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Veronica House, "Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact" (Utah State UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor to the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers, and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread Podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
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Dr. Veronica House
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Peter Astrus
Hi, my name is Peter Astrus and welcome to the New Books Network. Today we're speaking with Dr. Veronica House about her book Local Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact, published by the University press of Colorado. Dr. House is an Associate professor of English and directs the Writing center at Boston College. Before that, she spent over a decade at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she pioneered community engaged writing programs that brought students students into collaboration with farmers, activists, government agencies and food literacy advocates. She's won an award for Excellence in Innovation in Teaching and several other accolades. In her book, she shows how writing can Help community members create their own meaningful definitions of local food. Instead of pushing a single answer, the book emphasizes listening, relationships, shared inquiry, and action across an entire community. Veronica, it's wonderful to have you with us. Is there anything you'd like to add about your background or your current work right now?
- [02:59]
Dr. Veronica House
Thank you. I taught at the University of Colorado Boulder for 15 years and then moved to University of Denver and now am in Boston. And so it's going to be interesting to talk to you about place based work after having just moved across the country. I would say that one of the most interesting things about me maybe is that I don't have a background in food studies. I started as a literature PhD and took a job in Boulder to teach writing about literature courses. I happened in grad school to have taught some service learning courses and so my director was interested in having me develop some service learning with other professors at the university. And really I feel like food studies found me once I moved to Boulder. So my love for this work developed right along with my love of the place where I lived.
- [03:59]
Peter Astrus
That's one of the things about your book is it really touches upon the importance of place and you craft it beautifully. You start with this opening scene at your home desk. You even have a note about your dog. It is seven years that went into this book and it is evident it is more than theory, but lived experience. One of the things that you talk about is this sense of social responsibility. As scholars, we move to different areas. We bring our backgrounds and in some ways, reading between the lines, we force our backgrounds into where we go. Can you talk more about your insights about this social responsibility of scholarships and the communities that we join?
- [04:43]
Dr. Veronica House
You know, one of the great things about teaching writing is you can really teach about anything. And I think we have a real opportunity as writing and rhetoric scholars and professors to think about the ways in which the local community in which we live inflects the curriculum. When we listen to conversations and think about issues that are relevant in our communities, it can really shape the ways in which we teach and the subjects we teach about. When I came to Boulder, like I said, I was pretty illiterate when it came to food understanding and knowledge. And I started to see how important farming was in Boulder County. There were conversations going on all the time about supporting local farmers. This was not something I knew anything about. Coming from the D.C. area, growing up and then moving to Austin, Texas, and then suddenly I'm surrounded by farmland and people are talking about how important it is to support local food. I didn't really understand what that meant. I had heard a little about organic food. I had read Fast Food Nation and that was about it. And so I started going to events and restaurants that supported local food and just started to get interested in it. And right around that time, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma came out. And that then kind of like gelled it all for me. I started to get really invested in what it means to support local small scale producers. But I think, you know, one of the questions I had is, would that have happened if I hadn't moved to Boulder? And I don't think it would have. I think it really shaped my career trajectory to live in Boulder, in Boulder county, and to be surrounded by those conversations and ideas. And so my challenge to other professors and teachers is to think about what is most important where you live and then to get involved in that through curricular innovation.
- [06:50]
Peter Astrus
You also had an interesting discovery when you moved there about your great great grandmother. And it was such a wonderful addition to the book because it shows once a place becomes relevant to us, how important it is and how excited we get about it. Can you tell us a little bit about her?
