Hello,
For your listening pleasure this week, we have a recording of my conversation with Camille T. Dungy for the True Stories Club, talking about her brilliant memoir, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.
It was such a pleasure to hear Camille describe the wild, regenerative garden that she founded in a neighbourhood that was committed to neat lawns and regimented shrubberies. This monoculture - social and horticultural - is thrown into sharp relief by the histories that she uncovers of Black custodianship of American soil, and the way that nature can thrive in inhospitable terrain.
In this recording, we talk about the way that gardens can become a means of social control and conformity, but also an expression of freedom and solidarity that crosses generations. We also touch on the idea of outsidership, and the difference between choosing to stay at the edges, and being forced out of the centre.
By the way, this is the last audio recording that will also be available outside Substack in the more general world of podcasts - from now on, I’m keeping things more simple and only posting the recordings here. It has been a joy to run a podcast over the past few years, but I have to admit that it has also been a lot of work, and very expensive to maintain. I’m concentrating my efforts in one place (right here!) for the foreseeable future so that I still have plenty of headspace to actually write books. The audio recordings will continue to be available for free from your Substack app, and paid members have the option of attending the recordings, submitting questions for my guest, and watching the full video afterwards.
You can watch a clip of me and Camille below - click ‘CC’ to watch with subtitles.
Take care,
Katherine
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