#RaiseUP New Voices

Advisory committees and editorial boards play a key role in university press publishing. At the University of Wisconsin Press, the Press Committee is the guarantor of the press’s imprint, providing final oversight of the peer review process. Their discussions, comments, and questions produce valuable insights, critiques, and guidance to the press editors and director for current and future projects.

For University Press Week 2020, we are highlighting the voices of eight Press Committee members who bring unique new perspectives and ideas to the publishing process.

How do your academic discipline and experiences aid you as a member of the committee?

Anthony Cerulli: I specialize in the study of religion and medical humanities, with an area studies focus on South Asia. This background has helped me assess a wide range of manuscripts that come before the committee that contribute to these areas. I am also hopeful that I offer a helpful outsider’s view on work outside of my areas of expertise, such as the many works of fiction and manuscripts in European Studies.

Kathryn Ciancia: As academics, we know that writing, revising, and editing are processes that both take time and benefit from multiple perspectives. Having a team of people from different disciplines involved in a book can help to make it appealing to as wide a readership as possible.

Nan Enstad: My training and my career have been very interdisciplinary, crossing humanities and social sciences, which not only helps me understand the basis of more books being considered for publication for the press but also helps me understand disciplinary differences and boundaries. In graduate school, I gained training in history, African American studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies, focusing my work on people’s uses of cultural texts including film, popular fiction, and popular fashion. More recently, I’ve moved into Community and Environmental Sociology and study global capitalism, agriculture, labor, and food systems.

Kathryn McGarr: I enjoy being able to draw on my historical training and even simply my experiences as a critical reader to ask questions of the books we review and understand their contributions to their own conversations.

Sara McKinnon: I examine political rhetoric and communication about issues of violence, displacement, gender/sexuality, and human rights with a focus on the Americas. The University of Wisconsin Press has strong holdings in studies of Latin America and the Caribbean, human rights, and LGBT Studies. I apply my expertise in these subjects to assess the strength of the critical projects developed in the manuscripts we consider.

Nandini Pandey: We classics scholars call ourselves philologists—lovers of words. I love applying my love of words, my training in close reading, and my interest in meaning-making within a broader cultural context to my work on the UW Press Committee.

David Pavelich: My career has been built in academic libraries around the country, so I’ve been working with all kinds of books, journals, and other publications for years. Librarians are often generalists, so we take a broad view, and we’re naturally curious about lots of disciplines. As someone who is somewhat separated from academic debates, rivalries, and specializations, I think I bring an objectivity to the committee.

Porter Shreve: I’m a novelist, short story writer and essayist, and I direct the Creative Writing Program at UW, so I tend to lend my voice most often when the committee discusses creative projects. I’ve been very impressed with the range and quality of short story collections, novels and memoirs that have come before the committee. I’m also a screener for the Brittingham and Pollack Prizes in Poetry, which is one of the most respected university press book prizes in the country.


What do you find most fascinating about your role on the press committee?

Anthony Cerulli: I have written one book and recently went through peer review and contract negotiations for another one. Work on the Faculty Committee has opened my eyes to what happens on the press’s end of the book publication process, which, until my service on this committee, had been a little unclear to me. It’s wonderful to learn firsthand just how hard the editors and press’s staff work with authors, each other, and the faculty committee at UW Press, and I’m hopeful operations at most other university presses function this way, too.

Kathryn Ciancia: I’ve just been through the process of publishing my first book, so it’s been really enlightening to see things from the other perspective—that of a press. Plus, it’s just great fun to talk about books, including those in fields far outside of my own academic training, with a group of people who enjoy reading as much as I do!

Nan Enstad: On the press committee, I enjoy hearing about the editorial process and hearing others on the board respond to the topics at hand. I also enjoy reading the books UW Press is publishing!

Kathryn McGarr: Being on the Press Committee gives me a fantastic chance to read literature outside my discipline and enjoy works I normally would not have come across, from collections of short stories to histories of the Irish diaspora.

Sara McKinnon: It is so interesting to get a backstage view of the process of book making. I didn’t understand how much editors serve as advocates for the writers they work with, and just how many eyes are on a book before it goes into production. This experience on the board will undoubtedly shape how I develop my own future book projects and how I mentor colleagues and students who endeavor to publish their work.

