Madison BookBeat

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Jeff Sharlet about his new collection of essays, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (2023, W.W. Norton).

The Undertow is an incisive and at times foreboding collection. It is made up of ten interrelated essays that map the social, cultural and religious geographies of the contemporary United States. The collection takes the killing of Ashli Babbitt as its through line. Babbit was the pro-Trump insurrectionist shot and killed by a capital police officer on January 6 2021 who has since been turned into a far-right martyr.

Across these essays, Sharlet tracks the volatile combination of Christian evangelicalism and far-right paranoia that is fueled by conspiracy-laden social media platforms. On top of these trends Sharlet also discusses the eschatological belief in regeneration and redemption through violence. Traveling across the United States–from Sacramento, to Nevada, from Nebraska to Wisconsin, from Trump rallies to fundamentalist, warrior-Jesus megachurches and big tent revivals, to the front porches and kitchens of Confederate and Gadsden flag waving folks–Sharlet’s essays have a fever-dream-momentum.

A masterful blending of journalistic reporting, essay, and memoir, The Undertow is a book “written from the middle of something, a season of coming apart.” It is a “book of stories of difficult people doing terrible things” that registers “grief and its distortions, how loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate, or denial, or delusion.” Whiteness is the implicit and explicit specter that haunts the essays’ proceedings, and Sharlet offers provocative and productive ways of reimagining the roots and routes of White supremacy in the 21st century United States.

The opening and closing essays in the collection highlight two radical singers and performers–Harry Belafonte and folk singer Lee Hays–offering modicums of hope against the rising tide of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.

Follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffSharlet.

Image of author courtesy of W.W. Norton

Jonas Gomez Tijerino welcomes Anisa Yudawanti and Amy Wilson to discuss "What Does it Mean to Tell the Truth", written by Ms. Yudawanti’s 9th grade History students and illustrated by Ms. Wilson’s 2nd and 3rd grade Art students. This is a project which collects the musings of Madison high school students regarding the manner by which history is recounted. Whose stories are centered? Whose are left out? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that we as educators of our future leaders are telling the truth. History as it happened, not history as it pleases.

Proceeds from physical purchases of "What Does it Mean to Tell the Truth" go to Freedom Inc. It is also available online on Issuu.

Madison Book Beat host Gil Halsted sits down in the studio with Nick Vander Puy, journalist and author of the recent book “Water Protectors: The H.E.L.P Campaign to Save the Penokees” (Strong Dog Press, July 2022).

It’s a book that details the Harvest Educational Learning Project, or H.E.L.P. campaign, a coalition of tribal citizens, environmentalists and neighbors who occupied treaty-protected lands in the Penokee Hills, in Ashland and Iron Counties of Wisconsin’s Northwoods. The Penokees, elevated ridges that contain some of the oldest rocks in Wisconsin, are the headwaters of the Bad River and eventually flow into Lake Superior.

That campaign was successful at halting Gogebic Taconite – a multinational mineral corporation- from embarking on a plan for an open-pit mine. And it’s one instructive example for grassroots activists and water protectors everywhere.

Vander Puy will appear at an author event at Kismet Bookshop in Verona this Tuesday, March 21, at 5pm.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Jameka Williams about her Brittingham Prize-winning debut poetry collection, American Sex Tape™ (2022, The University of Wisconsin Press).

Brittingham Prize judge and poet Brian Teare describes American Sex Tape™ as a collection “[s]plit between a love of watching and the fear created by it.” “Williams demolishes misogynist, racist logic with weaponized line breaks and wrecking-ball wit. Looking directly “into the camera,” Williams writes “about taking back power” and “the thin line between pleasure and collusion.” “Complex and messy and necessary in all the ways sex is,” Teare concludes, “American Sex Tape™ is brilliant Black feminist truth.”

Jameka Williams holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her poetry has been published in Prelude Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, and Gulf Coast, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she resides in Chicago, Illinois.

You can follower her @meka_will_write on Twitter.

Stu Levitan welcomes WORT’S own Frank Emspak for a special pledge drive conversation about his new memoir Troublemaker: Saying No to Power.

You may know Frank most recently as Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin School for Workers, and the co-founder and co-producer of Madison Labor News and the Workers Independent News Services. Those of you of a certain age may recall his service in the sixties and early seventies as chair of the UW Socialist Club then chair of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, later chair of the group People Against Racism and a doctoral candidate in the history department. But between those two Madison eras of his career, he was in Massachusetts as a member of the industrial working class, union official and consultant to state government. In just one 3-year period, 1972-1975, he moved from Ph D student to senior lab technician to machinist to a laborer working in a foundry All in all, a pretty amazing life, recounted very well in Troublemaker.

Part one of the conversation aired Oct. 31, 2022.

