In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. To kick off the series, we’re offering one of our best-selling books from the Tucson Festival of Books, Chasing Arizona by Bisbee local Ken Lamberton.
Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 3/31/2020. Simply use discount code AZChase.
“Ken is not only a master storyteller who spews out lovely sentences at nearly every turn but is an enthusiastic fan of Arizona history. This is quite simply a keeper-enjoyable without being silly, and well-researched without being stuffy.”
–Gary P. Nabhan
Book Description:
It seemed like a simple
plan-visit fifty-two places in fifty-two weeks. But for author Ken Lamberton, a
forty-five-year veteran of life in the Sonoran Desert, the entertaining results
were anything but easy. Chasing Arizona takes readers on a yearlong,
twenty-thousand-mile joy ride across Arizona during its centennial, racking up
more than two hundred points of interest along the way. This book is an
adventure story, a tale of Arizona, and a celebration of what makes the state a
great place to visit and live.
In an effort to support instructors and students as they transition to remote learning arrangements in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Arizona Press has opened up access to its digital scholarly monographs, including its widely adopted Latinx Pop Culture Series, Arizona: A History, and titles in its award-winning Sun Tracks Series, a literary series focused on Indigenous artists and authors, through the end of June. The monographs will be open and free to use on Project MUSE and JSTOR.
“This move is in support of instructors, students, and their institutions who have had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances due to the COVID-19 crisis,” said Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press. “We want to continue to support the scholarly enterprise, as we have done for more than sixty years. This is a way university presses, in this unprecedented time, can connect scholarship and creative expression to students and instructors.”
Through this program, more than six hundred titles will become immediately available on partner platforms. As higher education institutions have quickly transitioned to remote learning, the Press and the University Libraries are working tirelessly to support the international academic community.
“Monographs published by the University of Arizona Press are heavily used in courses around the world on a variety of subjects,” said Shan Sutton, dean of University Libraries. “This shift will ensure that these works continue to positively impact student learning and research. Both the University of Arizona Press, and its parent organization the University of Arizona Libraries, are actively pursuing new strategies to continue our vital roles in teaching and learning in this new environment.”
A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that could be as dire as death.
Below, anthropologist and University of Arizona Press author Andrew Flachs discusses topics that are covered in his new book, Cultivating Knowledge.
Andrew Flachs is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, his research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology.
In the first episode of The Latinx Project’s Intervenxions podcast, University of Arizona Press author Simón Trujillo talks with The Latinx Project’s 2020 Artist-in-Residence Vick Quezada for an illuminating dialogue on Latinx indigeneity, representation, sexuality, and the politics of knowledge and activism. Click here to listen to the podcast and read more about the project.
Simón Trujillo is a professor at New York University, and is the author of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity. In his new book, Trujillo reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.
Hey everybody this is Abby Mogollón. I’m the marketing manager at the U of A press and we just wanted to let you know that we’re really thinking about all of our authors right now and trying to think of new ways that we can continue to do the good work of helping you share your scholarship and your books with audiences.
Like many of you, we also are getting used to working from home offices and getting used to being in front of digital devices for zoom meetings, and so forth, and we thought we’d make a quick video to show you how easy it is to make something. We really want to encourage you to make short videos. If you’re a poet, record one of your poems. If you are a chapter author, maybe pick out an excerpt and read some of it if you’d like.
Mari, Savannah, and I can send you five questions and you can respond to them, or perhaps instead if your text is for course adoption you can record a short video explaining how you use your work in your teaching.
Just three things to remember when you’re making videos: 1. Hold the camera close. 2. Please speak loudly. 3. And try to have as much light as possible.
We can’t wait to hear from you.
–The University of Arizona Press Marketing Team
Abby Mogollon, amogollon@uapress.arizona.edu Mari Herreras, mherreras@uapress.arizona.edu Savannah Hicks, shicks@uapress.arizona.edu
We are pleased to announce the availability of three important new contributions to Open Arizona. Selected by an advisory board of scholars and community members, the new additions include Edward H. Spicer’s seminal work Cycles of Conquest; Robert L. Bee’s Crosscurrents Along the Colorado; and Whiting, Weber, and Seaman’s Havasupai Habitat.
Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of
Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles
emphasize the relevance of the southwestern United States to understanding
contemporary American life.
After more than fifty years, Cycles of Conquest is still one of the best syntheses of more than four centuries of conquest, colonization, and resistance ever published. Thomas E. Sheridan writes in the new foreword commissioned for this special edition that the book is “monumental in scope and magisterial in presentation.”
This intriguing book, original published in 1981,
considers the Quechans as a case history of the frequent discrepancy between
benevolently phrased national intention and exploitative local action.
