Category Archives: Books

2018 James Harvey Robinson Prize for Understanding and Teaching American Slavery

Cover of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery The University of Wisconsin Press is thrilled that the American Historical Association Conference is awarding editors Cynthia Lynn Lyerly and Bethany Jay the 2018 James Harvey Robinson Prize for Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, part of the Harvey Goldberg Series for Understanding and Teaching History. This award, offered biennially, is given to the teaching aid which had made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field.

“Not only do I recommend this book to educators but I also will be using it in my own graduate courses, where we often spend much of our time discussing the intricacies of slavery but not quite enough on the effective teaching pedagogy that they will undoubtedly invoke in their own classrooms. It is my hope that all educators will find this book to be an invaluable resource to improve their own instruction and the instruction of others,” writes Kellie Carter Jackson, assistant professor at Wellesley College, in the Journal of American History.

Understanding and Teaching American Slavery has been a critical resource focused on teaching this challenging topic in all its complexity since its publication. In February 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Teaching Tolerance Project launched a framework for teaching students about slavery that was based on key concepts from the contributors of this book.

“Teachers with serious content knowledge are more likely to be effective, but we all know that content knowledge isn’t enough in the classroom. I hope we’ll see more resources like this stellar book to help move our society closer to understanding slavery in all of its dimensions. We, and our students, dearly need this knowledge to navigate the present,” says Kate Schuster in EdWeek.

Named for Harvey Goldberg—a professor renowned for his history teaching at Oberlin College, Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin from the 1960s to the 1980s—the series reflects Goldberg’s commitment to helping students think critically about the past with the goal of creating a better future. Other series titles focus on the Vietnam War; U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History; the Cold War; and the Age of Revolutions. The series editors are John Day Tully, Matthew Masur, and Brad Austin.

Congratulations again to the editors, series editors, and all involved with Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. To celebrate, we are giving away a copy of the book to one (1) lucky entrant:
Loading…

A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s “Petersburg”

Today we present a piece written by Leonid Livak, editor of the book A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.

Few artistic works created before World War I convey the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively as Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913), whose place and importance in cultural history have been often compared to those of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Yet Petersburg has not received its due attention from the Anglophone public and is rarely taught within the framework of literature and humanities courses, because like other hermetic modernist classics, this novel presents serious challenges to nonspecialist readers as well as to instructors in literature and general humanities. The essays collected in our volume strive to make Petersburg more accessible. They have been written with a broad audience in mind in order to help the Anglophone reader gain a better understanding of Bely’s novel and to facilitate its study in the college classroom. The volume’s contributors have been asked to refrain from new interpretations of the literary classic and to summarize instead what we already know about Petersburg, explicating it in the intellectual and artistic context that informed the novel’s creation and historical reception.

Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880–1934), who used the penname Andrei Bely, was an intellectual omnivore drawn to the most diverse practices in art and thought. Petersburg is a virtual encyclopedia of European philosophical and aesthetic currents between the turn of the century and World War I. This makes Petersburg—originally written for an interpretive community that shared the author’s cultural knowledge—all the more difficult to understand today. Hence the structure of our book: each essay explores a particular aspect of Bely’s novel.

The first part treats Petersburg’s rapports with Russian and European intellectual life in Bely’s day. Lynn Patyk elucidates the historical circumstances informing Petersburg’s terrorist intrigue, with an eye on the range of meanings that intrigue had in Bely’s modernist circle and in contemporary Russian society at large. Maria Carlson draws attention to Bely’s fascination with Theosophy and with its offshoot—Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical doctrine, which freshly captivated the writer midway through his work on Petersburg. Bely’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconoclastic thought predated his work on the novel. The formative role in modernist philosophies of art and life of Nietzsche’s intellectual heritage all but assured that Bely would engage with it in Petersburg, as Edith Clowes illustrates. Neo-Kantianism is yet another philosophical current informing the novel. As Timothy Langen explains, it shaped Bely’s thought in the decade preceding his Petersburg project, and it is present there as one of the novel’s competing philosophies. Henri Bergson equipped Bely with polemical tools for a critical reexamination of Nietzscheanism and Neo-Kantianism, whose philosophical virtues, Hilary Fink argues, the writer no longer took for granted during his work on Petersburg. Judith Wermuth-Atkinson shows that Bely’s modernist search for alternatives to the materialist understanding of the world and the human being led the author of Petersburg to heed the new science of psychology, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud. A special place in Petersburg’s imaginative universe is occupied by racial theories, whose narrative manifestations are explored by Henrietta Mondry. Closing the book’s first part, David Bethea demonstrates the centrality of eschatology—speculation about the end of history, framed as the demise and rebirth of the world and humankind— in Petersburg’s narrative and stylistic economy.

