During their conversation, Fleming speaks about differences in the way bats and hummingbirds carry pollen. He says, “Hummingbirds tend to be highly territorial when they are feeding, and they have small territories. But bats are not territorial and have large feeding ranges. They can carry pollen kilometers at a time.”
Fleming also talks about early hummingbird fossils found in Europe: “The earliest fossils dating from 32 to 30 million years ago were first unearthed in shale deposits in Germany. Previous to this fossil discovery in 1984, we thought of hummingbirds as New World only, but now we think they probably developed in tropical Eurasia.”
*** Theodore H. Fleming is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Miami. He spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He lives in Tucson.
Opperman remembers discovering Kelly when looking through archives in Mexico related to her dissertation work, “I came across this thoughtfully articulated ethnographic report of a community and a community center with all of its details about what was working in this community and what wasn’t. And it was written in English. It seemed like a thorough and well-researched piece. . . . and I wanted to know who is this person? What is her story?”
Opperman also discusses how Kelly’s story illuminates changes happening in Mexico and in the field of anthropology at the time. “In the post-World War II period, Mexico is going through industrialization, towards unification, towards having global alliances,” Opperman says. “The field of anthropology is also changing in the midst of all of this. It’s going through changes, many ups and downs and swerves and twists in this period. And for me, she’s the connecting piece.”
Stephanie Baker Opperman is a professor of Latin American history at Georgia College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Women’s History, Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Latin Americanist, and Endeavour.
InBlue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert, Amber McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place. Today she answers five questions about her collection.
What inspired you to write Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert?
In graduate school, I created a zine for my craft of poetry class called Indigenous Corn is Revolutionary Love. From the zine, I started molding my thesis. I originally started writing about Native (blue) corn and the power behind it, then it slowly started evolving into love poems as well. I would say these themes and images were mainly because that’s what was happening in my life: I was living in Oakland on a beautiful school campus, and I was in a long-distance relationship going back and forth between Arizona and California. I think a big part was living in California for a couple years and not realizing how much I missed the deserts in Southern and Northern Arizona.
How does your background in zine writing and illustration have an impact on your poetry writing?
Had I not made my first zine, I don’t think I would have realized I was a writer. I would have probably kept my thoughts to myself in a journal, which I think would have been fine. But I would still be living in fear of not being good enough or that no one was interested in what I had to write. I’m very thankful I started out in zines because it helped me realize that nothing is perfect, and my art and self encompass that.
You explore the complexities of environmental destruction within poems about love between a Diné woman and an O’odham man, what inspired you to combine these themes?
How I see it, there’s not much of a difference between an Indigenous person and the land they come from. I joke about my muse being my “saguaro,” but saguaros are everywhere where he comes from and with urbanization and land destruction in Southern Arizona, I do see saguaros falling over from climate change or being rooted up to make new freeways over sacred places like South Mountain. Having lived in the Phoenix area (on and off) for seventeen years, these are mainly the parts of the everyday conversations I see or hear with O’odham people. And it’s the same with being a Diné woman growing up in Northern Arizona. We see sacred land and sites being desecrated all the time. I think love for me as a Native person tends to go beyond just loving a person for their being but their land as well.
Why did you use Navajo letter “£” to explore family, language, and loss?
I’m not sure, that piece sort of became this organic thing that I would add onto over the course of four or five years. It originally started when I took a class between undergrad and grad school at Arizona State University with Natalie Diaz. I remember in her class she had us choose a letter and describe it. I thought it was interesting to choose Ł since I only tend to write it when I am spelling a Navajo word. It was a letter that I always felt connected to and just love not only visually but the sound of it as well. I think this letter bridges a lot between those that only speak Navajo and those that speak English but only know bits of their language. It helps me understand these bridges and connections that are there between myself and my relatives.
What are you working on now?
Heh, I’m currently working on a zine which may possibly be turned into a longer book about rez dogs. Over the past year, they have been my muse and my connection to compassion, trauma and love. I was living on the reservation the past year and fostered a few dogs through Tuba City Humane Society that needed homes and healing from illnesses, homelessness, and violence. My family and I are big time dog people, so this just sort of catapulted how much certain rez dogs need home and medical care, a warm place and snacks to overcome some of the trauma that happens to them on the streets. I have polaroids from the dogs I’ve fostered, and I thought this could be an interesting project to start.