Nandini Pandey: This is one of my most fulfilling and fascinating service commitments because it gives me an inside scoop into breaking ideas and trends in other fields, plus insight into things that affect every academic: the production of knowledge, the review and editing process, and the publishing industry. Through the press’s kaleidoscopic range of authors and projects, I get to learn about ideas, cultures, and disciplines that I’d otherwise rarely encounter in my ordinary scholarly life. So my work here redeems the joy in reading and love of imaginative travel that brought me into classics and academia in the first place.

David Pavelich: As a librarian, I’ve worked for years to acquire and provide access to university press books and journals, but I never had the opportunity to learn about university presses themselves. This has been a unique learning experience for me, a really exceptional look into the world of publishing. I’ve gained new insights into questions like, How does the move to e-books impact university presses? Or, How will a greater reliance on shared library collections impact university presses? Of course, it’s also been fascinating to see the results of new research before anyone else. The diversity of disciplines and subjects that the press publishes shows scholars exploring international archives, oral histories, and quantitative data. Librarians like me love to learn about scholars’ research methods and adventures.

Porter Shreve: As someone who submits manuscripts to presses and journals all the time and advises students about when and where to send out their own work, it’s been very helpful to understand the process from the publishing side. Creative Writing programs have such a focus on craft and technique that it’s useful for me to see some of the inner workings of marketing and editorial so my students have a better sense of what happens between the submission and publication of a book.


Call for Proposals: Monatshefte Special Issue

The editors of Monatshefte are pleased to announce a call for proposals for a special issue in 2022. They invite interested guest editors or co-editors to propose a topic with a German Studies focus (broadly conceived) by sending them a list of contributor names, brief abstracts from contributors (300 words maximum), mini-bios of the guest editor(s), and a rationale for the volume of 500–1000 words by January 1, 2020. Typically, Monatshefte issues consist of 5 to 7 articles with 6000–8000 words, but the editors are open to alternative formats provided they remain roughly within that total length.

The editors will evaluate the proposals on the basis of the interest and timeliness of the topic, the coherence of contributions as a single issue, the representation of diverse identities and career stages by the contributors, and the expertise of contributors in the topic.

Please send proposals to monatshefte_editor@gns.wisc.edu.

Timeline

  • Proposals due 1/1/2021
  • The editors, in consultation with the editorial board and international advisory board if needed, will make a decision by 2/1/2021
  • The completed manuscripts will be due to the editors by 11/30/2021, after which they will be sent out for peer review
  • Revisions after review will be due by 3/31/2022
  • The issue will appear as issue 114.3, fall 2022

New First Book Prize Honors Work of George L. Mosse

The University of Wisconsin Press and the George L. Mosse Program in History are pleased to announce the George L. Mosse First Book Prize. The prize honors Mosse’s commitment to both scholarship and mentoring new generations of historians. Winning books will be published as part of the George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas, and the winning author will receive a $5,000 prize. An honorable mention winner may also be selected to receive a $1,000 prize and publication.

Skye Doney, director of the George L. Mosse Program and Mosse series editor, says, “Mosse’s pioneering work set new trends in the field of European history. Our goal with the Mosse First Book Prize is to identify and support new voices in these scholarly discussions.”

The prize aims to support and engage early-career scholars writing on topics related to the history of modern European culture, sexuality, or ideas. It will be open to original, previously unpublished monographs of historical scholarship. Only English-language works (whether written in English or translated) will be considered. Proposals for the inaugural prize will be accepted between January 15 and May 15, 2021. All submissions will be reviewed by the press and series advisers, and a short list of no more than three finalists will be chosen in summer 2021. The finalists’ manuscripts will be read by a jury of expert readers, who will select the winning project.

Nathan MacBrien, UW Press editor in chief, says, “In addition to being one of the great cultural historians of the latter twentieth century, George L. Mosse was an inspiring mentor of young scholars. The Mosse prize continues that tradition of support, while further establishing UW Press as an important outlet for work in modern European cultural history.”

