I’ll be in conversation with Lydia Millet about her new incredible anti-memoir, WE LOVED IT ALL, at the ODYSSEY Bookshop in South Hadley, MA at 7pm
I’ll be in conversation with EmIly Raboteau about her new book of essays, LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL, at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT
The fundamental need for bodies to be respected has always been at odds with industry’s goals. History has shown these abuses to be true, from the cotton fields of Virginia to the paper mill towns of rural Maine. Yet people continue to work in such industries and the communities they live in endure, despite the knowledge (and the toxics) they accrue. Arsenault will discuss how our external landscapes inscribe themselves on our internal landscapes— and the reverse, and how power, politics, family, and love shape our choices, or lack thereof.
Thursday, March 28, 2024 | 12-1 pm EST
Location: Tufts University, Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room (474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA)
Online Viewer Livestream Registration – Mar 28
Every week during the academic year, the Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lectures feature speakers from government, industry, academia, and non-profit organizations to give presentations on environmental topics at Tufts University.
About the Nonfiction Dialogues:
The Nonfiction Dialogues is an evening literary series in which Professor and Writing Program Chair Lis Harris discusses with distinguished nonfiction writers their work and careers. Recent guests have included Emily Bernard, Peter Godwin, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jelani Cobb, Lacy Johnson, Terese Marie Mailhot, and Maggie Nelson.
Join Lis and I in conversation on Feb. 7 at 501 Dodge Hall - Details here
https://arts.columbia.edu/events/nonfiction-dialogues-kerri-arsenault
I’ll be talking to students enrolled in a year-long, interdisciplinary course at UCLA, titled Biotechnology and Society about Mill Town, which is one of the required texts for their "epigenetics and environmental exposures" unit. This is a unit which includes earlier lectures on basics of epigenetics (critiques, debates, mechanistic details), food as exposure; microbiome research, bioethics and the politics of various interpretations of "cure" in scientific study of environmental exposures; and storytelling around environmental exposures.
This 240-student course engages with controversial topics in current science through the lenses of biology, gender and sexuality studies and food studies, anthropology, sociology and public policy. We think that your book will be an incredible addition to the course, and truly embodies the interdisciplinary dimensions of environmental storytelling, and debates within science, technology and society we are trying instill in our students, who are primarily pre-science.
I’ll be talking with Rye Howard’s class, The Toxic Legacy of Local History: Industrialization, Deindustrialization, and Environmental Justice. Rye was a tremendous help in my own research for Mill Town and holds doctoral and MPH degrees in environmental public health, and has extensive teaching and policy experience. Rye is a staff scientist at ELAW, an NGO providing legal and scientific assistance to environmental defenders worldwide. Here’s a description of the class:
The history of industrialization in the northern Berkshires provides a remarkable illustration of the forces of that have shaped American society over the last two centuries. In this course, we will examine a number of local case studies that illustrate these forces and their outcomes, with particular attention to the history of North Adams. We will investigate and discuss, – How the needs of industry determined the location and the subsequent economic development of North Adams; – The transition from nineteenth to twentieth century industrial production, with particular attention to the dramatic increase in sophistication of products and the toxicity of the waste stream; – The connection between immigration, labor, and unionization, exemplified by the recruitment of Chinese immigrants to North Adams to break a strike; – The rise of environmental regulation and the rapid exportation of hazardous industries to developing nations, leaving industrial cities like North Adams with almost no economic basis; – The toxic legacy of our industrial past: A housing stock heavily contaminated by lead paint; a neighborhood razed because of contaminated groundwater, and a river so polluted that fish caught it in can’t be eaten. The course will highlight the local and global environmental justice and public health consequences of the different phases of industrialization, and will consider approaches to mitigating some of these impacts.
https://houseofbooksct.com/events
Join us for a discussion of the final issue of John Freeman's influential literary magazine, this volume called Freeman's: Conclusions. Select contributors will read from their work and then engage in a panel discussion with editor John Freeman.
JOHN FREEMAN was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include Dictionary of the Undoing, How to Read a Novelist, Tales of Two Americas, and Tales of Two Planets. His poetry includes the collections Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. In 2021, he edited the anthologies There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love with Tracy K. Smith, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. An executive editor at Knopf, he also hosts the California Book Club, a monthly online discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature for Alta magazine. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review and has been translated into twenty-two languages.
HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Her first novel, Sonora, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. In 2018, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, came out in 2022 to great acclaim. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
EMILY RABOTEAU is the author of The Professor's Daughter, Searching for Zion, winner of the American Book Award, and Lessons for Survival, forthcoming next spring. She's a contributing editor at Orion magazine and a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York. She lives in the Bronx.
