Category Archives: Q&A

Lorri Hagman, UW Press Executive Editor, Retires: Q&A

The University of Washington Press announces the retirement of longtime executive editor Lorri Hagman, whose last day in the office will be Friday, May 19.

Lorri has acquired books in Asian studies, anthropology, and environmental studies for UW Press since 1994. She began her publishing career as a student assistant at the press in 1977 while completing graduate work in Asian studies at the University of Washington. From 1980 to 1994, she worked for the marketing team part-time as the press’s publicity manager while also freelance editing scholarly books for other presses, including Princeton University Press, the Princeton Art Museum, and The Feminist Press. She specialized in books on China, which required Chinese language skills rare among editors in the US.

In 1994 Lorri became a full-time editor at UW Press. She was promoted to acquisitions editor in 2003, to senior editor in 2006, and to executive editor in 2008, when she also led the acquisitions team.

Her graduate training in China studies has enabled her to cultivate relationships with a network of leading scholars at universities around the world who have become UW Press authors, peer reviewers, and series editors. Many of her books have received competitive, merit-based support from scholarly associations and foundations, such as the Luce Foundation, Association for Asian Studies, College Art Association, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Korea Foundation, Geiss-Hsu Foundation, and Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies. The books she sponsors routinely receive top awards from scholarly associations and are favorably reviewed in the major scholarly journals in their fields.

Lorri has also handled or launched a number of acclaimed series at the press, including Culture, Place, and Nature; Studies on Ethnic Groups in China; Asian Law; Classics of Chinese Thought; Gandharan Buddhist Texts; Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies; Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; Global South Asia; and Taiwan and the World.

Many of her books have emphasized social justice and environmental issues of ongoing national and international concern. Her work in Asian studies has included books on historical and contemporary East, South, and Southeast Asia that present the voices of Asian scholars; highlight traditionally underrepresented groups, such as women and minority ethnic communities; and correct biased Euro-American views. This last point remains especially important today as inaccurate and sometimes racist views of Asians and Asian Americans perpetuate injustice.

In an exchange over email, Lorri shared more about her remarkable career, including how she got her start in scholarly publishing, opportunities and challenges for acquiring editors, and some of the many memorable book projects she’s worked on over the years. The good news is that Lorri has agreed to continue lending her expertise at the press on select projects and we very much look forward to continuing to work with her.

What led you to pursue a career in academic publishing?

As a new graduate student in China studies at the UW in the late 1970s, I serendipitously landed a student assistant job as receptionist at UW Press. I considered it a dream job, as I had already read and admired some of the press’s publications in Asian studies and was thrilled to be able to communicate with authors and to see first-hand how manuscripts become books and how books then make their way to readers. I soon transitioned to a permanent position in marketing and also began doing freelance copyediting and indexing for other presses. My core interest was more on the editorial side of publishing, and in the mid-1990s I was able to move to the editorial department, where I began acquiring manuscripts.

What do you look for when deciding whether to move forward with a book project? How do you approach the development of a manuscript with an author?

When I learn about a new project, I first consider whether it has a subject that is inherently interesting and timely, appears to make a valuable contribution to its field, is written engagingly, and has an identifiable market. If that market is one in which our press has established channels, I evaluate samples and discuss the project with our in-house acquisitions team. As a project moves forward, I try to meet with the author in person (at an annual scholarly conference, for example), and for a volume that will be in a formal series, I confer with the academic series editor to ensure that we have similar goals. As I guide the author through the stages of peer review, revision, and preparation for copyediting, I urge the author to always keep in mind a diverse, multidisciplinary audience.

You’ve worked on an incredible number of books, many of which are award-winning and continue to find a wide readership. Can you share a few of the most memorable book projects you’ve worked on?

My favorite will always be Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang’s translation of the three-volume set of Ming dynasty (1368–1644) vernacular short stories by Feng Menglong, which began with Stories Old and New, a set of forty stories that resulted in an 825-page volume. Working on it wasn’t like work at all—immersing myself in the stories was like time-traveling back to seventeenth-century China. I’m confident that the three-volume set (which also includes Stories to Awaken the World and Stories to Caution the World) will have what publishers call a “long tail” of sales, remaining in print over decades, as new generations of readers discover Chinese literary classics.

A milestone translation of another sort is that of early China’s first narrative history, Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan左傳: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals,“ the work of a team of scholars: Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg. Zuo Tradition, which was completed circa 300 BCE, is one of the core Chinese classical texts and was in need of a modern translation. Our 2,243-page publication is packaged as a three-volume boxed set and features facing pages of Chinese and English text, with extensive annotation and indexes. I first corresponded with the translators in 2003—after they had already worked together on it for a decade—and the book was finally published in 2016. At every stage the work was enormously complex, but the result was worth our investment, as the book won the Association for Asian Studies’ Hanan Book Prize for translation and, like the Ming stories mentioned above, should satisfy readers for at least a century—another long tail.

As you can see, I’m drawn to translations. I think reading translated literature is the best way of learning about other cultures, as it enables the reader to experience another place as an insider. If everyone read a translated novel each year, we would have a more harmonious world!

The glut of unreliable information circulating today makes peer-reviewed, properly documented publications more essential than ever, and scholars need help disseminating their work. Editors will always play a critical role in the cycle of knowledge production, albeit often an invisible one.

Lorri Hagman

My favorite subjects include plants, animals, and food, among which an especially successful monograph is Jinghong Zhang’s Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic. This was another project that felt more like a vacation than work, as I traveled vicariously across mountainsides of tea plants in Southwest China, visited tea farmers and processors, and observed consumers in high-end Hong Kong teahouses. The author is also a filmmaker, and videos related to the book can be viewed via the book’s webpage, under “Links.” Her cinematographic skills, including sensory emphasis and a well-paced narrative, make this an enjoyable read. We had fun marketing this one, giving away packaged bags of puer tea that were stapled inside cards folded to open like little books, with the Puer Tea book cover on the front. The book won the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize and is assigned as an undergraduate text.

So much of your work as an acquiring editor is focused on the future. What are some upcoming books you’re excited to have out in the world over the next couple of years?

Thank you for noticing that! Often, what others see of acquiring editors’ work is just the tip of the iceberg—the books that are already in production and scheduled for publication in the next season. Behind the scenes, there are hundreds of e-files with projects in all stages of development, some of which will go on to become successful books, and others that will fade away. I can’t mention authors and titles of works that haven’t been formally accepted and scheduled for publication, but topics of intriguing projects in various stages of development include bicycle culture in Mumbai; Tlingit cultural revival in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park; wine production in Tibetan communities; contemporary funerary practices in Singapore; resistance in Guatemala and Mexico to corporate agriculture’s attempts to control maize production; and the growing demand in China for locally sourced food.

Your academic background is in Asian studies, and you’ve been instrumental in establishing UW Press as an authoritative publisher in the field. How would you describe the relationship between an acquiring editor, with their own areas of scholarly expertise, and their publisher? How do you balance the tension between finding books that sell and developing worthwhile academic books?

Acquiring editors seek to maintain a balance between projects that come to them recommended by trusted experts, direct submissions by authors, and projects that the editor has herself sought out as part of a strategy to develop a formal series or informal list areas. We monitor and balance different measurements of success, such as copies sold per year, net income, subventions received, prizes won, reviews published in influential journals, and assignment in college classes. Some specialized monographs have modest sales, although their contribution to scholarship is substantial and their findings inform the content of later books that have a wider audience. As a nonprofit, self-sustaining publisher, UW Press looks for book projects whose sales will recover the cost of publication, but we recognize that the success of different books must be evaluated in different ways.

What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen within scholarly publishing? Are there ways you’ve adapted as an editor?