Amber McCrary is of the Kin Łichíí’nii clan, born for the Naakaii Dine’é clan. Her maternal grandfather is the Áshįįhí clan and her paternal grandfather is the Ta’neeszahnii clan. McCrary was born in Tuba City, Arizona, and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. She is a poet, zinester, dog (and cat) mom, and tea lover. She divides her time between northern and southern Arizona. This is her first book. www.ambermccrary.com
Treat yourself to some excellent listening to celebrate the end of the year. Recently, our authors were featured guests or guest hosts on radio programs and podcasts. Tune in to go behind the scenes of three of our 2024 books, and listen to a brand new poem from one of our poets!
Phoenix’s KJZZ public radio station interviewed Rafael A Martínez about his new book, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States. Martínez talked about how today’s youth movements were inspired by the history of activism. He says, “Most of these activists that I write about were trained by folks and leaders in the civil rights movement. [In the 1960s] there was a lot of civil disobedience in the country, but then they also had to push politicians to pass things that would actually make significant change. Undocumented youth took a page from that history book and started to say: we need to take our activism to sites and places like detention centers where undocumented communities are being criminalized and we need to change the narrative.” Listen to the radio show here. The full transcript is also available.
They Call You Back is a memoir about the investigations that have shaped the greater part of the author’s life. Hernandez takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. Hernandez continues his search for families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.
Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. His books include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award. His work has been featured in international media, and in 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his work locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos, which is chronicled in his book, All They Will Call You.
In the new work Hopis and the Counterculture, Brian Haley addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the appropriation of Indigenous identities that exploded in the 1960s. Today, the author answers our questions.
What got you interested in this topic?
The truth is that I stumbled upon it largely by accident. I was searching for what influenced many of California’s Spanish colonial descendants to adopt identities as “traditional” Native Americans after the late 1960s. This led me to discover a social field that not only cast Hopis as spiritual high priests of global significance, but also helped create a major strand of neo-indigenism and the Native American “traditionalism” of that era. I realized that I had connected the dots between these. I knew enough Hopi ethnography and counterculture history to realize that I’d stumbled upon answers to questions of great concern to Hopi people and to those interested in the development of traditionalism, neo-Indianism, and new spiritualities.
The book addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the explosive appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s. It delves into the roles played by non-Hopi actors and the timing behind the widespread popularization of Hopi religious practices. As an anthropologist, why is documenting this important?
The level of misunderstanding regarding the Hopi people is substantial. We need to understand why that occurs so we can strive to do better and be better neighbors. It is significant that this widespread misunderstanding ties in with other significant ongoing issues we are struggling to understand, especiallyhow we react to the constant disruptions wrought by global forces beyond local control. For instance, documenting neo-indigenism is vitally important because Native communities are under substantial threat from this phenomenon and our institutions still haven’t acknowledged it. Building an understanding of how and when people seek relief from their sense of powerlessness in identity, traditionalism, and primitivism is, I hope, another one of the payoffs here.
In the acknowledgements, you write that Stewart Koyiyumptewa, Director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation office, took an early interest in your research and invited you to share it with staff and elders who advise them. How did that take shape?
Ordinarily, if you wish to study the Hopi people you first talk with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. However, I was in the unusual position of having arrived at a Hopi subject through a non-Hopi one. My research lay primarily outside of the Hopi Tribe yet there were Hopis in my study. When I realized where my research was heading, I knew that the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office would be interested because they had long voiced concerns about the appropriation and misrepresentation I was uncovering. My friend, Wolf Gumerman put me in touch with Stewart. I periodically sent things to Stewart and asked questions. Eventually, he invited me to come share my research with his staff and the council of elders who advise his office. When I arrived, one of the staff thanked me for my work on this. I was very moved, and I hope they also find the book helpful.
You conducted research at archives and special collections across the country, including our own Special Collections, here at the University of Arizona Libraries in Tucson. What surprised you about your work in archives?
There were so many surprises that I originally wanted to call the book, “Unexpected Histories.” I was endlessly surprised by how much documentation was available about a story that had been so overlooked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been since my subjects were all writers! We are biased to think that if you are interested in things Hopi, that is where you look. But a truism of identity research is that how outsiders perceive your group can have huge impacts, something I had explored previously with immigrants and neo-Indians. So, I looked on the outside where others hadn’t, in the works of a Christian pacifist anarchist, two spiritual seekers, and the Firesign Theatre. The voices preserved in the archives led me to one surprising discovery after another, gradually revealing the shape and character of an expansive and influential social field that others had missed.
What do you hope readers and researchers take away from this work?
I hope that readers grasp how easy it is for our desires to color our understanding of the world around us, and how beliefs we think are respectful and protective of others may be anything but.
