A Load of Links Related to the UND Budget Crisis Class in 2018

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper for a volume on campus crises. This week, the volume feels all the more relevant (if not, to use everyone’s favorite academic term “urgent”).

I’m putting the final touches on the first draft of my chapter which will focus on how the budget 2016-2018 budget crisis at UND shaped what I did in the classroom. Here’s the rough outline of my paper:

Introduction
Teaching as Activism (here, here)
The Anatomy of the UND Budget Crisis
Teaching a Class on the University Budget
The Wesley College Documentation Project
Conclusion

With any luck, the conclusion will be done by the end of the week!

I came to realize that my writing about the UND budget crisis drew upon on a pretty interesting group of documents that my classes both produced and used upon. I know that I’ve shared a few of them here in the past, but now seems to be an appropriate time to share all of them.

First, here is the syllabus for my class on the UND Budget. 

History of North Dakota: Women’s Hockey, Higher Ed & the UND Budget

That class and the gradate reading seminar that I ran in the Fall of 2017 produced a pair of short, free, downloadable books:

Defending History: The Graduates Manifesto

 

Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget at the University of North Dakota

The class relied upon a document reader that was the product of a small graduate seminar. Joe Kalka, who was a student in that seminar (and the course that produced produced it. It remains a useful archival record of the budget situation on UND’s campus. We tried to stabilize the hyperlinks using the Internet Archive, but a number of the links don’t work. It nevertheless provides a basic survey of the sources that students in the UND budget class could use to  

Higher Education and Budgets Course Document Reader

We shared the first chapter of Andrew Larson’s thesis with the class as a general survey of the recent history of higher education grounded in some of the classic works on the field, but with an  

Andrew F. Larson, “Not Your Advisor’s Doctorate: The Doctor Of Arts And The Modernization Of Higher Education 1945-1970.” Unpublished D.A. Thesis, University of North Dakota, 2020. 

We also benefited from a couple of other documents:

William Caraher, “History at the University of North Dakota 1885-1970,” Unpublished 2009.

Louis G. Geiger, University of the Northern Plains: a History of the University of North Dakota, 1883-1958. UND Press, 1958

Of course, there have been several publications, both formal and more casual, out of our broader work on the UND budget:

Letters of Edward Robertson President Emeritus, Wesley College, From 1935.

Wyatt Atchley, “Images of Austerity,” NDQ 85 (2018), 124-125.

Melissa Gjellstad and Ryan Zerr, “Faculty Navigating the Age of Austerity: Affirming Roles and Renewing Alliances,” NDQ 85 (2018), 162-180.

William Caraher, “Humanities in the Age of Austerity: A Case Study from the University of North Dakota,” NDQ 85 (2018), 208-221.

William Caraher , Michael Wittgraf , Wyatt Atchley, “Hearing Corwin Hall: The Archaeology of Anxiety on an American University Campus,” Epoiesen (2021).

Wyatt Atchley, “Wesley College: Progressive Era Education in North Dakota.” Unpublished MA Thesis, NDSU, 2023.

William Caraher, “Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter,” in Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. Gabe Moshenska ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. (You can download a pre-print of this article here).

Teaching Thursday with NDQ

For the last few years, I’ve been teaching a practicum in the English Department’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program. This course splits its time between North Dakota Quarterly and projects with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. This semester, I literally split the class into two teams one of which focused on putting the next issue of NDQ in order and the other focused on editing, organizing, and developing a template for the first 50 contributions to the Grand Forks 150th volume.  

The NDQ team has completed organizing the volume and were impressive in their commitment to the project. In fact, they even met on the Snow Day to wrap things up. As part of their project, they prepared a brief “editors note” that connected their work in class to their hope for the readers. This will appear at the front of issue 91.1/2 and I share it with you here:

Editors Note

Eighteenth-century politician Edmund Burke once wrote, “Good order is the foundation of all good things.” Burke was reflecting on the bloody upheaval of the French Revolution—not a little magazine published in the Midwest—when he wrote those words, but he may as well have been writing about the North Dakota Quarterly. The 100-plus poems, stories, and essays selected to appear in each issue of NDQ must be thoughtfully ordered, creating an arrangement that will result in a cohesive issue.

