With Good Reason

In fascist Italy, resistance took surprising forms. Maura Hametz shares the story of one woman who stood up to the regime–by refusing to change her name. And: Numbers of Black women legislators have increased dramatically in the last decade. Jatia Wrighten argues that the success and drive of these leaders is rooted deep in history. Later in the show: Joan of Arc wasn’t the only medieval woman to lead an army. Steven Isaac brings us the queens and empresses whose military strategy drove European politics.

Einstein theorized the existence of black holes. Then in the 1960’s we observed them for the first time. Anca Constantin says black holes occur throughout the universe, but we can only see the hungry ones. Also: Mool Gupta was in grad school for Apollo 11 in 1969. He watched with wonder as Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. Now he’s partnering with NASA in the Artemis program - a series of missions that could return astronauts to the moon as early as 2027. He helped develop a rover with laser technology that can identify minerals and detect evidence of alien life on the surface of the moon. Later in the show: 35 million years ago, what is now the Chesapeake Bay was struck by an asteroid as big as Manhattan. Rich Whittecar is part of the team that recently discovered the first terrestrial evidence of the impact. He says the blast was 200,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb.

George Newman, born to free Black parents in 1855, was only 21 or 22 when he wrote the novel, A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia. Newman’s granddaughter, Ruth Toliver, talks about the just-published novel with Virginia Humanities Center for the Book director Kalela Williams. Also: Mollie Godfrey and Brooks Hefner helped bring Newman’s fascinating novel into digital and print publication. Later in the show: The author of Becoming Belle da Costa-Green: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters recounts the accomplishments of the first Director of the fabulous Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Deborah Parker says Belle da Costa-Green spent her life passing as white, even though she was the daughter of a prominent African American family.

Lucille Clifton survived cancer four times. She maintained that her mother would not let her die until she had finished her work on Earth. That work? Writing poetry. A year before she passed away, Lucille Clifton was honored at the Furious Flower Poetry Conference at James Madison University where she spoke to With Good Reason’s Sarah McConnell about inheriting her mother’s rage and commitment to writing. And: A whole lot can happen in a Southampton County minute. Latorial Faison’s Pulitzer Prize nominated poetry collection Nursery Rhymes in Black animates the education of her rural Virginia childhood. Later in the show: In 1941, Remica Bingham Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother Minnie and maternal grandmother Mary never met— but they had been within one mile of each other under extraordinary circumstances. Minnie was interviewed for the Works Progress Administration’s Slave Narratives project on her Petersburg front porch. Just down the road, Mary was taken to the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane for “water in the brain” – what we know now as postpartum depression. Nearly a century later, in Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home, they meet.

Join us as we bring two nationally renowned Black poets conversation with a new generation of Black poets. This episode features former Virginia Poet Laureate and Old Dominion University poetry professor Tim Seibles talking with rising poetry star Ariana Benson about alien life, good grammar, and the dreams of Langston Hughes.  Later in the show: Poets Elizabeth Alexander and Nicole Sealey discuss the treasures of archives, the work of a generation, and the resonant truth you feel in your bones. Former Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander is President of the Mellon Foundation and the author of the New York Times best selling memoir, The Light of the World. Alexander and Tim Seibles are Furious Flower Poetry Lifetime Achievement honorees.

Faedah Totah is a walker. So when she traveled to Damascus, Syria in the 2000’s, she ditched the car and sauntered the streets to really take in the beauty of the old city. She soon came across a neighborhood that sparked her forthcoming book, Palestinian Refugees in the Old City of Damascus. Also: The report card is out for America’s stormwater infrastructure. Spoiler alert: it’s a grade that probably would’ve gotten us all grounded by our parents. Tanjina Afrin explains where America is failing and why effective stormwater management is such an important but largely forgotten public amenity. Later in the show: As the Cold War drew to a close in the 1990s, the Hispanic Caribbean was rocked by what Elena Valdez calls “crisis moments.” She says these “crisis moments” sparked important changes in representations of sexuality and gender in the public sphere - especially in the urban spaces of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.

Scientists are using video cameras and glorified fitbits to decipher the body language of trees. Geology professor Dom Ciruzzi says the way trees sway tells us a lot about tree overall health. Also: The location of trees affects home values. A study by Kevin Boyle and the U.S. Forest Service reveals that adding trees can boost home prices but there is a sweet spot where too much canopy can reduce value. Later in the show: Each year David Goodman captivates hundreds of children and families in Appalachia with a thrilling live science show, complete with flames, explosions and interactive experiments and a particular crowd favorite called Puking Pumpkins.

