The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes

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-paste

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.

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.