Havasupai Habitat By A. F. Whiting Edited by Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman
Published in 1985, Havasupai
Habitat offers a rich ethnography on lifeways of the Havasupai
people.
Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in Modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements— earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Through keen observation and a deep understanding of Native life in Minneapolis, Molly McGlennen has created a timely collection that contributes to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.
Here, Molly answers five questions about her new poetry collection.
What inspired you to write this work?
Our Bearings has not only been part of an ongoing personal project of narrating my experience of growing up in Minnesota, but also part of a long-term creative and scholarly project which was focused on Native American urban experience more broadly. In my first book of poetry, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits (Salt, 2010) I submit in my preface that “poetry is a form of community-building, a means to locate oneself in relationship to a network of people and places and memories.” In my scholarly monograph, Creative Alliances: The Transnational Design of Indigenous Women’s Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), I explore how urban Native women demonstrate through their work the ways in which “poetry serves as a direction-finding tool for navigating various forms of (what I call) ‘dislocations’ and reclaiming urban centers as Indigenous territories.” Taken together, the projects are evidence of how I think about the ways Minneapolis, my hometown, has been historicized, shaped, and continually claimed by Indigenous peoples— and how my family’s stories add to that history and present reality. Our Bearings helped me think through what a poetic mapping of this history and reality would look, feel, and sound like: what Nativeness is in the present tense.
How do you think found poetry and poems which are rooted deeply in specific places help document the history of a city or state?
In general, poetry delivers emotional truths and accuracies that maps, written communications, archives— tools of western documentation— rarely convey. Some of the poems in the collection live as poetic documentation of my experience of the city based off of physical “findings” (such as flyers, signs, brochures, etc.). Some are experiential “findings” based upon the many trips back home with my two small children revisiting old (and new) stomping grounds with my family. And, finally, some are poems based upon my experience of working alongside my dad reading through documents archived at the Minnesota Historical Society, which consisted of correspondences and letters between my dad’s great grandparents begging for their children to be returned to them from the Owatoma School for Dependent and Neglected Children. My intention with the poems in Our Bearings was to offer the reader not an alternative history of Minneapolis, or even an alternative mapping of it, but rather to use poetry as a way to seek out stories of sustainability: Poetry as the vehicle to tell and tell again of what is undeniably and crucially Indigenous to this land. My poems are the stories of Native peoples shaping their own future, rather than the ones being acted upon by colonizing ideologies and racist federal laws, policies, and campaigns.
In the preface to this collection, you explain Anishinaabewakiing as an “ecosystem that explicitly includes people, their culture, and history.” Considering the cultural and historical impact of the current generation, what do you think the urban ecosystem of Minneapolis will look like in the future?
I think the ways we imagine the future are based on how we understand the instrument of memory. Poetry can be, in my opinion, one of many decolonizing efforts and materials needed to disarm the hegemony of settler colonial histories and realities. When we lean into specific Indigenous cultural knowledge to better understand a place (a city, a reservation, a suburb, an institution, a country), we harness tremendous power in recalling what has mattered to us, what works for us now, and the tools to safeguard Indigenous futures. I’m not certain what Minneapolis will look like in years to come. I am certain that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the planet’s future, as the logics of extraction and monoculture almost ensure it’s endpoint.
The poems in this collection range widely in form. In your opinion, what is the relationship between the form and content of a poem? How do you hope the form of your poems impacts your readers?
I feel I was especially attentive to form in this collection. Because of what I understood as both reflective impulses and storied impulses happening as I wrote, I was seeking a way for form to signal and enhance those influences. For the storied poems, I needed the prose poem form to stretch long those narrative lines and to distinguish the edges between story and verse. For the reflective poems, I leaned into lyricism, visuality, and experimentation. Often, I felt as if I was drawing elements of a mental map onto the page, where experience was imagistic and cycles could appear across the pages. I hope the reader can see each poem as a little story of Indigenous Minneapolis, a way to imagine how we connect to it and each other.
What are you working on now?
One of my interests for some time now has been Native women’s visualities: the way narratives are located and found in visual art; artists use of text in their work; and the conversation happening between and among Native women across artistic mediums. There could be a book of poems coming that interacts with the visual storytelling Native women are creating. We shall see!
Below, read a poem from McGlennen’s Our Bearings.
REMAINS IV
She wants to write about basketball in this poem and #21—always a Timberwolf— Kevin Garnett.
She wants to say Defensive Player of the Year and franchise records in this poem.
She wants to be able to just utter the fact that she was there, finally made it to the Target Center, for one of his last nights in the NBA. She was there.
She wants to just type the word hip-hop in her poem. Like it is her last poem to write. Where there are no rules about what she can say or not say, think or not think.
She wants to speak the names Tall Paul and Chase Manhattan in her poem, because she's a fan. Because if she's honest, basketball and hip-hop matter— sometimes more than poetry.