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Dr. Veronica House
Sure. Well, I found out once I moved to Boulder where I didn't think I knew anyone and didn't think I had any connections, found out that my great great grandmother was actually a homesteader in Boulder back in the 1870s and 80s. She was a girl at the time and had moved out kind of following her uncles during the Colorado Gold Rush. And so she lived on a homestead in Boulder County. I wasn't totally sure where it was, but I found the schoolhouse where she went to school and I learned that she was a student and then a teacher at the University of Colorado in their schoolteacher program. At the time it was very small, but suddenly I was learning about farming in Boulder and I was a teacher in Boulder and then realized that I had this ancestral connection to someone who had farmed and someone who had taught right in the area where I was. And it at first was really exciting. I would say that was the most immediate response, was just, wow, am I walking in areas she walked? Am I in buildings where she taught? And then I started to delve into the family history and trying to figure out where that homestead was and learned more about the family and more about settlers in the area in general. And it just wove in really deeply with who I am and how I want to practice and kind of be in the world. And I started to really wonder, was there some Kind of strange serendipity that led me to this place. And even if not, what is my role as someone descended from a settler colonizer? What is my role in this area and in the idea of promoting just local food? And so that also led me down a path of questioning and thinking about my impact in the community. The other cool thing that I talk about in the very end of the book is that I had a student in my last semester at University of Colorado who it turned out, happened to live on the old homestead. And that was like the strangest thing. I had thousands of students during my time at University of Colorado. And he was stuck in my section and we started talking about his family and where he grew up. And it turned out that he was on that old homestead. And so he let me go visit the homestead and kind of walk the grounds. And that was my final semester in Boulder. And it was an incredible kind of closing to that chapter of my life. So I think the personal can deeply impact the scholarly questions we have and the curriculum we design. And I also think you don't have to have those ancestral connections to think deeply about place. For me, it was just this added layer of sort of amazement at the connection that I had to this land.
- [10:19]
Peter Astrus
That is great and I'm glad you brought it up. You're a student and your own experience because there's always the theory of investing in place. You showed a real life example. What difference do you see in your students from your teaching? Because a lot of them, like the professors, are just joining a new area and in their case might be leaving after a few years. What impact do you see in differences in them?
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Dr. Veronica House
A lot. I think that it can be fairly common depending on the place where students are and the kind of university. It can be common for students to not leave campus a lot and to not understand what's going on in the city or town where they're studying. And I also think that it is so common in especially first year writing classes for people to just want to get that credit over with and to move on and they want to get the grade. And when I was in graduate school, I became frustrated with some of the typical assignments like pick a topic that you care about and then write about it. But it was so often pretty surface level or just, you know, stuff like that I could see did not resonate deeply with the students. And I started doing community based work with them because I wanted them to understand the importance of writing in the world. Writing can have profound impact in the world. You will be Writing for the rest of your lives, in your careers. But also writing can be an active force. And so how can we relate what we're learning about in a classroom to real lived experience? Why does it matter? And to be able to get students out in the community learning from really innovative people, I think was inspiring to them beyond anything I could have done in the classroom. Because you can only talk about an idea so much before you need to see it lived and embodied. And so when we would go to farms, when we would go to food banks, when we would learn from nonprofit leaders, that was when students saw like, I can actually make a difference in the world. These people are doing incredible things. These topics we're learning about that seem so overwhelming can be dealt with on a local level in really interesting ways. It helped them, I think, become less overwhelmed and more focused in how they understood that they could learn. Their use their education for something really.
- [12:52]
Peter Astrus
Meaningful that's really impactful. When you were talking about first year writing assignments, it reminds you of how I got started. And I'm thinking about how authors like you have helped me evolve my teaching and find more meaningful assignments and connections with the students. Your book has co authors. There's student work in here. It's. It's really a community based one. It's really interesting way you approach the scholarly work. I was thinking about audience. I'm thinking about it as a teacher, but all the different people that would benefit. Can you talk a little bit about people who can read this and enjoy it and learn from it?