The volume’s second part examines Petersburg in the aesthetic context of Bely’s day. Keenly following the latest developments in Russian and Western artistic theory and practice, Bely poured his erudition into Petersburg as a medium for reflecting on and realizing modernist artistic philosophy. Steven Cassedy explores the role of music in Bely’s novel against the backdrop of modernist musical theories and their implementation in literature. Considering Bely’s novel as an exemplar of modernism’s embrace of performance practices and metaphors, Colleen McQuillen shows Petersburg’s place in the practice of “life-creation,” common among Russian modernists who turned their lives into artistic texts that were lived before they could be written down. Olga Matich treats Petersburg as an expression of Bely’s passion for painting, exploring the ways Bely uses verbal signs to create visual images. Taras Koznarsky shows Petersburg’s contribution to transnational modernism’s intense preoccupation with urbanism. Violeta Sotirova looks at Petersburg as a case study in the larger modernist turn to consciousness as the source of reality, placing Bely’s novel alongside literary experiments by his Western European peers.

Petersburg explores every level of spoken and written language in order to speculate about language as a source of what people perceive as reality but what might as well be an illusion originating in the psyche. That is why we open this volume with an essay by John Elsworth, the author of the most recent English translation of Petersburg, who endeavors to impart to Bely’s Anglophone reader a sense of the challenges inherent in translating the novel; and to give the reader an idea of the inevitable losses and distortions accompanying any such translation project.

Petersburg’s importance for the evolution of Russian prose writing in the twentieth century had no equals. Fifty years after the novel’s original publication, Vladimir Nabokov ranked Petersburg alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in his list of “my greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose.” Like the other modernist masterpieces on Nabokov’s list, Petersburg makes for an intensely enjoyable but challenging read, for Bely expected his audience to actively participate in unraveling the work’s many meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. The present volume aims to facilitate that task by recreating for the general Anglophone public the sociopolitical, intellectual, and artistic context informing Bely’s novel.

Leonid Livak is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination, and How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism.

The Lasting Impact of Francisco Franco

This week we have a piece written by guest-blogger Stanley G. Payne, co-author of the book Franco: A Personal and Political Biography.

The revolutionary movements that provoked the Spanish Civil War in 1936 created the only violent mass collectivist revolution of Western Europe in the twentieth century, but the victor in this contest was Francisco Franco, the most successful counterrevolutionary leader of the era. He went on to create the first stable dictatorship in Spain’s history, surviving World War II and remaining in power until he died of natural causes in 1975, having defeated all comers for nearly four decades. In the process he promoted the definitive socioeconomic modernization of his country and created institutions that after his death permitted a peaceful transition to democratic constitutional monarchy, led by liberal Francoists, though this final outcome was not his intention.

Franco was the most powerful individual figure in the more than two millennia of Spanish history, for no king under traditional institutions enjoyed the resources of an organized twentieth-century dictator. He has been both the most widely praised and the most extensively and vehemently vituperated personality in the annals of Spain.

During the twenty-first century the country has begun to fragment. The Spanish left, bereft of ideas or a coherent new program, has partially repudiated the prosperous, broadly decentralized democracy of 1977-2018, claiming that it was tainted by Franco’s dictatorship, even though it put an end to the latter. “Anti-Francoism” has become a central banner, crediting a dictator who vanished more than four decades ago with the power to dominate Spanish affairs from beyond the tomb. In Spain more than anywhere else, polemics about recent history form a major part of current political controversy.

Though most twenty-first century Spaniards do not support the fantasies of so-called “historical memory,” which is neither history nor memory, the ignorance of history is as widespread in their country as in any other Western land. These circumstances raise anew the question of exactly who was Francisco Franco and what exactly was his historical record. The literature about him is enormous, greater than that concerning anyone else in Spanish history, but is strongly divided between encomia and denunciation.

