative at Michigan State University.Innovations in Collaborative Modeling is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews. My guest Miriam C. Brown Spiers book Encountering the Sovereign Other proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous science fiction, placing Native theorists like Vine Deloria Jr. and Gregory Cajete in conversation with science fiction theorists like Darko Suvin, David Higgins, and Michael Pinsky. In response to older colonial discourses, many contemporary Indigenous authors insist that readers acknowledge their humanity while recognizing them as distinct peoples who maintain their own cultures, beliefs, and nationhood. The book analyzes four novels: William Sanders’s The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, Stephen Graham Jones’s It Came from Del Rio, D. L. Birchfield’s Field of Honor, and Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears. Demonstrating how Indigenous science fiction expands the boundaries of the genre while reinforcing the relevance of Indigenous knowledge, Brown Spiers illustrates the use of science fiction as a critical compass for navigating and surviving the distinct challenges of the twenty-first century. MIRIAM C. BROWN SPIERS is an assistant professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Kennesaw State University. Where she is also the coordinator for Native American and Indigenous studies and teaches in the gender and women’s studies and American studies programs.Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. Records from the centuries since show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. If vessels that wrecked but were later repaired and returned to service are included, the number certainly swells into the thousands. Most did not mysteriously vanish like the Griffin. Instead, they suffered the occupational hazards of every lake boat: collisions, groundings, strands, fires, boiler explosions, and capsizes. Many of these disasters took the lives of crews and passengers. The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. In Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes, my Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes, and I’m so excited for the chance to talk with its author today.Richard Gebhard was director of the White River Light Station lighthouse museum from 1975 to 1980. He has also authored numerous articles of historical interest and essays for journals and newsletters of Great Lakes historical societies.Richard Gebhart’s book, Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg–Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

From 1940 to 1970, mid‐Michigan created an extensive and varied legacy of modernist architecture. Based on archival research and oral histories, Susan J. Bandes’s Mid-Michigan Modern explores that legacy in both the work of renowned architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Alden B. Dow, and the Keck brothers, and in the buildings of regional architects whose work was strongly influenced by international modern styles. In the growing optimism and increasing economic prosperity following WWII, the automobile industry, state government, and Michigan State University served as economic drivers enormously expanding the Mid-Michigan area. Government, professional associations, and private industry all sought an architectural style that spoke to forward‐looking, progressive ideals. Smaller businesses picked a Prairie style that made people feel comfortable, and modernist houses reflected the increasingly informal American lifestyle rooted in automobile culture.In this expanded volume that includes 36 new illustrations, readers encounter buildings of various types, from residences to sacred spaces. This new edition also adds over twenty architect-designed residences along the various rivers and creeks that traverse the area as well as on man-made lakes, and it introduces several popular architectural designers not previously discussed. The epilogue briefly considers disappearing modernist inventions and buildings. With a detailed narrative discussing more than 150 buildings and enriched by hundreds of illustrations, Mid-Michigan Modern is a vibrant reclamation of the history of modernist architecture in this part of the state. The expanded, paperback edition and the original hardcover version of Susan J. Bande’s Mid-Michigan Modern: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Googie are both available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb. For more about Michigan Modern Tours visit: http://www.michiganmodern.org/toursThe MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

The city of Detroit was the epicenter of the fur trade era, an unparalleled leader of shipbuilding for one hundred years, the Silicon Valley of the industrial age, and an unquestioned leader in the march of democracy. John Hartig’s book Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All offers a unique history of Detroit as a city of innovation, resilience, and leadership in times to change. Waterfront Porch examines how the city has begun responding to the challenges of climate change, again redefining itself as a national and world leader on the path, this time, toward a more sustainable future. This book details the building of a new waterfront porch alongside the Detroit River called the Detroit RiverWalk, which is meant to help revitalize the city and region and promote sustainability practices. It tells the story of one of the largest, by scale, urban waterfront redevelopment projects in the United States, and gives us hope while it proves that Detroit and its metropolitan region have a bright future. John Hartig is an award-wining Great Lakes scientist, a former Fulbright Scholar, and the current Great Lakes Science-Policy Advisor for the International Association for Great Lakes Research. His book Bringing Conservation to Cities: Lessons from Building the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge won a gold medal from the Nonfiction Authors Association in the “Sustainable Living” category and a bronze medal from the Living Now Book Awards in the “Green Living” category. Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

In a poem called “How to Be A Poet,” Wendell Berry insists, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” In many ways an exploration of what makes a place sacred to ourselves and our memories and what might ultimately desecrate a place, Daniel Lassell’s debut collection, Spit, examines the roles we play in the act of belonging. The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Spit is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to sleep by lullabies, captive wolves next door that attack a child, and a herd of llamas learning to survive despite the coyotes and the chaotic family. The collection explores the body in health and illness and how we treat of the earth and others. Trailing a thread of spirituality, the speaker treks into adulthood, yearning for peace amid the decline of his parents’ marriage. Driven by a “wish to visit / some landless landscape,” the speaker eventually leaves his family’s farm, only to find that return is impossible. After losing the farm and the llama herd to his parents’ divorce, the book’s speaker wrestles with the role of presence as it relates to healing, remarking, “I wish enough, / to have only // these memories I have.” Unflinching at every turn, Spit pushes the boundaries of “home” to arrive upon new meaning, definition, and purpose. As Rebecca Gayle Howell puts it, “Spit is at once a coming-of-age story and an elegy for that so-called coming-of-age, a necessary guidebook for anyone hoping to go home again.”I’m happy to have Daniel Lassell here to talk about Spit, poetry, home, place, and, of course, llamas. He is also the author of Ad Spot, a limited-edition chapbook. His poems have been published in the Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Puerto del Sol, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas. He now lives in New York with his wife and children. Spit is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @dlassell and on his website https://www.daniel-lassell.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

The United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan have danced on the knife’s edge of war for more than seventy years. A work of sweeping historical vision, A World of Turmoil offers five case studies of critical moments in these relationships: the end of World War II and the start of the Long Cold War; the almost-nuclear war over the Quemoy Islands in 1954–55; the détente, deceptions, and denials surrounding the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué; the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–96; and the rise of postcolonial nationalism in contemporary Taiwan. In the book, Hartnett explores how each country’s communication style structured these events and reveals that leaders in all three nations have fallen back on crippling stereotypes and self-serving denials in their diplomacy. The first study of its kind, this provocative book merges history, rhetorical criticism, and advocacy in a tour de force of international scholarship. By mapping the history of miscommunication between the United States, China, and Taiwan, A World of Turmoil shows where and how these entwined relationships have gone wrong, clearing the way for renewed dialogue, enhanced trust, and new understandings. Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the communication department at the University of Colorado Denver. He served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association, and is the co-founder and coorganizer of the Biennial Conference on Communication, Media, and Governance in the Age of Globalization, and the Shenzhen Forum on Communication Innovation, New Media, and Digital Journalism.Stephen’s book A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world with a ferocious industrial history. Despite these pressures, the great lakes remain wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, and Indigenous peoples and federal agencies. With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, The Accidental Reef helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire. As John Hartig puts it, “Heasley leads the reader to see, know, and understand these freshwater seas from different perspectives [which are] essential to developing a stewardship ethic.”Lynne Heasley is a professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is also the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley and a coeditor of Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship. Lynne’s book The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Lynne at lynneheasley.com and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.