Books published under the auspices of the Mosse series join a prestigious list of more than two dozen titles published by notable scholars. The first three were published in 2003—Collected Memories by Christopher R. Browning, Mosse’s own Nazi Culture, and the edited volume What History Tells. Forthcoming projects include titles on the struggle to act in the face of the Holocaust, masculinity in Italian fascist culture, and early twentieth-century pacifism. Additionally, UW Press and the Mosse Program have embarked upon the reissuing of Mosse’s Collected Works, with two titles published to date.

About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With nearly 1,500 titles and over 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.

About the George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas
The Mosse series promotes the vibrant international collaboration and community that historian George L. Mosse created during his lifetime by publishing major innovative works by outstanding scholars in European cultural and intellectual history.

About George L. Mosse
A legendary scholar, teacher, and mentor, Mosse (1918–1999) joined the Department of History at UW–Madison in 1955. He was an early leader in the study of modern European culture, fascism, and the history of sexuality and masculinity. In 1965 Mosse was honored for his exceptional teaching by being named UW’s first John C. Bascom Professor. He remained famous among students and colleagues for his popular and engaging lectures, which were often standing-room only. A Jewish refugee from prewar Germany, Mosse was appointed a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1969 and spent the final decades of his career traveling frequently between Madison and Jerusalem.

Butternuts and Maple Sugar Candy

In the Midwest, unmistakably crisp mornings and golden leaves herald the arrival of a new season. Today we share a charming excerpt about the autumnal butternut harvest from Farm Girl by Beuna Coburn Carlson.

Butternut trees grew in several areas in the woodlot and pasture on our farm. We watched the nuts develop during summer and waited for them to ripen in fall. While they were still green, they were soft enough to cut with a knife; when ripe, a hammer or a special nutcracker was necessary to crack the hard shell and extract the meat. Dad used his jackknife to slice through a green nut to show us the complex structure of the nut, and allowed us to taste the bitter, unripe nutmeat. How different they would be after the nuts had ripened and dried, their rich, creamy, buttery taste a perfect flavor in maple sugar candy!

Our farm in west central Wisconsin was at the western and northern limits of the range of the butternut tree. Sometimes called white walnut, it produces nuts that are extremely hard shelled, much like black walnuts. Butternut trees grow to sixty feet in height, rarely higher. The wood was prized for carving and, before metal items were readily available, for maple sap spiles. Dad was skillful also in making wonderful wooden whistles for the kids in spring before the new growth in the tree hardened.

We knew which of the trees produced the most and the best nuts. One special tree on a sunny knoll in the pasture bore a great crop. Whereas butternuts generally are oval in shape, the nuts from this tree were nearly round, more like walnuts. It was easy to fill a bucket with these gems! Another tree, growing in the woodlot near the edge of the pasture, produced long, oval nuts, huge and choice. It was important to gather them as quickly as possible before the butternut poachers found them. The tree was near the road, with only a two-strand barbed-wire fence between the woodlot and road. People from as far away as St. Paul and Minneapolis combed the countryside and took butternuts wherever they found them.

Black and white photo of a farm with trees in the background showing four children: Neva sitting on the left with short curled hair and a gingham dress, nest to her Beuna sits with short parted hair and a checkered dress with a bow on the neckline, Burr is seated wearing a shirt and trousers, and Add is seated on the right wearing overalls.
Coburn kids. L to R: Neva, Beuna, Burr, Add.

Gathering the nuts on a sunny day in fall after the butternut shells had hardened and the outer husks had dried involved the whole family. Little kids could pick up nuts from the ground where they had fallen while Mother and Dad harvested the ones still on the tree. They carried buckets filled with nuts to the granary and spread them on the floor to finish drying.

On cold, dark winter days when no outdoor work was possible, Dad often got a pail of butternuts, now dried and ready to use, from the granary. He took them to a warm spot in the cellar near the furnace, sat down with a hammer in hand, placed a butternut upright on a special piece of wood, and cracked it. If he hit it just right, it would split into two pieces and the nutmeat would come out easily. That was a rarity. Most often it required several blows of the hammer to shatter the shell and expose the meat. When Dad had cracked a goodly amount, he brought them upstairs to the kitchen, where anyone willing to do so attacked them with a nutpick.

