Food. Food is so many things. It is nourishment, sustenance, it fuels our bodies as we work, live, and play. It’s something that motivates us, a symbol of survival. But it is also so much more. Food is capable of satisfying not just our biological needs, but our spiritual ones too. Food brings people together, through both process and product. It’s the thing that gathers families around the table in celebration, and in memorial. It’s the centerpiece of romance, the fertilizer for budding relationships. And it’s what you bring to a friend, when they have experienced a tragedy. Food is the glue of society.

But it’s also a weapon.

The denial of food is an unmistakable act of aggression, and it is the base structure for societal inequity. Starvation is a completely preventable disease in America, but yet it persists as a threat to more than 44 million people. To face hunger isn’t merely a product of circumstance. To go hungry is to be abandoned by your community.

In the South, food has an especially complicated relationship to politics. In the land of plantations, Jim Crow, and indigenous removal, the American South has seen more than its fair share of foodway disruption. The massive influx of African influence brought in through the transatlantic slave trade, the tactless appropriation of indigenous crops and traditions, bound beneath the overeaching umbrella of European methods and mentalities, has made the history of Southern food a richly seasoned gumbo of unexpected flavors and ingredients. It makes for a heavy dish, served on a platter forged from racism, and with a side salad of civil disobedience.

Rachel Merritt Jones has made a picnic of her scholarly endeavors this semester, diving headfirst—or rather mouth-first—into the rich history of African Diasporic foodways and traditions in the American South. She is a graduate student here at UNCW, and has dedicated much of her research to studying the relationship between food and African American history. Recently, she embarked on an academic survey of Natchez Mississippi, to explore the oral and culinary traditions of her home-town community there. Today, Rachel is here to talk about that experience, and to share what she learned—and tasted—while immersed in her delicious pursuits.

We live in a content saturated media landscape. Since the birth of Netflix's streaming service in 2007, there has been a steady exponential explosion of online media and media platforms. It seems that every month we have a new streaming app, and every app offers dozens to hundreds of brand new original series and movies. Society has gone from being at the receiving end of a monocultural conveyor belt, to scavengers in a wasteland of varied and disparate small scale and blockbuster offerings. Media companies have had to change their entire approach to the way they create content for audiences, because they have to fight tooth and nail for just a second of attention.

The things that do float to the surface these days are assigned unusual adjectives. They’re called ‘“binge-worthy,” “addictive” — they’re characterized more akin to the way we talk about narcotics, than traditional pieces of art. Streamers aren’t in the business of making movies or television, they’re in the business of stealing your attention.

In the wake of this media overhaul, there is one genre that has come out on top, one genre that has captured the attention of millions, and consistently sits at the top of the charts. That genre is True Crime.

Aidan Healey is a Senior here at UNCW, and he has been examining the murky depths of this cultural phenomenon. Sifting through dead bodies and murder weapons, his senior thesis is dedicated to the analysis and unearthing of the origins of the True Crime genre. He has traced a line all the way back through the decades, to the mid-century novelist Truman Capote, and his infamous “non-fiction novel.” Capote’s In Cold Blood, he believes, is the catalyst for all of our bloodlust and intrigue for scandal; it is the beginning of popularized crime dramas and macabre documentaries. Today, he is here to discuss all things Capote, True Crime, streaming and the intriguing liberties taken in nonfiction storytelling.

In 1925, right here in Wilmington North Carolina, Gertrude Perry West founded her little magazine, Poetic Thrills. It was the first of its kind in the state, and West had big plans. The magazine prided itself in its “national scope and international hope.” There were hundreds of poetry periodicals popping up around the country at this time, but Poetic Thrills was different. Commonly, little magazines like this would relish in the rebellious — they would push back against the popular movements of the time: engage with controversial methods and topics, and serve as testing grounds for new concepts, forms, and ideas. These magazines typically served urban audiences, as that’s where the art communities flourished, and so they catered to a highly urban flavor of discourse and ideals.