The present biography seeks to open a new inquiry that is more balanced and objective, or at least less subject to the influence of polemics than its predecessors, based on a broad base of key primary and secondary sources. It treats the sharply contrasting aspects of Franco’s rule, from the rigorous Civil War-era repression to the positive achievements of later years. While investigating all the major aspects of Franco’s career over four decades, it also seeks to offer a personal portrait of the dictator, from his early career as a teen-aged infantry officer through his marriage and family life to his eventual demise in the most public (and one of the most prolonged) natural deaths of modern times.

It may be that no other Western country changed more during one lifetime than did Spain during Franco’s eighty-three years, and many of these changes were closely involved with his own biography. The book grapples with this lengthy process of change, and with the numerous mutations of Franco’s own rule, as his regime evolved from a politics of semi-fascism to Catholic corporatism to modernizing bureaucratic authoritarianism, from associate of the Third Reich to important ally of the United States. It seeks to provide deeper understanding of a key historical personality, and also of the dynamic evolution of Spain during the twentieth century.

Stanley G. Payne (right) is the Hilldale–Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of many books, including A History of Fascism, 1914–1945; The Franco Regime, 1936–1975; and Spain: A Unique History.
Jesús Palacios (left) is a noted historian, investigative journalist, and adjunct professor at the University of Madrid.

Universal Witchcraft and the Problem of Categories

Today we present a piece written by Douglas J. Falen, author of the new book African Science.

In 1935, the British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote, “Witchcraft is an imaginary offense because it is impossible.” Although Evans-Pritchard made a sincere attempt to explain the rationality of African witchcraft, his remark voiced an enduring Western view of the distinction between imaginary witchcraft and scientific reality. Since then, anthropologists have used less dismissive language to address such cultural differences, but this does not automatically mean they accept the reality of other cultures’ magical forces. What is the role of our own reality in our interpretation of other cultures? And what do we make of a society where witchcraft and science are not competing paradigms, but rather are similar forms of knowledge? These are the philosophical and interpretive dilemmas that an anthropologist faces in studying the occult in the Republic of Benin, West Africa.

Sacred objects used in the creation of a deity’s new shrine

In the course of many years of research, I have come to recognize that my Beninese friends do not feel the need to make a choice between science and magic. For them, western scientific knowledge is a kind of magic that is responsible for fantastic technology, such as airplanes, cellphones, and the internet. This “white people’s witchcraft” as Beninese call it, is often likened to the incredible accomplishments of their own occult knowledge, which they call “African science” – an indigenous force that also permits people to travel around the world and to communicate via invisible waves. Another feature that these two systems share is their moral ambiguity. Beninese people acknowledge that, despite their benevolent potential, technology and witchcraft are similar in that both can result in death and destruction – such as through bombs or invisible soul attacks. This suggests that in Benin, what we might call “witchcraft” (àzě in the Fon language) is a much broader category drawing up ideas about knowledge, technology, and magic. Some informants also suggest that witchcraft is the animating force behind their indigenous deities, Christian churches, and esoteric societies like Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. They regard witchcraft as the ultimate, all-encompassing, and universal force in the world. While people attribute misfortune, illness, and death to the work of malevolent witches, àzě’s incorporative tendencies allow traditional healers to adopt and employ new, often foreign, spiritual traditions in a supernatural arms race to triumph over evil. Beninese witches and healers battle over people’s souls, reaffirming the existence of good and evil in the world.

A healer, right, engages in an Asian-inspired ritual to protect a patient from witchcraft

Rather than reduce witchcraft to mere folklore, or a naïve belief held by those lacking scientific rationality, I have taken inspiration from my Beninese friends for whom witchcraft is not a traditional belief giving way to modernity. Witchcraft is instead a contemporary, adaptive, and inclusive system that incorporates many domains that westerners regard as distinct – science, medicine, religion, and the occult. Although I do not expect foreign people to accept another culture’s supernatural reality, one of the lessons of anthropology’s “ontological turn” has been to encourage us to take native categories seriously and to let them shape our interpretation of other cultures. Through long-term, intimate ethnographic experience, I have come to appreciate my Beninese friends’ understanding of their world without feeling the need to discount it or frame it terms of my own categories of real, imaginary, science, or myth. Anthropology’s contribution to current social debates is to show us that cultural difference does not have to result in judgment, disavowal, and discrimination. If we make an effort to befriend people who are different from ourselves, we usually find that they possess the same human rationality as we do.

