Books

All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare

Kylie Clarke — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:32:57 +0000

All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare Kylie Clarke Wed, 11/26/2025 - 14:32

Alexandra Phelps

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, CU Boulder scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later

Act One: Setting the scene

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The legacy and legend of William Shakespeare has expanded well beyond the open-air theaters of Renaissance London. Embedded in classrooms, films and novels, his plays and poetry have become universally known and loved. Before he inspired generations of artists, however, he was inspired by the art around him. Adapting the stories and dramas he observed and experienced, his storytelling has entertained viewers and readers for four centuries.

However, his dramas are mostly what we have left of him.

“The wealth of beautiful and deep feeling poetry and drama that Shakespeare left, contrasted with the poverty of documents that give us a sense of who he is as a person, is very intriguing” explains Dianne Mitchell, a �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of English and Renaissance literature scholar. This poverty has led scholars and writers, including bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, to imagine what the lives of Shakespeare and his family may have been like.

In her 2020 novel Hamnet, a film adaptation of which will be released in theaters today (Nov. 26), O’Farrell weaves a plot following Shakespeare and his wife – referred to in the novel and film as Agnes – and their children, twins Judith and Hamnet and their older sister Susanna, creating a domestic view of their lives in Stratford. Based on the sparse information about Shakespeare available through legal documents, O’Farrell spins a fictional tale of loss, love and the family of one of the world’s most influential playwrights.

Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet. Image provided by Focus Features

Meet the Shakespeare scholars

Scene One: Finding a love

Enter Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt, & Amanda Giguere

At CU Boulder, Shakespeare’s work is integral both in English classrooms and on stages. Scholars of literature and theater, as well as organizers of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF), found a love for Shakespeare’s work which now guides their professional careers.

Katherine Eggert

Katherine Eggert, a professor of English and vice chancellor and senior vice provost for academic planning and assessment, remembers, “I was going to study Victorian literature in graduate school, but then I took a class from Stephen Greenblatt, who is one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare scholars, and I knew that I could not leave the Renaissance behind.”

Eggert, drawing on her work on Renaissance epistemology – understanding how it is possible we know things and not others – and Renaissance history, explains, “We know a great deal about Shakespeare’s dealings in property, his legal involvements, we know whether he paid his taxes. We know the kinds of records that get kept in life. We do not have his diaries; we do not have his private remarks about what he thought about any given subject. What we do have is his literary work.”

Dianne Mitchell

For Dianne Mitchell, literary work and poetry of the Renaissance in particular spoke to her. “I had some great teachers when I was an undergraduate who really brought the 16th and 17th century literary world to life, especially poetry. I hadn’t realized how sensual and how deep the poetry felt.” Mitchell, among the other classes she teaches, developed an upper-level English course that is cross-listed with women and gender studies called Sex in Shakespeare’s Time. She reflects that students are “often surprised how up front both real women and imaginary women can be about what it is that they can and don’t desire.”

Kevin Rich

The stage is another way people find new ways to look at texts and themselves. For Kevin Rich, associate professor of theater and director of the Applied Shakespeare graduate certificate, theater offered him a place to conquer his fear of speaking. He remembers, “I was at a summer camp junior year of high school and they said do something that scares you, and I said acting scares me. I always wanted to be a teacher and once I found acting, I knew what I wanted to teach.”

Later, he saw a six-person production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It on a basketball court in New York City’s lower east side and “it was magical. It was awesome. Kids who were coming to play basketball saw that a play was happening and sat on their basketballs and watched it,” he recalls.

Heidi Schmidt

For Heidi Schmidt, a director and teacher with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, it was the connections she made rather than the setting of a theater that drew her in. “I really liked theater people. When I started hanging around theater people there was this relief that I could just be more of myself than I was in the rest of my life.” Now involved in every aspect of the theater, she works alongside Rich and Amanda Giguere, CSF director of outreach, to develop the CSF school program.

Amanda Giguere

Amanda Giguere found theater at a young age at a Shakespeare camp: “It planted the seed and now this is my life’s work.” When she was choosing a graduate school, “I applied to one school, CU Boulder, sight unseen … because of its connection to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Twenty-one years later, I’m still here.” Her book, Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators, allows teachers all over the country to use CSF’s teaching and practices in their classrooms.

In the five years since its publication and adaptation to film, the novel has grown a wider audience interested in imagining who Shakespeare could have been. Although scholars often try – to varying degrees of success – to explain Shakespeare the person, it is often novelists and playwrights like Shakespeare who bring him most to life. Through his plays, Shakespeare has touched audiences by interpreting the world he experienced through his writing.