- [13:33]
Dr. Veronica House
Sure. I had multiple audiences in mind. And so I wanted to think about how to craft a book that could be both important for scholars and teachers and then also useful to activists and organizers. So first I'm thinking about, let's say, the community members or the lay audience, people who don't know much about food studies and who wants an introduction to food studies can read it and I think learn some interesting and important things about how to approach their purchases and their support of certain companies and things like that. I also wanted to give ways in which organizations, activists or organizers could think about putting together events for the public that helps to move public opinion forward or helps people understand complex issues in ways that resonate and that they can engage with. And then finally, and perhaps like, the first audience that I was thinking about is other teachers and scholars, other academics who might be teaching a variety of different subjects around social issues or environmental issues. How do we get our students engaged? How do we have our work have impact in the community? How do we do outreach to the community. So I wanted people to use my story of food work as a way to help them imagine what they could do with their own classes and scholarship. You mentioned the co authorship in the book and the student projects. It was so important to me to invite the voices of all of these people I had worked with over the years to tell their stories, to talk about their incredible work. And then each of them had the opportunity to say whether they wanted to be a co author on the chapter. And that, I think is just the right thing to do. They were so fundamental in shaping my ideas and the way in which I worked. I really feel like they co authored the book with me in that all of our projects together are what make the book what it is. I've written in other places and I feel this really strongly. I think there's a push in scholarship, especially in the humanities, maybe to have a single authored work. It counts more in certain cases of tenure and promotion. It's considered more valuable in some universities. And I just fundamentally disagree with that idea. I think that especially if we are doing community based work, it should be celebrated that we co author with the people we work with and the students that have helped us understand our projects better. And so I very much love that idea of co authorship. I'm glad that more and more people are starting to do that in our field and that it's, you know, tenure and promotion ideas are changing. I hope slowly, but I wanted to embody that belief that I have that we do this work together and that the shared knowledge is much more valuable than anything I could have offered myself.
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Peter Astrus
That's really insightful. It was evident from reading your book. Your research is slow, relational, deeply collaborative, and I do think it challenges the way research is usually valued in the academy. It's a book I was excited to talk to about with others and a book I'm excited to give to other people. And there's so many things to learn from it. You introduce a process called distributed definition building. How might you describe that to someone who's never heard the term before?
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Dr. Veronica House
It is the idea of taking a complex or contested term like local food in Boulder. And I can talk about what I mean by contested with that term and creating projects and events, a kind of distributed model for sharing ideas with the community and then letting them help to create a definition that is meaningful. Meaningful and that might impact policy or community based practices. So that sounds abstract. What I mean is, came about through the work I was doing with my students. It started in 2014, a potential partner approached me after these horrific floods in Boulder county that wiped out a lot of the farmland in 2013, and his nonprofit wanted to study the disruption to distribution channels between farms and restaurants. And so his question for my students was, can you interview the restaurateurs or chefs, interview the farmers and figure out how distribution was disrupted? They did that assignment, and we turned that information over to our partner. But after the semester ended, I reviewed those interviews, and I saw an interesting and I thought disturbing problem emerge, which is that people did not have a clear sense of what local food meant. There was no clear definition. There were also restaurants, especially these 34 locally owned restaurants, who had writing on their menus that said something like, we source local or in organic ingredients whenever possible. And so I read that as a consumer, and I think they are actively working to bring in local food. And this is a restaurant that I want to support. So that's my consumer read of the menu. What it turned out to be was something really different. Some restaurants did source deliberately local and organic ingredients. Others might have one special one summer where they're selling arugula, you know, using arugula from a local farm. And that's it. That's all they did for the whole year. Or one of the most disturbing was a chef said that Cisco was the farm that they source from. And, you know, this is like one of the largest national distribution companies in the states, so that was problematic. And then some had, you know, those cute blackboards that would list all of the farms they got their ingredients from. And then we would talk to the farmers who said they had never connected with that restaurant at all. So there was. There was some, I would guess you could say, lying or deception going on. More common, though, was that chefs and restaurateurs genuinely didn't know what to do after the growing season ended. They might support farms during the summer months, but then turn to Cisco or US Foods or Sodexo in the off months. And so they. They genuinely were asking, what do we do to support local food if there isn't local food available here? So good, so good, so good.
