MSU Press Podcast

In The Call: Eloquence in Service of Truth, my guests Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde offer a rare examination of a rhetorical phenomenon referred to as “the call,” which is closely linked to eloquence. They explore this linkage by examining various components of eloquence, including examples of its misuse by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. The case studies here, include examples drawn from addresses by Barack Obama, Daniel Webster, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Chase Smith, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney. Smith and Hyde examine religious rhetoric, too, including the Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Augustine, and the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. Finally, the book explores eloquence in films and in communication between artists and writers, concluding with a study of how Annie Dillard evokes the sublime with eloquence and awe.

CRAIG R. SMITH is the director emeritus of the Center for First Amendment Studies at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught for twenty-seven years. In 2010 he received the Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association for his contributions to rhetorical theory.

MICHAEL J. HYDE is professor and University Distinguished Chair in Communication Ethics at Wake Forest University. He is a distinguished scholar of the National Communication Association, a fellow of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and a recipient of national, state, and university research grants for his work in “the rhetoric of medicine.”

Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Craig on the History Rated R podcast. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

As I said in the intro, this will be the fifth season of the MSU Press podcast, and I’m excited to share new interviews with MSU Press authors on subjects such as remix culture, nuclear energy, and life in a small town in Michigan’s upper peninsula. We’ll also have native American stories, Australian politics, eloquence in public speech, and plenty of poetry. I hope you’ll come along for the whole season.

Today, we’re discussing Coffin Honey. Todd Davis’s seventh book of poems and his sixth with MSU Press. In the book, Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share this planet. Davis dramatizes racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young victim of sexually assault struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. The poems in Coffin Honey illuminates beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking along here in the twenty-first century. As in his previous prize-winning books, Davis names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”

TODD DAVIS is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry as well as a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, & Snow. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards.

Todd Davis’s Coffin Honey along with his other poetry collections are available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about Todd and his work at todddavispoet.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Collaborative applications of a variety of modeling methodologies have multiplied in recent decades due to widespread recognition of the power of models to integrate information from multiple sources, test assumptions about policy and management choices, and forecast the future states of complex systems. However, information about these modeling efforts often is segregated by both discipline and modeling approach, preventing folks from learning from one another. Innovations in Collaborative Modeling addresses the need for cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological communication.

To enhance a shared understanding of systems problems, scientists and stakeholders need strategies for integrating information from their respective fields, dealing with issues of scale and focus, and rigorously investigating assumptions. The chapters in this edited collection first explore modeling methodologies for enhanced collaboration, then offer case studies of collaborative modeling across different complex systems problems. Edited by Laura Schmitt-Olabisi, Miles McNall, William Porter, and Jinhua Zhao, this volume will be useful for experienced and beginning modelers as well as for scientists and stakeholders who work with them.

LAURA SCHMITT OLABISI is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Sustainability and the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.

MILES MCNALL is the Director of the Community Evaluation and Research Collaborative at Michigan State University.

Innovations in Collaborative Modeling is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews.

My guest Miriam C. Brown Spiers book Encountering the Sovereign Other proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous science fiction, placing Native theorists like Vine Deloria Jr. and Gregory Cajete in conversation with science fiction theorists like Darko Suvin, David Higgins, and Michael Pinsky. In response to older colonial discourses, many contemporary Indigenous authors insist that readers acknowledge their humanity while recognizing them as distinct peoples who maintain their own cultures, beliefs, and nationhood. The book analyzes four novels: William Sanders’s The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, Stephen Graham Jones’s It Came from Del Rio, D. L. Birchfield’s Field of Honor, and Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears. 

Demonstrating how Indigenous science fiction expands the boundaries of the genre while reinforcing the relevance of Indigenous knowledge, Brown Spiers illustrates the use of science fiction as a critical compass for navigating and surviving the distinct challenges of the twenty-first century. 

MIRIAM C. BROWN SPIERS is an assistant professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Kennesaw State University. Where she is also the coordinator for Native American and Indigenous studies and teaches in the gender and women’s studies and American studies programs.

Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. Records from the centuries since show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. If vessels that wrecked but were later repaired and returned to service are included, the number certainly swells into the thousands. Most did not mysteriously vanish like the Griffin. Instead, they suffered the occupational hazards of every lake boat: collisions, groundings, strands, fires, boiler explosions, and capsizes. Many of these disasters took the lives of crews and passengers.

The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. In Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes, my Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes, and I’m so excited for the chance to talk with its author today.

Richard Gebhard was director of the White River Light Station lighthouse museum from 1975 to 1980. He has also authored numerous articles of historical interest and essays for journals and newsletters of Great Lakes historical societies.

Richard Gebhart’s book, Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg–Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

From 1940 to 1970, mid‐Michigan created an extensive and varied legacy of modernist architecture. Based on archival research and oral histories, Susan J. Bandes’s Mid-Michigan Modern explores that legacy in both the work of renowned architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Alden B. Dow, and the Keck brothers, and in the buildings of regional architects whose work was strongly influenced by international modern styles. In the growing optimism and increasing economic prosperity following WWII, the automobile industry, state government, and Michigan State University served as economic drivers enormously expanding the Mid-Michigan area. Government, professional associations, and private industry all sought an architectural style that spoke to forward‐looking, progressive ideals. Smaller businesses picked a Prairie style that made people feel comfortable, and modernist houses reflected the increasingly informal American lifestyle rooted in automobile culture.