Douglas J. Falen is a professor of anthropology at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. He is the author of Power and Paradox: Authority, Insecurity, and Creativity in Fon Gender Relations.

Last Days of Theresienstadt

John Tortorice, Director Emeritus of the George L. Mosse Program in History, sits down with Skye Doney, the translator and editor of a new book in the Mosse Series, Last Days of Theresienstadt by Eva Noack-Mosse.

John Tortorice: Eva Noack-Mosse was a trained journalist who valued detail, distance, objectivity. She was related through her father to one of the most influential German Jewish publishing houses that was active throughout Germany prior to 1933. She came from a family of well-educated, strong, resilient, notable women, including her cousin Martha Mosse, a lawyer. How did her background affect her writing of the diary?

Skye Doney: One of the most impressive aspects of the Noack-Mosse diary is that it is so well-written. As a prisoner, Noack-Mosse renders her personal experiences of daily life in Theresienstadt in striking detail. At the same time, as a journalist, she is able to stand back from her own hardships to document the crimes and brutality around.

Throughout her ordeal, she identifies reasons not to despair. These range from engaging conversations with friends and family to small acts of kindness she observes among the inmates. Noack-Mosse also sees beauty in the nature both within and around the camp—most notably, the birds nesting outside her barracks window.

John Tortorice: This comes across as an authentic account of diary entries, yet you also note that it has been edited after the War. How did you deal with the juxtaposition of what sounds like on the spot observation and retrospective editing?

Skye Doney: The document from George L. Mosse’s archive is best understood as an annotated diary or as a hybrid diary-memoir. Noack-Mosse acknowledges that she typed up the work before sending it on to George L. Mosse. But her “supplemental text” greatly enriches the account. For instance, she writes in Theresienstadt of the agony of composing a thirty-word postcard home that must also survive censorship. Then, she interjects that after the war only one of the eight postcards she wrote made it home. Additions like these render the work a text that is both present and past. For readers, I have offset these retrospective interjections in italics throughout.

John Tortorice: Noack-Mosse gives a scrupulous account of what is happening in a world of great cruelty and death, yet without any self-pity. Her ability to empathize with herself and her situation is still intact, yet what happens is not “about” her?

Skye Doney: Right, yes, she actually resolves to document her experience before she learns she will be deported to Theresienstadt. From the outset, she notes that “I have written down how I experienced Theresienstadt in order that their [the those who died in Theresienstadt] sacrifice should not be in vain. So that there shall never be a second Theresienstadt anywhere in the world.” She is tasked with typing up endless lists for the SS, so she learns quickly that the Nazis have perpetuated an unspeakable crime. She writes so that no one will forget. Her own experience stood in for everyone unable to write their own story.

John Tortorice: How did you convey a nuanced voice in translation? Was your approach to interpret freely rather than attempt perfect transparency? The manuscript was jointly translated by you and Professor Birutė Ciplijauskaitė. How did this affect how you approached the translation? Did your translation styles, your translation “voice” differ?

Skye Doney: Professor Ciplijauskaitė began the translation before falling ill in 2016. She passed away in June 2017. She was a great friend of the Mosse Program and helped with many translations after her retirement from the UW-Madison Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

Yes, we had very different approaches. Professor Ciplijauskaitė completed the first portion of the translation and adopted a very literal approach. For example, she translated the ranks of German SS officers. I went back over her work to reintroduce the nuance and wit of Noack-Mosse’s language. And part of that “re-translation” work was to heavily annotate the text with explanatory notes. In the end, this was a collaborative effort, as the annotations were supplemented by your comments, by the then Mosse Program Project Assistant, Kilian Harrer, as well as by the anonymous peer reviewers. Together we have preserved Eva Noack-Mosse’s candid perspective and beautiful prose.

John Tortorice: Tell me about her correspondence with her second cousin, the historian George L. Mosse? What was their relationship like after the war?

Skye Doney: Very friendly. Noack-Mosse calls him “Georgie” in some of their correspondence. It is clear that they met frequently in Munich when Mosse traveled to Germany for research. They also shared many mutual friends and discussed the family efforts to get back property stolen by the Nazis after the war. You can read some of their correspondence at the end of Last Days of Theresienstadt.

