The Gwen Frostic Lecture Series presents seminars, readings, and workshops by local, national, and international experts on a wide variety of subjects relating to the environment. All events are open to the public.
The 2011-12 lecture series is co-sponsored by the WMU University Center for the Humanities and the Department of English.
Speaker Series Chair:
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2011-12Monday, Oct. 3, 6 p.m.
Edwin and Mary Meader Rare Book Reading Room, 3016 Waldo Library
Elizabeth Dodd, Professor, Kansas State University
Elizabeth Dodd's personal site
“Correspondences: Elizabeth Bishop, BP, and Me”
In “Questions of Travel”, her Brazilian poems of the 1960s, as well as throughout the plentiful letters she wrote to friends and family in the U.S., Elizabeth Bishop celebrated the resilient ecology of the Amazonian landscape even while she lamented the violence and plunder of the nation's colonial past. She wrote at the historical moment just before automobile travel and highway construction would further fragment the rainforest. Professor Dodd’s travel to the region took place half a century later, during the BP oil spill. Dodd’s narrative scholarship takes a personal perspective on the poetry, the place, and the alarming stain of peak oil.
Monday, Oct. 24, 6 p.m.
Edwin and Mary Meader Rare Book Reading Room, 3016 Waldo Library
Tom Montgomery Fate, Professor, College of DuPage
Tom Montgomery Fate's personal site
“Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild”
Try to imagine Thoreau married, with a job, three kids, and a minivan. This is the serious yet irreverent sensibility that suffuses Tom Montgomery Fate’s new book, “Cabin Fever” (Beacon Press, 2011), as the author seeks to apply the hermit-philosopher’s insights to a busy modern life. In this seasonal nature memoir, Fate takes readers on a search for the wild both in the woods and within ourselves. In his exploration of how we are to live "a more deliberate life" amid a high-tech material world, Fate invites readers into an interrogation of their own lives, and into a new kind of vision: the possibility of enough in a culture of more.
Monday, Nov. 14, 6 p.m.
Edwin and Mary Meader Rare Book Reading Room, 3016 Waldo Library
Alison Swan, Adjunct Professor, Western Michigan University
“No Complacency: Words, Imagination, and Calls to Action
Award-winning writer and wildlands advocate Alison Swan has been immersed in the literary arts for as long as she can remember. Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction have been central to her connection and commitment to the wild places that have shaped her. She’ll talk about this, and read from some of the poems and prose she has written as she works to preserve space for wild nature in an increasingly built-up Michigan.
Thursday, Feb. 9, 6 p.m.
Edwin and Mary Meader Rare Book Reading Room, 3016 Waldo Library
Jerry Dennis
Jerry Dennis' personal site
“The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes”
If you have been enchanted by Jerry Dennis’ earlier works on sailing the Great Lakes, canoeing, angling and the natural wonders of water and sky—or if you have not yet been lucky enough to enjoy his engaging prose—you will want to immerse yourself in his powerful and insightful new book about winter in Great Lakes country. Grounded by a knee injury, Dennis learns to live at a slower pace while staying in houses ranging from a log cabin on Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Peninsula to a $20-million mansion on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. Walking beaches and exploring nearby woods and villages, he muses on the nature of time, weather, waves, agates, books, words for snow and ice, our complex relationship with nature, and much more.
