Interview with Tom Rosburg

This spring we’re releasing the second edition of Sylvan T. Runkel and Dean M. Roosa’s Wildflowers and Other Plants of Iowa Wetlands. Botanist Tom Rosburg provided all new photographs for the second edition, as well as some additional text. Here, he talks with Bur Oak Books series editor Holly Carver about how he became a plant photographer.

Holly: How long have you been photographing plants?

Tom: I obtained my first 35 mm SLR camera in 1977 as a graduation gift and started doing casual nature photography. In 1986, I switched to Nikon equipment and added several lenses to my gear. That’s when I started pursuing nature photography more seriously and began developing plant photography skills.

Holly: Why have plants kept your photographic attention for so long? What other subjects do you focus on?

Tom: About the same time, in 1986, I began the graduate work that eventually lead to my becoming a botanist. So plants have occupied my interest ever since I began serious photography. There are over 2,000 species of plants in Iowa, so there is a huge list of potential plant subjects to photograph. I’d like to have a photographic record of every one of them. I shoot all nature subjects—landscapes, wildlife, macro subjects as well as plants. Because plants are always available, I tend to gravitate towards them when I am out doing photography and time is limited.

Interview with Sapna E. Thottathil, pt. 2

This interview is continued from the post on Monday, Sept. 22. Sapna E. Thottathil’s book, India’s Organic Farming Revolution, appears in October. Here, she shares with UI Press editor Catherine Cocks why she wrote the book and what Americans can learn from farmers in Kerala, India.

Catherine Cocks: Who led the drive for organic agriculture in Kerala, and what motivated them?

Sapna E. Thottathil: Kerala’s farmers had been facing years of hardship. For example, Kerala is one of the smaller states in India, yet a few years ago, it had the third highest suicide rate—many of the suicides were of farmers who had accumulated a lot of debt. This situation caused farmers, government leaders, and religious and advocacy groups to realize that something had to change in the agricultural sector, so they began exploring organic farming. In 2010, the state government finalized a policy to convert the entirety of the state to organic farming within 10 years. The hope of these organic farming advocates is that organic agriculture will make Kerala’s farmers more self-sufficient and less debt-dependent.

CC: What lessons should people in other places take away from the movement toward organic agriculture in Kerala?

ST: I believe one inspiring thought we can take away is that we can do agriculture differently here and elsewhere—we don’t have to live in a world where farmers are committing suicide, half of the food produced is going to waste, and nearly one billion people are malnourished. We don’t have to live in a world where we rely on chemicals to make the food we put into our bodies. It’s possible to envision and put into practice a different and more sustainable way of doing agriculture.

CC: In your view, what are the top three reasons why people should choose to eat organic fruits and vegetables?

ST: The most important reason is that it is healthier for you, because organic fruits and vegetables have fewer chemical pesticide residues. Most conventionally grown crops here in the U.S. and elsewhere are treated with chemicals that have been linked to several health problems, including cancer, birth defects, and neurological disorders. Globally, there are three million cases of pesticide poisoning reported each year. In Kerala, the pesticide Endosulfan has been linked to hundreds of birth defects.

Pesticides like Endosulfan are found in our waterways and air, impact the health of farmworkers, can kill beneficial pests and organisms (threatening biodiversity), and ultimately end up on our plates.  This leads me to the second and related reason to eat organic: Organic is healthier for the environment.

The third reason to eat organic is that it’s important to support good farmers who are turning away from chemical-intensive agriculture. Growing an organic fruit or vegetable is not always easy. Organic farmers can’t resort to a chemical pesticide when a plague of insects comes through, for example. Some organic farmers I interviewed talked about how they’d hand pick bugs off their vegetables—that’s a lot of work.

In general, farming is not an easy profession, which is why the number of farms and the percentage of people employed on them are both decreasing, here in the U.S. and in India. Organic farming can bring many benefits to farmers and balance out many of the hardships. In Kerala, the spread of organic production has opened up opportunities for farmers to negotiate directly with buyers in foreign markets, communicate more easily with state policymakers, and collaborate and share best practices with like-minded farmers. One group of organic farmers I spent time with in Kerala (who were also certified Fair Trade) decided to put the profits from an organic coffee shipment to Germany toward school scholarships for the children of group members.