 

As students in the University of North Dakota’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing certificate program, the NDQ editors tasked us with ordering this issue. We chose theme and tone to thread from piece to piece. We hope this issue, read from cover to cover, moves seamlessly, builds momentum, unveils emotional highs and lows, and makes you want to stay up a little later to read just one more.

 

By reading this issue from cover to cover, not only will you appreciate each piece on its own merit, but you will also see the issue as we have. We think you will be rewarded with a genuinely distinctive reading experience. The issue spans every stage of life from birth to death, travels miles to locations both exotic and familiar, and meets compelling characters—from one-armed lion tamers to convenience store cowboys. Part of NDQ’s charm is its freedom to publish content with few artistic limits. Without any one mission statement, every issue becomes its own unique style, creating what can only be defined as the North Dakota Quarterly.

 

We would like to thank editor Bill Caraher for throwing us into the deep end of this project. Coming to know every composition intimately and crafting an order that honors each piece has been a rewarding challenge. Bill has encouraged us to be innovative, independent, and reliable. Thank you, Bill, for trusting us, even though we messed up your Excel spreadsheet. We hope you’re not still upset about that.

 
Chad Erickstad

Brenden Kimpe
Danika Ogawa
Caitlin Scheresky
Maren Schettler

Three Things Thursday: An Abstract, a Panel, and Poetry

It’s going to be another day of weirdly crappy weather, but we’re almost a third of the way through the semester and it’s not -20°! Maybe it’s the strange weather, maybe it’s the hectic semester, or maybe it’s a kind of general fatigue, but I’m having a tough time feeling like February will be a productive month.

This probably accounts for this rather anemic Three Things Thursday:

Thing the First

My greatest accomplishment this week was this abstract for a Friends of ASOR Talk. The talk will be on March 7th (I think). More details soon.

For the last two decades, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has explored the coastal region of Pyla village. Located 10 km east of Larnaka and immediately below the famous Late Bronze Age site atop the Kokkinokremos coastal ridge, Koutsopetria featured a now-infilled embayment which likely served as a harbor in antiquity. The location of the site near an ancient harbor and astride the major road running between ancient cities of Kition and Salamis likely led to the fortification of the prominent coastal height of Vigla in the Hellenistic period. This site likely served as strategic outpost for mercenaries during the tumultuous period after Alexander the Great’s death when his successors battled for control over the island and the Mediterranean littoral. The forces occupying the fort appear to have abandoned it within a generation of its construction leaving behind a fascinating window into the tumultuous life of this strategic site.

During the Roman and Late Roman period, a prosperous town developed in the coastal zone. Excavations in the 1990s by the Department of Antiquities revealed parts of an Early Christian basilica and the intensive survey carried out by our team showed that the site had trade connections across the Mediterranean. The rise and decline of the Roman period settlement at Koutsopetria was less abrupt than that of its Hellenistic predecessor on Vigla, but our work at Koutsopetria similarly offers a window into an era of significant change on the island. Our excavations and survey at Koutsopetria have revealed that the church and surrounding settlement likely experienced a gradual abandonment over the course of the 7th and 8th centuries. This suggests that the site did not succumb to a catastrophic end at the hands of Arab raiders, but declined gradually perhaps as a result of the changing economic and political landscape of the region. 

This talk will interweave the story of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project with our understanding of the history of the site during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Roman periods.

Thing the Second

Kevin McGeough and I are happy to announce that we’ve had a Workshop accepted for the 2024 ASOR Conference in Boston. 

Here’s the abstract:

Contemporary Perspectives on Near Eastern And Mediterranean Pseudoarchaeology (Workshop)

Despite decades of debunking, pseudoarchaeology remains evergreen. A recent documentary series devoted to yet another pseudoarchaeologcial expedition to prove the existence of Atlantis provoked yet another chorus of outrage from archaeologists. Atlantis, in particular, appears to attract perniciously persistent perspectives anchored in Victorian racism and colonialism. At the same time, it is clear that Atlantis continues to fascinate 21st-century audiences not because of their deep attraction to Platonic rhetoric, but because it also offers a way to think about the consequences of catastrophic climate change. In general, pseudoarchaeological sites, artifacts, and explanations continue to resonate with contemporary challenges including race, identity, forced migration, millenarianism, and globalization.