Very rarely, a perfectly cracked nut would yield a perfect nutmeat—two halves shaped like fat pantaloons. Finding a “pair of pants” among the butternuts was comparable to finding a four-leaf clover in the grass and gave the finder special bragging rights.

Helping pick out the pieces of meat from the shells with a nutpick entitled one to snack on them too, but wise children waited until Mother made a batch of maple sugar candy. She made it by boiling a saucepan of maple syrup, beating in cream, adding a handful of butternut meats, and pouring the thick, smooth mass into a buttered pan. When Mother decided it was cool enough, she cut it into squares and we tasted the wonderful candy. I believe we could taste in every bite the sap from the trees gathered on a frosty spring morning, the steaming syrup from the big, black kettle, the sunny afternoon of gathering the nuts, and the triumph of getting pieces of nuts from the rough shells. We knew where it came from and what effort it took to produce it. It was our candy and we loved it.

Beuna Coburn Carlson is a writer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

From Farm Girl by Beuna Carlson Coburn. © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

University of Wisconsin Press Welcomes New Journal for 2021: History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals

The University of Wisconsin Press is pleased to announce a new partnership with the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP). The institute’s journal, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (formerly Pharmacy in History, 1959–2020), will be published by the Press beginning in January 2021. AIHP is located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy.

AIHP executive director Dennis Birke says, “We look forward to working with the University of Wisconsin Press. With their capabilities and publishing expertise we can continue to place the highest priority on serving our members and community, while exploring new opportunities to broaden the reach of our journal.”

History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals publishes original scholarly articles about the history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals, broadly defined, including (but not limited to) the history of: pharmacy practice, pharmacy science, pharmacy education, drug regulation, social and cultural aspects of drugs and medicines, the pharmaceutical industry—including the history of pharmaceuticals, drugs, and therapeutics—and facets of the related medical sciences.

History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals publishes two issues per year, and its online content can be found on JSTOR. The title joins the Press’s eleven other peer reviewed academic journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Toni Gunnison, Journals Manager at the University of Wisconsin Press, states, “We are thrilled to add this dynamic and well-established journal to our publishing program. We look forward to partnering with the AIHP, a fellow University of Wisconsin organization, to disseminate scholarship in support of the Wisconsin Idea.”

Biography and Economics in African History

The most recent issue of African Economic History, a special issue entitled “Biography and Economics,” is now available. The lead editor for this issue, Paul Lovejoy, explains his choice of theme:

The inspiration for this special issue on Biography and Economics was the realization that economic history often does not focus on individuals and what their personal testimonies can tell us about economics and economic relationships. The issue brings together five articles that address this theme in different ways; the first through the lens of Philip Quaque on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century; the second the case of the Ologoudou family on the coast of the Bight of Benin; third through biographical perspectives on enslavement in the upper Guinea coast; fourth, through the memories of indentured women in Natal; and lastly through the autobiographical details found in the wills of freed Africans in Brazil.

This was the final issue for Lovejoy, who is now retired after more than 30 years of editing African Economic History. Browse the table of contents on Project MUSE.

African Economic History Welcomes New Editors

Following the retirement of longtime editor Paul E. Lovejoy, African Economic History has appointed two new editors. Earlier this year, George Bob-Milliar and Chétima Melchisedek joined the existing editorial team of Mariana Candido, Toyin Falola, and Toby Green. Together, the editors recently launched a social media presence for African Economic History, posting about current events related to African economies as well as important research in the field. You can follow AEH on Facebook and Twitter. Read on to learn more about the journal’s new editors.


George M. Bob-Milliar is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Political Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, one of the most prestigious public universities in Ghana. He joined the faculty of KNUST in August 2013 and has been involved in research, teaching, and mentoring of students at all levels. He is currently serving as the director of KNUST’s Centre for Cultural and African Studies (CeCASt). In 2012, Bob-Milliar received his PhD from the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, the oldest center for African Studies on the continent. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, his research lies at the intersection of history, political ethnography, and development studies. He has published in the preeminent journals in his field of specialization. Bob-Milliar has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, Uganda’s Makerere University, and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), as well as a guest lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. In 2010, he received the inaugural African Author Prize for the best article published in African Affairs by an author based at an African institution, and in 2012 he was awarded a prize for his contribution to research on African policy issues from the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He sits on the editorial boards of African Affairs, African Review of Economics & Finance, and the Journal of Political Economy and Development.

