Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheanno‪n‬ Francesca Rheannon

We talk with Heather McGhee about her important new book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together. It’s about how the politics of racial division keeps working class people of all races from having what they deserve.

But first, we talk with Michelle Commander of the Schomburg Center about the anthology she’s co-edited: UNSUNG: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition.

Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use!

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Michelle Commander

We’ve all heard of Frederick Douglass. But how about the great Abolitionist David Walker? And how many of us have read accounts of slavery written by people who had been enslaved themselves?

Now, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a historic branch of the New York Public Library, has reached into its vast archive of slavery and anti-slavery materials to bring us Unsung.

The anthology gathers together well-known documents by abolitionists alongside lesser-known life stories and overlooked accounts of the everyday lives and activism of the slavery era.

Michelle Commander has written the introduction and co-edited Unsung with Kevin Young. She’s Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center for Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, part of the Schomburg Center and the author of Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic and Avidly Reads: Passages. Kevin Young is the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Read An Excerpt from UNSUNG

Heather McGhee

Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a majority of white voters have chosen Republican candidates over Democrats.

And since that time, middle and working class white folks have seen their incomes flat or declining, the decimation of the unions that had once protected their incomes and the constant narrowing of access to public goods like education and health care. Is there a connection?

You bet, says Heather McGhee. Her new book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together shows how the racist zero-sum narrative has led to the impoverishment of middle and working class Americans of all races and ethnicities.

And overturning that narrative will mean a new race/class narrative that builds solidarity for all.

Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy. The former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos, she has drafted legislation, testified before Congress and now chairs the board of Color of Change.

Resources on the Race/Class Narrative

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We talk with Rebecca Sacks about her powerful debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates. It’s about the intersecting stories of the peoples of Israel and Palestine, and how oppression twists and informs the humanity of perpetrators and victims.

Then, we replay our 2016 interview with Palestinian-American novelist Susan Abulhawa about her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water.

Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use!

Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.



Rebecca Sacks

Rebecca Sacks’ searing and powerfully written debut novel City of a Thousand Gates interweaves the stories of a cast of characters — Palestinians, Israelis and observers— in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The novel revolves around two interconnected and defining events, the murders of two teens. One is Yael, an Israeli settler murdered in her bed at night. Soon after, a revenge killing: Salem, a young Palestinian boy, is beaten to death by a gang of Israeli men at a mall. Vera, a German journalist, plays witness to the impact of the murders on the society and people around her.

These are three of the many characters that bring to life what it’s like to live in a place where violence is routine and survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them.

Rebecca Sacks fully enters into the personalities of her characters, never shrinking from the moral challenges of a society where injustice and privilege play out. A citizen of Canada, the United States and Israel, her dispatches from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have been published in journals such as the Paris Review Daily.

Read An Excerpt From City of a Thousand Gates

Susan Abulhawa

In this episode, we look at how fiction can illumine the conflict of Israel and Palestine: how the asymmetrical power between a dominant state and a subjugated people impacts the lives of all who live within the borders of the conflict.

In this second segment, we hear an extended excerpt from our 2015 interview with Susan Abulhawa about her novel of a Palestinian family, The Blue Between Sky And Water.

Listen to the full interview with Susan Abulhawa

 

We talk with world renowned climate scientist Michael Mann about his book, The New Climate War. It’s about all the ways the fossil fuel industry and its allies seek to discredit, divide, and deflect the movement to save the climate from making our planet uninhabitable.

Later, we check in with Nation magazine political correspondent John Nichols about his recent post about the fight over the COVID19 relief plan.

Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use!

Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon or find us on twitter @WritersVoice.



Michael Mann

Michael Mann

As the evidence mounts that the climate crisis is here right now, the voices saying climate change is a hoax are fewer in number—a certain recently past president notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean the fossil fuel industry or its minions have given up.

Instead, they’ve adopted a soft denialism, one that uses divide and conquer tactics to turn climate activists against each other; deflects attention from the need for systemic change to focus on individual responsibility; and uses so-called “allies” to discredit renewable energy and climate heroes like Bill McKibben (looking at you, Michael Moore) in order to weaken the fight against the carbon pollution that threatens our survival.

In his book The New Climate War, climate scientist Michael E. Mann describes the fossil fuel industry’s tactics of divide, deflect and discredit — and shows what we can do to counter them.

He also pushes back against the Climate Doomers to gives us reason to hope that we can win the climate war for a healthy planet.

Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State. In addition to The New Climate War, he is the author of numerous books, including The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and The Madhouse Effect.

Here’s the 1970s beverage industry-funded ad that put the kibosh on a National Bottle Bill, as Michael Mann discusses in our interview.