In light of the ongoing relevance of pseudoarchaeology, this workshop seeks to situate specific pseudoarchaeological phenomenon in their intellectual, historical, social, and even archaeological context by considering the following questions:

1. What are the intellectual, social, political, and material contexts for pseudoarchaeology?

2. How have pseudoarchaeologists responded to normative archaeological arguments, methods, epistemologies, and institutions?

3. How have pseudoarchaeological ideas circulated? What genres, media, and institutions create space for pseudoarchaeology?

4. Have disciplinary efforts to debunk or critique pseudoarchaeology benefited or harmed the discipline?

5. How does the growing appreciation of the plurality of archaeologies create new space within the discipline to recognize and learn from pseudoarchaeological traditions?

As a workshop presenters will present a very brief pseudoarchaeological case study and address these five questions directly. These brief presentations will provide the foundation for an open discussion in the remainder of the workshop.

Thing the Third

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been re-reading William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923). I’m particularly appreciating the 2011 reprint produced by New Directions Publishing which preserve in all its glory the original Contact Editions typesetting and (cough) editing. 

There’s something about the poem’s bleak rendering of the interwar American landscape shaped by the memories of the Great War and the failed promise of industrialization that resonated with me more strongly (and urgently?) than T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland (1922), to which it is often compared. Any number of casual and academic observers have noted that Williams 

I don’t read a lot of poetry and most of what I read is confined to my work as the editor of North Dakota Quarterly and to the casual perusing of various little magazines. When I read something like Williams’ Spring and All, though, I am reminded just how powerful poetry can be and how much more poetry I should read.

Five Things to Consider Before Submitting to NDQ

The little devil on my shoulder has sorely tempted me to post this over on the NDQ blog, but for whatever reason, something has always stopped me from posting this. This week it was the passing of N. Scott Momaday. Other weeks, it was something more positive and creating. 

As I’m working to bring together issue 91.1/2, I find myself thinking a good bit our authors and how they often struggle to understand NDQ and manage the submission and editorial process. To help this along a bit (and as an excuse to vent some), I thought I would offer this simple guide on things to consider before submitting to NDQ:  

Over the past five years, I’ve spent a good bit of time working with authors to get their work published in NDQ. Over that time, I’ve noticed a few curious trends in authors who submit to our pages. These trends are in equal parts amusing, alarming, and depressing. The slight increase in alarming and depressing trends has nudged me to make a few recommendation to folks considering submitting to NDQ.

I’m framing these  

First, do you know the name of the journal? 

I regularly receive email that refer to the North Dakota Review or the North Dakota Quarterly Review. This is amusing, but also a bit demoralizing. After all, we’ve been North Dakota Quarterly since 1910 so there has been plenty of time for someone to get to know our name. More than that, it suggest an abject unfamiliarity with our little magazine. This is fine, if it comes from a casual inquiry from a reader or colleague, but in an alarming number of cases this comes from folks who have submitted or even PUBLISHED work to our pages. As the great Keyshawn Johnson famously exclaimed “C’mon, man!”

Second, have you read NDQ?

I’ve also become amused (and a bit troubled) by the number of people who submitted work, but have never read NDQ. I understand, of course, that there are many little magazines and we have limited time in our days, but why would you submit something to a journal that you’ve never even bothered to peruse?

It’s not like you have to subscribe! We regularly post content here on the web, we’re not available via Project Muse, and you can download two complete recent issues and our entire back catalogue for free! Despite this accessibility, people still ask me simple questions: Is NDQ a print journal? How many issues per year do you publish? 

Third, are you able to respond to Submittable and email messages? 

I find it incredibly confusing (and a bit demoralizing) that authors submit work for review and then never respond when we accept their work. To be clear, we do this via submittable and via the email that the author provided.

Of course, we often run behind in reading, but we also charge no reading fee (a common feature at many journals). In other words, we read everything that we have submitted to us, but we do it slowly. We don’t get upset when we accept something and are then told that it will appear elsewhere. I do get a baffled, though, when we accept something and then hear nothing. Or, stranger still, when we accept something, the author responds positively the acceptance, but then no longer replies to messages. This leaves the work in an awkward limbo where it can easily fall between the cracks in our rickety system.

Fourth, can you sign a PDF, prepare a 50 word bio, and manage edits made in a Microsoft Word (or similar) document?

