Join us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out.
Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative, whose writing you may have encountered in the novels War Porn and I Heart Oklahoma!, such nonfiction books as Learning to Die In The Anthropocene and We’re Doomed, Now What?, and various journals and magazines. This ep is occasioned by Roy’s latest book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, just out in August 2025 from Stanford University Press, which we find to be a true fount of 21st-century publishing inspo. In the book, Roy takes our magical thinking about ecological collapse and what we think we can do about it to task, questioning progress narratives and arguing for realistic responses in the tradition of Ethical Pessimism. Ethical? Pessimism? Sounds like small press publishing to us! Why make books? Why make books at the end of the world?
Along the way: suffering, time, attention, hope, nihilism, antagonism, the Serenity Prayer, Mary Shelley’s dad, AI, parasites, trolls, Michael Mann, Joseph Tainter, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books (s/o ep. 9), Matvei Yankelevich (s/o ep. 1), Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse, crises in our national political discourse and in higher ed, publishing's carbon footprints, three adults trying to figure out what a Wojak is, and other stuff that’s decidedly not for everyone. Buckle up, doomers.
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Join us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out.
Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative, whose writing you may have encountered in the novels War Porn and I Heart Oklahoma!, such nonfiction books as Learning to Die In The Anthropocene and We’re Doomed, Now What?, and various journals and magazines. This ep is occasioned by Roy’s latest book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, just out in August 2025 from Stanford University Press, which we find to be a true fount of 21st-century publishing inspo. In the book, Roy takes our magical thinking about ecological collapse and what we think we can do about it to task, questioning progress narratives and arguing for realistic responses in the tradition of Ethical Pessimism. Ethical? Pessimism? Sounds like small press publishing to us! Why make books? Why make books at the end of the world?
Along the way: suffering, time, attention, hope, nihilism, antagonism, the Serenity Prayer, Mary Shelley’s dad, AI, parasites, trolls, Michael Mann, Joseph Tainter, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books (s/o ep. 9), Matvei Yankelevich (s/o ep. 1), Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse, crises in our national political discourse and in higher ed, publishing's carbon footprints, three adults trying to figure out what a Wojak is, and other stuff that’s decidedly not for everyone. Buckle up, doomers.
Episode 20: Noor Hindi & George Abraham - “Structures for Abundance”
Index for Continuance
1 hour 26 minutes 20 seconds
11 months ago
Episode 20: Noor Hindi & George Abraham - “Structures for Abundance”
In this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about Heaven Looks Like Us, a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the challenges and opportunities of anthology editing, and how they’ve grappled with anthologizing’s pitfalls of reduction, representation, canonization, and exclusion. Instead Heaven Looks Like Us is offered as a fresh site of radical connection, newness, abundance, and Palestinian futurity. Under conditions of hyper-visibility, where we see atrocity unfold in real time, what is the role of the book as a technology for interacting, knowing, and imagining deeper? We talk about it, interrogating the roles of institutions and time and money, theorizing strategies for reclaiming those resources and building new structures, amid and through the work of editing. We try to understand what that work even is. Poetry expands the question.
This episode opens with George and Noor reading poems by Jen Siraganian, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (translated by Fady Joudah), and Mira Mattar. The anthology’s title comes from a poem by Fargo Tbakhi. In discussion we quote a poem by Micaela Kaibni Raen. Find George’s poetry collection Birthright here, and here’s Noor’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. George is executive editor of the journal Mizna. We also refer to RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers) and some previous anthologies including Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak.
Index for Continuance
Join us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out.
Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative, whose writing you may have encountered in the novels War Porn and I Heart Oklahoma!, such nonfiction books as Learning to Die In The Anthropocene and We’re Doomed, Now What?, and various journals and magazines. This ep is occasioned by Roy’s latest book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, just out in August 2025 from Stanford University Press, which we find to be a true fount of 21st-century publishing inspo. In the book, Roy takes our magical thinking about ecological collapse and what we think we can do about it to task, questioning progress narratives and arguing for realistic responses in the tradition of Ethical Pessimism. Ethical? Pessimism? Sounds like small press publishing to us! Why make books? Why make books at the end of the world?
Along the way: suffering, time, attention, hope, nihilism, antagonism, the Serenity Prayer, Mary Shelley’s dad, AI, parasites, trolls, Michael Mann, Joseph Tainter, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books (s/o ep. 9), Matvei Yankelevich (s/o ep. 1), Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse, crises in our national political discourse and in higher ed, publishing's carbon footprints, three adults trying to figure out what a Wojak is, and other stuff that’s decidedly not for everyone. Buckle up, doomers.