Over the last few decades, average sales per title have steadily declined, as have the number of independent bookstores and the percentage of library budgets dedicated to books (as opposed to journals, online databases, etc.), while the number of books published annually has increased. This adds up to ever-increasing competition among new books for media attention, shelf space, and consumer dollars. E-book sales have increased, but most of the expense of publishing is in developing it to the stage of publication and in other overhead, not in the cost of printing physical books, so publishing e-books doesn’t help much to recover the cost of a book’s publication. I’ve become more strict about controlling the length of manuscripts, both for economy throughout the publication process and for readability. On the bright side, a remarkable trend over the last decade or so is the growing interest of Chinese publishers in translating our monographs about China into Chinese. We’ve even had bidding wars for some titles, and foreign rights sales are becoming an increasingly valuable income stream.

What opportunities do you see for new editors in the field?

The glut of unreliable information circulating today makes peer-reviewed, properly documented publications more essential than ever, and scholars need help disseminating their work. Editors will always play a critical role in the cycle of knowledge production, albeit often an invisible one. As longtime UW Press managing editor Julidta Tarver used to say, “Good editing is conspicuous only by its absence.” Intellectually curious, detail-oriented, judicious people (i.e., editors) are needed to identify and develop manuscripts that address contemporary issues and make use of resources in new ways. Digital humanities, Open Access publication, and accessibility for visually impaired readers are a few areas of rapid development that are of relevance to editors.

From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California: Q&A with Kaitlin Reed, author of Settler Cannabis

In anticipation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) 2023 conference, taking place in Toronto from May 11 to 13, we caught up with Kaitlin Reed, author of Settler Cannabis, over email.

The newest book in our Indigenous Confluences series, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation in California that foregrounds Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories. Below, Reed shares about the ongoing effects of resource rushing in the state and how this history can inform the path toward an alternative future, one that starts with the return of land to Indigenous stewardship and rejects the commodification and control of nature for profit.

As part of the Summer Reading Sale, enjoy 40% off and free domestic shipping on all books when you order on our website. Use promo code WARM23 at checkout. The sale ends June 16, 2023.

Can you tell us about your background and how your research for Settler Cannabis took shape?

It was never my plan to write a book about cannabis. Thinking back, my scholarly entanglements with cannabis began within the first few days of my freshmen year of college. Gathered in the hallway of our dorm building, my cohort and I exchanged introductions and pleasantries. I shared that I was a member of the Yurok Tribe in northwestern California—as soon as the word “Humboldt” left my lips, eyes lit up. I pondered: How had this commodified plant relative made its way over three thousand miles from Yurok ancestral territory to the Eastern Seaboard? And who was really paying the price? These questions would take a backseat for the next few years.

In 2014, I was an inexperienced intern working for the Yurok Tribe Environmental Program (now referred to as the Yurok Tribe Environmental Department). One July morning, I was drinking coffee at my desk. I opened my inbox to see a Los Angeles Times article that had been forwarded to all Yurok tribal employees. The headline read: “Massive Raid to Help Yurok Tribe Combat Illegal Pot Grows.” This has come to be known as Operation Yurok. While I sat safely in my office, other tribal members and employees, accompanied by dozens of law enforcement officers clad in camouflage and carrying assault rifles, made their way upriver. Their goal that morning was to eradicate cannabis cultivation and document the resulting environmental damages, both within and beyond the boundary of the Yurok Indian Reservation.

The health of ecosystems is directly connected to the vitality of Indigenous peoples.

Kaitlin Reed

That summer, and several summers to follow, the Yurok Tribe was under siege from illicit trespass cultivation. Illegal and unregulated water diversions were running our streams dry. Chemical pollution and human waste dramatically degraded our water quality. Our wildlife were intentionally and accidentally poisoned. Our traditional gatherers and basketweavers faced threats, physical violence, and intimidation from cannabis cultivators. And yet, all the while, the experiences of California Indian people were largely left out from mainstream cannabis discourse. For me, it became very important to document the ecological and cultural impacts of cannabis cultivation for Indigenous peoples not as a new phenomenon but as a continuation of settler-colonial resource extraction.

Can you share a brief overview of resource rushing in California and describe how this history connects to cannabis cultivation in the state today?

The book aims to connect the historical and ecological dots from the gold rush to the green rush. I argue that resource rushing, or the “rush” mentality, is a violent settler-colonial pattern of resource extraction that must be repeatedly played out—first gold, then timber, then fish, and now cannabis. While it may have started with gold, resource rushing did not end with gold. Resource rushing in California has always been less about the specific resource/relative in question and more about access and control over lands and the ability to assert ecological managerial authority. The real gold is not gold, after all, but the land itself. In Northern California a pattern of resource rushing has left a toxic legacy that shapes the historic context of emerging industries in the state. From the widespread use of mercury during the gold rush and its disproportionate impact on Indigenous fishing communities to the aerial spraying of atrazine over Yurok forests as late as 2013, the use of toxics within settler resource rushing has negatively impacted tribal peoples since invasion. California Indians have watched this pattern play out over and over again.

How does settler-colonial violence against the landscape correlate to violence on Indigenous bodies and cultures?

We are a part of the land, and the land is us. We mean that quite literally. When a group of people live in the same place for thousands of years, our ancestors become the soil, they become the Earth. The gifts we receive from Creator—Salmon, Elk, and Acorns—nourish us and become part of our bodies. In caring for the land, gathering the plants, dancing for the Salmon, we engage in an ancient relationship with our land bases, rooted in a connection and reciprocity that has developed over millennia. Additionally, the health of ecosystems is directly connected to the vitality of Indigenous peoples. For example, Yurok elders have said that as long as our River is sick, our people will never be healthy. This includes the Salmon people swimming upriver to spawn, the Tree people dependent on the marine nutrients their Salmon relatives will deliver to the forest, and, of course, the neediest of the bunch, the human people. Our health and vitality are tied to the health and vitality of our landscapes. If the River is sick, everything that depends upon the River will not flourish.

Is sustainable cannabis production possible? What might that look like?

While working on this book project, I received several invitations to speak at academic gatherings. This question comes up a lot. I tell these folks what I tell my students: here in California, our land was stolen only 170 years ago. Before that, our ecosystems thrived. The Salmon runs were so huge, our elders say you could walk across the River on their backs. To us, 170 years is not very long ago. For a people who have been here for tens of thousands of years—and, by the way, some argue over 100,000 years—170 years is a blink, a flash. So, my sustainable vision of cannabis production, then, is not focused on preserving folks’ ability to continue to cultivate for-profit cannabis.

As a result of the legacy of the settler state’s toxic relationship with lands and waters, coupled with the impacts of climate change, our River systems are reaching their breaking points. Our Rivers are choked and contaminated, yet more is demanded from them every day. Our River systems need time to heal, to recover. Demanding water allocations for yet another industry is like asking your relative, still in the intensive care unit recovering from a heart attack, to help you move your furniture. This is not to say that the cannabis industry, specifically, is the cause of this problem. Rather, it is a worldview that considers our water systems as resources to be plundered for export-based agriculture and other industries. My sustainable vision is land return. Decolonization. Ecologically speaking, I argue this is the only path forward. We need to operate within a framework of radical relationality that rejects the commodification and control of nature for wealth accumulation.

Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is assistant professor of Native American studies at Humboldt State University.

Discover More Books in the Indigenous Confluences Series

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Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon: Q&A with Ryan P. Kelly, Terrie Klinger and John J. Meyer

A spectacular variety of life flourishes between the ebb and flow of high and low tide. Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon uncovers the hidden workings of the natural world of the shoreline. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, the guide illuminates the scientific forces that shape the diversity of life at beaches and tidepools.

Ryan P. Kelly is associate professor in the University of Washington’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. Terrie Klinger is professor in the UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. John J. Meyer is Senior Director for Marketing and Communications for the UW’s College of the Environment.

