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: Dispersals

12. Special episode in English: Collaborative nature writing – a conversation with Jessica J. Lee and Nina Mingya Powles

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

5 Books about Travelling Ideas

Physical bodies travel across oceans, mountains, and borders. Ideas too can travel from place to place, context to context. Here are 5 books that we think represent how an idea can travel.  

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Jessica J. Lee
Dispersals

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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