John Nichols

Go bold — and go bold now. That’s what the American people are telling President Biden and the Congress when it comes to COVID19 relief.

$2,000 relief checks? 74 percent of Americans polled favor them. Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour? 58 percent favor it. But GOP senators are either dead set against covid relief or have offered a paltry package less than one third that proposed by Bide...

We talk with Paul Pitcoff about his memoir, Cold War Secrets. It’s about growing up in leftwing circles in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s with a father who had a hidden past.

Then, a woman is raped and finds a path toward healing by examining the objects associated with her trauma. We talk with Laura Levitt about her memoir, The Objects That Remain.

Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use!

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Paul Pitcoff

When Paul Pitcoff was eleven, the FBI came to the door of his family’s apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, asking for his father. It took years for him to find out the reason for that visit—a secret that lay at the heart of his family’s life while he was growing up in the 1950s and 60s.

In his memoir Cold War Secrets, Pitcoff recounts his search to discover his parents’ well-hidden secrets and learn how they shaped his identity, secrets that had to do with his father’s involvement with the Soviet Union and then his rejection of it.

Cold War Secrets also brings vividly to life the leftwing community in New York City during a time when being on the Left could cost you your job — or worse.

Paul Pitcoff is Emeritus Professor at Adelphi University. He had multiple careers in education, film, law, and youth development.

Laura Levitt

One evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura’s attacker.

When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. But the evidence was never processed.

Decades later, Levitt returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large.

The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and an examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss.

Laura Levitt is Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender at Temple University where she has chaired the Religion Department and directed both the Jewish Studies and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Programs.

Next week on Writers Voice

Don’t miss our interview with world renowned climate scientist Michael Mann about his terrific new book, The New Climate War.

It’s about the campaign by fossil fuel interests to distract and deflect the public from the climate emergency—and divide and discredit the climate action movement. It also shows us how to fight to take back our planet from those who would destroy it.

What’s the prospect for a Green New Deal in the Biden administration? We talk with Guido Girgenti about the book he co-edited with the Sunrise Movement’s Varshini Prakash, Winning The Green New Deal.

Then, we talk with wildlife photographer Ian Shive about his stunning book of photos and essays about America’s wildlife refuges. It’s called Refuge: America’s Wildest Places.

Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use!

Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice Radio with Francesca Rheannon or find us on twitter @WritersVoice.



Guido Girgenti

In his inauguration speech on January 20, Joe Biden promised bold action on the climate crisis. He’s learned a lot since the Democratic primary, when his climate plan got a D rating from climate activists.

But now they are cautiously optimistic that Biden understands the scale and urgency of what it will take to tackle the issue. One of the key figures who got Biden up to speed on climate is Varshini Prakash, leader of the Sunrise Movement.

Prakash and Guido Girgenti are co-editors of  Winning the Green New Deal, a collection of essays from leaders and experts about the Green New Deal—and a detailed playbook for how we can win it.

Girgenti is the Media Director for Justice Democrats and a founding Board Member of the Sunrise Movement. He’s also host of the podcast Bloc Party.

Listen to an audio excerpt from The Green New Deal

Ian Shive

The Trump regime mounted an unprecedented assault on America’s environment when it was in power, including on its wildlife refuges.

In the waning weeks of the regime, Trump opened perhaps the most important of those refuges, the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, to oil and gas drilling, although there were few takers.

Wildlife photographer Ian Shive has been photographing America’s wilderness for decades for some of the nation’s most prestigious magazines, like National Geographic and Outside.

His new book, Refuge: America’s Wildest Places, is a stunning coffee table book of his photos of the nation’s wildlife refuges, with essays from scientists and conservationists with US Fish and Wildlife.

Ian Shive is an Ansel Adams award-winning photographer, filmmaker, author, and environmentalist.

See More Wildlife Photos by Ian Shive

We spend the hour talking with Hugh Raffles about his new book, The Book Of Unconformities: Speculations On Lost Time. It’s part natural history, part memoir, part meditation on the relationships between people and rocks throughout time.

Then, at the end, a short story about the Cure Hunter from Francesca’s book Province of the Heart.

Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use!

Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice Radio or find us on twitter @WritersVoice.



Hugh Raffles

When Hugh Raffles’ two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, as ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own.

The book that emerged is The Book of Unconformities: Speculations On Lost Time. It’s a profound and affirming meditation, grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape Indians, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in New York City in 1897.

Hugh Raffles is the author of the acclaimed book Insectopedia and of In Amazonia: A Natural History.

Read An Excerpt from The Book of Unconformities