May Reading!
In May, for our final reading of the spring, we are diving into the crucial work of Heather Corinna. Tease apart their pivotal chapter "What Fresh Hell is This?" with us as we explore the nuances of perimenopause and menopause. Corinna focuses on breaking through the myths, grounding the nitty gritty of lived experience, and pushing the reader to consider those who often get left out of these discussion.
Registration is now open for the next session of The Stories Between reading group! Join us when reading starts up again in September!
Who Are We?
The Stories Between is an alumni reading group that meets virtually each month to discuss shared texts. As we dive into each reading, we connect with each other, build community, and explore important themes of feminist theory, speculative fiction, past/present/future, bodies, identities, autonomy, and much more.
We are better together and stronger than ever in our vibrant GWS community.
GWS Staff Picks!
Recommended By Amber
This month I am diving into How Far The Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (2022) by Sabrina Imbler. In this book, the author poses a series of essays that explore the connections between humanity and nature, exploring the interconnected relationship between humans and the ecologies that reside around us. From themes of sexuality, adaptation, survival, imaging, and grief, Imbler implores us as readers to understand we are more connected to the systems that surround us than we might imagine, and importantly, that we are better always surviving in community.
Recommended by Dr. Kate Phelps
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich tells the story of Thomas Washashk, the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. Paying homage to the life of her grandfather, Erdrich draws together narratives of members of the tribe – Thomas, Patrice, Wood Mountain, Vera, Millie, and others – as they fight against dispossession and erasure brought by the federal government in 1953.
I also recommend Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (2024) by Sunaura Taylor. In her book, Taylor tells the story of the Tucson aquifer and describes a crip kinship with the expansive ecological water system flowing beneath her wheels. Shechallenges ableist ecologies and the logic of abandonment, arguing that people with disabilities already demonstrate “lives well lived” and are necessary knowledge makers and keepers in creating new forms of solidarity, community, and care. As she digs into the archives and speaks to members of the Indigenous and largely Mexican-American communities that have felt the shared impacts of an injured landscape, Taylor puts forth an “environmentalism of the injured,” and bridges human and nature in a call for a future focused on caring for multi-species disability.