The Chesapeake Bay is ballooning with an apex predator that can only be defeated with grease and breading – blue catfish! They were introduced to Virginia’s freshwater rivers in the 70s and 80s for recreational fishing. Now, the Bay is teeming with 700 million to 1 billion pounds of blue catfish. Michael Schwarz says that we can restore balance to the bay by eating the fresh, white saltwater catfish filet. And it’s best served fried! And: Growing up, Maurica Bynum smelled the funk of the Franklin County paper mill and collected water samples with her parents who were water treatment operators. Now, she brings her childhood experience with public health and environmentalism to the classroom, preparing the next generation of public health experts. Later in the show: Indigenous people throughout the Amazon basin understand themselves to be deeply connected to the more-than-human world. So the pollution of waterways and loss of biodiversity is not just an environmental loss, it’s a loss of spiritual protection and livelihood. Jeremy Larochelle says that indigenous amazonian people honor poets as much as they honor the fishermen. And poets like Juan Carlos Galeans and Ana Varela Tafur are sounding the alarm about the urgent need to save the Amazon by honoring it.

Universities have been trying to curb dangerous binge drinking for years. Today’s students are glued to their phones, and Abby Braitman (Old Dominion University) and her colleagues are meeting them where they are for interventions. And: Meagan Brem (Virginia Tech) says that drinking is intertwined with a lot of the intimate partner violence that happens on college campuses. Later in the show: There’s a psychedelic renaissance going on in Javier González-Maeso’s (Virginia Commonwealth University) biochemistry lab. He’s hoping to develop a new drug using psilocybin, the component found in magic mushrooms, to help people battling alcohol abuse disorder. Plus: How Jasmohan Bajaj (Virginia Commonwealth University) discovered that addiction lives in the gut, not the mind.

As we age, we come to appreciate the holiday traditions of our youth. Ricky Mullins (University of Virginia at Wise) remembers receiving treat bags at his small, backroads church. The poke bags were stuffed oranges, peanuts, cracker jacks and sometimes even a chocolate bar. Now, he’s passing the tradition along to the youth at the church that he pastors. And: Mary Lou Williams was a renowned jazz pianist and composer. She brought sacred Black jazz music to Duke University’s chapel every year. Gayle Murchison (William and Mary) shares some of Williams’ music with us. Later in the show: How Ryan Stouffer (Longwood University) learned the value of fellowshipping over food from his dad’s rib spot. Plus: Mary Beth Matthews (Mary Washington) walks us through how the American traditions of Hanukkah and Christmas have changed over the years.

Music is wrapped up in how we celebrate the holidays. Musician and band director Stephanie Sanders (Norfolk State University) shares some of her favorite holiday tunes and why they’re so meaningful for her. Later in the show: As a performing trombonist, Dayl Burnett (Radford University) plays the same holiday songs year after year. But he doesn’t get tired of them! We listen to a few of the songs that he’s always happy to hear when December rolls around.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ concept of the stages of grief gave people real footing in understanding how we react to loss. But Sherman Lee (Christopher Newport University) says grief isn’t experienced in a linear, neat way. Have you ever been driving and suddenly found yourself in tears about a loss, real or imagined? Or maybe you were washing the dishes and suddenly spaced out and started having painful feelings as you anticipate or remember a loss? He calls these sudden, intense experiences “grief attacks,” and says they can happen at any time.

A new anthology of poems, including one that reflects on the weight of a whale, gathers voices from science, the arts, and Indigenous communities to create a portrait of nature in America. Former Virginia Poet Laureate Luisa A. Igloria (Old Dominion University) is co-editor of The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders. Plus: Ana Lang (Washington and Lee and Central Virginia Community College) is the first ever student Poet Laureate of Virginia Community College System. She is torn between her Cambodian family’s expectations of her and her desire to be a free and independent woman. Later in the show: The editor of a new online poetry journal, Steve Knepper (Virginia Military Institute) loves highlighting new lyric and narrative poetry.

New-to-this-country students are constantly being asked to adapt. And often, their wellbeing is measured almost entirely by their ability to speak English. Alfonzo Perez Acosta (Virginia Humanities K-12 Education Fellow) is an arts educator. In his classroom, he gives students the tools to let their art do the talking. And: Everybody has a story. Not everyone has a place to tell it. Through the Community Media Center, Chioke I’Anson (VCU ICA Community Media Center hopes to solve the problem of the untold story. Later in the show: Education has long been seen as a tool of racial uplift. In the early twentieth century, Phyllis Wheatley YWCA’s across the country served young Black girls and women. Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Norfolk State University) fondly recalls her days at the Norfolk YWCA, and is hopeful about what the old facility could become today. Plus: A generous grant from the Mellon Foundation has changed the game for many Richmond area high schoolers. Janelle Marshall (Pathways to the Arts and Humanities) and her team with the Virginia Community College System are helping get students enrolled, and sticking beside them all the way until the finish line.