Chétima Melchisedek is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at York University. Before coming to York, Melchisedek was a senior lecturer at the University of Maroua; a fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies; the Gordon Henderson Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa; and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel. He earned a PhD in history from the Université Laval and a master’s degree from the University of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon. Melchisedek is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Canadian Journal of African Studies. His articles have appeared in the Historical Journal, African Studies Review, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and Afrique Contemporaine, among others. His article in Cahiers d’Études Africaines (2015) was awarded the Prize for the Best Paper on Central Africa by the Central Africa Studies Association, while his paper in Africa Spectrum (2018) won the UFS/AS Young African Scholar Award. Melchisedek guest edited a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies on “Boko Haram beyond the Media” (Volume 54 Number 2, 2020) and is currently co-editing, with Paul Lovejoy, a volume on Boko Haram and Political Distancing (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2021). Chétima is an affiliate member of the African Academy of Sciences and a founding member of the Cameroon Academy for Young Scientists.

Submissions open for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, Judged by Carmen Giménez Smith

Carmen Giménez Smith standing in front of brick wall

The University of Wisconsin Press and the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing are excited to announce that National Book Award Finalist Carmen Giménez Smith will judge this year’s Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. Any poet with an original, full-length, yet-to-be-published collection is eligible. Each manuscript will be considered for both $1,000 prizes. The winners and up to three finalists will have their books published as part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s Wisconsin Poetry Series. Submissions are open, and this year’s deadline is Tuesday, September 15.

Before visiting our Submittable page, please assemble a single pdf including a title page, a table of contents, your poems, and (optionally) an acknowledgments page listing any magazines or journals where the submitted poems may have first appeared. Your name and contact info should not appear anywhere in the document, or in the pdf file name. Manuscripts should be fifty to ninety pages in length on 8.5″ x 11″ pdf pages.

Simultaneous submissions are permitted, as long as the author agrees to withdraw the manuscript via the submissions manager if it is accepted elsewhere. If you have any questions, please first consult our FAQ. If you don’t find your answer, query Series Editors Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace at poetryseries@english.wisc.edu.

Recent titles in the Wisconsin Poetry Series

  • Cover image for Ganbatte
  • Cover image for If the House
  • Cover image of Gloss
  • Cover image of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor
  • Cover image for House of Sparrows

About This Year’s Judge
Carmen Giménez Smith is a former Guggenheim Fellow and the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and Be Recorder, a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. She was awarded an American Book Award for Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She is the publisher of Noemi Press. With Steph Burt, she is the poetry editor of The Nation.

UW Press Colophon

About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With nearly 1,500 titles and over 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.

For more information on the Wisconsin Poetry Prizes, please visit https://wwwtest.uwpress.wisc.edu/series/wi-poetry.html

30th Annual Midwest Book Award win for Dairylandia

We are thrilled to announce a Midwest Book Award winner from the University of Wisconsin Press! These awards from the Midwest Independent Publishing Association (MIPA) recognize quality in independent publishing in the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin).

Book cover showing Mona Lisa in Wisconsin Rose Bowl shirt painted on side of barn with cows in front.

Dairylandia: Dispatches from a State of Mind by Steve Hannah won the travel category. This book recounts Hannah’s love for his adopted state through his long-lived column, “State of Mind.” He profiles the lives of the seemingly ordinary yet quite (and quietly) extraordinary folks he met and befriended as he traveled the main streets and back roads of Wisconsin. From Norwegian farmers to a CIA-trained Laotian fighter to a woman who kept her favorite dead bird in the freezer, Hannah was charmed and fascinated by the kind and authentic folks he met. These captivating vignettes are by turns humorous, touching, and inspiring.

Congratulations again to the author and all involved! 

What Changes Us

This month marks the publication of The Change: My Great American, Postindustrial, Midlife Crisis Tour by Lori Soderlind. In this week’s guest post, Lori reflects on journeys, crisis, and connection.