KERRI ARSENAULT is a literary critic, co-director of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University; associate at the Mahindra Center at Harvard; contributing editor at Orion magazine; and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
For the past ten years, the literary annual Freeman's has highlighted some of the best new writing from around the world, grouped around themes of importance, from power to love to change. And now, for its final issue, conclusions.
What does it mean to stop in a time where endless expansion is often prized -- personally, institutionally? How do we live a life that makes room for ceremonies of conclusions, without the narrowing effect of coming to conclusions?
Join editor John Freeman with contributors and 100 W resident alumni A. Kendra Greene, Kerri Arsenault and 100 W residency co-founder David Searcy as they read, discuss and celebrate the 10 years of coming together around great writing and conversation in Freeman's. Reception to follow.
Memoir and history are often seen as separate genres, shelved in different sections, one in which the author fades to the background as they write about past events, the other a deeply personal take on the author’s own life. But when authors blend these genres, remarkable narratives emerge, showing how the past reverberates into the present and future. Join Kate Carpenter, host of the Drafting the Past podcast, along with me, Arsenault, Erika Bolstad (Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her), Staci Drouillard (Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe and Seven Aunts), and Vivian Gibson (The Last Children of Mill Creek) as we discuss our experiences writing about personal connections to the past.
I’ll be in conversation with Ben Fountain about DEVIL MAKES THREE a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti in 1991.
PRAISE
“Devil Makes Three is the sort of expansive, heartbreaking, thrilling novel I didn't realize I was missing until it grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go. Writing at the peak of his considerable powers, Ben Fountain makes a harrowing period in Haiti's recent history come wonderfully and tragically alive. This morally complex novel is why we read fiction." —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins
“Devil Makes Three brings the relentless intimacy of great literature to the quest to understand Haiti, and in this sense the novel is both an act of wild faith and an act of mad love and, finally, a triumph.” —Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and The Immaculate Invasion
"Devil Makes Three is a fast and riveting read, a gripping thriller braided with a couple of credible love stories. This novel will pin your ears back with some of its hard-won truths." —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising
I will be speaking at the National Digital Newspaper Program’s (NDNP) Annual Meeting, hosted jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress.
The NDNP produces Chronicling America, the largest, opened source of historical newspapers produced in the United States, and it’s what I aim to discuss — newspapers and how I used them to write my book.
The live event will be closed to the public, but if can watch it via ZOOM. Registration is HERE
I’ll be in conversation with Maine author, Gregory Brown, at the Denmark Arts Center, Sunday, September 10 at 5pm. MORE information HERE
On 9/6 at 6:30 pm at RJ JULIA in Madison, CT I’ll be in conversation with Christina Gerhardt about her new book SEA CHANGE: AN ATLAS OF ISLANDS IN A RISING OCEAN, which examines islands and how physical landscapes and cultures adapt to the current and projected effects of sea-level rise.
MORE INFORMATION HERE:
About Christina:
Christina Gerhardt is an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. and former fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Before that, she worked as a Barron Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. She is a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, where she previously taught. Professor Gerhardt has been awarded fellowships by various institutions and commissions, including the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, and the Rachel Carson Center. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin, and Columbia University.
Join me in conversation at TWENTY STORIES w/ Jennifer Lunden about her book, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back To Life
This event is free and open to all!
ABOUT AMERICAN BREAKDOWN:
A Silent Spring for the human body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.
When Jennifer Lunden became chronically ill after moving from Canada to Maine, her case was a medical mystery. Just 21, unable to hold a book or stand for a shower, she lost her job and consigned herself to her bed. The doctor she went to for help told her she was “just depressed.”
After suffering from this enigmatic illness for five years, she discovered an unlikely source of hope and healing: a biography of Alice James, the bright, witty, and often bedridden sibling of brothers Henry James, the novelist, and William James, the father of psychology. Alice suffered from a life-shattering illness known as neurasthenia, now often dismissed as a “fashionable illness.”
In this meticulously researched and illuminating debut, Lunden interweaves her own experience with Alice’s, exploring the history of medicine and the effects of the industrial revolution and late-stage capitalism to tell a riveting story of how we are a nation struggling—and failing—to be healthy.
Although science—and the politics behind its funding—has in many ways let Lunden and millions like her down, in the end science offers a revelation that will change how readers think about the ecosystems of their bodies, their communities, the country, and the planet.
