As an exception, this podcast episode is in English. It is actually the recording of our last event, “A radicle reaching for home in the earth: collaborative nature writing.” We hear from two members of the fieldnotes collective, Jessica J. Lee and Nina Mingya Powles, about their recent publication “This too is a glistening”.
Jessica J. Lee is an award-winning author and environmental historian. She is the author of three books of nature writing, Turning (2017), Two Trees Make a Forest (2019), and Dispersals (2024), and the children’s book A Garden Called Home (2024). She is also co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted (2023), and founding editor of The Willowherb Review. She currently lives in Berlin.
Nina Mingya Powles is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer and poet living in London. She is the author of several poetry collections and pamphlets, including Slipstitch (2024), Magnolia 木蘭(2020), Tiny Moons (2020) and the award-winning collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021). She writes a monthly substack on food and memory called Crispy Noodles.
The event was part of the minor cosmopolitan intervention, organised by the Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms of the University of Potsdam. It was hosted by Spore Initiative in Berlin.
Shownotes
Warm invitation to our upcoming event with Jessica J. Lee and Nina Mingya Powles at Spore Initiative in Berlin-Neukölln on May 10, 2025.
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Jennifer Neal always led a very mobile life and in her memoir My Pisces Heart she shares what it was like to live on four different continents as a Black queer woman.
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Last year we started the poco.lit. podcast and one thing was very important to us: Give independent bookshops all around Berlin space to recommend books.
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Berlin ist ein beliebter Schauplatz in der Literatur. In dieser Folge sprechen wir über 3 sehr unterschiedliche Berlin Bücher und ihre sprachlichen Besonderheiten. Es geht um Jessica J. Lees Mein Jahr im Wasser: Tagebuch einer Schwimmerin, um Sharon Dodua Otoos Adas Raum und Esi Edugyans Half Blood Blues. Sprache kann zum Lokalkolorit eines Textes beitragen und hat eine emotionale Bedeutung. Einige Sprachentscheidungen treffen Autor*innen und Verlage im Sinne ihre imaginierten Leser*innenschaft – was können sie verstehen oder was wäre vielleicht zu herausfordernd?
Shownotes
As part of the Barrio Berlin festival, Hopscotch Reading Room, and poco.lit. co-program an evening at the cemetery café Lisbeth. Several dozen people squeeze into the building for a reading by Avrina Prabala-Joslin, a Tamil poet, and Maya Saravia, a Guatemalan artist.
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Join us for an evening with the 2 storytellers and artists, avrina prabala-joslin and Maya Saravia, who will share their approaches to open questions of belonging.
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In her second essay, Sophie Yukiko continues her critical examination of the German Ballroom culture. She observes that it holds huge potential because from its earliest days, it has always been a space for discussion, criticism, adjustment and conversation.
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Warm invitation to our second community event! We would like to meet you all in person and have a chat over a drink. First we will introduce ourselves, poco.lit. and our newly published book “Macht Sprache: Ein Manifest für mehr Gerechtigkeit”. And then, we will be able to enjoy a performance by poet Giuliana Kiersz and musician Ben Osborn.
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Jessica J. Lee’s third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.
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