About the Author Brian D. Haley is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Oneonta and a leading scholar of the appropriation of Indigenous identities by people with non-Native histories. He is the author of Reimagining the Immigrant: The Accommodation of Mexican Immigrants in Rural America and the co-editor of Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries.
Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? Meena Khandelwal, Associate Professor of Feminist Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Iowa, explores this paradox in her new book Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India. Based on multidisciplinary collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, development specialists, and others, Khandelwal discusses chulhas as women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work.
In The Jugaad Project: Material Religion in Context podcast, Khandelwal explains the questions that led to her research: “Why do these old technologies persist? Why does the chulha persist? I believe that re-imagining the chulha as a dynamic technology helps us understand the reasons that people and especially rural women may retain older technologies . . . despite the allure of modern energy infrastructures.”
The author also addressed the multidisciplinary aspect of the book: “We’re all trying to have a conversation. The language that we use is very different. The methods in each discipline are different. What counts as reliable data?” For example, the engineers wanted GIS data on forests and harvesting wood, with women’s stories as narratives about that data. But as an anthropologist, Kehandelwal believes women’s words and stories were the actual data. She said, “I pushed back at that moment and said stories are data too, not just embellishment of so-called ‘hard data.’”
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre in her new collection, House of Grace, House of Blood. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’sfrom Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations. Today we ask Low five questions about her book.
What inspired you to write this collection?
I have a double life as a scholar (should I digress about my Mercury in Gemini?), which leads me to write critical works about literature and Plains Indian ledger art. So I have spent many months of my life in Footnote Land, and those original versions, as close as possible to the historic events, have so much textured information—even when recorded by European settler descendants. The Gnadenhutten massacre, which I researched for my memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, resonated with many people of the time, from Tecumseh to Benjamin Franklin. To keep focus on one family in the memoir, I cut this incident. Every Lenape person I know remembers Gnadenhutten, and few others. I want to make this event part of the conversation about genocide in North America and genocide as a predicament of human experience, along with a conversation about actions toward reconciliation.
These poems weave historical voices and primary sources into the lyric, first-person perspective in a mode sometimes called “documentary poetics” or “archival poetry.” What are some of the challenges—or opportunities—that come with working in this mode?
The complicated history of East Coast Native peoples, especially Lenapes and related nations, leaves behind many archival artifacts, which include: texts about massacres, alliances, marriages, enslavements, destructions, ordinary farm life, military service, scouting, and trading. These moments all create a factual narrative of Delawares, who were the first Indigenous people to trade with the English on the island of Manhattan. This book pushes back at the image of primitive “Indians” selling New York City’s site for a few beads. By foregrounding the back stories—using oral and written histories—I want to uncover the apocryphal and vital presence of Native people. With Gnadenhutten archives, I found myself interacting in present time with the texts, so I created verse forms to engage in intertextual and inter-chronological dialogues. These were couplets woven from a document line alternated with my response. It was a ghost-like call-and-response. One text was a transcription of a massacre survivor’s granddaughter’s account. This was so moving to hear the story from the Delaware point of view. American lyrical poetry is so elastic. With researched information about Pennsylvania-sponsored scalp taking, I used a ledger format to make a point not possible in prose lines. The American poetic tradition can hold all this, plus lyrical words about faith and courage.
Where and how did you do the research for this book? Which sources were particularly important to this collection?
Research began with my uncle and brother—about the family’s occluded Native heritage. Delaware elders have shared information with me orally and some documents. The paper trail includes local Ohio histories, Moravian archives, military records, and maps. My husband Tom Weso, Menominee, used to say the land is the first place to start with Native narratives, and indeed the maps tell so much about this event and the history of Delawares in general. Maps confirm the diaspora. In text and visual maps, I trace the timeline of the Gnadenhutten massacre and then expand the horizontal line into one with depth—all the details that were happening in the same place and time moment by moment. The unfolding consequences, including intergenerational trauma, continue today.
Importantly, this work moves past the Gnadenhutten Massacre and into its aftermath, following the speaker’s childhood memories, visiting monuments, and ending with the wonderful poem “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County, Kansas,” which feels like both a celebration and a memorial. Why was it important for you to merge the historical with the contemporary moment?