Can you tell us a bit about Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon and what motivated you to write the book? How does it differ from other coastal guides?

Terrie Klinger: This book is about the wonder of the intertidal environment, why it is unlike any other on Earth, and the seaweeds and animals that have evolved to live in such a place. We wanted to share that wonder with others who might not be marine scientists. The title evokes Ed Ricketts’s Between Pacific Tides. Published in 1939, Ricketts’s book is widely held to be the classic in the field. We wanted to honor that book and the lasting influence it has had on each of us.

John J. Meyer: The Pacific Northwest is brimming with so much incredible life and beauty between the tides—the diversity of marine invertebrates and seaweeds is just stunning. We wanted to shine a light on these special places, which many folks don’t discover unless they just happen to be at a good rocky beach on a good low tide. A little planning can unlock a world you never knew was there!

Ryan P. Kelly: This book is an attempt to tell people why the species at the shore are where they are, rather than simply being another guide about what one might find there. It’s about ecology, about process. That’s pretty unusual in a book for non-specialists.

There’s a degree of order to the apparent messiness of life along the shore, and uncovering the hidden rules that result in that order is really exciting.

Ryan P. Kelly

What are the main themes of the book and how are they brought to life?

Kelly: We wanted to show, rather than tell. While the themes are those that you might find in a course on marine ecology, we tried to bring those to life by highlighting examples that the reader might run across during a visit to particular places. That was the power of using individual places along the coast as a way to illustrate processes that happen in many other places as well.

Klinger: Intertidal habitats and the species that occupy them are our focus. Habitats determine who can live where, and once occupied, the residents in turn shape their habitats—like your neighbors shape your neighborhood. We try to shed some light on these complexities.

Meyer: To support showing not telling, this book is filled with many photos that are more than just pretty pictures; they are meant to visually bring the vignettes we write about to life.

Who is this book for and how would you recommend readers approach it?

Kelly: The book is for everyone! Mostly non-scientists, but the kinds of curious, outdoorsy people that might find themselves at the shore. We ended up with a lot of text at the beginning that bears reading straight through, but the geographically specific chapters are meant to be read in bits, perhaps as the reader is headed out on a road trip.

Klinger: Nearly anyone who likes to stroll along on the beach, stumble across slick rocks, and explore out-of-the way places along the Washington and Oregon coasts might find something of interest in this book. Readers can jump around to find fun facts and satisfy their curiosity or read from cover to cover for a consistent narrative. My friend Jane, who just celebrated her hundredth birthday, read all the place-based chapters before diving into the first two chapters.

Meyer: This book is meant for people who love to discover new things. So much of what’s living in the intertidal looks and behaves like nothing else, it’s almost like discovering organisms from another planet here on Earth.

Surfgrass (Phyllospadix sp.) grows alongside subtidal kelp (Laminaria setchellii) at Ecola State Park in Oregon.

Which location or site in the book is your favorite to visit and why?

Meyer: Second Beach in Olympic National Park is a favorite. I discovered it nearly thirty years ago while on a road trip and have gone camping there every summer since. I always couple my visit with a good low tide for some excellent tidepooling, which is backdropped against a spectacularly beautiful location.

Kelly: I just fell in love with Ecola State Park in Oregon during a research trip, and I’ve been back since. What a beautiful place.

Klinger: The rocky sites are my clear favorites. They’re chock-full of interesting species arranged in ways that beg for investigation and explanation.

What’s your favorite species profiled in the book? Are there any fun facts that you’d like to share?

Kelly: I did my PhD on chitons, and so I suppose I can’t resist a good chiton. Tonicella lineata, the lined chiton, is probably the most beautiful thing you’re likely to see on the outer coast.

Meyer: A friend of mine introduced me to the sea palm, Postelsia palmaeformis, years ago, and it’s been a favorite ever since. Watching hundreds of them getting bowled over by crashing waves and then pop back up is one of my favorite things to see.

Klinger: There are some fun facts for sure—for instance, the story about the horse stuck in a sea of foam—and I have a ton of favorite species. One favorite is the air-breathing sea slug called Onchidella—I’m always excited to find one.

The sea palm (Postelsia palmaeformis) grows among mussels and barnacles on wave-swept shores.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Klinger: I might hope readers deepen their curiosity about life in the intertidal and the puzzling complexity of nature all around us.

Kelly: A sense of wonder, really. But also a sense that there are answers to questions like “why is this snail here, but not over there?” There’s a degree of order to the apparent messiness of life along the shore, and uncovering the hidden rules that result in that order is really exciting.

Meyer: I think once you understand something a bit more, you care about it a bit more. I hope readers walk away indeed with a sense of wonder that also translates to stewardship.

Upcoming Events

April 11, 6:00 pm at the University Book Store: Learn more about the intertidal zone at an author talk with Terrie Klinger and Ryan P. Kelly. Register for this free event here.

May 13, 11:00 am–4:00 pm, at Friday Harbor Laboratories Open House: The San Juan Island marine biology field station of the UW College of the Environment, Friday Harbor Labs, invites the community to their annual Open House. Guests may meander about the campus and experience touch tanks, science demonstrations, seaweed pressing, and a science speaker series that will include a talk with Terrie Klinger. Visit the FHL news and events page and stay tuned for more details!

University Press Week | #NextUP: Phinney Books

On this final day of University Press Week, we are delighted to showcase Phinney Books, a Seattle neighborhood bookstore known for its careful selection of titles and expertly curated subscription program. Phinney Books serves a community of wide-ranging readers and is a valued promoter of UW Press books and university presses in general. Read our Q&A with owner Tom Nissley to learn more about Phinney Books and its customers and what’s next up for the bookstore.

How do you see university presses fit into the larger publishing world?

Through the bookstore, I see the trade side of university publishing, and I love to see their qualities of authority and care for scholarship and (relative) indifference to the market turned toward publishing for general readers. In the case of UW Press (and Washington State and Oregon State), that’s often done through publishing about the Northwest, a subject of great appeal to our customers. I’m always delighted to see the new catalogs from the “national” university presses as well (and to talk about them with our wonderful sales reps) and to find out what they are publishing next with their usual rigor and imagination. Every season there are books that we know will have a significant audience but that would not otherwise find a publishing home outside a university press.

What are Phinney Books customers reading these days?

Our customers always impress me with their appetite for translated literature and meaty books on history, politics, and nature. They are trying all the books by new Nobel laureate (and store favorite) Annie Ernaux, and reading about mushrooms and Greek myths and Vikings. From UW Press, our perennial favorite is David B. Williams, our best Northwest historian, whose last three books, Too High and Too Steep, Seattle Walks, and Homewaters, have each been bestsellers for us. This season we’ve had many readers coming in asking for Megan Asaka’s new history of migrant workers in our city’s early years, Seattle from the Margins. And every once in a while, a happy customer walks out the door with one of the most beautiful books in the store, the exquisite three-volume Fishes of the Salish Sea set.

Dark-haired woman reading on a bench in front of a bookstore. Signs on the bookstore read "Phinney Books" and "BOOKS" in neon lights.

Can you recall a memorable event with a university press author?

We do very few events, almost always for neighborhood authors—many of whom are customers as well—but one of my favorites was when a sister and brother, food writer and memoirist Jess Thomson and Reed professor of history and environmental studies Joshua Howe, both had new books out from UW Press: Jess’s memoir A Year Right Here and Joshua’s documentary collection, Making Climate Change History. I loved their mutual respect for each other’s very different work, and the affection and intuitive, slightly rivalrous connection that only siblings could share. It was a special night.

Beyond events, are there other ways that you have found success when collaborating with publishers?