Interview with Sapna E. Thottathil, pt. 1

Sapna E. Thottathil’s book, India’s Organic Farming Revolution, appears in October. Here, she shares with UI Press editor Catherine Cocks why she wrote the book and what Americans can learn from farmers in Kerala, India. This interview will be continued on Wednesday, Sept. 24.

Catherine Cocks: What drew you to Kerala, India, to study organic agriculture?

Sapna E. Thottathil: My parents grew up as farmers in Kerala—working fields, planting rice and vegetables, and being familiar with the seasons. Yet the stories I heard from them about their lives while I was a kid here in the U.S. fell far short of the romantic, pastoral vision I expected of farm life. They instead would tell me about crops dying off, financial hardships, and hunger. To me, the last bit was the most confounding—the idea that people working the land and familiar with growing food could go hungry.

These stories stuck with me as an adult, so I was surprised to see the increasing presence of organic food products from Kerala in grocery store aisles. And some of these foods were grown within a few miles of where my parents were born and raised! To learn more about these organic foods and to better reconcile in my head the absurdities of our food system (how farmers can go hungry, for example), I decided to spend some of my own time in India.

CC: Here in Iowa, many farms are very large, the work is highly mechanized, and only a small percentage of the state’s population is engaged in agriculture. How is farming organized in Kerala by comparison?

ST: The majority of Kerala’s farms are less than 2 to 3 acres in size, and the work is not as mechanized. Part of this is due to Kerala’s land reforms, which took place starting in the 1960s and ‘70s and put a cap on the size of the state’s farms. Prior to the land reforms, much of Kerala’s farmland was feudal, worked by laborers who had insecure tenancy arrangements. These land reforms (instituted by the state government) were the outcome of decades of protests by workers and attempted to redress many of the social inequities that they had been facing.

There is also a lot of intercropping in Kerala—growing coffee underneath areca nut trees alongside pepper vines and other spices, for example. (Areca nut trees produce a fruit that is chewed and has a stimulant effect, like tobacco.) This intercropping, along with the undulating topography of the land and muddy soils from monsoon rains, makes mechanization difficult in Kerala.

There are about two million full-time farmers in Kerala, which is around 5 percent of the population.

Interview with Ladette Randolph, pt. 2

Ladette Randolph is the author of Leaving the Pink House, published just this month. University of Iowa Press acquisitions editor Elisabeth Chretien asked her a few questions about writing her book, growing up and living in Nebraska, and her life in Boston now. This interview is continued from the post on Friday, September 5.

Elisabeth Chretien: You’ve lived in Nebraska most of your life, but you now reside in Boston. How did it feel to make this transition and leave the country house you worked so hard on?

Ladette Randolph: First of all, I moved to Boston because I was offered a fantastic job. It came at a good time for me when my book was coming out and it provided a way for me to be both a writer and an editor more comfortably than my previous work had allowed. It was, though, as you might imagine after having read this book, a very, very difficult move, and not only because of having to leave the country house. I have a lot of life still in Nebraska and I miss my family and friends. In fact, we weren’t sure at first that Noel would follow me to Boston, but after two years of the long distance thing, we decided it was best to sell the country house. We grieved (and still feel homesick) for it, but we were fortunate that our daughter-in-law’s parents were planning a move to Lincoln around the time we were leaving and liked the place enough to buy it from us. So, our two little grandchildren now spend time there, which makes us happy. We love hearing about their adventures, building fires in the fire pit, walking through the woods and meadows, watching the birds and looking at the stars.

EC: Who are your inspirations among nature writers and writers of place?