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- [21:13]
Dr. Veronica House
Ford Bluecruise Hands free Highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in bluecruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E available feature on equipped vehicles terms apply does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details. And one thing that this raised was okay, consumers are thinking they're supporting something that might necessarily not necessarily be the case. But another thing that has struck me deeply was one restaurateur who considered himself an activist chef. And he said, well, I'm forging relationships all over the world with small scale ethical producers. I get my salmon from a fishery in Tasmania. I get my strawberries from this woman in California. I get my blueberries from this farm in Maine. I'm forging these relationships. Is that local? Because these are small, little, small scale ethical businesses. How, how are consumers thinking about what they want to support? And this like blew me and my students away. And so we were like, well wait, if he's saying that's local, then what is local? Is local about ethics or relationships or is it miles based? It really, I think, was what raised the question initially for me and then for my students for years to come, what is local food? What does that mean? The county had a different definition for local than the city. And we looked at, I had my students look at media from across the state. They looked at 90 media sources which seemed to suggest that consumers wanted healthy, organic food where they knew their farmer, they had relationships that were good with the land, they had ethical practices with animals. You know, there were like these other considerations and distance was not always foregrounded. So that's where, where this investigation really began. And it was interesting for my students to read those interviews, read the media discourse analyses that we did in the next semester. And I kept having my students reading previous students work. And so I wanted them to think about their work as meaningful, think about the work as like building knowledge. And then like, what do we do with it each semester? And so every semester from that 2014 interview semester on, I would let my students choose the project in the last half of the course and we would think, where do we go now? Given what we know, where do we go now? Who do we need to connect with? How do we help communities understand ways in which local food is discussed and then write their own definitions that are meaningful for them based on knowledge that we can share, literacy events that we can put on, but then that they really can like build their own definition and that these definitions will accumulate and start to have impact on policy and on ways in which people understand food production. So distributed definition building was a way for saying, if companies, if restaurants, if the government are all disagreeing about what local food is and these are all kind of the people in charge, then can we, at a kind of grassroots level, have people with knowledge and understanding start to form their own definitions for what they want to support?
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Peter Astrus
That is highly insightful. I'm thinking about how you also frame the larger issue of food distribution and why this matters. There's elements of justice, nutrition, who the system was meant for and who it wasn't meant for. Can you explain that a little bit, just to kind of understand why this local aspect really does matter and make a difference.
- [25:28]
Dr. Veronica House
Everything local is going to be particular to the locale. That sounds obvious, but what I mean is my curricular work, my projects that I do with my partners might be very different from what someone would be doing with their partners in, let's say, Detroit, or even what I was doing when I moved to Denver. The food scene was totally different, even 35 miles down the road in Denver from what it is in Boulder. So in Boulder, there are farms and farmers who are predominantly who are leasing land from Boulder County Open Space and city of Boulder. And on this leased land, they are growing things from like, or they are a kind of farm that might be regenerative. They might be growing GMO sugar beets and corn. They might be small scale organic certified farm. And so there are lots of different kinds of practices that are happening in Boulder. And as my students and I talked with experts in the area, we realized that there were all of these barriers to local production and ways in which farmers were really struggling. Boulder county has a very high rate of consumer demand for local food and consumer enthusiasm for local food. And we also have an 80% failure rate for small scale farms. It's higher than the national average. And so a question that one of my partners posed is like, why is this happening? What are the barriers that are making it difficult for farmers? So that kind of research project is going to be really different from something, say, working with an urban farm, like I did when I moved to Denver, who are really interested in cultural sovereignty and in saving heritage seeds and in helping communities grow foods that are relevant to them in a predominantly immigrant and refugee neighborhood. So really, really different kind of a project. My students would be reading different information and different texts. We would be talking with different people. So I think the locale is really vital in shaping a curriculum.
- [27:54]
Peter Astrus
You also connect this really well to other academic scholarship. You bring up Rhonda McGee and you discuss this idea of vulnerability. And I can see that in your writing, how you situate yourself of who you are and how you fit into it. And there's one particular quote. Viewing vulnerability as a gift brings to mind so many of the traits and states of being that mainstream white supremacy culture shuns. Can you talk about, quote, and maybe how it fits into the work and how people can view this book?
