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.
In this ep we get into “arts administration”: how to do it well, why maybe it should be called something else, and what small presses can offer literary programs of all sizes. We talk with one of the best in the field, literary organizer Sony Ton-Aimé, currently executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and formerly director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution. Sony talks about how programs like these reach and activate readers and shares his insight on how to build community practices and empowering conversations between readers and writers. How do you cultivate agency in your audience? How do you create meaningful events? What does it mean to be a good host? How can organizational and curatorial work help create openness, grace, and a readiness to learn and be challenged? We try to answer it all and see what small presses can teach us.
A couple books get mentioned along the way, including Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us. And we highly recommend checking out some of Sony’s recent work, for example “Awe Studies: Resisting Awe” and “A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire.”
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.
