WVU Reads- A Campus Read Podcast

This week Geoff talks to Dr. Rosemary Hathaway about her new book, "Mountaineers Are Always Free: Heritage, Dissent, and a West Virginia Icon" (WVU Press).

In the spring season of WVU Reads, Geoff will continue to interview people from around campus but move away from Educated. This week, Geoff talks to Melissa Giggenbach and Hope DeLap from the West Virginia Innocence Project, which is affiliated with WVU College of Law. 

If you enjoy the conversation and want to learn more about the WV Innocence Project, you can visit their website: wvinnoceneproject.law.wvu.edu. You can also follow them on Twitter @WVInnocence. If you're a student and are interested in helping them screen for clients, they are currently open for applications.

In this episode, Geoff wraps up the fall semester and looks ahead to the future. WVU Reads will take a brief hiatus for the holidays. See you in January!

In this episode, Geoff talks with Melissa Sherfinski, associate professor of Early Childhood and Elementary Education, about Tara Westover's experiences as a home school student. They discuss what's lost and gained in that experience, not just for Tara but for her brothers. The conversation ranges across public and private education, knowledge funds, distance mentors, ideology, and other topics.

In this episode, Geoff talks with Dr. Christina Fattore from the political science department about the ways her experience as a first gen student were and were not like Tara Westover’s. Topics covered include student loans, imposter syndrome, work-study and work/study, power and wealth, and the importance of feeding your soul.

In this episode, Geoff talks with Delia Trickett about reading Educated with a group of incarcerated men at the federal prison in Hazelton, WV. They read from the men's responses to the book and discuss the sometimes surprising points of contact the men found with Tara Westover's story.

In this episode, Geoff talks with Lena Cerbone, Director of Midwifery Services in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at WVU. Geoff and Lena talk about midwifery as it's depicted in Educated and as it is practiced here in West Virginia and elsewhere. They also talk about what it means to be called to a profession, the secret strength that good work gives us, home births and hospital births, catching babies, and many, many other things. Enjoy!

This week, Geoff welcomes Lynne Stahl into the studio to discuss Westover's book. Lynne Stahl is the Humanities Librarian at WVU. She has a PhD in English from Cornell. Prior to coming to WVU, she worked for the Portland Public Library. Geoff and Lynne talk about some of the book's blind spots, as well as its strengths. Topics covered include the logic of misogyny, negative spaces in reading, what makes a "good" book, and whether memoirists have a responsibility not only to tell their story but to connect it to other stories.

As sometimes happens, the discussion of Educated leads to a discussion of several other books as well. Here are the titles of those books, should you want to read them: Down Girl (Kate Manne); Are You My Mother? (Alison Bechdel); Heartland (Sarah Smarsh).

This week Geoff talks to Cutter Wood, author of Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime, about the unreliability of memory and the constraints of narrative. Cutter talks about the obligations that memoir imposes and the possibilities it affords. A recipient of an NEA fellowship, Cutter Wood attended Brown University and the Iowa Writers Workshop.