Home > News & Public Affairs > Interchange – On Just Being with Scott Russell Sanders (Fund Drive)

Interchange – On Just Being with Scott Russell Sanders (Fund Drive)

Play

Last week I spent a few days with Bloomington’s Scott Russell Sanders, a well-known writer of novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. His work is generally described as “nature writing” though as we’ll hear, Sanders does not accept this, insisting he’s an “earth” writer.

To clarify, I didn’t actually spend time with Sanders – though he and I do live about a block apart – with new COVID cases steadily reaching about 30 per day for the last month, we connected for our discussion via Zoom. Perhaps we should have used some twine and two soup cans.

But I did spend some quality time with Scott Sanders – I read his new book of essays, The Way of Imagination, out earlier this year from Counterpoint. Sanders, at least in this book, offers enough of himself, of his life – from youth to the present – including intimate details about his family’s well-being – to make even essays that are primarily didactic feel personal.

So what are these essays about? Sanders treats three primary themes: first, the role of imagination in art, science, social reform, and compassion (unsurprising given the book’s title); the second is neighborliness, kinship, and community; and finally the personal and the public – (it’s not just neoliberal capitalists that blend these modes!).

As I made my way through the book it surprised me that I had never spoken with Scott Sanders on Interchange before: so many of his subjects and even references are shared in past programs. There’s an essay on Thoreau (and, listener, you know we’ve done a few shows on Thoreau’s life and writing); there’s an essay that discusses the thinking of John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker born in New Jersey who was anti-slavery, anti-war, and vegetarian, and this is ground tread in our program on Benjamin Lay, another Quaker with the same fiery stance against the status quo of the times and the so-called New World; there’s a strong pacifist tone throughout – noted particularly in the essay on the Trappist Monk Thomas Merton who lived most of his writing life in Kentucky; we can pair this with our program on anti-war and labor activist, the clergyman A. J. Muste. And I could go on…but I don’t think he mentions Melville! Nobody’s perfect.

The centerpiece in today’s program is our talk about the essay “The Suffering of Strangers” which details a visit Sanders took to Charleston, South Carolina touring two former slave plantations – one still in the hands of the family that enslaved Black men and women and one run by a non-profit trust supported by donations. The differences of “presentation” are striking and instructive of so much that troubles this country. It’s a seven-page essay that I think admits more than its author might want to about necessary trouble (to quote John Lewis). That essay opens with an epigraph from Thomas Paine that we should all commit to memory: “It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.” That distance is killing us.

GUEST
Scott Russell Sanders (The Way of Imagination, Counterpoint Press)
Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put, Writing from the Center, Hunting for Hope, and A Private History of Awe.He spent his teaching career at Indiana University, where he was a Distinguished Professor of English. His writing examines the human place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path.

RELATED
From Plantation to Planet” by Scott Russell Sanders (“The Suffering of Strangers”)
‘Stone Country,’ the Land That Carved a People by Yaël Ksander (Limestone Post)
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: The Radical Pacifism of A. J. Muste
Walking the Talk: The Revolutionary Abolitionist Benjamin Lay
Storied States: James Scott’s Against the Grain

MUSIC – Songs of the Degrees by Yaron Herman Trio
“Just Being”
“Kinship”
“Song of the Degrees”
“The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young

Check Also

Bring It On! – March 18, 2024: “Pauli Murray: I’ve Come Full Circle”

On this edition of Bring It On!, hosts, Liz Mitchell and Gloria Howell, speak with …