Noack-Mosse also asked for help with getting her memoir translated and published. For the Mosse Program, we are honored to complete this request first made in the 1950s.

Skye Doney is the Director of the George L. Mosse Program in History and a Series Editor for the Mosse Series in European Cultural and Intellectual History. He received his PhD in German History from UW-Madison in 2016.

John Tortorice is Director Emeritus of the George L. Mosse Program in History and a Series Advisor for the Mosse Series in European Cultural and Intellectual History. He directed the Mosse Program for nearly twenty years before his retirement in May 2017.

Series Surprises – When the Characters Take Charge

Today we have a piece written by Patricia Skalka, author of the Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries. The third book in this series, Death in Cold Water has recently been released in paperback.

In real life, people and relationships continually shift and change. They do the same in fiction. Perhaps one of the biggest surprises I encounter in writing the Dave Cubiak Door County mysteries comes from seeing how the characters evolve from one book to the next. Death in Cold Water, the third book in the ongoing saga, finds protagonist Dave Cubiak firmly ensconced as the heroic sheriff even as he continues to struggle with the issues of grief and loss that propelled his move to Door County. But he is no longer the same character he was in Death Stalks Door County, the book that kicks off the series. Over time, and the course of three volumes, he transitions from a forlorn, drunk recluse into a man who slowly learns to trust both himself and others and one who learns to love again.

In describing the heroic detective figure, Raymond Chandler once famously said “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero.” Chandler’s description does not fit the flawed and tragic protagonist we first meet. He is mean (punishing himself for the deaths of his wife and daughter); he is tarnished (having drunk himself out of his job as a Chicago cop); and he is afraid (fearful of life, of making more mistakes); he is not a hero (initially he stubbornly refuses to help solve the mysterious murders plaguing the county). After his moral compass swings back into place, all changes. Cubiak’s plight endures him to readers who empathize with his failings and see themselves reflected in his struggles.

Although I create the stories and control the words that fall upon the page, more often than not I feel like a bystander, one who records events as they occur and documents the shifts in relationships between my fictional characters. I always imagined that Dave Cubiak and the erudite physician Evelyn Bathard would be friends, but I never planned for Bathard to become a father figure to the sheriff. Yet that is exactly what happens. The process begins in the second book and intensifies in Death in Cold Water.

Meanwhile, Mike Rowe makes his entrance in book two as a minor character. His role is expedient. Cubiak needs access to a fast boat, so I introduce a hot-shot young deputy who owns the high-powered Speedy Sister. I cast Rowe as a minor figure but then the muse takes over and in Death in Cold Water, the deputy plays a pivotal role. Even more interesting, at the same time, almost magically, Cubiak emerges as something of a father figure to the younger man.

Did I mention love? In book two, both international photographer Cate Wagner and local vet Natalie Klein appear as romantic interests. In Death in Cold Water, one of the two wins Cubiak’s heart. But I’m not telling which. The answer is one of the series surprises.

Patricia Skalka is the author of Death Stalks Door County, Death at Gills Rock, and Death Rides the Ferry, the fourth book in the Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery series. She is president of the Chicagoland chapter of Sisters in Crime and divides her time between Chicago and Door County, Wisconsin. A former staff writer at Reader’s Digest, she presents writing workshops throughout the United States.

On Poetry of Place, the In-Between, and Tenderness

Today we welcome a post by award-winning poet Michelle Brittan Rosado, author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, part of our Wisconsin Poetry Series. In this essay, she explains how the spaces in her life have influenced her poetry.

“The poet of place,” according to James Galvin, “situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it. Poetry of place is actually a poetry of displacement and self-annihilation.” Overlooking the masculine pronouns, I do think this can be true of poetry of place, that it can be a way to dissolve the self into an anonymous landscape. But I also think such poetry can be a map to find ourselves, a space in which to reassemble the annihilated and recover the displaced.

Many of the poems in my collection, Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, were written with particular landscapes in mind. One of these is the Vacaville-Dixon Greenbelt, a thousand acres of agricultural land protected from development, just outside of the Northern California town where I was raised. As an only child in the backseat of my parents’ car, I’d watch through the window the even lines of crops flanking the interstate: towering sunflowers, mature almond trees, dense strawberries close to the ground. The distance between my hometown of Vacaville and neighboring Dixon seemed never-ending, but out of that childhood boredom and restlessness came an eventual appreciation for spaces in between, both literal and figurative, and what could grow there.