This is a time when awareness of factual, not settler colonial fictions, are evolving. House of Grace, House of Blood contributes to this turn toward truth. I want better understanding of the Lenape and East Coast histories; I also want better understanding of how eradication of populations—human, animal, plants—is part of human experience and how to address it. The local newspaper reports that Governor Newsom of California recently signed a state bill that requires teaching of the Indigenous genocide during Gold Rush times and also Indigenous contributions. This is a great moment in California. My plan with my book is not to simply say, “J’accuse” / “I accuse you.” Telling the truth about the brutality of that massacre is embedded within themes of shared family ties, healings of the earth, spiritual ways, the arts, power of language, and hope. Through the years elders have taught these values as ways to survive as individuals and as communities. This healing is for all of us.
What are you working on now?
Research is taking me to deeper sources for the slavery of Delaware and other related peoples, who were taken from their lands to the Caribbean cane fields. Something is known about the Pequot slaves traded to the West Indies in the 1630s. Little remains, however, about the history of up to 50,000 Indigenous people of mainland United States sent to this forced labor. Erasure of historic facts like Native plantation slavery distort understanding of the eastern tribal nations, especially. I’m also working toward another study of Northern Cheyenne ledger art texts regarding the Fort Robinson Breakout of 1879, connected to my book co-authored with Ramon Powers, Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors (University of Nebraska, 2021).
Denise Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her recent books include Shadow Light: Poems, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, and A Casino Bestiary. Her Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors won a Kansas Notable Book Award. She founded the creative writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University and is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. She has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage. www.deniselow.net.
Congratulations to author Rafael Martínez, who has received the “Líderes Under 40 Award” from the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los D-backs Hispanic Council. The award honors leadership in Arizona’s Hispanic community.
Martínez was recently interviewed by Scott Bordow of Arizona State University News about the honor, which recognizes Martinez’s 2023 oral history project Querencia: Voices from Chandler’s Latinx Barrios. They also discussed Martinez’s new book Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, and the Latinx Oral History Lab.
Martínez tells Bordow, “The questions are framed around the idea of querencia. It’s a common Spanish word that means love to place. It’s terminology that’s been developed by Latino and Hispanic Southwest authors. Mexican Americans and people of Spanish descent have been in this region for multiple generations. The idea of connection to place is embodied in this concept of querencia. So, the questions really revolve around talking about growing up in the city of Chandler. What did the city look like at that time? What did their neighborhood look like?”
In the photo above, Rafael Martínez and his daughter are on the left with other award winners at Diamondbacks’ stadium.
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”
The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Storiesis a celebration of the people, ideas, inventions, teaching, and structures that have been part of the school’s evolution from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. Drawing on half a century of connection with the University of Arizona as a student, staff member, and faculty member, Gregory McNamee presents a history through the lens of a hundred subjects.Today we ask McNamee five questions about his book.
What’s a favorite undergraduate moment?
Tucson is a friendly, laid-back town, and when I landed here in 1975 it was immediately apparent that someone forget to tell it that the 1960s were over. One of my favorite moments at the University came when I enrolled as an undergraduate on a hot August day. As I was walking down the olive-tree-lined path along Park Avenue, two bands were setting up on the back of a flatbed truck for a welcome-to-campus concert, Summerdog and the Bob Meighan Band, who were favorites of campus and community alike and who gave extraordinary performances for a body of bobbing, dancing students, many of them as disoriented as I was in the brand-new world of college. I later became friends with players in both bands. Anyway, that capped off my first day here, when, gathering punch cards to get into classes, I met several young men and women who remain dear friends to this very day. Many of them turn up in my book.
Not a moment so much as a series of moments was the delightful fact that on almost any evening on campus during my undergraduate years (1975–78) there was something going on: a lecture from a world-class visiting scholar in Social Sciences, a poetry reading in the Modern Languages Auditorium; a musical, dance, or theatrical performance in what became Centennial Hall; some great film in the Gallagher Theater. Within the space of a few months, if memory serves, I saw Spanish director Victor Erice’s life-changing film Spirit of the Beehive and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, as well as repeated showings of the mind-blowing 2001, Allegro Non Troppo, and the collected works of the Marx Brothers; attended poetry readings by W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Lucille Clifton, and Seamus Heaney, among many others; heard fiery lectures by William Kunstler, Angela Davis, and Noam Chomsky, as well as a slurred one by Hunter S. Thompson; went to a Pink Floyd light-and-sound show at Flandrau and several great rock concerts at the Senior Ballroom; and talked about every possible topic there was to talk about late into the night, night after night, over coffee at the Student Union or beer at Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow down on Fourth Avenue.
University of Arizona vs. University of Wisconsin men’s basketball game atMcKale Center.