- [28:25]
Dr. Veronica House
I think that with academics, even, certainly the way that I was kind of brought up as a grad student, there's an idea of needing to tear down other people's work to build up our own. There's this kind of entrenched idea of, like, rugged individualism that I think happens in academia as well. And I don't want to be a part of that. I want to showcase. I mean, vulnerability for me seems obvious. I am not a scientist. I am not a farmer. People know a lot more than I do about the, like, let's say, science of soil health or about why farming is difficult in Boulder County. There. There would be no way that I can imagine writing a book without incredible value for the knowledge of other people that I don't have. And so I think vulnerability is essential in scholarship, especially when you're working with communities. There's no place for ego in it. Ego can really harm communities. And there are a number of cases that have been written about where communities are really harmed by academics who go in and have a kind of like, one and done mindset with projects, or the semester ends and you leave and the community hasn't gotten what they need. But our students got to do a little bit of charity work. I mean, that's not a model that is thought of as best practices anymore, luckily. And I think that vulnerability means accountability. We are accountable to the communities in which we work and. And their needs come before my need to publish. And so you mentioned earlier that this is a really, like, there's slow scholarship in this book. Ten years of work, seven years of writing and revising and revising and revising. The hard thing about community based work when you're writing a book is so much changes over the course of the writing. I mean, laws were continually changing, policies were changing. I had to keep revising and trying to keep up with what Boulder county was doing and what my partners were doing to be accountable to them. And I hope I did a good job with that. It also means that I know I'M going to screw up, and that's okay as long as I am honest about it and try to do better. Some projects fell flat and didn't do much. Others were really successful and exciting. And again, that's okay as long as your partners that you're working with understand the products that might come out of the partnership and the intention behind it. So some of them, for example, they knew they were working with first year writers. They knew the writing might not be publishable right away on their website or something like that, but they were so excited about getting students invested in the work and getting students excited about the work that for them was the purpose of the project, regardless of the outcome. For others, they were like, we want blog posts that we need to publish twice a week, every week, and we need your students to meticulously revise these blog posts. So that was something else that we contended with as we worked with the students. So I think that the accountability has to always be front and center, and that necessarily means a lot of humility and just let ego go. It doesn't have a place in this work.
- [32:12]
Peter Astrus
It is evident the work that you put into it. I love the tidbits about having to revise because seven years is a really long time. And you talk about other key issues like climate change and how we think about them. And at the heart of it is this idea of tipping points and this contagious type of writing. What kind of general advice do you have to make more scholarship that people get excited about? Maybe don't even feel overwhelmed, like thinking about climate change. Sometimes students are like, what can we do about it? It's too late. As opposed to really feel part of the conversation.
- [32:52]
Dr. Veronica House
That's really vital. I mean, I talk in the book about watching my students kind of hit an emotional wall. After reading a lot of the national work on food. We all, including myself, we get to a point where we're like, I can't eat anything without a million problems coming up with what I'm eating. I remember the first time I read an article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times talking about the problems with almond milk. And I was like, great. I had just given up dairy. Now what do I do? So there are all of these things that students were uncovering in their research. And it was like, we can't drink coffee, we can't eat chocolate, we can't. And so all of that can feel very overwhelming. And I think it's so important to recognize the realities of these problems, but then also provide ways for people to get involved in a way that has joy, in a way that feels like we are part of something that matters. And so for students, putting on the events that I talk about in the book, connecting with community members, and again, I think it's really important for them to see innovative people at work. The problems are there, but if we can connect and don't feel like we have to do it all ourselves, it can really help a student get over that hump of the fear and overwhelm and move into a belief in action. That's what I want to do with them. So the idea of rhetorical contagion comes from Kristen, sy's traitor. She talks about virality and contagion in terms of ideas. And I was thinking about local food. It's not just the thing itself that we eat. There's an idea associated with local food. It's the way people feel about it. It's belief in doing something good for the environment, doing something good for the farmers, making an impact, making a statement with the ways in which we support people being able to access local food or healthy food. So the question that I and my partners had was, who do we need to reach out to? How do we kind of