Book Talk: "Watershed"

The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a discussion of the new book, Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress, featuring author Ranae Hanson and discussants Sarah Degner-Riveros, Chelsea DeArmond, and Sam Grant. Watershed explores the lands of northeastern Minnesota where Hanson's parents cleared land and built a house by a lake. As a young person in those woods, Hanson learned an abbreviated history of the land—one that largely left out Indigenous neighbors. “The fur trappers left cabins; the lumbermen, tree stumps; the Finns, grandmothers on swamp farms; the Englishmen, mine shafts; the miners, company towns. All of us came from somewhere else. None of us belonged.” As an exchange student in Europe, during the Vietnam War, Hanson explains: “I discovered, to my surprise, that some people found my life interesting. My new friends had never been in a canoe, did not know how to knead bread, had not built a fire or slept in a tent.” As a graduate student in Ohio, Hanson “began to see the woods where I had grown up as an outsider would. I had thought we were living a real-time regular life, that eating from the woods was what people did. […] We had been part of nature.” Hanson raised two children on her own, taught at three colleges while pursuing a doctorate, and began to notice how quickly the earth was shifting. “In the summer of 1989, the rains did not come. When I drove north, I noticed that the pines on the southern edge of the boreal forest were dying.” She noted that tent caterpillars ate the early birch and poplar leaves four years in a row. Drinking water from the lakes was no longer safe. In Watershed, Hanson asks: What if we tended to an ailing ecosystem just as we care for ourselves in the throes of a medical condition? She offers a work that is at once a memoir of illness and health, a contemplation of the surrounding natural world in distress, and a reflection on how these come together in opportunities for health. Join Ranae Hanson for a conversation with three people who have read her book—Augsburg University Spanish-language professor Sarah Degner-Riveros, SP350 East Side activist Chelsea DeArmond, and MN350 Executive Director Sam Grant. There will be time for you to ask questions as well, via Zoom or Facebook. View the video here: https://youtu.be/UcCEs_4j6uQ