One of my favorite collaborations with a publisher took place behind the scenes: over the years, I got to know—almost entirely through his outreach—Andrew Berzanskis [former senior acquisitions editor at UW Press], who just moved on to become the editorial director at the University of Oklahoma Press. He was always curious to hear our frontline perspective on readers and bookselling, and I got to get a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of the long-term process by which books are made.

When it comes to reaching readers, Phinney Books has been particularly forward thinking—from one of the best bookstore newsletters around to your subscription program, Phinney by Post. What’s on the horizon? Any new or upcoming programs you are particularly excited about?

Thanks for the kind words! For the most part we are busy enough with what we have going on already that we don’t have much chance to look beyond it, but we are delighted that this month we’re bringing back one of our favorite traditions, the Holiday Bookfest at the nearby Phinney Neighborhood Association, with two dozen authors (including David B. Williams and Oregon State University Press author Jessica Gigot) signing books on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And we always love to keep spreading the word about Phinney by Post, one of the few subscription programs we know of that focuses on backlist books (“lost classics” that we think our subscribers don’t know about but will love). After eight years of the program, we look forward to celebrating our 100th selection next year. Past selections have included such university press books as Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre (Ohio), Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur (Minnesota), Carolyn See’s Golden Days (California), Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon), N. Scott Momaday’s The Names (Arizona), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Virginia), and Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way (Chicago).

This post is part of the 2022 University Press Week blog tour hosted by the Association of University Presses. This year’s theme is #NextUP, reflecting the spirit of constant learning, adaptation, and evolution within scholarly publishing. Read more about UP Week and all of the featured books and blog posts here.

University Press Week | #NextUP: Jordan Biro Walters, author of Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico

In celebration of University Press Week, we are delighted to feature Jordan Biro Walters, associate professor of history at the College of Wooster and a first-time university press author. Her book, Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico, is forthcoming January 2023. Read our Q&A with Jordan to learn more about the book, her experience as a new author, and how working with a university press has benefitted her work.

Why publish with a university press?

Because Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico is the first comprehensive study of queer lives in the twentieth-century American Southwest, a virtually unexplored region in LGBTQ+ history, I only had a small research trail to follow when I started the project. Interest in sexuality, specifically the LGBTQ+ past in American West history, is recent. My collaboration with the University of Washington Press—well-known for works in American history, visual culture, critical ethnic studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and women, gender, and sexuality—allowed me to contextualize Wide-Open Desert for scholars in these disciplines. Additionally, I worked closely with UW Press to share the stories of Pueblo, Navajo, Nuevomexicanx, and white LGBTQ+ people with a general audience.

Covering more than seventy years of New Mexican history, the book brings together the narratives of queer mobility and cultural productions to think about their relevance to sexual politics and gay liberation activism. In anticipation of the book’s release, I’ve heard from scholars interested in purchasing the book to explore interrelated themes in their own research, such as women’s friendship and intimacy in 1940s modernist circles. Additionally, a documentarian contacted me wanting oral histories to make a film about Claude’s, a bohemian bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico known for its regular crowds of gay and lesbian artists in the early 1950s and through the 1960s. Publishing with a university press was important in giving my work visibility among these different audiences.

Tell us more about your experiences working with a university press.

It takes many hands to make a book. As a first-time author, I greatly benefited from the guidance of a team of people who assisted with developing, copy editing, designing, and marketing my book. In particular, [editorial director] Larin McLaughlin and editorial assistant Caroline Hall helped me manage copyright permissions. The queer history of New Mexico is scattered in various archives, unpublished personal narratives, private visual queer representations, and people’s memories. Part of this project was to create a composite portrait of queer lives, grounded in archival and oral research, that will serve as a starting point for others. UW Press helped me to navigate the copyright process. A few images I wanted to include in the book, especially the cover image, proved difficult to track down the necessary permissions. While securing copyright falls on the author’s shoulders, Larin and Caroline offered guidance on how to proceed when I hit a roadblock. It was important to me to start my book (the cover) with queer women who have long been overshadowed by works about men. This book begins with queer women’s voices and from there highlights people who possessed a wide range of desires, sexual subjectivities, and gender variance. A university press’s familiarity with the scholarly process enabled me to use all the materials I collected as fully as possible.

How do you see university press publishing as helpful to your work and career? What are your thoughts on the university press community as a whole?

Scholarly presses serve a public good by producing trustworthy sources of information by experts who aim to bring their intellectual expertise to expand people’s ways of thinking and solve modern injustices. They take risks in publishing cutting edge ideas. Academic theory, in conjunction with community activism, eventually seeps into mainstream culture and has a tremendous effect on the way people think and talk. As a short example, the term nonbinary, conceptualized by activists and queer theorists in the 1990s, is now used by many ordinary people to self-identify. Wide-Open Desert contributes to a body of scholarship that shows that queer, nonbinary, and trans identified folks have always been here, even though people used different terms to describe themselves. They embraced innovative ways to survive and thrive. My work argues that queer people contributed substantially to making Santa Fe the third largest art market in the United States. Creative centers, like large cities, inspired queer people to move, place-make, and unleash their creativity. Over several decades, both subtle and explicit queer cultural production opened sexual discourse, which served as a foundation for the later triumphs of the modern gay liberation movement.

Was there a particularly significant book that influenced your own?

I read Andrew J. Jolivétte’s (Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Louisiana) Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community [published by UW Press in 2016]. The book explores the HIV epidemic among, gay, two-spirit, and transgender Native people who also identify as mixed race. Jolivette’s succinct chapters address structural risk factors, particularly the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, and the final chapter offers a solution—implementation of intergenerational healing and cultural leadership. Indian Blood influenced me to work with UW Press. It made me rethink university presses, which I conceived of as producing lengthy and dense academic works for specialists. I was impressed by the readability and short length. My own book also centers two-spirit history and interrogates colonialism. Similar to Jolivette, I show the harm of settler colonialism through the suppression of two-spirit roles. At the same time, queer Native artists pushed back through artistic and cultural survival tactics. Particularly for historically underrepresented communities who were often shut out of formalized political structures, creative expression served as an arena for activism. The geographical and cultural borderlands of the American Southwest afford scholars an opportunity to better understand both the exclusion and flourishing of racially diverse queer representations outside of gay meccas. New Mexico has a long queer history and remains a center of queer creativity.

This post is part of the 2022 University Press Week blog tour hosted by the Association of University Presses. This year’s theme is #NextUP, reflecting the spirit of constant learning, adaptation, and evolution within scholarly publishing. Read more about UP Week and all of the featured books and blog posts here.

Tips for the Home Gardener: An Interview with Linda Chalker-Scott, Co-Author of “Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest, Third Edition”

During the COVID-19 sheltering-at-home period, have you noticed an increased interest in home gardening?

Oh, wow, yes! Our Garden Professors Facebook group has been swamped with questions from new gardeners, and I’m glad I’ve got that group there to help provide science-based advice.

Is this interest mostly in growing edibles or ornamental plants?

It’s both, though I bet that vegetable gardens have the upper hand. But lots of people have been tackling long-term projects that they didn’t have time to do before, like removing lawns and putting in landscapes.

For beginning gardeners, what would be good projects to start with this summer?

I would really recommend building a raised bed system for growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers. We put one in last year and it was fantastic. We put up a fence to keep out the four-legged critters and used our native soil to fill the beds. It takes some time to do this correctly but once it’s done, it requires little upkeep other than laying down a protective mulch over the winter to keep weeds out.

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Courtesy of Linda Chalker-Scott

What mistakes should beginning gardeners try to avoid?

Don’t try to do it all the first year! Choose something you really want to focus on—a vegetable garden, a pollinator garden, or some other relatively small project. It is going to take time and patience to do this right. Don’t expect instant gratification. Plants are living organisms, not design elements—and they will require proper planting and care to thrive.

