Camille T. Dungy on unearthing histories
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Camille T. Dungy on unearthing histories
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At a superficial level, Soil is a gardening memoir, full of gorgeous descriptions of plants and getting your hands in the soil. But the garden in question is a political gesture, an act of resistance and an assertion of belonging. Camille T. Dungy uproots the staid monoculture of the suburban garden, and takes a fierce, critical look at its assumptions.
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Show Notes
At a superficial level, Soil is a gardening memoir, full of gorgeous descriptions of plants and getting your hands in the soil. But the garden in question is a political gesture, an act of resistance and an assertion of belonging. Camille T. Dungy uproots the staid monoculture of the suburban garden, and takes a fierce, critical look at its assumptions.
In this conversation, we talk about the way that gardens can become a means of social control and conformity, but also an expression of freedom and solidarity that crosses generations. We also touch on the idea of outsidership, and the difference between choosing to stay at the edges, and being forced out of the centre.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology. Currently, she is the poetry editor for Orion magazine and hosts Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise.
A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, her further honours include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden is her most recent book.
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