In this expanded volume that includes 36 new illustrations, readers encounter buildings of various types, from residences to sacred spaces. This new edition also adds over twenty architect-designed residences along the various rivers and creeks that traverse the area as well as on man-made lakes, and it introduces several popular architectural designers not previously discussed. The epilogue briefly considers disappearing modernist inventions and buildings. With a detailed narrative discussing more than 150 buildings and enriched by hundreds of illustrations, Mid-Michigan Modern is a vibrant reclamation of the history of modernist architecture in this part of the state.

The expanded, paperback edition and the original hardcover version of Susan J. Bande’s Mid-Michigan Modern: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Googie are both available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb. For more about Michigan Modern Tours visit: http://www.michiganmodern.org/tours

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

The city of Detroit was the epicenter of the fur trade era, an unparalleled leader of shipbuilding for one hundred years, the Silicon Valley of the industrial age, and an unquestioned leader in the march of democracy. John Hartig’s book Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All offers a unique history of Detroit as a city of innovation, resilience, and leadership in times to change. Waterfront Porch examines how the city has begun responding to the challenges of climate change, again redefining itself as a national and world leader on the path, this time, toward a more sustainable future. This book details the building of a new waterfront porch alongside the Detroit River called the Detroit RiverWalk, which is meant to help revitalize the city and region and promote sustainability practices. It tells the story of one of the largest, by scale, urban waterfront redevelopment projects in the United States, and gives us hope while it proves that Detroit and its metropolitan region have a bright future. 

John Hartig is an award-wining Great Lakes scientist, a former Fulbright Scholar, and the current Great Lakes Science-Policy Advisor for the International Association for Great Lakes Research. His book Bringing Conservation to Cities: Lessons from Building the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge won a gold medal from the Nonfiction Authors Association in the “Sustainable Living” category and a bronze medal from the Living Now Book Awards in the “Green Living” category.

Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

In a poem called “How to Be A Poet,” Wendell Berry insists, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” In many ways an exploration of what makes a place sacred to ourselves and our memories and what might ultimately desecrate a place, Daniel Lassell’s debut collection, Spit, examines the roles we play in the act of belonging. 

The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Spit is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to sleep by lullabies, captive wolves next door that attack a child, and a herd of llamas learning to survive despite the coyotes and the chaotic family. The collection explores the body in health and illness and how we treat of the earth and others. Trailing a thread of spirituality, the speaker treks into adulthood, yearning for peace amid the decline of his parents’ marriage. Driven by a “wish to visit / some landless landscape,” the speaker eventually leaves his family’s farm, only to find that return is impossible. 

After losing the farm and the llama herd to his parents’ divorce, the book’s speaker wrestles with the role of presence as it relates to healing, remarking, “I wish enough, / to have only // these memories I have.” Unflinching at every turn, Spit pushes the boundaries of “home” to arrive upon new meaning, definition, and purpose. As Rebecca Gayle Howell puts it, “Spit is at once a coming-of-age story and an elegy for that so-called coming-of-age, a necessary guidebook for anyone hoping to go home again.”

I’m happy to have Daniel Lassell here to talk about Spit, poetry, home, place, and, of course, llamas. He is also the author of Ad Spot, a limited-edition chapbook. His poems have been published in the Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Puerto del Sol, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas. He now lives in New York with his wife and children.

Spit is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @dlassell and on his website https://www.daniel-lassell.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

The United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan have danced on the knife’s edge of war for more than seventy years. A work of sweeping historical vision, A World of Turmoil offers five case studies of critical moments in these relationships: the end of World War II and the start of the Long Cold War; the almost-nuclear war over the Quemoy Islands in 1954–55; the détente, deceptions, and denials surrounding the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué; the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–96; and the rise of postcolonial nationalism in contemporary Taiwan.

In the book, Hartnett explores how each country’s communication style structured these events and reveals that leaders in all three nations have fallen back on crippling stereotypes and self-serving denials in their diplomacy. The first study of its kind, this provocative book merges history, rhetorical criticism, and advocacy in a tour de force of international scholarship. By mapping the history of miscommunication between the United States, China, and Taiwan, A World of Turmoil shows where and how these entwined relationships have gone wrong, clearing the way for renewed dialogue, enhanced trust, and new understandings. 

Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the communication department at the University of Colorado Denver. He served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association, and is the co-founder and coorganizer of the Biennial Conference on Communication, Media, and Governance in the Age of Globalization, and the Shenzhen Forum on Communication Innovation, New Media, and Digital Journalism.

Stephen’s book A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world with a ferocious industrial history. Despite these pressures, the great lakes remain wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, and Indigenous peoples and federal agencies.

With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, The Accidental Reef helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire. As John Hartig puts it, “Heasley leads the reader to see, know, and understand these freshwater seas from different perspectives [which are] essential to developing a stewardship ethic.”

Lynne Heasley is a professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is also the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley and a coeditor of Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship.

Lynne’s book The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Lynne at lynneheasley.com and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.