I have joked that being an editor involves 10% facilitating the development of a shared creative vision and 90% on helping poets sign PDFs. This is an exaggeration, but there is a kernel of truth to it. 

Little magazines like NDQ rely heavily on a digital workflow. This not only reflects the changing nature of publishing (where all books are digital books even if they appear in print form), but also reflects the real need to maintain an efficient system. Authors who want to publish need to develop the skills necessary to navigate our digital world.

While I recognize that this might sound agist, classist, or simply the condescending perspective of a digital-native, I hasten to point out that not only are we flexible as editors, but most of the tools necessary, say, to sign a PDF, accept or reject changes in an edited manuscript, and submit a short (<50 word) bio in a usable format either are already necessary to submit to NDQ or a free.   

Finally, do you understand that we’re a venerable, but under resourced little magazine that doesn’t have a staff, a four-digit budget, or vague but meaning institutional support?  

We try to remind our authors (and ourselves) that the most important aspect of editing is the human one. Part of this means being attentive to the context in which your work is being read, edited, and published, but also recognizing that we as editors will do our best to treat your work as if it were our own.

We are a very small operation, run by volunteers, with no office staff and access only to a very limited budget (used almost entirely for copy editing). As a result, the NDQ editor — in this case me! — updates the website and writes for the blog. There is no social media manager, no digital content director, and no independent webmaster. We also rely on our publishing partner for typesetting and distribution. Often our authors get their copies before I see them!

All this is to say, please be nice and understanding if correspondence, editing, production, and printing aren’t quite as immediate as you’d like and if we can’t solve a problem (or even know its status) when you reach out. 

Teaching Tuesday: More on the Practicum

Like most of America, I’m up and at my keyboard with the Naoya Inoue-Marlon Tapales super undisputed bantam weight bout from Japan, but I’m starting to fret about my spring semester classes. The man class that I’m worried about is the Practicum in Editing and Publishing. I’ve taught this class in the past, but only to a handful of students at a time. Next semester, I’ll have a full class of a dozen students. It feels like I’ll have a bit less flexibility in terms of what I can do with the class and will require a bit more of a plan.

Since there are two major projects (and two minor projects) that require attention next semester, it makes sense to divide the class into two groups. One group will focus on the next issue of NDQ and one group will focus on the Grand Forks 150th project.

 The question is how do I get these groups started on these projects. It seems to me that there  are three ways to learn about editing and publishing. You can write books and get them published and learn about how different publishers and editors do their work first hadn’t. You can read books and pay attention to how they work and how they look. Finally, you can edit and publish as many books as possible and learn on the job. For me, getting published and publishing books has informed my ability to look at books as artifacts of the publishing process in a critical way. 

The tricky thing about this is that we don’t have a lot of time to get up to speed in that both of the major projects have March 1 deadlines. This means that the teams have to not only get up to speed quickly on the content of their projects, but also come to understand something of our “house style.” 

My current plan is to offer three quick assignments at the start of the semester:

Assignment One

Explore the NDQ archive with particular attention to issues published since 2018. Think about structure and content. What kind of content appears in these issues? How is it organized?

Explore The Digital Press catalogue. What kind of books does The Digital Press publish? What are key elements of the “house style”? 

Assignment Two

Identify three of NDQ’s “peer publications.” What are their common features? How do they differ?

Using the library collection, identify some books that might offer some ideas for the Grand Forks 150th project? 

Assignment Three

Working as a team, apply what you’ve learned from NDQ’s archive and peer publications to the current group of contributions to the Quarterly. Identify themes in the work and propose a way to organize the volume.

Working as a team, establish some recommendations and some priorities for the editing and design of the Grand Forks 150th project.

 

These three assignments should get the students starting to think about both publishing and how publishing (and editing) applies directly to their projects. It should also only occupies the first month of the semester leaving them time to work on their projects in February. 

Next week, I’ll work on how I’ll approach the class after the March 1 deadline!

Cyber Monday FREE Download Bundle from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota

Apparently today is Cyber Monday which marks the end of the a week of glorious (if glutinous) consumption featuring Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Small Business Saturday.

To celebrate this holiday, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is making a veritable gaggle of its books available in a simple, one-click, download.