Now that nurseries are beginning to reopen, should people expect most of the usual plant inventory to be available?

From my personal experience, it varies! As I expected from our local nurseries, the inventory got pretty slim after the spring rush. However, I’ve found that some garden centers at hardware or big box stores still have excellent selections and the quality can be surprisingly good. And again, work with the nursery or garden center if you are looking for something they don’t have.

Which plants are good to order by mail? Do you recommend particular nurseries?

Only seeds and bare root plants are consistently reliable for ordering by mail. You can look online for other options, but be aware that mailing live plants is difficult on the plants and you may not like what you receive. It’s best to work with a local nursery to order plants.

How can people living in apartments grow edibles and ornamentals? Which plants grow well in pots on apartment balconies? What are successful indoor plants? What kinds of pots are best?

Tropical ornamentals are great choices for house plants, as are cacti and succulents; temperate perennials and woody plants are not good choices, as most of them do best with low winter temperatures. Whatever you choose, you’ll just need to make sure you have the right exposure for your desired choices. If you have a balcony that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day, you can grow some vegetables though yields can be low with reduced pot size. I think herb gardens are the easiest to create. You can also grow many smaller trees and shrubs. You will need to protect the pots from cold weather, not only so ceramic pots don’t crack but so that roots don’t freeze.

You really can use any type of pot you want, inside or out. You need to ensure that there are drain holes and protect surfaces, either with saucers or cachepots on top of some sort of impermeable material. I like to buy single-glazed floor tiles and then glue cork on the bottom.

Which are the best plants for edible landscaping?

First, you’ll want to know that you can safely eat plants in your landscape, and the best way to find out is to do a soil test to be sure you don’t have lead or some other heavy metal in your soil. Assuming you don’t have a problem, then choose perennials and woody plants you like to eat that are also ornamental. Consider perennial herbs, rhubarb (there are several cultivars with attractive leaves), berry bushes (we have lots of natives in this group), and dwarf cultivars of tree fruits that can be espaliered or otherwise formally trained. There are even ornamental groundcovers with edible fruit.

Which drought-resistant native plants do you recommend for home gardeners in the Pacific Northwest?

A lot of this is personal aesthetics, but you can tell which plants are going to be drought-tolerant by looking at their leaves. Plants with small, thick leaves, with a waxy covering that appears to be gray-green or gray-blue, use much less water than those with broad, thin leaves. But do understand that even drought-tolerant plants need to be watered through their first year of planting to get roots established.

For people who want to stroll (socially distanced) through a park or garden to see the mature sizes and shapes of plants they’re considering planting at home, can you recommend a few places in the Pacific Northwest?

Here are places I’ve visited where you can see many native (and nonnative) trees and shrubs in their full glory. Of course, state and national parks will also have many of our more ornamental natives, but the environmental conditions in large tracts of land may not reflect those in a small urban landscape. More managed gardens are probably the best bet. For more information, just look at their websites online.

Seattle area:

  • Bellevue Botanical Garden
  • Bloedel Reserve
  • Heronswood
  • Kruckeberg Botanical Gardens
  • Washington Park Arboretum/UW Botanical Gardens

Tacoma area:

  • Lakewold Gardens
  • Point Defiance Park
  • Rhododendron Species Garden
  • Wright Park

Spokane:

  • Manito Park

Portland:

  • Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden

Vancouver/Victoria BC areas:

  • Butchart Gardens
  • The Gardens at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific
  • UBC Botanical Garden
  • Van Dusen Botanical Gardens

For people who want to support their local bee and bird populations, what are good landscape plants that provide pollen and seeds?

There are so many choices! There are great pollinator plant lists at websites such as Xerces. Don’t worry about having to use native plants (but do avoid any known invasive species). Wildlife is highly adaptable to their habitat and they learn to use new food sources. For the most part, the types of plants you choose because of their flower color and fragrance will be good choices for pollinators. And birds will eat just about any type of fruit. If you want to provide seeds without getting weed problems, you can cook seeds in the oven at 300°F for thirty minutes. This prevents germination but does not affect the nutrient content.

Linda Chalker-Scott is associate professor of horticulture and extension specialist at Washington State University. She cohosts the Garden Professors blog, and her books include Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest, The Informed Gardener, The Informed Gardener Blooms Again, and How Plants Work.

 

 

What You Need to Know About the Measles Outbreak

In light of the current measles outbreak in the United States, we asked Dr. Christopher Sanford, author of Staying Healthy Abroad, to break down the statistics on measles nationally and globally for travelers across the country. He also answers some commonly asked questions about immunity and vaccinations.

The purpose of this article is educational. For medical advice for any health condition, please consult your physician.

Over 700 people in 22 US states have been infected with measles this year—the biggest measles outbreak in the US since 1994. Sixty-six of these people have required hospitalization. Most of those with measles had not been vaccinated for measles.

Per the WHO (World Health Organization), global measles deaths have decreased significantly in recent years, from 550,000 deaths in 2000 to 90,000 deaths in 2016 (an 84% reduction), but measles remains common in many low-income nations, particularly in Africa and Asia. An estimated 7 million people were infected with measles in 2016.

People immunized before 1989 may have only received one dose of measles vaccine. This provides partial protection, but better protection is provided by receiving a booster dose, that is, two doses of MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) total.

International travelers should receive a total of two doses of MMR vaccine. If travelers are uncertain as to their vaccine status, they may request serology (a blood test) from their medical provider to look for immunity. Those born before 1957 in the US are assumed to be immune to measles, mumps, and rubella from prior natural infection; vaccination with MMR is not advised.

Almost all US and Canadian universities and colleges began to require evidence of two prior doses of MMR vaccine (or proof of immunity) in about 1994.

Background

Measles is a serious viral infection that is transmitted by coughing and sneezing. The virus can live for up to two hours in an airspace or on a surface. Usual symptoms are fever, cough, rash, runny nose, and conjunctivitis (pinkeye). Although most people fully recover, complications include encephalitis—swelling of the brain which can result in permanent brain damage or death—and pneumonia.

The usual case-fatality rate in measles is 1-2/1,000 (0.1-0.2%). However, in malnourished populations, the case-fatality rate can approach one in ten.

In order to prevent sustained transmission of measles, 95% of the population needs to be immune, either from vaccination or natural infection (“herd immunity”).

In the US, in the decade 1912-1922, measles caused an average of 6,000 deaths per year. Prior to 1963, when measles vaccination became available, measles caused 4,800 hospitalizations, 1,000 cases of encephalitis, and 400-500 deaths each year in the US.

Washington State

In the current measles outbreak in Washington State, there have been 71 cases in Clark County (in southwest Washington, adjacent to Portland, OR) and one case in King County. The majority of these cases were in unimmunized people.

United States

There are currently measles outbreaks in 22 US states.

There were 372 cases of measles in the US in 2018. Between January 1 and April 26 of this year, 704 cases have occurred.

Most US cases are in children. Per a April 9 article in the Wall Street Journal:

New York City officials declared a public-health emergency as authorities elsewhere in the state announced new measures to halt the spread of measles, stepping up their responses after a recent surge in cases. The city on Tuesday ordered mandatory measles-mumps-rubella vaccination and fines for noncompliance in certain ZIP Codes in Brooklyn.

The current US vaccine schedule for measles: two doses; first at 12-15 months, second at 4-6 years. Boosters after initial series of two are not advised.

Global Picture

The dramatic decline in global measles is primarily due to increased vaccine coverage in low-income nations. However, should vaccine efforts wane, measles cases and deaths would inevitably markedly increase.

Many countries in Europe have seen a large uptick in measles cases in recent years. There are currently outbreaks in Germany, Ireland, Italy, France, and other European countries. Countries outside of Europe with current outbreaks include Israel, Ukraine, and Australia.

