Episode One of Into a Darker Wilderness introduces the podcast and its inimitable hosts, Erin Sharkey and Michael Kleber-Diggs.Each episode brings a guest to the show, and for this inaugural talk we've got Erin Sharkey herself, the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed Editions), the anthology that provided the seeds for this new podcast.Guest bioErin Sharkey (she/they) is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, a cultural worker and a film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder with Junauda Petrus of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt, and is the producer of film projects, including “Sweetness of Wild,” an episodic web film project, and “Small Business Revolution,” which explored challenges and opportunities for black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, Vona Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History and the Jerome Foundation. Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and taught for many years with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Erin is a cooperative member of The Fields at Rootsprings retreat. Rootsprings is a land-based cooperative caretaking space for healing and development of black, indigenous and people of color artists, activists, healers, and community centering lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer folks in central Minnesota.Selected references from this episodeFederal Works AgencyNatasha TretheweySaidiya HartmanThe Fields at RootspringsEuell GibbonsBenjamin Banneker - his 1793 Almanack and EphemerisDogon peopleLiberia (fka Banka)Buffalo, New YorkBuffalo wingsNiagara FallsFollow Into a Darker Wilderness wherever you get your social media (Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, YouTube), subscribe to our newsletter, and become a member supporter at our website, IntoADarkerWilderness.com (and maybe pick up some merch while you're there 😉).Prompt from the EpisodeNote that the prompts from our show can be used as writing prompts but are also opportunities for life prompts - something you might meditate on over a few days or use to put a practice into place in your own life.ERIN'S PROMPTJournal about nature every day for a week — reflect on it at different times and locations — see if you can hunt it out and find it in surprising ways.Can you find nature in your living room?Can you find nature in your car? Can you use your senses to locate it?Think about your own archive.What would you collect that would illustrate the important eras of your life?What would your 20s archive look like?What would the archive of the summer that you backpacked through Europe, or what would the archive of your time as a first-year teacher look like?What are the important pieces of ephemera, the little objects that could illustrate those things?What have you not collected that you wish you had collected?What are the objects that you can just remember? And how can you create evidence of that remembering in your own archive?
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47 mins
May 20 20262 mins