saturate the community with ideas around local food so that it feels inevitable? And this comes from Malcolm Gladwell's the Tipping Point, the idea that you take the innovators, some of the farmers or nonprofit leaders, and you think about then, who's the first people we can kind of hit with the message, who will accept the message and pass it on so that eventually it becomes viral, it becomes inevitable, like, local food just is what we want to support. What would that look like? And so my students and I started to create projects that would have events in parks and libraries, in public schools, in places where people go. It would be free. And we would have, let's say, like, tons of apples that had been rescued from all over the city. And then they make cider and they make applesauce together. And we talk about issues of food waste, and we talk about hunger in the county. But then we also can enjoy this beautiful apple cider and some food together. And then we distribute the remainder of the apples to a rescue place. And so we're thinking about some of the issues of distribution and access, but then also enjoying food together while we do it. So we kept trying to think, how do we make these events educational, meaningful, but also enjoyable so that people feel like they're part of a community? And one of my favorite events that I Talk about in the book is the work that we did with high school students. So my students were often first years. They really wanted to connect with other teens. So one of my partners suggested that we work with high school art students. We got in touch with all of the high school art teachers in the county, and we created curriculum with them so that they would teach their students about local food issues and then create art and writing about what they learned. So students were going to farms, they were going to book butcheries. They were talking about their experiences as gardeners. It was so cool. Going to ranches and creating beautiful art and writing about the experience of learning more deeply about local food. And then we partnered with a museum and displayed the art. And then we invited people at the farmer's market to come. It was right next to the farmer's market. Parents, teachers, other students. We had several hundred people at the event. And then we thought, well, how do we think about moving that art through the community? So it started to be displayed at coffee shops. Boulder Valley Public Schools has a calendar that they produce each year with student art. It's like the lunch calendar. And so that was another way of getting student art out into the community. People were sharing it on social media. So we were thinking, what's the ripple effects we might have from the single event? How do we continue to get the word out? That's that idea of virality, of saturating a community. It's like as many audiences as you can imagine in as many places as you can imagine. And so we were having lots of events simultaneously. Lots of organizations and groups were doing things simultaneously. It was messy, but it was really exciting.
- [38:39]
Peter Astrus
It's terrific. I mean, this is an issue that is not only engaging, but you do ground it that it's really important. I mean, you do talk about the industrial food systems, you know, the environmental destruction, the communities, such as the indigenous and black communities it impacts. And I'm imagining students from learning from the specific local take a larger meaning into ways of thinking that is more than just like, we can't drink coffee.
- [39:03]
Dr. Veronica House
Right.
- [39:04]
Peter Astrus
I don't know if you want to comment on that. If you have examples of students who have continued on this work that you're proud to see, or they reach out to you.
- [39:14]
Dr. Veronica House
Yeah, it happened. It happens. I. Well, one of my favorite student stories is I had a student. This was many, many years ago. He was like a little bit of a frat bro. He would come to class pretty sullen. He. One time when we were reading a chapter of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. He brought McDonald's to class. It was just like that kind of a student initially. And he was also a really good writer. So it was very frustrating for me. And as the semester went on, he started to work for his community based work. He worked with a guy who, in Boulder, in his Boulder neighborhood, had started to convert front yards into farms. And so it was like this CSA model in a neighborhood where all of these people use their front yards to produce food. And then they, as a neighborhood sold the food at a, in a csa. So they were sharing the food that they produced. And my student was writing about this work very passionately. And I thought, is he just doing this for the grade? Does he really care? Like, how can you convert, you know, turn that much? But he seemed to genuinely care. And then three or four years later, he sent me an email and he was in Australia. No, in New Zealand, working on an organic farm. And he was wearing overalls and he had long hair. And I was just, you know, he talked about how the class meant so much to him and had changed his life. And I just thought, that is amazing. I never would have thought that this student would have had that experience. So that's an extreme story, but I have had several students also go on to either study environmental science in relation to food studies or to work on some of the farms that we have partnered with to. I had one student become a communications manager for one of the farms she worked with. So yes, it happens. It's really exciting to see that students especially focused on environmental issues, really see the connection between food studies and environmental studies.