Wants to shout out 90s R&B. Mint Condition and Next and Morris Day.
Wants to just keep listing things. Because they sound good out loud, like KMOJ 89 dot 9, and she can imagine saying them out loud— the way poems are supposed to come into the world.
She just keeps scribbling without thoughts of editors or colleagues, about what she ought to type or censor. Because, when it comes down to it, she'd rather think about basketball and hip-hop and 90s R&B— and talk about it too. With someone. Someone who loves it all the same.
Someone who knows every street she utters in her poems, and the corners, and every person who's died and who's still living, every hospital visit and wedding, and giveaway. Every canoe trip and coffeehouse, every lake and swamp.
She wants to give these words all away to that person. Again and again. And with them, trace and retrace the designs embossed in her memories, the fibers that become the maps of home.
Molly McGlennen received her Ph.D. in Native American studies from the University of California, Davis, in 2005, and her MFA in creative writing and English from Mills College in 1998. She is an associate professor of English at Vassar College. She is the author of Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits and Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry. McGlennen’s writing has appeared in Sentence, As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.
The poems in this collection are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands.
The awards luncheon is in McAllen, Texas on March 6, 2020 at the South Texas College Pecan Campus Student Union Ballroom, from 12 to 2 p.m.
We are excited to announce that Tom Miller is the recipient of a Bronze Best Travel Writing Solas Award for an excerpt from the first chapter of his University of Arizona Press book, Cuba, Hot and Cold!
Since his first visit to Cuba thirty years ago, Miller has shown us the real people of Havana and the countryside, the Castros and their government, and the protesters and their rigor.
Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Fred Arroyo‘s memories of his father. By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer.
Below, Fred has answered a few questions that shed more light on the process and thoughts behind writing Sown in Earth.
This collection of essays is deeply personal and, at times, traumatic. How do you approach and process writing about topics that require you to be vulnerable?
That vulnerability is at the heart of almost everything I write. I can think of no other way to go about it. There is a desire, want, or yearning that drives my writing, and often that has to do with some kind of wound. Hurt. Loss. Psychic wound. In writing Sown in Earth I made a point of not using the word añoranza, which in Spanish relates to yearning, longing, and nostalgia— though it is a difficult word to translate or define in English because it’s much more than these other words or qualities. The longing and yearning of añoranza are tied to a deep need to return to a place. Maybe, in the mind, to be sown in earth. When I write, I don’t set about to approach this añoranza or loss; it is there in the form of mood, an atmosphere of meditation and exploration, a space where I might discover aspects of a vulnerability I would not have realized without writing. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been looking from the outside in. Given periods of sadness and depression, I am often inhabited by the “blues”, and that’s clearly an essential part of my poetics. What was it that Federico Garcia Lorca said, “I am neither all poet, all man or leaf, but only the pulse of a wound that probes the opposite side.”? You have to be open, without a purpose or agenda when writing about certain memories and situations, if you want to discover the other side of the wound, something new about the memory or situation.
In Sown in Earth, you write “Ever since I discovered things can be beautiful because of the care I take to see them….” Was this a sudden discovery, or a gradual shift in your worldview? How has it impacted your writing?
From the very beginning of my writing, if añoranza or loss existed, lyricism and a sense of beauty existed as well. My lyricism had always been unbridled though, passage after passage, flights that seem to soar without end. This lyricism often got in the way of a “story”, others would say. More to the point is that I have a particular way of looking at the world, and that makes for a different kind of story. The passage quoted in the question came about through a gradual discovery. I started to think of beauty and writing in terms of space, I suppose like sculpture, a library, or a field, about how you have to carefully mold or cultivate a space for beauty. And there was something about where you stood, or from what angle you looked at things. So if you were always walking in a field from one direction that only allowed you to notice certain spaces, but if you found new ways to walk the field, and you were carefully attentive in your looking and listening, you might discover a new grove of birches on the edge of the field, hear a spring, feel the way a meadow rolled towards the fence line. I can recollect that much reading of John Berger and José Ortega y Gasset helped shape my view, but it was also a gradual recognition that a seemingly rural and “poor” life had just as much dignity, honor, and beauty as any painting or sculpture in a museum. Or a book on a library shelf. And it was up to me to figure out how to create a space that allowed that life to exist in a way where others would recognize this life. A space of memory and imagination where others could recognize its dignity and beauty within their own lives.
Would you please discuss the balance between forgiveness and accountability when writing pieces about your childhood and your father?