I don’t want to sound like too much of a cranky old guy, though I am certainly that, but back in those happy days before students glued themselves to cell phones and social media, it was possible to have a happy life with orders of magnitude more actual social interaction. In any event, I could fit an awful lot into my schedule: take a full course load, work a part-time job, keep my grades up, and even get a little sleep from time to time while enjoying all that the campus had to offer.
One hundred stories is a lot of history. Will you share a bonus 101st story, perhaps one that didn’t make it into the book?
Well, it’s telling tales out of school, as the old saying goes, but back in the day I hung out from time to time with several friends who lived at the old grad-student apartments in the Babcock Building, which I believe became office space for a couple of decades and then became a dorm again. One of the residents was a friend of a friend, Barbara Kingsolver, whom I got to know. While the rest of us were hanging out down by the pool, jawboning about politics or literature or whatever until midnight, I could hear Barbara typing away in her room up on the second floor. Just a few years later her first novel, The Bean Trees, appeared, and the race was on. Every now and then I reflect on what might have happened if I’d gone home and hit the typewriter myself on a Saturday night, but things have worked out pretty well.
Thinking about what you call the four foundational pillars at the U of A—agriculture, mining & geology, astronomy, and anthropology—what is a great example of a modern research achievement from one of these areas of study?
Ten-odd years ago, my friend Neal Armstrong, now a retired Regents Professor of Chemistry, invited me to come up to the UA experimental farm in Maricopa, 85 or so miles northwest of Tucson, to see what appeared to be the world’s largest scanner. Some fifty feet high, it weighs thirty tons and moves along steel rails over crop rows the length of four football fields. Those fields contain thousands of sensors, reading data from forty-two thousand plants below, about five terabytes a day. The numbers are then crunched to determine which plants are thriving under experimental conditions that are expected to resemble the future climate. Those plants that produce good yields are then selected for breeding, while those that fail are pulled. Darwinism in action, that.
TERRA (Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture), as it’s called, represents the confluence of three important areas of research, conducted by scientists from many disciplines: energy, water, and food. We’re likely to be scrambling for energy, unless we go fully renewable, in the next quarter century; we’re likely to find that water is ever scarcer; and in the year 2100, by most estimates, the human population of the world will stand at nearly 11 billion people, about a third more people than are alive today. All of them need to eat, so TERRA, helping select crops that will do best under arduous conditions, is a potential life-saver and world-changer. As I say in the book, it’s a matter of life and death.
Agricultural analysis machine that is part of the TERRA program.
The other pillars have done more than their share to keep up with the modern world. But growing food is perhaps the most important thing humans can do, and it pleases me that our school’s very first pillar, agriculture, is such an important part of the planet’s future.
What is the most surprising thing you learned about the University of Arizona while writing this book?
I wouldn’t say I learned it so much as appreciated it more while writing the book, but one of the underlying themes of my book is the power of interdisciplinarity in research and study. Years before it became standard, UA scholars were going from building to building, anthropologists talking with economists, space scientists cooking up projects with hydrologists, physicians teaming up with physicists, writers collaborating with dancers and photographers and musicians, and professors and administrators such as John Schaefer, a chemist, making room in his schedule as UA president to teach a humanities course. Much of the intellectual richness of our school—and it’s always yielded an embarrassment of intellectual riches—comes from that kind of interdisciplinary work, leaving the rigid confines of supposed fields for the freedom of the highway, if you’ll forgive the tortured metaphor.
What is your current writing project?
I have a superstition against talking about work in progress, since it’s altogether too easy to talk all the energy out of the writing, to go out to lunch one time too often on a good anecdote and eventually get so sick of your stories that you want nothing less than to repeat them on the page. I’ve seen it happen many times, not least with my old friend Dick Tuck, scourge of Richard Nixon, who would have had a ten-thousand-page memoir in him if he’d only stopped talking and started writing.
I will let on, though, that I’m hoping to focus my next book on a certain animal that’s a distant cousin of the wildcat rather than on the capital-W Wildcats of the current book.
Apart from that, each month I pull together a Substack newsletter called World Bookcase, four or five thousand words of musing about whatever topics in history, culture, language, food, travel, and suchlike matters happen to be catching my interest at the moment. New subscribers are always welcome!
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About the Author Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of more than forty books and author of more than ten thousand periodical pieces. He is a contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a contributing writer to Kirkus Reviews, and his writing and photographs have appeared in dozens of magazines and online publications. McNamee is a former lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Arizona and is a longtime traveling speaker for AZHumanities.
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