- [41:21]
Peter Astrus
I'm not surprised. That is an excellent story. And since I have the author here, is there anything that did not make it into the book conflict that you faced in the last seven years? An anecdote, specific challenge that could not, all those years, could not have possibly made it. Within these pages, there were a number.
- [41:41]
Dr. Veronica House
Of projects that I did with community partners that weren't directly related to food, that didn't make it into the book, but that I loved. Can I tell one of my favorite stories?
- [41:54]
Peter Astrus
Please go ahead.
- [41:55]
Dr. Veronica House
I had students. This was before the 2014 interview semester that kind of launched the subsequent semesters of work. I had a student, we were working with a nonprofit that was a day shelter for homeless men, and we were doing some writing for them. My students were also volunteering at the shelter to learn more about the work that they did and to meet some of the clients that frequented the shelter. And my student was a musician and he Met this homeless man, Jeff, who was also a musician, and they formed a relationship, a friendship, talking about music. And then when it became, you know, it was time for us as a class to think about what our final project might be. Jeff and my student talked about how cool it would be to put on a concert at CU Boulder where we had student musicians and homeless musicians performing together. And so we did that and it was so cool. We rented out the ballroom and we had a couple bands from people from the shelter. We had student groups and like a cappella groups. And it was so amazing to see, you know, a bunch of, I would say, several hundred students and then a handful of people from the shelter and dancing together, cheering together, singing together. It was so, so cool. And the musicians talked about their experiences. We had the executive director talk about what the shelter does. And there were people from the newspaper there. And my students had written press releases and they had written to people to invite them to offer contributions for our silent auction. So they were practicing rhetorical awareness and thinking about how you invite various audience, getting them motivated and excited to come. But it was this incredible concert. So I really, you know, I talk about this in the book. And this is again, humility. I never would have come up with that idea. That was so cool. And it was a student and partner driven idea. I try to foreground in the first half of the semester the content that I really want to make sure that we get. And based on the program, based on the school, there may be requirements like a rhetorical analysis of an article or a research paper. But then in the second half of the course, I always open it up to my students, like, now what do we do? And that's where I think the exciting projects come from. That was one of my favorites.
- [44:38]
Peter Astrus
That is incredible. I'm curious about the reception of the book beyond scholarship. Have you had somebody, a student, an activist, a farmer, something? An interesting reception you have gotten to this?
- [44:54]
Dr. Veronica House
Not yet. It's so new. I have been giving it to people that I've worked with. And I had the joy last month of meeting someone in Detroit who I really admired from the D Town farm in Detroit. And so this is a black led farm that really focuses on racism in the food system and empowering black youth to think about getting connected to farming. And I met someone during my conference on community writing that I put on every two years, met someone from the farm and I gave her the book and asked if we could connect later. So that was probably the most exciting thing in terms of offering the book out My partners are very happy with it. They're so proud to be featured in it. And I'm looking forward to hearing from people who end up using it in courses or who are moved by it.
- [45:56]
Peter Astrus
There's so many awards. I was actually really curious about the University of Colorado Boulder's Women who Make a Difference award. And was there a particular thing that went into it? I mean, I imagine you should be very proud of it if you could tell us about it.
- [46:10]
Dr. Veronica House
It was for the work that I did with the initiative I started, which was called the Writing Initiative for Service and engagement, the WISE project. It started in 2008. I had been working at the university for two years and had been doing service based courses. And some of my colleagues were asking how they could do it. There was some work happening in the department, but we didn't talk about it together. And there wasn't a kind of shared resources and talking about partnerships and things like that. And so I talked with my director about launching something where I could help build this work in the program. It seemed like there was a desire for it, but I wanted to help, you know, look at best practices, get people more invested in ethical partnerships and things like that, like how do we do this in a robust way? And so I launched the WISE project and over the 15 years that I worked there, built it up to be really one of the first writing programs in the country to have integrated community engagement through our entire curriculum. So from the first year writing classes to our upper division topics in writing, business writing, science writing, environmental writing, working with professors across the curriculum, and we had about 31 was at the height of the work, 31 professors and grad students working with me to develop their courses. And I would help them find partners, and we'd meet with the partners over lunch or coffee and talk about possibilities for projects. And so that was the WISE project. We ended up working with about 50 community partners and the students were doing about 15,000 hours of writing based work for nonprofits each year. It was really incredible and fun to see it just blossom. And my colleagues were incredible, incredibly innovative. And so the award was for that work was for building up the WISE Project.