What’s the difference between elimination and eradication?

Eradication is the complete and permanent worldwide reduction to zero new cases of a disease through deliberate efforts. Smallpox has been eradicated from the planet. Elimination is the reduction to zero, or a very low defined target rate, new cases of a disease in a specified geographical areas. Measles was declared to be eliminated from the US in 2000.

How effective is measles vaccine?

Very. The two-dose series provides 97% protection.

What is herd immunity?

If a certain threshold level of a community is immune to a disease, either through infection or immunization, that infection cannot be propagated within that community. The threshold for different infections varies. For example, the level of resistance for polio in a community necessary to prevent an epidemic is 80%. Measles is more infectious; about 95% of a community needs to be resistant to measles to prevent epidemics.

What is the current measles vaccine rate in the US?

Fairly high. Currently, per the CDC, 94.3% of kindergartners were current for measles vaccine in the 2017-18 school year. However, this rate is markedly lower in some communities, e.g., the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, NY, and Clark County, WA, in which measles epidemics are currently occurring.

How can I tell if I’m immune to measles?

If you’ve received the two-dose series of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, it is reasonable to assume that you’re immune. If your vaccine history is uncertain, options include a blood test to check immunity, or receiving the two-dose series.

Christopher Sanford, MD, MPH is associate professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Global Health at the University of Washington, and a family medicine physician who specializes in tropical medicine and travelers’ health. His research interests include medical education in low-resource settings and health risks of urban centers in low-income nations.

To hear more from Christopher Sanford, come to his book talk at the University Bookstore on Tuesday, June 11th. To learn more about how to keep yourself healthy while traveling, buy his book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Q&A with Poet David Biespiel

For National Poetry Month, we are pleased to share a conversation with poet David Biespiel, author of Republic Cafe.

It’s Monday, 10am. Would you tell us your motto for writing poems?

My motto would be, writing poems is impossible. That’s my motto. It’s impossible for me to do anything else, first of all, but to write poems. But, to write a poem? What is that? What is a poem? Every effort to write a poem is as much a soaring success as it is a terrible flub. It’s impossible to write in the direction I want to write, because as soon as I get close to that point on the horizon I’ve been aiming toward, what I’ve been trying to write appears different to me. Everything I’ve been doing, therefore, is wrong. A failure. In a catalogue essay from the 1960s of a MOMA exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s work, there’s this opening paragraph in Peter Selz’s introduction:

‘To render what the eye sees is impossible,’ Giacometti repeated one evening while we were seated at dinner at the inn at Stampa. He explained that he could really not see me as I sat next to him—I was a conglomeration of vague and disconnected details—but that each member of the family sitting across the room was clearly visible, though diminutive, thin, surrounded by enormous slices of space. Everyone before him in the whole history of art, he continued, had always represented the figure as it is; his task now was to break down tradition and come to grips with the optical phenomenon of reality. What is the relationship of the figure to the enveloping space, of man to the void, even of being to nothingness?

That about covers it—for writing. It’s impossible. And, that’s exactly what makes it so freeing, so enticing.

What led you to become a writer? And, specifically a poet?

I recently published a book on this subject, The Education of a Young Poet. I think I became a writer because I liked messing around with words, with sentences. I liked the feel of moving a verb from the front of a sentence to the end. I liked feeling curious about whether I should end a sentence on a noun, or start with a noun. I liked seeing the figure of ideas and images form, from one word to the next, one phrase and one clause to the next, one sentence and one paragraph to the next. That’s what I liked and what I still like at the most tactile/DNA level of writing. Writing a poem is all of that on steroids. Now, with a poem, too, you have lines to enhance even more new relationships between adjective and noun, for instance. It’s mind-blowing.

As for why I became a poet? Writing poems, for me—because I write poems and nonfiction—I find that poetry offers greater velocity than prose and also poetry dwells more deeply in metaphor. Speed plus associative feeling. That’s two things that draw me to write poems. Underneath all that is an interest in asking questions that, perhaps, poetry can reflect upon. Writing Republic Cafe I was interested in the importance of forgetting, as opposed to the more traditional interest in the importance of remembering. So I was writing the poem—the long poem that’s the centerpiece of the book—to reflect upon that question. And yet, that’s the paradox. The close I got to dramatizing what I was forgotten, I began to see it, or remember  it, differently. So the book is trying to figure out what to make of that enigma.

Did you write the book in Portland?

Mostly, yes. In late 2012, during the production period for Charming Gardeners, which UW Press published in 2014, I began taking notes and studying the patterns of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour in Portland. Then, in the fall of 2014, I went to West Texas and wrote for a month without interruption. That’s where I drafted the book. I worked on it for several years after that, and then, in late 2017, I put the book through a big revision after Linda Bierds read it. I did that revision in my house here in Portland over several weeks.

Many writers begin their career with teachers and models. Republic Cafe is your sixth book of poems since 1996. Did you have a model when you first started to write? Do you now?

When I first started to write, I was mostly alone. Not alone in the world—well, not entirely alone in the world, I mean—but alone with my books, with paper and pen. No teachers. I had no guidance. Later I studied with several wonderful poets. At the University of Maryland I studied with Stanley Plumly, Michael Collier, and Phillis Levin. At Stanford, when I was a Stegner fellow, I studied with W.S. Di Piero and Ken Fields. Because Stan Plumly introduced my first book, I suppose I’m most identified with him, and I’m extremely grateful to have studied with him. Truth be told I still learn things from him. From him personally—we’ve remained close for thirty years. And especially through his poems, which are remarkable for their warmth and tenderness. Before those teachers came along, and ever since, I would say Walt Whitman has been a model for me. I don’t mean the man so much—not to dismiss the man, that is, but I mean the writing. His engagement as a poet with language and life. The nexus of self and society that is the hallmark of his poetry. I’ve learned from Whitman that while images never become out-of-fashion or obsolete, blow-hardedness does. Commentaries do. Explaining or psychoanalyzing kills invention. Kills metaphor. Kills freshness. What’s so great about Whitman is he still feels contemporary. It’s the 200th anniversary of his birth this year, and he still feels in touch with our own time. Whitman doesn’t try to explain his motivations. Instead he conveys a consciousness. That’s the thing I’ve most tried to learn from Whitman. To write a poem is to invent a consciousness. But, of course, it’s impossible.

Biespiel photo 2David Biespiel is a poet, critic, memoirist, and contributing to writer to American Poetry Review, New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, Politico, The Rumpus, and Slate. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University, faculty member in the Rainier Writers Workshop, and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received NEA and Lannan fellowships and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. He has previously published The Education of a Young Poet, Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women, and Charming Gardeners. You can buy his most recent collection, Republic Cafe by clicking here.

Inside the Publishing Process: An Interview with Series Editor Paul Sutter

This year marks the 25th anniversary of our series Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. It also marks Paul S. Sutter’s fifth year as series editor.

Here, Sutter talks with our Senior Acquisitions Editor Andrew Berzanskis about his goals for the series, how he sees environmental history changing, and offers some practical tips for authors.

Sutter is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. His five books include Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (University of Georgia Press).

For those interested in the origins of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series, here is an account by founding series editor William Cronon.

In 2002, you published your first book, Driven Wild, in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books (WEB) series. William Cronon, the founding editor of the series, was editor then. How did Cronon help shape your book?  

Bill was a huge influence on my decision to choose the series. His famous wilderness essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” had just come out, and it was a piece that refined my argument in important ways. I sent an initial email inquiry to Bill—we had met once or twice, but I’m not sure he knew who I was—and he wrote a lengthy response that quickly convinced me that working with him would be the right thing to do. The series was quite new at that point, and Bill put a lot of energy into reading and commenting on my manuscript. Driven Wild mediated the wilderness debate in a ways that I think Bill appreciated, but he also pushed me in ways that made my argument better.