LR: Cather’s depictions of landscape (not just Nebraska) are influential as is her plain-spoken prose. I’m also influenced by Western writers like Terry Tempest Williams and Teresa Jordan, among many others--too many to mention. I do think of myself as a western writer, though it may be pretentious of me to make that claim. I was inspired by these books to include some of the history of Nebraska in Leaving the Pink House. Alice Munro has been a huge influence. The way she trusts herself in depicting out of the way places and everyday people (many of whom I identify with because of their farm and small town connections), and to write it all in a way that feels simple but is in fact very complex is continually a challenge to me. I’m also a big fan of Chekhov’s short stories (for many of the same reasons I admire Munro). Chekhov was masterful at capturing just the right detail about a person or a place. He was deeply aware of landscape in much of his work and used it well to depict the emotional tenor of his stories. Again, his writing is deceptively simple. The more I read him the less confident I am about what he might be trying to say. 

EC: As your editor, I appreciate the fact that you are an editor yourself. How has this kind of detailed work on others’ manuscripts affected your own writing?

 LR: Again, like the landscape question, I’m not sure if I have enough perspective to answer this properly. I was a writer first and became an editor after I finished my PhD, so although I love my work as an editor and take it very seriously, if pushed, I would still identify primarily as a writer in a way some editors who write might not. I like to think I’m more ruthless in editing my own work because of my experience as an editor, but I’m not sure that’s quite true. I think as writers we all have difficulty seeing our work clearly, and an editor who writes needs an editor as much as any other writer does, so, thank you, Elisabeth, and everyone else at Iowa (Rebecca and Charlotte!) who worked so hard to help me with the edits on this book.

EC: What are you working on now?

LR: I’ve finished what I call the “Zero Draft” and the “Dirty Wedding Draft” of a new novel. (I always generate a lot of pages that help me create characters and plot.) I’m hoping by the fall to have a proper “First Draft.” (I’ve learned to avoid becoming overly attached to generative drafts by using these distancing terms.) I’m still at the point in this project, though, where I’m feeling like the whole thing is a complete waste of time; it could all end up in the wastebasket yet, but for now I’m still engaged with it. 

Interview with Ladette Randolph, pt. 1

Ladette Randolph is the author of Leaving the Pink House, published just this month. University of Iowa Press acquisitions editor Elisabeth Chretien asked her a few questions about writing her book, growing up and living in Nebraska, and her life in Boston now.

Elisabeth Chretien: What drew you to write about your life through the lens of houses?

Ladette Randolph: The structure of this book arose organically. I kept careful notes throughout the process of our gutting and rebuilding the house in the country, so that formed the core of my inspiration for this book; however, the story of the house project wasn’t quite enough (or so early readers told me). Years before I wrote about the country house, I had written a series of essays, and when I looked back through them I realized many of my memories had been archived through the various moves we’d made in my childhood and later moves in my adulthood. When I started playing with combining the two stories, it seemed the best way to tell what turned out to be a complicated story about the meaning of home.

EC: What was the most difficult thing for you in restoring the country house? What was the most rewarding?

LR: There were a lot of difficult things about restoring the country house. It was financially very risky and the time involved to pull it off was almost inconceivable. It was painful and exhausting work. I still don’t quite know how we (mostly my husband Noel) did it. I would say, though, that the most difficult thing and the most rewarding thing are the same. We jumped into this project (and we aren’t usually such impulsive people) and then came to see how we’d need the help of other people if we were going to meet the deadline for the bridge loan. While it’s true if we hadn’t met that deadline we could have extended it, during the volatile period after 9/11 we were very anxious to lock into a permanent loan. Friends, family, and our neighbors at the country house were wonderfully generous to us, as the book makes clear, and that was incredibly affirming, but it also felt at times like we’d created a burdensome situation. People never made us feel that way, but we were very humbled by the experience.

EC: You’re a native of Nebraska. How has your homeplace influenced your writing?

LR: I’m not sure I have enough perspective to answer this question, but I know that I can’t seem to stop writing about Nebraska. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s a landscape that has shaped me; it’s in my bones, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Nebraska remains imaginatively important to my work (at least so far it has). I keep wondering at what point I’ll start writing about New England with as much familiarity. It’s something of a puzzle to me.

This interview is the just the first part! Check out the rest on Monday, September 8.