ABOUT JENNIFER LUNDEN
The recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for Literary Arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, Jennifer Lunden writes at the intersection of health and the environment. Her essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Orion, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Longreads, and other journals; selected for several anthologies; and praised as notable in Best American Essays. A former therapist, she was named Maine’s Social Worker of the Year in 2012.
FRIDAY JULY 21, 6PM - Conversation with ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE about her book BODY HORROR and things surrounding her book, like bodies and politics and writing! At the indie bookstore, A NOVEL IDEA. Please register HERE
Chatham University’s Falk School of Sustainability and Creative Writing program have invited me to serve as part of a new initiative at Chatham—the Rachel Carson Visiting Scholars Program. I’ll be teaching a 4-day master class in writing, during the MFA program's Summer Community of Writers program. Carson was a graduate of Chatham College for Women, and much of their programming in the MFA program and across the university, grows from her ethic of care for the environment and interest in how humans connect to it.
Join us at the Science History Institute, where I will be a fellow in the summer of 2023, as we discuss how questions can sometimes be more important than answers.
LINK: https://www.sciencehistory.org/event/fellow-in-focus-a-conversation-with-mill-town-author-kerri-arsenault
From June through August 2023, I’ll be the Ullyot Scholar for the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia
I’ll be at my hometown library in Roxbury CT to discuss Mill Town with neighbors and friends!
If you plan to attend in-person, Registration is required. RSVP not required for Livestream. Go to YouTube @mindichprogram at 5pm on April 28
“Meet Mill Town: A Roundtable” brings together students I’ve been working with at Harvard with guests from my book and the mill towns of Rumford and Mexico, Maine: Maddy Arsenault, Jim Aylward, Marie Therese (Terry) Martin, and Lisa Russell.
Together, the roundtable will explore questions of community, ecology, and inequality in America.
Maddy Arsenault is my mother and a longtime resident of Mexico and now lives in Freeport, ME; Jim Aylward is the former guidance counselor and former Head Coach of the high school football team at Mountain Valley High; Marie Therese (Terry) Martin is the author of And Poison Fell From the Sky and a former nurse; and Lisa Russell teaches high school math at Mountain Valley High School
The roundtable will be facilitated by undergraduate student discussants Alex White (’23, Government and Public Policy), Jana Amin (’25), and Katie Catulle (’24, English), Aeden Marcus('25, Environmental Science, Engineering), and Eshan Vishwakarma ('26).
This event is sponsored by the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship.
The Harvard University media relations policy outlines that the press is not permitted to film or cover events on campus. If individuals attending Harvard sponsored events meet someone or hear something as an attendee that they would like to pursue as a journalist they should contact the Harvard communications team (collegecomms@fas.harvard.edu) to discuss options.
Also journalists, per the above, you can also write to me and I’ll talk about anything!!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/meet-mill-town-a-roundtable-tickets-602817141297
“Toxic Discourses: Hope and Hazards in Environmental Storytelling” - I’ll be in conversation with Dr. Genevieve Gunther at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard University.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther is an author, climate activist, and native New Yorker. An expert in climate communication and fossil-fuel disinformation, she is the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School, where she sits on the board of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Dr. Guenther advises activist groups, corporations, and policymakers, and she serves as an Expert Reviewer for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her next book, The Language of Climate Politics, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
The annual “Conversations in Science” symposium gathers teachers from area public and independent schools for an evening of collegiality and science at Belmont Hill School, an independent school for boys grades 7-12. I’m hosted by environmental science teachers, John McAlpin and Maine native, Tyson Trautz!
I’ve been invited to talk to New York area supporters of The Trustees on April 6th at the Harvard Club. The Trustees is one of the oldest land trusts in the world and the largest in Massachusetts. They own and manage 27,000 acres on 123 separate reservations across the state, and have 100,000 household members and about 2.5 million visitors per year.
Join me, Jess Varner, Gregg Mitman, Rebecca Altman, Bartow Elmore, and Ellen Spears for our panel at the 2023 conference for American Society for Environmental History at the Hilton in Boston’s Back Bay. — "When Archives are Closed or Hidden, What Next? Taking on Environmental Histories of Corporate Worlds." Registration opens fall 2022, HERE.
Maine Public broadcasting and host Bill Nemitz, have chosen Mill Town to be their first book club pick for 2023. Yay! If you would like to join the club, click HERE. If you would like to join the discussion on March 16, click HERE, but the Livestream link will only be avaialbe 48 hours before the event.
Mill Town was shortlisted for the inaugural Inge Feltrinelli Prize to be delivered on March 8, 2012, in collaboration with the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, the Feltrinelli Group, BookCity Milano, the Associazione Italiana Editori, and The School for Librai Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri.