My mission for the road trip that became my book The Change was to visit the most depressing, god-forsaken, ruined little places I could find on a loop through this country and try to get to know them. It couldn’t get hard enough for me: guns, drug addiction, unemployment, mean dogs, religious zealotry, isolation, family tragedy, untreated mental illness, fouled drinking water, industrial waste, unresolved race wars, labor wars, civil war, merciless tornados, abandonment, crop failure, deindustrialization: bring it.

Cover showing a grey building with a blue sign and yellow letters next to a red building with a sign reading Croatia Club with a blue sky full of clouds

All of it.

I wanted to look it in the face and take it in.

Everywhere on the map, there it was: cities large and small and innumerable towns that had lost the energy they’d grown up from, and that now presented an inventory of pain in a country that had changed and did not understand why, and was suffering for these changes. I lived in New York City, where the view of the other 320 million people in this country can be very narrow, sadly. But I have traveled through the country with curiosity all my life and I loved exploring it, and I had become aware in the past decade of a real gloom out where I’d always wandered carelessly, and I wanted to know what had changed. Much of the visible evidence of the change was its ruins. All the old factories that cities grew up around, gutted; all the downtowns that had given places their identities now swallowed by sprawl or just plain abandoned. I wondered why all that could have happened and how it felt to see that pain, if you lived there, every day.

Much of the change had to do with a huge shift out of the American industrial age, and the loss of manufacturing. One example: Gloversville, New York, had been a great, bustling place back when it made gloves for the world; now, go there and you’ll find all the social ills you can name without encountering a single scrap of leather or a sewing machine. Change has come to American places through countless other evolutions: the rise of the interstate highway system, the decline of family farms, the advent of malls, the new cyber economy. What the changed places had in common was the grief they felt for what they’d lost. Once, each place existed for some reason that was an established reality, just like, once, newspapers were an established reality or train travel was an established reality or my cousin’s first marriage was an established reality. Change had come and so much established reality had been upended and people and places were grieving what was lost, as if it were all meant to last.   

The Change has been released, now, in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic that has us aghast at how helpless we humans are, truly. We like reality to be a manageable and predictable thing, but we are reminded always—and now profoundly—that the living world is not so easily tamed. We of the country long regarded as exceptional, who felt all through the past century so breezily powerful: we hit full stop and faced daily the feeling of powerlessness. Nine weeks of quarantine as I write this, and we are, many of us, on our knees in a new posture that feels permanent, though this too will change. My city—New York City—has been hit worst of all, and is suffering. Our fear is much deeper than a fear of getting sick, of death by virus. We fear the collapse of systems we are utterly dependent on. We fear, in the midst of this unparalleled helplessness, that nothing of what we once knew and counted on will ever be the same. We see how vulnerable these structures we have built may truly be, and we are grieving before our house is even gone—because we are shocked to believe that all we have built really could fall down around us. That is how shaken we are, in New York City, in May of the year of Covid-19.

As I write this, a storm has taken the power out and I am alone in the dark in my house; lately, any respite from this sense of plunging into darkness is brief. We are shaken, but only as shaken as others in our country have been for a long, long time now. We are as shaken as a small steel-making town south of Pittsburgh where none of the kids pass standardized tests, and all of the storefronts are empty. We are as shaken as a broken mining town, or a rural desert. We know the country is divided, but to really know the sides is to measure their pain: Some have not worked in years, some lost their homes long ago, and then, too, some are simply Black in America. Others, meanwhile, have felt oddly invulnerable, and believed their fortune to be the norm. From where I sit today, it seems we are all, at once, saying foxhole prayers and hoping simply to survive.  

It could be really good for us. It’s good to know this fear deeply, and to understand that our longing to survive is what, at core, connects us. It is basic, and human. If we can know that connection to each other, and see all of ourselves as beings trying to survive, we will have changed.

Not all of us, but enough of us will change. We’ll know what it is to watch the promises we’d built our lives on collapse, or to fear that they will and to hate this fear. We will know that really, such promises don’t exist. We have only ourselves, which is to say, each other. The same. The one thing we should learn to count on.

Photo of Lori Soderlind

Lori Soderlind is an award-winning essayist and journalist, and author of the memoir Chasing Montana: A Love Story.