I suppose I’m beholden to the notation that character is fate. Or in fiction writing, character is everything. I love the notion of energeia, that is, the possibility or potential of story is discovered within a character and the situation. That guides my writing of fiction and nonfiction. I’m the narrator, I’m the sentient being present in the making of the world, and so I do hold the character or situation to a kind of accountability. But not much. I think of people or characters like quicksilver— they have a spontaneity, a wild side, an unpredictability and chaos that’s not easy to control. What’s more important in the writing is the forgiveness. You cannot discover the gift of the past, a person, or a situation if you can’t approach it with openness, vulnerability, and forgiveness. Writing can create or offer islands of repair, as I wrote in Sown in Earth because I loved that phrase by Henry Miller.
I didn’t really think of writing Sown in Earth as a way to create accountability, or to “stop” or “recapture” time. I felt that way because I envision memory as material, and a force, moving through time and space. As a material phenomenon, memory can be held, shaped (parts discarded, parts held close), and re-made given where the material and force— like a creek, a watch, a knife, a name— takes you. I couldn’t have written this book if I didn’t discover how to forgive the past. More urgently: I couldn’t have written the book if I didn’t forgive myself for what I remembered. It was through this forgiveness that I discovered a lost self, peoples and places I might have forgotten, that I discovered sources of life, story, and spirit that could be vividly brought to life on the page. Always in my mind was Ortega y Gasset’s notion that an essay is a meditation, and borrowing from Spinoza, Ortega y Gasset wrote that at the heart of a meditation is amor itellectualis. I like to run from the things having to do with intellect as fast as I can, and yet I kept this feeling close in writing meditations of forgiveness, meditations of love.
In one essay, you write, “…or should I write, in memory, that he’s my uncle by blood?” I think this explores the fallibility of memory in an interesting way. Could you please discuss the role that misremembering, whether subconscious or intentional, plays in writing a memoir? Do you think that memoirs, by default, have unreliable narrators?
Even though I suggested that memory is material, that it has an existence and force that is not simply found in the “past”, my memory is continually shaped by my imagination. Misremembering is present for sure. My memories, for example, are clearly shaped by my becoming a writer, so that the process of writing, the reading of books, words, and passages by writers, shape my memory, shape how I imagine certain memories. That has to create some form of selection and misremembering. And yet, at the same time, each memory in this writing is a glimpse and a seed, an image, scene, event, or experience I can’t deny. Involuntarily, without my doing anything, certain memories speak to me, flash and shudder within, invigorate the five senses, and make me pay attention. I assume everyone has this kind of memory writing within them. Though I have a sense, again, it also has something to do in particular with imagining yourself as a writer— and that’s why I admire the power of memory for writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Rhys, Patrick Modiano, or Anne Michaels. How the language of memory shapes their writing selves. So I’m trying to say that I’m not sure “memoirs, by default, have unreliable narrators.” They exist, for sure. But for me you are striving to be as reliable as a person, irrespective of factual truth, because memory has its own language and emotion that cannot be denied.
In discovering this writing self, I’m often struck by how my best self is present— or, as Kristjana Gunnars proposes, a stranger has entered into my writing room and helped me to discover my writing in ways I am most grateful for. I would say this stranger or best writing self strives for a great amount of reliability because there’s a strong presence of authority and vulnerability in the moment.
What are you working on now?
I wish I knew. On paper I have a half a dozen stories for a collection of short fictions, The Book of Manuels, that I continue to return to, and in these stories various characters named “Manuel” are present, the stories have something to do with manual labor, a manual or a book, and they dramatize the power of sight (as in Immanuel: one with ideals, one who can see), and the conflicts of perception. I envision these stories as also being containers of fictional consciousness meditating on a lack of empathy for the working-class, and how their lives and stories continue to be marginalized— if not erased— from American culture and society. Also, I’ve written some 40 poems that I imagine as becoming a manuscript, Before Birches Blue. I’m still kind of haunted by writing Sown in Earth. I’m taking things slow in terms of writing. I can’t seem to take a break or stop writing, however. Whenever I finish a book, I always seem to mull over how I failed, what I didn’t accomplish, what I might have done better, no matter that when I finished I knew it was my best at the moment. I supposed this is why The Region of Lost Names, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, and Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging are in line with each other, create patterns across genres, peoples, and places. Maybe they are all a part of one big book. So I’m finding I have all these new essays to write, and wondering where they will take me, what I might discover, and how they might help me to get the writing right.
Fred Arroyo is the author ofSown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, and The Region of Lost Names: A Novel. A recipient of an Individual Artist Program Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, Arroyo’s fiction is a part of the Library of Congress series Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers. Arroyo’s writing is also included in Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. In the past decade Arroyo has driven considerable miles along the northern border of the United States, particularly in Ontario, Quebec, and the maritime regions, where he’s camped, walked, canoed, and fished in a real and imagined North Country that’s influencing a new collection of short stories and a book of poems. Arroyo is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.
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