More about the Prize:(translated from the Italian) To change the world, you need to tell stories. Collect and amplify the voices of those who investigate the despicable rights, act as a megaphone for the persecuted, the betrayed and silenced aspirations, the calls for help, to which the international community – by virtue of the consensus around indispensable principles of justice – should respond. To wake up public opinion by reminding us that culture can also play its part in acting as a witness, in moving consciences, in exercising a role of counterpower.
Inge Feltrinelli taught us this: culture creates bridges and opens gates; words and images are made to travel, to communicate the most remote points in the world. Telling stories is a way of not giving in to the existing, of making a commitment to the world.
Queen of international publishing with a German accent and icon of Italian culture, before she was a publisher – to survive the deprivations of the post-war period – Inge Schönthal Feltrinelli was a journalist and photographer around the world, becoming in no time – thanks to her determination and her courage – an established photojournalist. In the fifties she spent a long time in the United States where she had the opportunity to portray politicians such as John Kennedy and Winston Churchill; writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Günter Grass; painters such as Picasso and Chagall. Coming to Milan, since 1960 not only has she opened the doors of the publishing house to anyone who wanted to be heard, with human and intellectual intelligence, but,
One of the lessons that Inge Feltrinelli leaves us in legacy – noted the writer Richard Ford – is the rejection of conventional points of view. The idea that art and politics live in symbiosis is part of the same continuum. Books, stories, images are naturally made to break in, to bring fields of experience closer together, to engage in civil battles. Insisting on raising public awareness around the issue of fundamental freedoms, promoting new authorial capabilities and spreading new looks at the world through the words of the Inge Feltrinelli Prize. Telling the world, defending rights wants to represent a tribute to the figure of Inge Feltrinelli.
Lunchtime workshop on writing about place, in collaboration with Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American history.
“Family and Environmental Legacies” is the name of the talk I’ll be giving at Calvin University’s January Series, at 12:30 pm on 1/19, as part of a 15-day free lecture series, given as a gift from Calvin University to the community, both local and now global. Calvin’s goal is to curate a diverse group of speakers, all of whom can challenge us, encourage us, and cause us to think about things a little differently than when we arrived. This talk is in partnership with the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing.
A list of previous speakers and talks are at www.calvin.edu/january.
Time: 25–27 November 2022
Location: Studienhaus Gut Schönwag, Schönwag 4, 82405 Wessobrunn
Conveners: Prof. Dr. Melanie Arndt (University of Freiburg), Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch (RCC), Prof. Dr. Christian Rohr (University of Bern)
This is the second Oberseminar workshop convened by the environmental historians Melanie Arndt (University of Freiburg), Christof Mauch (RCC), and Christian Rohr (University of Bern) and author, Kerri Arsenault. The workshop invites doctoral students from Austrian, German, and Swiss universities who are working in the field of environmental history and related disciplines. The first workshop took place in Switzerland and was dedicated to “Interdisciplinary and Mixed-Methods Approaches in Environmental History: Potentials and Challenges.” This second workshop will take place in a farmhouse in Upper Bavaria. It focuses on the pleasures and challenges of writing dissertations, books, and articles on environmental history. Participants will analyze and critique existing texts and learn about the “dos and don'ts” of writing. The workshop will address all aspects of writing and the writing process—from style to word choice over questions of readership and publishers. It will help participants to arrange and communicate their ideas in a way that leads to clear and strong prose. Ideally, it will help to make writing a pleasurable challenge rather than a painful chore.
With Robert Newton and Bathsheba Demuth, we will be discussing “The Art of Fact” and environmental storytelling, at the Conference to Mark the Anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, on October 16-19 at the Akademie Schloss Tutzing, Germany.
The conference is a joint initiative of Le RUCHE (Réseau Universitaire de Chercheurs en Histoire Environnementale) and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich. Held in English and French, it will focus on the discussion of pre-circulated papers of 6,000 to 8,000 words, including footnotes (due by 15 September 2022), and the discussion will be in both languages. The RCC and Le RUCHE will cover travel and accommodation costs.
For more information about the conference, click HERE
Friday, October 7 at 7 pm at Mechanics’ Hall in Portland, ME, as part of the first annual Maine Literary Festival, I will be in conversation with author Rebecca Traister. The event is co-sponsored by Mechanics’ Hall, The Portland Public Library, and the Maine Women Writers Collection at UNE, and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
Rebecca and I plan to have a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to write nonfiction as a woman in this political/cultural/environmental moment!