Poetic Thrills, however, was its own breed of little magazine. West didn’t just aim to criticize discourse at large, but the very little magazines she would consider her peers. In doing so, she provided a new avenue for writers and poets, creating a space for those on the fringes of the fringes. She created something entirely unique, and artistically anomalous.

Dr. Alessandro Porco has been exploring this curious little entity, and his paper “Southern Tradition and the Eccentric Editorial Talent: Gertrude Perry West and the Little Magazine in Southeastern North Carolina” is set to come out later this year. Today I invite you to dive into Poetic Thrills with us, as we attempt to get to the heart of why little magazines like this were essential to the arts, to small country life, and why they still matter today.

In the Fall of 1933, John Andrew Rice and and a half dozen ex-Rollins professors set out into the unknown. Spurned by their previous employers, sick and tired of the American higher education system, they took to the wilderness—setting up camp in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. There, they did what any rag-tag ensemble of renegade college professors would do: they built a school. They attempted to build a new kind of educational facility: one that cared not about classicism, canonized texts, and memorization, but about the well-rounded formation of the student. They called the place: Black Mountain College.

Black Mountain would go on to change not only the way liberal arts education was approached in academia, but the very way art and music were thought about and created. It would come to produce some of the greatest poets, artists, writers, and composers of the mid 20th century. It would become the global center for the Avant Garde. And then, it would disappear. Like a candle in the wind it would sparkle, shine brightly, and extinguish.

Black Mountain shut its doors in 1957, only twenty four years after its creation. It’s a blip on the timeline of progress, and yet, we still feel its echoes today. The legacy of the college lives on, remaining a persistent presence in art, culture, and academia. In July of 2022, the New York Times published an article about this enigma, titled: “Why Are We Still Talking about Black Mountain College?” Today, we might get an answer.

Dr. Alessandro Porco has been fascinated by the phenomenon of Black Mountain college for a long time. He has hunted down troves of untouched information, traversed heaps of unseen poems and pieces, and has discovered a side of the school that very few have ever come in close contact with before. His book, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry which he co-authored with Blake Hobby and Joseph Bathanti is set to come out next year, and today he was gracious enough to give us a sneak peek.

Acclaimed American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said, that “The most daring thing (a person can do,) is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

I started going to college in the heart of the COVID pandemic. It wasn’t until my third semester that I actually started going to classes in person; and, those classrooms were not at all what I expected. They were awkward, silent, uncomfortable. Nobody looked at each other, nobody spoke, and nobody was there to make friends or meet people. I was struck by the realization that despite being finally let out of the confines of our homes, we were each still firmly living within our bubbles.

It took a few years to come out of it. And that’s understandable. Society itself had to recover from a tremendous international trauma. Becoming ourselves again was going to be uncomfortable, it was going to be weird, and difficult. But, we did it. Now, after a couple semesters back, classrooms are filled with buzzing conversation before lectures, people are getting to know each other with ease, and almost nobody is staring at their phone in absolute silence anymore.

Right behind the millions of human lives lost during the Covid pandemic, one of the greatest losses we all experienced was the death of community. Being shut inside for so long, we forgot how to live and interact every day with each other. This was especially apparent on college campuses. But, not everybody stood by and waited for things to get incrementally better. A bold few took the courageous steps forward: to build a better future, and to get people interacting and simply having fun with each other again.

Autumn Kepley and Rachel Hendrix are two of those delightful, courageous human beings, and I am exceedingly thrilled to have them both on the podcast today. Both are graduate students here at UNCW, and are both people I have had the pleasure of knowing and working alongside for a number of years now. Together, they have been making significant strides to bring the UNCW English department back into a meaningful sense of community. Their endeavors have been fun, creative, unexpected, and utterly necessary in this time of societal reconstruction. Their work has created an exciting and tangible sense of camaraderie and family, in a place and time where those two things felt distant and almost entirely forgotten.