Vacaville is, socially and politically, a unique mix where the liberal San Francisco Bay Area blends into the more conservative Central Valley, the agrarian way of life is adjacent to the gates of the Air Force base, and first- and second-generation immigrants have put down roots alongside established families. This is the heterogeneous context in which I began writing, and was the inspiration for the poem “Pastoral with Restless Searchlight.” This backdrop would also lead me to write more consciously about the in-betweenness of adolescence as well as the two halves of my family history. On my fathers’ side, I’m descended from California settlers, and on my mother’s side, my extended family lives mainly in Sarawak, a state in East Malaysia on the island of Borneo. Both the landscape surrounding Vacaville and the more distant Pacific Ocean instilled in me a fascination for what simultaneously separates and joins people: the greenbelt of land between one town and another, the world’s largest swath of water between two sides of a family.

The word threshold can be used to describe the space we pass through to arrive at one space from another, though a threshold seems like a much quicker passage than the landscapes of my youth. It is usually associated with a doorstep, a slim panel of wood at the foot of a door’s frame that we step over to enter a room. It suggests an instant change of scenery, an immediate transportation. But as John O’Donohue points out, the etymology of the word can be traced to the act of threshing, of separating the grain from a husk. It is work, a process of engaging with the land, of being an active participant in change, of producing something useful that can nourish us. Having witnessed the seasons pass along with the blooming and harvests and dying vines from the roadside, that sense of work has entered my approach to writing poems and utilizing the materials at hand.

Poetry for me has been a celebration of the in-between—which is where tenderness can be found, too. “Tender” has its roots in the Latin word tendre: to stretch, hold forth. When I began writing poems, I think I encountered the space of the page like it was a physical place, an endless belt of green, something beyond the window I could almost touch. Poetry has since carried me through uncertainty and knitted together what is broken apart. How merciful that language, land, and water have the ability to carry us when we have left what we know but have not yet arrived to where we are going.

Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of Theory on Falling into a Reef, which won the inaugural Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Born in San Francisco, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Find out more at http://www.michellebrittanrosado.com/

My Writing Teachers, This is for You!

Today’s guest-blogger is D.M. Aderibigbe, author of How the End First Showed, part of our Wisconsin Poetry Series. In this post he discusses how his teachers helped him get to where he is today in his career as a poet.

Of all human endeavor, mentorship is the most underrated. Here is the thing: I finished the first draft of what became How the End First Showed, while completing my undergraduate studies at the University of Lagos. I sent it in for a contest and came out as one of three finalists. Add that to the fact that the poems in the manuscript already appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, and RHINO, among others. As such I thought I knew everything I needed to know about poetry—at least my poetry. So much so that when I was hugging my grandmother at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, about to board a Marrakesh-bound plane en route to Boston to begin my MFA, all that occupied my mind were new poems. “I won’t touch anything from this manuscript.” I said to myself.

Then came the famous Room 222. Then came workshop after workshop. Then came the lessons. From Robert Pinsky, Karl Kirchwey and Maggie Dietz (my MFA teachers), I learned that when it comes to oneself, honesty is always farther than we think. From them, I learned that the destination is as important as the route. From them, I learned that nothing is impossible to let go.

These words gradually took over my mind like true love. I decided to step into the past. So when I sat to edit the manuscript again, I parted with several parts of me. It was hard. I hesitated. I cut. I re-added. Then cut. I tell you one thing: if it wasn’t for what my teachers taught me, I never would have been able to do this. Never.

Back to my first ever literature class in high school. As a matter of fact, my first ever class in senior high. The topic for the day was literary appreciation. My teacher, Uncle Titus wanted to tell us the major difference between poetry and prose. He picked up a chalk, drew something that looked like a bungalow on the blackboard. Then he drew something that looked like a road. “If you are prose, you go straight,” he said. “But if it’s poetry, you’ll go round and round and round, until you arrive.” He made what look like a circle with the chalk. To prove his point, he asked us to read two poems: David Rubadiri’s “An African Thunderstorm” and “ A.E. Housman’s “Is My Team Ploughing.” He asked us what we thought each poem was trying to say. As you might guess, no two people got the same reading. Not even close. “That’s what poetry is,” he said. “It has the ability to provide numerous roads for many people to arrive at a particular home.” And that home means different thing to different people,” he added.

