Here at The New Sincerest, I’m very excited to announce a new regular series. You’re now listening to Ecopunk, a music and talk show program aiming to highlight the intersection between the arts and environmental perspectives. Ecopunk will air on Thursdays from 12pm-1pm on KHOI Story City/Ames, except for the last Thursday of each month, and will be archived here on this Substack.
I’m your host, Connor Ferguson. I am a creative writer based out of Ames. My work largely considers the intersection of urban environments, natural environments, and human environments in relation to queerness, cultural criticism, and mysticism.
For this week’s episode I’m excited to be joined in the studio by Elizabeth Wenger, a peer of mine in the MFA in Creative Writing and Environment Program at Iowa State University. Elizabeth J. Wenger is a queer writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the winner of the Baltimore Review Winter Prize in flash nonfiction. She was shortlisted for the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. Currently an MFA student at Iowa State University, Wenger is at work finishing a collection of essays about desire, violence, and belonging. Her website is wengerwrites.com.
In this episode, Elizabeth Wenger reads “Places We Don’t Belong” and “A Goat”, two essays from her thesis collection (titled Places We Don’t Belong), shares how getting grounded as a teenager got her into reading and writing, her time working in construction and drywalling, the performance of masculinity in wrestling, and much more!
Song Selections:
“Okie From Muskogee” - Merle Haggard
“Make Me Feel” - Janelle Monáe
“Teenage Talk” - St. Vincent
“Before the World Was Big” - Girlpool
“Hours Were the Birds” - Adrianne Lenker
“Modern Girl” - Sleater-Kinney
“Are You Leaving For The Country” - Karen Dalton
“All Mirrors” - Angel Olsen
“For Her” - Fiona Apple
About Ecopunk
The title of the program comes from its definition as a literary genre: Ecopunk is a subgenre combining science fiction with themes of sustainability, conservation, and reparation; it explores how humans can symbiotically and respectfully interact with the environment and adapt to climate change. Ecopunk is also a design aesthetic that embraces a positive outlook on the future. While the definition does relate it to fiction as a genre, I think it’s a philosophical concept that can be applied to any creative work, since it champions the imagination of a better world in our current climate crisis.
Each week on Ecopunk, I will invite a locally based creative to come onto the show to discuss their craft, how philosophical perspectives on the environmental imagination informs their work, and how the arts can connect and collect our community. After our conversation, the guest will curate a selection of music that is conversation with their craft.
Ecopunk is produced in collaboration with KHOI’s partnership with the BeWild/ReWild program, a loosely-knit group of volunteers with a passion for wildness, reconnecting with the natural world, and curiosity about what lifestyle changes are necessary for us to live within the bounds of sustainability. Here at Ecopunk, we invite you to imagine a better, more sustainable world through the arts.
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