2023 was a bit of a slow year for the press with only two titles appearing — Tuna Kalaycı’s Archaeology of Roads and Shilo Viginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar’s Campus Building — but 2022 was a banner year with Rodger Coleman’s award-winning Sun Ra Sundays, two novels — The Cherry Tree and The Library of Chester Fritz — and Mike Michlovic and George Holley’s Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend. 

You can download all these books FOR FREE plus a couple bonus books just be clicking here. 

This is a direct download link. I don’t ask for your email, your credit card number, or even your name. You don’t need an account and you don’t need to explain yourself. You also don’t need to tell me why you like paper books better, but you are free to follow the links to the individual titles above and pick up a paper copy. All proceeds from paper books support the work of the press.

Stay tuned to this blog (and the Digital Press homepage) for some great titles scheduled to appear in 2024. This means more Corinthia, more archaeology of eastern North Dakota, some poetry (in collaboration with our friends at North Dakota Quarterly), some history, and maybe a bit of Athenian street art.  

Some Gritty Literature for Black Friday

I know and appreciate the Black Friday tradition of looking for bargains and stretching the dollar to initiate a more disciplined holiday practice, but I want to make a suggestion for anyone looking for something a bit less basic (sensu this) might check out a subscription to a little magazine.

This past week, I did some traveling with volume 114 of the Greensboro Review. I really enjoyed the short fiction which featured stolen submarines, relationship wracked by climate change and Hawaiian crickets. The stories in the volume reveal the fertile ground at the intersection of dirty realism and climate fiction and embody the notion that in the 21st century, the poor will experience the future first. 

The Greensboro Review is one of five little magazines that I get each year and each of them offers something distinct and 

Conjunctions 80, for example, shares the Greensboro Review 114 interest in water and Conjunctions 81 explores the numinous and Conjunctions 82 is titled “Works and Days.”

Ploughshares is another regular read and the Fall 2023 issue’s emphasis on long-form prose made it an easy companion on flights and lazy Sunday afternoons. The essay by Anthony David was brilliant. The Ploughshares’ blog opens up new critical perspectives and has enriched my reading list. Check out a recent post title “Fiction of the Shopping Mall.“

It’s taken me a bit longer to warm to Prairie Schooner. I know its history and its central place in the development of “Midwestern Modernism,” but living on the Northern Plains initially washed off any of the exoticism that this distinctive regionalism offered. Over time, however, I’ve warmed to it and found more and more to appreciate in its pages. Ángel García’s portfolio on history in the most recent issue (96.4, I believe) is worth a read.

My longest standing subscription is to N+1. It feels like the most ambitious of the little magazines that I read regularly and its online presence is certainly the most robust and perhaps even the most compelling. I love their take on social issues from the little book What Was the Hipster? (for which they brilliantly published the index online) to their recent issue on Aggression. The essay “Not One Tree” interrogates the intersection between carceral state, the environment, and poverty in a way not radically different from some of the stories in the Greensboro Review.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to North Dakota Quarterly which readers of this blog know well enough that I don’t need to introduce it here.

It’s Black Friday and I get that many of you are probably not in the mood to curl up with a little magazine by the fire, but just maybe you’re looking for something to buy for that one uncle or cousin or sister who is always hard to by for. Maybe check out a subscription to a little magazine as a gift!

Three Things Thursday: Teaching, Travel, and Reading

This month is hectic, hence the disruption in my regular blog posting. Worse still, fragments of blog posts are beginning to collect in the queue, but between late semester meetings, conferences, and deadlines, I’m struggling to develop these fragments into something more substantial.

In other words, it’s a good time for a three thing Thursday.

Thing the First

I’m thinking a good bit about my Byzantine history class in the spring and planning to model it on my relatively successful Roman history class from last year. This means that it’ll focus on three or four key primary texts. I’ve not decided which primary texts (although I have some ideas!), but I think that I will assign Anthony Kaldellis massive The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (2023).

Of course, there are students who will see assigning a 1000+ page book for an undergraduate class as cruel and unusual punishment, but my plan isn’t for the students to read the entire book. Instead, I’ll ask that every student read at least one 300-ish page section of the book and write a critical review of it. This feels like a nice way to get students to engage with some scholarship on Byzantium, without being thrown into the deep end of very fussy and specialized debates. Kaldellis’s commitment to writing narrative history will help keep students engaged in the “story.” More than that, Kaldellis command over detail offers a nice counterpoint to my tendency to generalize. His extensive references will provide students with a change to dig deeper into a particular topic.

