Veronica House, "Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact" (Utah State UP, 2025)

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New Books in Environmental Studies 52 min 3 speakers 4 chapters transcribed 2 months ago

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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

Marshall Poe 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the NewBooks Network. And if you're listening to the NewBooks 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,

Marshall Poe 0:39

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. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges. Basically, One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience.

Marshall Poe 1:17

Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBN have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many sponsors. academic podcasts and we would like to help you if you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast please contact us just go to the front page of the new books network and you will see a link to nbn productions click that fill out the form and we can talk welcome to the new books network

Peter Astris 1:58

Hi, my name is Peter Astris and welcome to the New Books Network. Today we're speaking with Dr. Veronica House about her book, Local Organic, 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 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.

Peter Astris 2:43

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?

Veronica House 3:01

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 online. 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.

Veronica House 3:53

So my love for this work developed right along with my love of the place where I lived.

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Chapters

4 chapters

1 What is the main topic discussed in this episode? 0:00–10:13 2 How did Veronica House's move to Boulder spark her interest in food and place-based scholarship? 10:13–26:21 3 Why does Veronica argue scholars have social responsibility to the communities they join? 26:21–38:48 4 What personal family history connected Veronica to Boulder’s agricultural past? 38:48–52:39

Speakers

3 identified

Veronica House 42 min Peter Astris 7 min Marshall Poe 2 min

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Recorded20 Dec 2025

Publisherfeeds.megaphone.fm

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Show notes

This episode features a conversation with the inspiring Dr. Veronica House, whose book Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (Utah State University Press, 2025) explores how writing takes shape within community networks. House brings a generous scholarly voice to questions of writing, community partnership, and meaningful collaboration, and this episode offers a chance to hear how her ideas grew from years of work alongside the people who shaped the project. From Dr. House’s faculty bio: Veronica House is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Writing Center at Boston College. She is the author of Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (2025) and Medea's Chorus: Myth and 20th Century Women's Poetry Since 1950 (2014). Veronica's recent teaching, community work, and scholarship focus on food movements, community-engaged writing, and writing as a force for social change. Veronica is Founding Director of the Conference on Community Writing and Founding Executive Director of the Coalition for Community Writing. She consults with faculty at colleges and universities across the country to design community-engaged courses and programs. Veronica is recipient of Campus Compact's Engaged Scholar Award; University of Colorado's Women Who Make A Difference Award; and numerous teaching awards. She serves as Consulting Editor of the Community Literacy Journal. ABOUT THE BOOK: In Local Organic, Veronica House explores ways to collaboratively build resilient local food systems and coalitions across disciplines and communities. Framed by a study of language, power, and food both nationally and in Boulder, Colorado, the book offers teachers, organizers, activists, and scholars ideas and examples for building interdisciplinary and intercommunity coalitional ecologies through writing in a methodology for engagement that the author calls ecological community writing. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, writing, and project-building with undergraduate writing students and project partners, House theorizes how work to encourage local community-based writing becomes an ecological thread connecting things, ideas, and people. Local Organic is a book about collaboratively building community-derived definitions for resilient local food systems and how faculty and students can work to ethically partner with local communities using distributed definition building.Local Organic offers writing and rhetoric faculty and graduate students an ecological methodology to produce, teach, and theorize writing to help communities engage with a wide array of social issues and to work toward individual and community-level impacts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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