2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the series. As a discipline, environmental history has blossomed. More scholars, more students, and many more publishers. What keeps Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books—a series launched in 1994—unique in 2019?

During the early years of Bill’s editorship, environmental history was a much smaller field, and one that seemed overwhelmingly U.S.-focused. In that context, the series sat at the center of a series of nature/culture debates that largely defined the second generation of environmental historiography. In the last decade or so, the field has changed in dramatic ways. Environmental history is much more international, the number of programs training graduate students has grown geometrically, and the subfields within and around the edges of environmental history have multiplied. Environmental history is a large and crowded room with many conversations going on. The series has changed with the field.

We still publish books that critically assess the historical and cultural dimensions of our current environmental crises and commitments. But the qualities that keep the series unique have more to do with how we work with authors: our commitment to careful developmental editing, our desire for books that are clearly and accessibly written and intended for a crossover audience, our commitment to producing beautiful and well-illustrated books, the work we do with authors to help them to market their books, and our author community. Perhaps nothing better symbolizes that approach than the time we spend with authors and prospective authors at the annual American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) meeting.

Why is publishing with a series different than publishing as part of a press’s regular publishing program?

In the simplest sense, publishing a book in a series helps to define the book by the company it keeps. It also helps to get the book in front of the eyes of those who pay attention to that particular book series and the field it helps to define. But perhaps the biggest advantage to a book series is the chance to work with an academic series editor who can help to shepherd the book manuscript through the publication process. Not all editors put in the effort that Bill and I have at WEB, and so even among other series I think we are unique in the editorial energy we put into the books in our series. Having an engaged series editor can also be helpful in navigating peer review.

As a series editor, how do you like to work with authors?  

Because of the energy we put into developmental editing, we usually like to work with advance contracts, which confirm our partnership with the author. I then like to work with authors on matters of big argument and framing. It is a truism that most dissertations are written to a narrow audience of specialists, and so I push authors to figure out how their book can speak to thousands of interested readers rather than dozens. That often means working with authors on their introductions first, and then the overall organization and narrative arc of their manuscripts. When the author has a fully revised manuscript ready for peer review, I will read it along with the peer reviewers and provide a thorough report that both synthesizes the external reviews and offers comments of my own. We spend a lot of time with authors, on the phone and in person.

What do you get out of serving as a series editor? What makes it personally and/or professionally rewarding?

Being the series editor at WEB is a lot of work. But I love helping authors do what Bill did for me with my first book—transforming promising manuscripts into the books that their authors want them to be. I have seen quite a few authors transform their manuscripts through careful and thoughtful revision, and I take great pride in the role that I play in those transformations. (Mine is a small role. The authors do most of the work!) I take great pride when a beautiful series book arrives in my mailbox—and even more pride when the authors feel like the results are better as a result of working with us.

You write a foreword for each book. Why is that important?

Bill described the foreword as an extended blurb, and I have tried to follow that model. The foreword is a pitch to readers and reviewers to buy or review or assign the book.

You are entering your fifth year as editor and putting your own distinctive imprint on the series. What series books are you particularly proud of and why?

This feels like asking me which of my children is my favorite. I am proud of all of the books we have published for different reasons. But I will provide an example of why I am proud of one book. A year or so ago I received an email from a legal scholar who had just reviewed Jakobina Arch’s Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan. This particular scholar is an expert on contemporary legal frameworks for managing international whaling, and he found Arch’s history of whaling in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) as critical to contextualizing Japan’s contemporary claims that its whaling practices are traditional. Bina had worked hard to transform a masterful but somewhat narrow study into one that mattered to today’s whaling policy, and this reviewer made it clear that she succeeded.

What are the most common mistakes you see when people put together a book proposal?

I think there are several. One is the proposal that suggests that the book in question is the most important and innovative thing to come along in ages. A good proposal is humble and realistic about what it will accomplish, and respectful of the field in which it will sit. I also often read proposals that are too topical and not sufficiently thesis-driven. More than that, though, I increasingly urge authors to define not just the argument but the research problem that their book will address. A well-defined and expansive research problem will get my attention. Defining the research problem is a way of explaining why we need your book, which is a different issue than what it is about or what it will argue. Finally, I often find prospective authors to be overly optimistic about the popular appeal of their books. To reach a crossover audience, I think authors need to think deeply about which specific non-academic audiences they might realistically reach.

You see many manuscripts go through peer review. What are the most common problems identified in peer review, and how can authors avoid those same mistakes?

The most common problem, particularly for first-time authors, is that they don’t have a clear enough sense of what their book is about. That might be a strange thing to say, but often authors want their books to be about too many things. What’s the big idea/argument? How do the chapters contribute to and build towards that big idea/argument? The big idea is what disciplines a manuscript and helps to create a hierarchy of arguments, and it is not something that emerges organically. Rather, it is usually a matter of authors making tough choices.

What advice do you have for scholars trying to reach a broader audience?

First, figure out specifically who that broader audience is. Know who else might be interested in the book and speak to them. Second, get comfortable imagining your reader as an intelligent non-expert and explaining why scholars argue over the things that they do. An accessible book elegantly explains significance, constantly circling back to it. Third, develop characters if you can, and tell good stories.

I constantly urge authors to tell me the biography of their project. This forces them to go back to the moment when they decided to pursue the topic, to explain what made them passionate about it, and what it was like to know little about the book they were embarking upon. It requires them to imagine the reader opening their book for the first time and deciding whether to buy or devote their time to reading it. If you can go back to that point of initial ignorance and then explain how you proceeded to a deeper and more satisfying understanding of a topic, you can better convince your reader to want to follow along. A book that can explain the process of coming to understand a topic—rather than merely presenting the results of a deep understanding—is a book that will be more accessible.

Tell me about the first time you went to an American Society for Environmental History conference. How was it different then?

I first attended ASEH in 1993 in Pittsburgh. That was only the sixth ASEH conference ever held, and back then the conferences were biennial and much smaller. I was still a graduate student at the University of Kansas and did not have enough travel funding to afford both the flight and the hotel room. So four of us pooled our funds, rented a white Cadillac Seville, and made the 13-hour drive in style. I think the conference was at a Days Inn, and I’m not even sure if there was a book exhibit. It was tiny. I have been to every ASEH meeting since.

Where do you see the field of environmental history developing in the next 20 years? 

I will answer this in two ways. The first is that our field must directly address the big environmental problems of our moment, and many scholars are busy doing that. Where the second generation of environmental history was largely engaged with a critical assessment of nature as our field’s category of analysis, I think the current generation of scholarship will be defined by its critical engagement with the Anthropocene concept and the material environmental challenges that it encompasses.

The second is that I wouldn’t be surprised if a singular field of environmental history no longer really exists in 2040. Rather, we may see a proliferation of subfields and sub-conversations in fields such as animal history, energy history, climate history, evolutionary history, environmental justice, etc. The field of environmental history that I matured with was fundamentally shaped by the national environmental movement of the 1960s-1980s; the current generation is being shaped by global concerns about climate change and the great acceleration of human impact on the natural world.

Andrew and Paul will both be attending the American Society for Environmental History annual meeting April 10-13 in Columbus, OH. Stop by the University of Washington Press booth (#21) to meet them and to learn more about this series!

What Prisoners Tell Us: The Making of Concrete Mama

Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla, by Ethan Hoffman and John McCoy, won the Washington State Book Award in 1981 for its stark, sympathetic portrayal of life inside the maximum-security prison. The University of Washington Press is publishing a new edition of the book, long out of print but as relevant as ever.