D. M. Aderibigbe is a PhD student at Florida State University. He is the author of a chapbook, In Praise of Our Absent Father, selected for the New Generation African Poets Series of the African Poetry Book Fund. Born and raised in Nigeria, he earned his MFA in poetry from Boston University. His poems have appeared in the African American Review, The Nation, Ninth Letter, Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and elsewhere.

The Story Behind The Book of Joshua

Our guest-blogger today is Jennifer Anne Moses, author of the new novel The Book of Joshua, a novel that portrays the challenges of mental illness. (Content warning: this post contains references to self-harm and suicide.)

Danny Greenberg was my first boyfriend. Our summer romance occurred when we were both seventeen and students at the same college-prep summer school. Danny was handsome, clean-cut, sweet on me. In August, he returned to his home in L.A. A year later, both of us enrolled in colleges on the east coast, we embarked on a friendship that would last only a few more years, during which Danny became oversensitive, depressed, and paranoid, convinced that only by taking on the world’s pain would the world’s sufferings abate.

He was, at times, obsessed with me. Just before I flew to London for my college “junior year abroad” he crossed the English Channel from France, where he himself was spending his junior year, to find me. How he did it I still don’t know, but there he was, waiting for me outside the cell-like room of my dorm in southeast London.

Then the shit got real. Back on the east coast and torn by psychoses, he committed what he later called “a blood sacrifice,” and, while staying at a YMCA in New York, poked out his own eye with—was it a wire hanger? A fireplace implement? A letter opener? I’m not sure I ever knew.

He survived his wounds and even graduated from college—in his case, Princeton. Afterwards, he moved back home, to Los Angeles, and did what he did. Grad school. A serious girlfriend. Social work. Through the world of Jewish communal philanthropy, our mothers were friends, and now and then Mom would call me with an update. But by then I was too busy having babies to notice much of anything outside my own home. Then I was thirty-six, with two two-year-olds and a hyperactive six-year-old, and Mom called to say: “Are you sitting down?” After I assured her that I was indeed sitting down, she said: “Danny Greenberg killed himself. He lit himself on fire in front of his parents’ house in Los Angeles.” Up until her own death, many years later, from cancer, Danny’s mother called me every year on Danny’s birthday. I always theorized that she wanted to talk to me, especially, because I had known him, if only briefly, before he was ravaged by the beasts of mental illness.

His story gripped me—because here was an unusually sunny boy, a popular and gifted and beloved boy, who, even before he struck that match, had been destroyed by a cancer so much worse than cancer, because cancer merely destroys the body, whereas mental illness destroys you, claiming your personality and mind and soul as its own. I wrote a short story called “This Danny of His, This Most Beloved,” that was vaguely sort of kind of about my Danny. I didn’t think it was that good a story, though. I was surprised when it was published.

Years later, I started writing about a Danny-like figure again, only in this case, the protagonist of the book that eventually became The Book of Joshua, would have hope. In real life, Danny’s parents had long since endowed a program called “Daniel’s Place,” hoping to give to others who suffer from mental illness the light and love that their own beloved son wasn’t able to find.

Jennifer Anne Moses is a multigenre author whose many books include Tales from My Closet, Visiting Hours, and Bagels and Grits. Her journalism and essays have appeared frequently in Time magazine, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other publications.

When Nature Bites the Hand that Tills It

Today’s guest blogger is Brian DeVore, author of the new book Wildly Successful Farming: Sustainability and the New Agricultural Land Ethic.

Tyler Carlson farms near “Gopher Prairie,” the fictional setting for Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel, Main Street. In the book, Lewis, who grew up in the real Gopher Prairie, otherwise known as Sauk Centre, used biting satire to poke fun at small town life. On this summer day, Carlson is finding the havoc burrowing rodents are raising in his part of central Minnesota less than amusing.

“Some of the vision of this farm is really trying to make agriculture work alongside wildlife and wild ecosystems,” he says to me while examining a three-foot-tall white pine tree that’s listing to one side in a pasture, its roots gnawed off by gophers. “But wildlife are pests in certain instances.”