Many �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder Shakespeare scholars and Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF) drama researchers are excited for the film adaptation of Hamnet. This film offers another insight into what Shakespeare could have been, beyond the dramas he created.

Act Two: Teaching Shakespeare

Enter CU Boulder’s Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt and Amanda Giguere

“Shakespeare’s plays can be a way to think through questions that students themselves are asking, and we don’t only need Shakespeare to help us answer these questions. But it’s funny how much he is wondering about some of the same issues many of my students are wondering about or exploring some of the same problems that beset them,” says Mitchell.

Part of Shakespeare’s brilliance is his ability to reach people at any age. Kevin Rich, an associate professor of Theatre at CU Boulder, remembers seeing “a 4-year-old perform a Cleopatra monologue (from Antony and Cleopatra). You would think that’s too hard, but at that age, they’re not afraid of words yet – all words are new. This language was not intimidating and she killed it. She was so brave and let the words be as big as they were. That’s when I realized no age is too young to be introduced to these plays, and you’ll always learn more as you get older.”

Eggert emphasizes the importance of reading the text aloud in English courses: “I do ask students to read in class. I think it’s really important to hear Shakespeare and to hear the language coming out of your mouth and not just as a professional. When you read Renaissance literature – not just Shakespeare – and literature of any kind aloud, you understand it in your ear, even if you don’t understand every word on the page.”

Act Three: Favorite plays

Everybody reads Shakespeare differently, allowing for individuals to connect with his works in different ways.

Schmidt, for example, recalls a time at a camp where she was directing Measure for Measure. The play is about a duke who lets the affairs of state slide and instead of handling them, claims he’s going on sabbatical. However, he doesn’t and sticks around in disguise, observing as people get manipulated by his deputy.

“I said, ‘OK, let’s just agree as a group that tricking someone into having sex with someone they don’t want to is bad. Period, the end,’” Schmidt says. “The youngest kid in the class, 13, puts her hand in the air and shouts, ‘Consent is sexy!’ It was one of my proudest teaching moments.”

Giguere recognizes the power in drawing connections between historical events and the situations Shakespeare portrays in his stories.” Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt is about the tyrants in Shakespeare’s plays. I’m on the section on Richard III, and I’m thinking about how it shows what happens when hate is allowed to grow and fester. It’s crazy that Richard III became king, that’s sort of baffling.”

Rich sees great power in how Shakespeare can capture human conditions in social and emotional situations, recalling, “I’ve had an inmate say to me, ‘Shakespeare had to have done time,’ because he cannot have written the prison scene in Richard II without having spent time in a cell himself. I’ve had veterans say he had to have been in war, because he cannot have possibly written about war like he does without having experienced it. So, maybe that’s true or maybe he was just that empathetic, that able to imagine perspectives other than his own.”

Mitchell reflects, “I’ve started teaching one of Shakespeare’s late plays — by which I mean a play that he wrote at the end of his dramatic career — both at the undergraduate and graduate level. It’s a play called Cymbeline. One of the reasons [I like teaching it] is that students have no expectations about the play and its characters when they come into my class. I like teaching it because you really see a Shakespeare at the end of his career who is so confident in his dramatic abilities that he starts breaking all the rules. It’s really fun to watch him discard habits that he practices in some of his more canonical plays.”

Eggert finds that familiarity can generate new insights. She says, “The play I most like to teach, that’s Hamlet. It’s infinitely rich and even if students have already read it before, there is so much to discover on the second, third and 20th reading.” Whether a student is completely new to a play or reading it again, there are so many meaningful ways for them to interact with the text.

Act Four: Hamnet as a novel and a stage play

Giguere and Schmidt both saw the first stage adaptation of Hamnet at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Prior to seeing it, Giguere read the novel and was pleased that even though the novel takes a lot of liberties with who Shakespeare’s wife was, they are “beautiful liberties.”

O’Farrell’s novel, despite being about Shakespeare, leans more deeply into the lives of Agnes and his children than other novelists and scholars have. Often villainized in history, Agnes in the novel is shown in a new light. There is much speculation about the circumstances around her and William Shakespeare’s marriage, Eggert disputes some scholars’ insinuations that since she was older than he and was pregnant, she trapped him in a marriage that he didn’t want. This has led to a fictional narrative in which the two lived separate lives, and Shakespeare moved to London to escape her.

Eggert emphasizes that there is no evidence that supports this theory. In fact, she says, “just a few months ago, a scholar made a good case that a letter found in an old book that had been owned by an acquaintance of Shakespeare’s, used as part of the binding of this book, was written to Shakespeare’s wife, and the letter was to her in London. While this letter doesn’t indicate the entirety of their relationship dynamic, it displays that their lives weren’t as separate as some scholars would want them to be.”

