Three Things Thursday: Walking, Rivers, and NDQ

It’s getting toward the ragged end of the semester where stacks of grading, packing, and reading start to slump together into unwieldy piles of “things to do.” As a result, it seems like a great time for a three things Thursday.

Thing the First

One of my favorite recent articles is Beck Seifried and Chelsea Garner’s “Mapping the Leigh Fermors’ Journey Through the Deep Man in 1951” ABSA 2023, 1-24. You can read it for free here! It combines the recent vogue for walking as a method for understanding Medieval and Post-Medieval landscapes (for example see Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou’s recent book on the Zagori) with an exceptional savvy use of GIS data (and the analytical capacity of contemporary GIS software). Seifried and Garner attempt to trace the walking routes of Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor as they traversed the Mani Peninsula in the 1950s. This is effectively a sequel to their 2019 article on the landscape of William Leake in the same landscape, but rather than using a route prepared by an explicitly colonialist military traveler, they carried followed the perambulations of writers whose travels in the Mani had altogether different aims  They did this through the use of archival research, the use of Least Cost Path analysis using GIS, and, perhaps most interestingly, through an effort to walk the same route as the Leigh Fermors at the same time of year. This allowed them not only to compare the contemporary landscape to that of the early 1950s, but also to ground truth the relationship between LCP analysis and existing routes, roads, and paths. You can check out their comparison here.

Seifried and Garner demonstrated that the landscape and route walked by the Leigh Fermors has both changed significant over the 75 years since their travels, but also remained visible in the modern Mani despite the region’s economic, demographic, and infrastructural changes. Walking the same routes at the same time of year allowed them to acquire some embodied knowledge of the landscape that was different, but not entirely removed from that experienced by Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor. It also allowed them to speculate on future changes of the region experienced by a future traveler perhaps carrying the routes followed by Beck and Chelsea alongside those followed by Paddy and Joan.

Thing the Second

The Red River flood of 2023 was rather mild compared to years past. The river appears to be returning to its usual course through the city and slowly revealing Lincoln Park. As happens every year, the river’s new course creates lines of debris that the river leaves behind as it returns to its banks. Over the past few years, I’ve followed these trails and casually noted the things that the river’s current deposited as a reminder of its capacity to defy its banks. Plastic bags, styrofoam, wooden golf pencils from the nearby golf course, PVC piping, beer cans, water bottles, wooden fences, and twigs and sticks tell a story of that years flood as well as the course of the river through contemporary Grand Forks and surrounding communities. 

I was pretty excited to read Geneviève Godin’s recent article, “Meeting Things: On Material Encounters Along the River Thames” JCA 9.1 (2022): 23-38 which discussed in broadly poetic and theoretical terms the practice of mudlarking along the Thames river. As the name implies, mudlarking is the permitted exploring and collecting material from along the muddy banks of the Thames. Godin explains the history of this practice which seems to focus on parts of the Thames with particularly rich histories and opportunities for finding historic artifacts left behind.

Mudlarking the temporary foreshores created by the retreating Red River is unlikely to offer as many historical objects, but it does evoke the shifting boundaries that Godin recognizes in the muddy banks of the Thames. The receding waters of the Red reveal these porous boundaries between the shore and the river bank as well as the historical boundaries between the extent of the former glacial Lake Agassiz and the contemporary course of the Red. The flood likewise reveals the patterns of streets and foundation depressions left behind by the Lincoln Park neighborhood that the city demolished as part of its flood mitigation efforts in the aftermath of the 1997 flood. The annual floods in Lincoln Park bring back a ghostly image of this neighborhood. 

Thing the Third

As many of you know, I am also editor of the literary journal North Dakota Quarterly. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working with some remarkable students in the English Department’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program to produce a digital archive of the NDQ and to produce a small digital anthology of the first 90 volumes of the journal. You can download a copy (or purchase a paper copy) of the NDQ@90 anthology here. 

As part of our ongoing efforts to raise the profile of this venerable journal, we are now included in Project Muse. This is the first time that NDQ has an official and hopefully persistent digital version in the journal’s 114 year history. To celebrate this milestone, we’re going to release parts of the issue for free download over the next few weeks. Supposedly, the fiction will be available for download today (although it is not at the time of this writing!) and then in following weeks, we’ll make essays and poetry available. Check it out here.

Of course, the goal of this isn’t just to raise NDQ’s profile or to make NDQ available digitally. We hope that being part of Project Muse will help us get into more libraries and, perhaps as importantly, to attract readers who might not want to read in paper, who live outside the US, or who might just want to read a single story or essay from a volume. 

I don’t want to always be selling stuff on my blog here, but it would be very cool if some of you downloaded the stories in the most recent issue or, if you’re feeling generous and curious, bought a copy of the issue!