Thing the Second

Traveling sucks for so many reasons. It reproduces colonial inequality, it adds carbon to the atmosphere, spreads disease, and is generally unpleasant. I got to wonder whether the inefficiency and inconvenience of travel might work as a check on the continued reproduction of its more “toxic” elements.

In other words, is there something self-correcting in travel? 

Are forces of efficiency and economy conspiring to make travel less and less appealing, which, in turn, starts to temper the environmental and political damage that travel induces. For example, post-COVID tourism still has not returned to 2012 levels. While tourism is on the rise again, my experience this past week gave me reasons to hope that this rise will not culminate in a return to 2018 or 2019 levels.

Whatever romance existed in travel (perhaps clinging on from mid-century, post-war modes of travel and tourism that celebrated the power of the American dollar and the emergence of a global bourgeoise), it seems to be waning especially as airlines, hotels, airports, and the other institutions necessary to make travel possible are struggling to turn profits or looking to wring every dollar (and ounce of dignity) from the bedraggled traveler.

Thing the Third

Over at NDQ, I’ve posted an essay recognized in this years Best American Essays. Erica Goss’s essay “Talismans” was listed as a “Notable Essay.” In general, I’m not a huge fan of these competitions in part because by elevating some work, they invariably obscure other work (although I suppose one could argue that they draw attention to other authors and contributions published by the journal. 

Whatever one thinks of books like Best American Essays (and the myriad of little competitions), the essay is good. Read it here.

Clell Gannon on the Missouri

Crossposted with the North Dakota Quarterly blog.

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the prairie poet Clell Gannon recently. In fact, I’m working to produce a “centennial edition” of his 1924 book of poems Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres.

As part of that process, I’m doing a bit of reading around in Gannon’s other works and reading some work on Gannon. In fact, this project was inspired by Molly Rozum’s recent book Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairie (2021). This week, I had the pleasure of perusing Aaron Barth’s very recent dissertation from NDSU, Settler Colonizers’ Sense of History on the Northern Plains Before and After the Turn of the Nineteenth Century from 2022, which includes a chapter on Gannon.

He and his wife’s home in Bismarck, called the Cairn, had become sufficiently iconic to gain a mention in the WPA guide to North Dakota. It was made of native stone and perhaps represented the most literal possible interpretation of the so-called “Prairie School” of architecture. Rather than embracing the prairie as a kind of icon of openness, freedom, and American modernity, Gannon built his home of prairie granite and instead of referencing the explicit modernity of formal architecture, made a nod to the practice of using stones cleared from fields to build barn foundations.

Barth’s dissertation spent some time discussing Gannon’s 1925 trip on a shallow draft boat down the Little Missouri River from Medora to Elbowoods on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. He was accompanied on the journey by George Will and Russell Reid. They then continued down the Missouri River to Bismarck. Gannon published a description of his journey in the first volume of North Dakota History: “A Short Account of a Rowboat Journey from Medora to Bismarck.” Fortunately, you can now read this because it entered the public domain last year.

The narrative is sparse, but the authors had a shared interest in both the scenic and historic aspects of the 350 mile journey. They noted, for example, the historic remains at both Marquis de Morès’s Medora and Theodore Roosevelts Elkhorn ranch as well as the remains at several Mandan villages on the Missouri River downstream from Elbowoods.

One of the more disappointing things to discover is that, as far as I can tell, Gannon never contributed any of his writing to NDQ. He did however contribute some cover art.

Stay tuned for more Gannon related posts in the future!

Three Things Thursday: Walking, Rivers, and NDQ

It’s getting toward the ragged end of the semester where stacks of grading, packing, and reading start to slump together into unwieldy piles of “things to do.” As a result, it seems like a great time for a three things Thursday.