- [48:21]
Peter Astrus
I highlighted it because I keep thinking back to your idea of joining a community and making a difference, as it says University of Colorado Boulders women. And you kind of exemplify that. So I was bragging on your behalf and really wanted to know more. I'm curious about things that you're working on right now, things that excite you, what's next that we can Expect.
- [48:44]
Dr. Veronica House
Well, I mentioned earlier, I started working with a farm in Denver called Frontline Farming. This is when I moved to Denver four years ago from Boulder. So I still lived in Boulder, but I was working at the University of Denver. And part of my excitement about switching institutions was to work in a place where students could have access to more food justice organizations. Frontline Farming, the farm with which I worked is a bipoc and women led farm right in the heart of Denver. They have three farms, two in Denver, one in a town right next to it called Arvada. And they work on three things. Food access, food justice, and food sovereignty. So the way that they would distinguish those is food access is kind of the immediate needs of very insecure communities in which food insecure communities in which they work, people who don't know where their next meal is coming from. And so the farm has things like a free grocery that they offer for people in the community, and CSAs where you can also donate a CSA if you have the means to do so. Things like that. Food justice would be working within the current system to try to change laws or policies. So one of the most exciting things Frontline was a leader in was in getting a law passed recently to support food system workers so requiring things like water breaks, shade, things like that that were not required before. And then what they would call food sovereignty or food liberation would be that the communities have a say in what they're gonna eat and can feed themselves in a way that is culturally relevant. So Frontline has one farm called Sister Gardens, and it's a terraced farm, and they have three terraces. One is an Arab foodways terrace, one is African foodways, and one is a bioregional foodways looking at, like, native grown plants. And so the executive director of Frontline wanted help in creating signage at the farm with QR codes to tell kind of the stories of the plants. Where did they come from? What's the cultural relevance? How did they get here? And so she wanted my students to do work in researching the plants. And it was really cool at first. I thought we would be interviewing people to tell stories of their relationships to the plants. And she said, no, I really want the stories of the seeds themselves, stories of the plants themselves. And so one semester of students did research looking at other gardens and farms. What kinds of signage did they have? How did they make them interactive? And we presented that information to Fatima Imad, who's the executive director of Frontline, to help her think about the kind of signage she would want. And then the second semester was doing all of this research on the seeds, and she gave us a list for each food way of what they grow. These are seeds brought over by immigrants and refugees. They're sent to people from family in their home country, and it's food that can't often be found in supermarkets in the United States. And so they're building up a seed bank of these heritage foods, and it's very cool project. And so my students were involved in that, and Fatima and I are writing about that work right now with one of my undergrads and with another two women who run a nonprofit called Sidewalk Poets. They do writing workshops in underserved communities in Denver. And so they generously ran some workshops with some of the farmers and people that work at Frontline about their experiences with seed. And so we're writing about our collaboration there, and Fatima is in the process right now of making these signs. And then there will be a big celebration that I will hopefully go back to in Colorado and see the fruits of our work together.
- [53:18]
Peter Astrus
Wow. That's fantastic. I'm excited to follow your future work.
- [53:22]
Dr. Veronica House
Thank you.
- [53:23]
Peter Astrus
Thank you so much for your time today and for the care you bring to community writing, food systems, and scholarship. Overall, it's really been a pleasure speaking with you.
- [53:34]
Dr. Veronica House
Thanks so much, Peter. I appreciate it.