McCoy was recently interviewed by prison scholar Dan Berger, who wrote the book’s new introduction, in Berger’s class at the University of Washington Bothell. For University Press Week, here are some edited highlights from the interview about our neighbors behind bars.

DAN BERGER: Why did you decide to write about the prison?

JOHN MCCOY: My first glimpse of the penitentiary was as a cub newspaper reporter at the Walla Walla Union Bulletin. At that time—this was 1977—the State Penitentiary was ending a reform experiment in which prisoners were allowed a fair amount of autonomy inside the walls and allowed outside furloughs. The theory was that the more contact that prisoners have with the outside world, the better the chances are that they can be safely returned to society. But this reform project was failing. I wondered why.

So you and Ethan Hoffman, a photographer at the paper, quit your newspaper jobs to do a book on the penitentiary?

The guard in 9-tower, his rifle ready, watches as new prisoners arrive “on the chain,” a bus that carries them shackled from the state corrections reception center in Shelton.

Yes. Ethan and I spent four months in the fall and winter of 1978-79 inside the prison. We were allowed to come in as early as 5:00 in the morning and stay as late as 10:00 p.m. We were unescorted, which was absolutely crucial. If we walked around with a guard, we were not going to get any information from prisoners. Then, towards the end of our time there, we spent some time with guards, which was interesting, because some prisoners who had talked to us earlier ceased talking to us. It’s a very polarized world inside prison.

How did you approach doing the book?

As journalists. Ethan and I were not prison experts. We simply wanted to photograph and report on what we saw inside the walls. Here’s what prisoners tell us. Here’s what their day-to-day life is like depending on whether they’re tough or vulnerable, men or women, black, white, or brown. Here’s what the Parole Board members say. Here’s what the warden says. Here’s the guards.

Besides the warden, did you have to talk to others to get access?

Not to get access—but politically, I had to talk to the head of the guards’ union and the prisoners who served on the Resident Council, the elected representatives of the general population.

One thing that helped pave our way with prisoners was Ethan’s decision to give anyone who asked a nice 8-by-10-inch black-and-white portrait photo of themselves. So Ethan had guys posing with weights, stripped to the waist, displaying all their tattoos. He took pictures of whatever they wanted, but one picture only. And in return, they signed a release form that said we could use these pictures in the book. Ethan spent a lot of nights in the darkroom because prisoners wanted quick results. Nonetheless, the decision created a lot of goodwill and gave us great access.

Kim, right, spends time with Leomy, his “inside lady” and a member of Men Against Sexism, a club popular with prison gays and queens.

At this time, there were all kinds of areas that were off limits to guards. So, in order to enter these areas, we had to have either the president of the Lifers’ Club, or the Chicano Club, or the Meditation Group, or Men Against Sexism, or some other prison leader, either accompany or approve us. We had to tread cautiously. If we got crosswise with any particular group, we would be out of there, or we could have caused harm to ourselves. There were certainly some tense situations with both prisoners and guards.

Could you describe an average day in those four months you were there?

Prisoners were locked in their cells overnight. The day began with morning chow, about 7:00, for the general population—those not confined in the segregation unit or in protective custody.

Prisoners were released by tiers and walked to the chow hall—an ugly, cold brick building with a lot of cold metal tables and metal serving trays. Sometimes there were fights in the chow hall, or food was thrown, and guards intervened.

Some prisoners spend hours playing dominoes in the black prisoners’ club room.

After chow, most prisoners had nothing to do. There were certainly not enough jobs to employ even a minority of the 1,400 prisoners. So they were free to go back to their cells or wander the breezeways. There was recreation time in the gym, the weight room, and the Big Yard, where prisoners played baseball, card games, and smoked weed. On occasion, the bikers were permitted to race their motorcycles around the inside perimeter. There was also a limited education program—which soon ended when the Legislature withdrew funding—in which prisoners could complete their GED or get community college credits or university credits. Occasionally, there were movies or shows in the auditorium.

Some prisoners hung out at their private club rooms. Although you could get an infraction for smoking weed, it was basically tolerated. And there was heroin and other drugs smuggled in from outside.

You could work if you could find a job in the kitchen, chow hall, laundry, license plate shop, or elsewhere. Pay was pitiful—a few cents an hour. The primary advantage of a job was access to things you could steal and then exchange or sell.

Lockup in the evening came early, right after dinner, unless you had a permit to be out for work or prison business.

Because most of the population spent most of their time in four-man, 10-by-12-foot cells, your cellmates were very important. The Resident Council ostensibly helped prisoners find compatible cellmates. But there were powerful guys in the prison who really controlled the cells. Often, you had to buy a cell. Sometimes you’d get a cell equipped with a television, a nice mattress, and so on, but you paid for that. And you paid for that with money, drugs, sex, cigarettes, pruno—which is prison-brewed liquor—or other things.

What did you expect to find at the prison and did you find it?

First of all, we knew it was a good and unexpected story. Look, these guys are in motorcycle gangs, and they’re in prison, and they’re racing their Harleys? We knew Ethan could get fabulous pictures. I mean, a sweat lodge—I’d never been to a sweat lodge before, and certainly not one inside a prison. A casino night at the Chicano Club. There were transgender or cross-dressing dancers. There was sex, there was drugs. So, without making a judgment call, we had to ask: What’s happening here? And why?

“Nert,” left, and “Kickstand” are bikers, cellmates and tattoo enthusiasts.

Our hope was to do a fair, balanced, and accurate account of life inside a state penitentiary—a notorious state penitentiary, perhaps—at a time in which hard questions continued to be asked about the purpose of prison.

How do you know you got at the truth?

Ethan had it easier, because photos don’t lie. I had to pursue multiple sources. Sometimes I heard prisoners explain their crimes and protest their innocence in ways that were preposterous. Fortunately, a helpful prison trustee was willing to share confidential records with me. And a prison attorney was quietly willing to access court records for me. I was able to verify prison stories and eventually developed a pretty good BS detector.

How did the experience of those four months in the prison affect you?

I went away humbled by the experience. I left with the strong feeling that this is really a destructive place. It’s destructive for those who are there, both keepers and the kept. It’s dangerous. It does little to help people adjust to the real world. In fact, it destroys a lot of prisoners’ chances of having a successful transition.

And it picks on the poor, the less educated, and the mentally ill. Incarcerated people are disproportionally poor and minorities. They have unaddressed behavioral issues; learning issues; addiction issues. Their keepers, at Walla Walla and prisons elsewhere, tend to be disproportionally white, rural, with a high school education, often veterans, and with limited understanding of those they are charged with “correcting.”

Why is Concrete Mama relevant 40 years later?

Ed Mead, a founder of the radical George Jackson Brigade and a Marxist revolutionary serving time for armed assault on a bank, is confined to the “intensive segregation unit” commonly known as “the hole.”

For two reasons: First, prison life doesn’t change much. Prisoners spend most of their time caged. They have little to do. They band together for protection and personal gain. And they generally leave prison more alienated and damaged than when they came in. As a result, two-thirds of them return.

Secondly, starting in the early 1970s, Washington State had tried to reform its prisons by emphasizing rehabilitation rather than punishment. That meant giving prisoners a good deal of autonomy with the expectation that if they could make something of themselves inside, they could be successful on the outside. For a variety reasons, it was a failure. Ethan and I were there as the experiment finally fell apart. But you have to ask, what have we done since?

John A. McCoy is the author of A Still and Quiet Conscience, a biography of Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen. He was a reporter and editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Walla Walla Union-Bulletin and has taught writing courses at the University of Washington-Tacoma and Seattle University.

Dan Berger is associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell, and an interdisciplinary historian focusing on critical prison studies. He is the author of several books, including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, and coauthor most recently of Rethinking the American Prison Movement.

To learn more about Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla or to buy your copy of the book, click here.