Circa 1867, Louisa May Alcott was yearning for success. Despite being featured in a number of periodicals, writing consistently for serials, and even putting out a few books, she hadn’t yet broken through to the realm of real popularity. She tried seemingly everything, even writing salacious tales of seduction and murder — under pseudonyms, of course, but nothing ever really stuck. She just couldn’t break through to the masses.

Discouraged and indignant, Alcott frequently did verbal battle with her publishers. She insisted that the stories she wrote would catch on, and they told her to instead try writing things that would appeal more to traditional American young ladies. So, in an act of sneaky rebellion, she decided to give in to her publishers—those dim-witted literary patriarchs, and prove to them that the moralistic tales they wanted were boring, overly sentimental, and would never sell like they predicted. In 1868 she turned in the manuscript for her first sentimental novel, a book she coyly entitled, Little Women. By the following year, it would be one of the most highly sold books in the entire Western World.

Savannah Jones is a graduate student here at UNCW, and she has spent a lot of time looking into Alcott, her literary tastes, and the effect that Little Women had on the now iconic author’s developing career. She has dedicated her honors thesis to the study of Alcott’s resistance, dabbling, and eventual dedication to Sentimentalism. She grapples with the disconnect between Alcott’s disdain for sensationalism, and her full-fledged commitment to the genre in her professional offerings.

We like to categorize things—put them in neat little boxes with defined walls, with simple labels, and expect that nothing will ever challenge or break free of those molds. We do this with people, with media, and clothing, we even do it with tools. We assign something, anything, a function, and we rarely think about the ways in which it might work outside of those parameters.

Take the computer for example. We have expectations for our computers. We want them to be good at math and processing data. We want them to assist us in our daily tasks, to look things up when we don’t know the answer. To store our documents and photos.

What we don’t expect our computers to do, is help us understand what it might feel like to die, or assist us in evoking an emotional response through heart-wrenching musicality. These, in our categorized belief system, are human endeavors—distinctly separate from science and innovation.

Yet, computers can do these things, and they are, all of the time.

Dr. Nicholas Laudadio has been examining this relationship between technology, music, humanity, and art for the better part of the last twenty years. His research has looked at the many ways in which electronic music, especially analog synthesizers, have been infused into the genre of Science Fiction media. In studying this blurring of lines between man and machine, between musical performance and technology, a paradigm shifts in our own understanding of what it really means to be human.

Alice Corbin Henderson did not want to leave Chicago. The mid-west born and raised poet and editor had everything that she needed right there in the city. She was in with the hot and happening poets of the day, she was the co-editor of the most popular and influential of the city’s poetry magazines, and she was receiving considerable acclaim as a rising poet herself. When her husband told her that he was moving the family to Sante Fe, she felt that her world was ending.

Yet, it didn’t end, even if it did almost kill her. She moved to New Mexico in 1916, and found something there she never could have imagined, a muse. Her entire worldview shifted, gazing upon the vistas of pueblos and cacti, and she quickly became one of the most prominent advocates for Midwest poetry and indigenous midwestern culture. The move proved not to be a career ender, but a catalyst for her most prolific and meaningful era as an artist.

Henderson kept editing her Chicago based periodical remotely, and her newfound midwestern influence would come to heavily shape national poetry taste. This change made her grapple with her own relationship with place, with the notion that real art only happened in cities, and that real poets were an urban commodity. Living out in New Mexico, she found a true appreciation for the rural, for the small-town, for the outskirts of American civilization. She realized that her move had forever changed not only her poetic sensibilities, but her outlook on life.

Rachel Williamson is a graduate student here at UNCW, and her thesis is dedicated to Alice Corbin Henderson’s career and poetry. In her own writing, she analyzes the changes that Henderson underwent, and considers the widespread effects that her writing had on American poetry. In doing so, she asks us all to consider the effect that place has on our day to day lives. She encourages us to wonder, is true art only made in the cities? What is the value of a life on the outskirts? For a small coastal town with its own vibrant community of poets, songwriters, and artists, I feel that Wilmington is exactly the kind of city that needs to hear a message like Henderson’s. A message of hope, of creation, of finding peace and community right there, right where you already are.