That’s a harsh reality for someone who studied restoration ecology in college before moving onto this 200-acre farm in 2012 to launch an operation that includes practices like “silvopasturing” — a system combining tree production with rotational grazing of livestock. Carlson saw silvopasturing as an economically viable way to re-build soil, combat climate change, contribute to cleaner water, and support wildlife and pollinator habitat.

Six years later, the 32-year-old farmer is still committed to producing ecosystem services, but reality checks like root-chomping rodents have tamped down his enthusiasm a bit, prompting him to readjust how he reaches his environmental goals while staying economically viable. Carlson, pictured below, has accepted the fact that farming with nature utilizing the principals of diversity, biology, and interdependence—rather than attempting to bring it to heel with iron, oil, and chemistry—means exposing oneself to a world that can be pretty unforgiving. This is the reality of being an “ecological agrarian,” someone who is unwilling to separate a working farm from a working ecosystem.

As I show in my new book, Wildly Successful Farming: Sustainability and the New Agricultural Land Ethic, ecological agrarians are using everything from managed rotational grazing and cocktail mixes of cover crops to the integration of native perennials and annual row crops to blend the wild and the domesticated on agricultural landscapes.

Ideally, these wildly successful farms strike a balance that provides practical benefits to the farmer while countering the negative repercussions of industrialized agriculture: dirty water, eroded soil, loss of wildlife habitat, and greenhouse gas emissions. A healthy soil ecosystem, for example, not only sequesters carbon but allows farmers to better manage precipitation while providing free fertility for crops.

Ecological agrarians trust that a healthy ecosystem will eventually produce a healthy working farm. Some may argue that by placing their trust in the ways of the wild, farmers are abdicating control over their own destiny in a way that’s no better (or is worse) than allowing human-centered technology to call the shots. But during my thirty years as an agricultural journalist who has interviewed a wide range of farmers, I have observed that ecological agrarians are continuously on the lookout for a better way—the opposite of being passive recipients of whatever life tosses their way. When a corn and soybean operation is reliant on petroleum-based inputs and technology developed in a biotech firm’s laboratories, events far from the land determine that farmer’s destiny. War in the Middle East can disrupt the flow of oil; yet one more consolidation in the biotechnology sector can limit the availability of affordable seed. But building a healthy, functional ecosystem starts and ends with a farm’s local terra-firma, literally from beneath the ground up.

Tyler Carlson and his partner Kate Droske have modified their silvopasturing system and made it, if not exactly ecologically pristine, at least a benefit to the environment. And the forage being produced by building their soil health between the rows of surviving trees is good enough to consistently produce quality beef, which is important economically.

And on a farm where the borders between the wild and the tame are porous, opportunities for making mid-course adjustments abound. If injecting a little bit of woodland into a domesticated pasture doesn’t pan out, why not reverse polarity?

At one point, Carlson leads me over a fence to an existing stand of bur oak, ash, ironwood, elm and aspen on a hill that slopes down to a pond. Invasive buckthorn has been set back considerably with the help of a chain-saw (Carlson has also thinned out bigger trees to let in more sunlight). In glade-like spots between trees, red clover and orchard grass Carlson had seeded are making use of the solar energy. For the past few years, this woodland has been a part of his rotational grazing system. Grazing among the trees isn’t as productive as running cattle through open pastures, but it is a low-impact way of attaining ecological goals in a financially viable manner. The cattle have a cool place to graze during hot weather while they help control buckthorn. Opening up the woodland hasn’t just benefited forages—recently Carlson noticed oak seedlings sprouting; in 2012, there were few oaks under 75-years-old here.

This woodlot has been abused and neglected for over a century. But through the introduction of innovative farming practices that involve disturbance and rest, it is being revived as a key ecological component of a working landscape. Transplanting a little nature into tame pastures has been surprisingly difficult, but reversing things and introducing domesticated beasts into an unruly corner of the farm is paying off. When the wild bites back, it doesn’t always hold a grudge.

“It shows that if you let it, nature can be pretty forgiving,” says the farmer as he makes his way among the trees in the dappled sunlight.

Brian DeVore is a contributor to farm and conservation magazines and an editor with the Land Stewardship Project in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He grew up on a crop and livestock farm in southwestern Iowa and, while serving in the Peace Corps, managed a dairy cooperative in Lesotho, Africa.