Thing the First

One of my favorite recent articles is Beck Seifried and Chelsea Garner’s “Mapping the Leigh Fermors’ Journey Through the Deep Man in 1951” ABSA 2023, 1-24. You can read it for free here! It combines the recent vogue for walking as a method for understanding Medieval and Post-Medieval landscapes (for example see Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou’s recent book on the Zagori) with an exceptional savvy use of GIS data (and the analytical capacity of contemporary GIS software). Seifried and Garner attempt to trace the walking routes of Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor as they traversed the Mani Peninsula in the 1950s. This is effectively a sequel to their 2019 article on the landscape of William Leake in the same landscape, but rather than using a route prepared by an explicitly colonialist military traveler, they carried followed the perambulations of writers whose travels in the Mani had altogether different aims  They did this through the use of archival research, the use of Least Cost Path analysis using GIS, and, perhaps most interestingly, through an effort to walk the same route as the Leigh Fermors at the same time of year. This allowed them not only to compare the contemporary landscape to that of the early 1950s, but also to ground truth the relationship between LCP analysis and existing routes, roads, and paths. You can check out their comparison here.

Seifried and Garner demonstrated that the landscape and route walked by the Leigh Fermors has both changed significant over the 75 years since their travels, but also remained visible in the modern Mani despite the region’s economic, demographic, and infrastructural changes. Walking the same routes at the same time of year allowed them to acquire some embodied knowledge of the landscape that was different, but not entirely removed from that experienced by Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor. It also allowed them to speculate on future changes of the region experienced by a future traveler perhaps carrying the routes followed by Beck and Chelsea alongside those followed by Paddy and Joan.

Thing the Second

The Red River flood of 2023 was rather mild compared to years past. The river appears to be returning to its usual course through the city and slowly revealing Lincoln Park. As happens every year, the river’s new course creates lines of debris that the river leaves behind as it returns to its banks. Over the past few years, I’ve followed these trails and casually noted the things that the river’s current deposited as a reminder of its capacity to defy its banks. Plastic bags, styrofoam, wooden golf pencils from the nearby golf course, PVC piping, beer cans, water bottles, wooden fences, and twigs and sticks tell a story of that years flood as well as the course of the river through contemporary Grand Forks and surrounding communities. 

I was pretty excited to read Geneviève Godin’s recent article, “Meeting Things: On Material Encounters Along the River Thames” JCA 9.1 (2022): 23-38 which discussed in broadly poetic and theoretical terms the practice of mudlarking along the Thames river. As the name implies, mudlarking is the permitted exploring and collecting material from along the muddy banks of the Thames. Godin explains the history of this practice which seems to focus on parts of the Thames with particularly rich histories and opportunities for finding historic artifacts left behind.

Mudlarking the temporary foreshores created by the retreating Red River is unlikely to offer as many historical objects, but it does evoke the shifting boundaries that Godin recognizes in the muddy banks of the Thames. The receding waters of the Red reveal these porous boundaries between the shore and the river bank as well as the historical boundaries between the extent of the former glacial Lake Agassiz and the contemporary course of the Red. The flood likewise reveals the patterns of streets and foundation depressions left behind by the Lincoln Park neighborhood that the city demolished as part of its flood mitigation efforts in the aftermath of the 1997 flood. The annual floods in Lincoln Park bring back a ghostly image of this neighborhood. 

Thing the Third

As many of you know, I am also editor of the literary journal North Dakota Quarterly. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working with some remarkable students in the English Department’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program to produce a digital archive of the NDQ and to produce a small digital anthology of the first 90 volumes of the journal. You can download a copy (or purchase a paper copy) of the NDQ@90 anthology here. 

As part of our ongoing efforts to raise the profile of this venerable journal, we are now included in Project Muse. This is the first time that NDQ has an official and hopefully persistent digital version in the journal’s 114 year history. To celebrate this milestone, we’re going to release parts of the issue for free download over the next few weeks. Supposedly, the fiction will be available for download today (although it is not at the time of this writing!) and then in following weeks, we’ll make essays and poetry available. Check it out here.

Of course, the goal of this isn’t just to raise NDQ’s profile or to make NDQ available digitally. We hope that being part of Project Muse will help us get into more libraries and, perhaps as importantly, to attract readers who might not want to read in paper, who live outside the US, or who might just want to read a single story or essay from a volume. 

I don’t want to always be selling stuff on my blog here, but it would be very cool if some of you downloaded the stories in the most recent issue or, if you’re feeling generous and curious, bought a copy of the issue!