For more than a dozen years, Rebecca Webster served as an attorney for the Oneida Nation, at a time when the nation was defending itself against threats to its land and sovereignty.

Her experience working on those lawsuits, combined with a history of the Oneida over centuries and cultural teachings from the Nation, along with the changing policy on tribal land rights is the subject of her new book, In Defense of Sovereignty: Protecting the Oneida Nation’s Inherent Right to Self Determination, published this year from the University of Wisconsin Press.

The book takes us on a historic journey of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, from their arrival to Wisconsin through the federal history of allotment. It also outlines the Oneida Nation’s recent legal battles, the result of attempts by local governments – particularly, the village of Hobart which surrounds the reservation – to regulate the Oneida and repudiate its sovereignty.

Webster joins WORT News Director Chali Pittman on Madison Book Beat for a conversation about this history of the Oneida Nation and a window into their struggles to preserve their land and culture.

Rebecca M. Webster is Associate Professor in the American Indian studies department at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, where she teaches courses related to tribal administration and governance and is the Director of Graduate Studies for the department.

She was a staff attorney for the Oneida Nation for thirteen years, focusing on government relations, jurisdiction concerns, and a wide variety of tribal land issues. She is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, and runs a 10-acre farm on the Oneida reservation

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Kathryn Harlan about her book of short stories, Fruiting Bodies (2022, W.W. Norton & Co.).

Across Fruiting Bodies’ eight stories, Harlan deftly blends the fantastic, weird, and macabre with the sensual, tender, and mundane as we follow a cast of characters–mostly queer and mostly young women–as they navigate ever-changing bodies, ever-changing relationships with friends, lovers, and family, and a world rapidly changing due to the effects of climate change.

Kathryn Harlan is a graduate of UW-Madison’s MFA program, and is currently at work on her second book. She now lives in Oregon. Her work has also appeared in Strange Horizons, LitHub, and The Gettysburg Review.

You can find out more about her at kathryn-harlan.com and follow her @kay__harlan on Twitter.

Stu Levitan welcomes Brian J Kramp, author of a book about a world-famous band that is technically from Rockford IL, but which owes a lot of its success to Madison. That band of course is Cheap Trick, the book is This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, from the good people at Jawbone Press.

The book’s title notwithstanding, the band does indeed have a past, and a very interesting one at that. First, there was the Byzantine way in which the bands Grim Reapers, Toastin Jam, Phrenz, Toons, Zander and Kent, Sick Man of Europe, Fuse and others morphed and mutated into CT. Then there was the relentless and ultimately effort by our friend Ken Adamany, who booked or managed several iterations, to get them a record deal. Their hard work paid off – 5000 live performances, 20 million albums sold, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It’s a double-header that Brian J. Kramp is well, maybe even uniquely qualified to tell. After all, he was across the street from Sunset Bowl in his native Waukesha Wisconsin that night in 1976 when a legendary record producer signed on with Cheap Trick. Now Brian was 2 years old at the time, so he was likely not aware of the epochal event, but it does give him some personal skin in the game.

And he’s worn out a lot of shoe leather researching the book, at least metaphorically, interviewing not just several of the principals, but tracking down musicians who were in bands with the tricksters close to sixty years ago.  The result is a fascinating deep dive on a band that went from bowling alleys and beer halls to arenas and stadiums, from the Stone Hearth to the Rock and Rolll Hall of Fame.

It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Brian J. Kramp.

Angie Trudell Vasquez interviews Ron Czerwien on his new collection of poetry, 100 Umbrellas, published by Bent Paddle Press.

Stu Levitan welcomes back to the show the award-winning journalist, music critic and author Joel Selvin for a conversation about his classic book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, out of print for many years but just reissued by the good people at Permuted Press. It is the story of the rise and fall of one of the most important figures in modern music, from his childhood as a musical prodigy to the end of the band in 1975. It’s a tale told well by the people who were there – his parents, his bandmates, his ex-wife, his managers, his gangsters, even some members of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Some who loved him, some who came to hate him, some who did both.

It’s a story Joel Selvin was exceptionally well-qualified to uncover. Not only is he an award-winning journalist and music critic who covered pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than thirty-five years, and the author of close to 20 best-selling books about the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Ricky Nelson, Haight-Ashbury and more. He is also a native of Berkeley California, and was in his early teens as Sly was making a name for himself as a hip disc jockey on San Francisco radio. And he also remembers everything about the first time he heard Sly’s seminal song Dance to the Music as a 17-yo in late 1967. And he is a great raconteur.

As to the requisite Madison connection, well, it’s through Stu. Because this is the fourth time around for Joel on his show, following conversations about his books Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day; Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues and Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise.

It’s a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Joel Selvin