Gumbo, BBQ, and biscuits–what makes Southern food Southern? Caity Finlayson (University of Mary Washington) talks about the fusion of cultures–African food brought by enslaved people, British and French food brought by early European colonists–that created a mouthwatering Southern cuisine. And: For indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic and Sri Lanka, hunting and gathering is still a main source of food. Eranga Galappaththi (Virginia Tech) is working with these communities to address how climate change is affecting their food sources. Later in the show: Recipes from home can comfort us and connect us, both to the past and to the present. Suryani Omar is the Program Manager at Mozaic, a nonprofit that works with refugees and asylum seekers. She’s collaborating with some of the women Mozaic serves to write a cookbook of stories and recipes from their homes.

At the end of the world, Philip Lorish (University of Virginia) decided to open a bookstore. He says that despite the cultural moment that audiobooks are having and that impenetrable, digital mass distribution behemoth who shall not be named – bookstores matter. He’s the owner of Commerce Street Books. And: As a child, Lamar Giles (William & Mary) was allowed to read anything he wanted. And he took full advantage of that on his weekly library visits. Everything from DC comics and Stephen King novels, he read it all. There was nothing called “young adult” literature when he was coming up. Now, he writes it. And he says it's important to him that kids today have the same freedom to read. Later in the show: When you think of trees in Charlottesville, Virginia, what comes to mind? Probably not the willow oaks lining the eight-block downtown mall. But MaKshya Tolbert (University of Virginia) became entangled with the trees. Her book is Shade is a place.

Into the Sun is a new musical featuring the poems of British war poets and soldiers who were killed in World War I. Co-author Mike Gubser (James Madison University) says the title is from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem Futility, where soldiers try to awaken their fallen comrade with the warmth of the sun. Move him into the sun. Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. Later in the show: The 1918 Battle of Megiddo was the world’s last great cavalry charge and a decisive British victory. Eric Osborne (Virginia Military Institute) says the victory led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and paved the way for the future state of Israel in Palestinian territories. Plus: In his forthcoming book, “Unwilling Doughboys: The U.S. Army’s Foreign-born Conscripts in World War I, Alex Paul (Virginia Military Institute) shatters the myth that during WWI, most immigrants in the United States submissively complied with the conscription practices of many local draft boards.

Legacies of WWII by With Good Reason

Armed with a newly-talking cinema and trying to survive The Great Depression, Universal Studios developed a new genre – horror. For twenty-two weeks, crews filmed Dracula. And for six of those weeks on a shoestring budget of $66,000, they shot Drácula at night. Antonio Barrenechea (University of Mary Washington) says that despite this unbalanced relationship with Hollywood, this inter-American production contributed to a national cinema throughout the Western Hemisphere in Mexico, Brazil, Peru and beyond. Also: Each generation has its own toxicant. The children of The Great Depression had asbestos. Their children were rattled with lead exposure. And their children are littered with microplastics. Aaron Reuben (University of Virginia) says over 150 million Gen X’ers have mental health issues because of their exposure to lead. And here’s the real fright: there’s no cure! Later in the show: We’re all gonna die. That’s one thing that life promises us all. After helping his parents settle their estate and make funeral arrangements, Willy Donaldson (Christopher Newport University) realized that they needed to talk more about death. Way more. Did they want to be cremated or buried? Did they want a big funeral or something more intimate? He found it easier to start with the negative. What don’t you want at the end of your life? Willy’s book is Estimated Time of Departure.

In a walk through the forest, an Appalachian landowner and biologist points out dozens of species he and his family sustainably harvest for meals. From sycamore trees–whose syrup tastes like butterscotch–to Appalachian wasabi–a spicy root they use in their spice blends–Ryan Huish (University of Virginia College at Wise) is teaching a new generation plant identification and sustainable harvesting practices. Later in the show: For hikers seeking self-discovery on the Appalachian Trail, their cell phones are both a tool and a tether. Scott McCrickard (Virginia Tech) studies how hikers' use of cellphones transforms the experience of the trail. Also: Students in Jacob Barneys (Virginia Tech) invasive species class get to eat what they study. They cook up creative dishes that include blue catfish, wild boar, chickweeds, bamboo, kudzu, autumn olive, and wineberries.