Mitchell describes the importance of centering a story around women, especially beside a character as large as Shakespeare. Instead of imagining Agnes’ life as small in comparison to Shakespeare’s, “One of the things that I liked about the novel was that it’s not about Shakespeare and his rise to fame and success, but rather about the domestic life of the intelligent and deep-feeling woman he married. We don’t have diaries or letters, so fiction is doing the work (of defining) that (Agnes) wasn’t some small person who wasn’t cared for and who was just kind of caught up in the Shakespeare industry. She has her own important life.”

Mitchell explains that the villainization of Agnes’ character could possibly stem from a thoughtful act William Shakespeare and his wife did. Many scholars use the fact that the couple didn’t get married in the local parish church to diminish her character since this act was violating the religious conventions at the time. However, at the time they got married, Shakespeare’s father, John – a cruel character in the novel – was being pursued for his debts. Instead of getting married in the church, where people would have seen him and tried to collect, William and Agnes married elsewhere as a kindness to William’s father.

Act Five: Hamnet as a film

There are many films that have captured, or attempted to capture, the plays and fictionalized life of Shakespeare. Movies such as Shakespeare in Love offer viewers a way to enter his life, even if it’s heavily fictionalized. Films are often one of the most important tools used by professors, including Eggert. Films about Shakespeare or his plays allow viewers to better understand the content, through observing the choices actors and directors make.

“I show clips from films and theater adaptations; there are resources through the [�Թ�� of Colorado Boulder’s] libraries where you can see how if something is performed slightly differently, it emphasizes an entirely different meaning to the text,” Eggert says.

Although there are fictionalized elements, the stage adaptation of Hamnet was another way for viewers to understand Shakespeare and England at the time. The stage adaptation included people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, something Schmidt notes was a larger part of Shakespeare’s London than people often consider.

Colorado Shakespeare Festival remains popular

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival program has reached more than 140,000 Colorado students and continues to be an integral part of English courses in college. For this school cycle, Rich has adapted Hamlet into a digestible 30-minute and 45-minute play, depending on the student audience. Giguere and Schmidt’s work allows for teachers to prep their students on the plots, background and characters in the plays. Similarly to Rich’s opinion that anyone can interact with the material, Giguere states, “I don’t think you need to be a professional actor or violence prevention expert to use Shakespeare’s plays to think about patterns of violence. I think the plays unlock a lot about our own world and help us understand what it means to be human and what it means to live in a society.

“There is a lot of research that exists about how London, in particular, is a lot more diverse than we like to think it was – it was not all white. There were a lot of different people coming from all over the world and living in London and making their lives in London. I think [an all-white version of London] is an outdated and disproven illusion of what life looked like,” Schmidt says.

Rich adds that the landscape in theatre for interpreting Shakespeare has moved beyond a binary system of comedy and tragedy. “When I was first starting out as an actor, auditioning for companies, they would ask for two contrasting monologues – one comedic, one tragic. It seems that many have moved away from that because that creates a two dimensional view of his plays, which in reality are more than just two genres of comedies and tragedies. He finds levity in serious moments and he finds gravity in the funny moments.”

The film version of Hamnet continues to break down these binaries and established structures through its storytelling. The mysticism that Rich sees in Shakespeare’s work is what Giguere recognizes in O’Farrell’s novel. Some film viewers may recognize the mysticism of the novel while also seeing the humanity of Shakespeare and his family.

Some 400 years later, Shakespeare can connect with individuals on a number of levels. Hamnet’s release in theaters offers viewers a fictionalized way to see him as a person and one version of the life he could have led. However, the concrete things people know about Shakespeare’s storytelling and genius are found in his works. Giguere emphasizes that people should read “all of them. Truly, every Shakespeare play collides with you in different ways depending on where you are in life or what the world is doing. I say this in a tongue-and-cheek way, read all of them, watch all of them. Because that’s what baffles me about these works, is that sometimes you’ll collide with a play and it just hits you in the right way where, ‘Oh my goodness, this sheds light on this other aspect of my life.’”

They Exit (the movie theater)

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, CU Boulder scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later.

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Image provided by Focus Features

Charting the rise and fall of great sea powers

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:29:31 +0000

Charting the rise and fall of great sea powers Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/18/2025 - 11:29

Bradley Worrell

CU alum’s book examines how the fate of the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States as economic and political powers has been deeply intertwined with their ability to project power via the seas

Colin Flint, a �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder PhD geography graduate and professor of political geography at Utah State �Թ��, researches the rise and fall of great world powers.

It’s a topic beyond simple academic interest to Flint, who was born in 1965 and raised in England during a period of seismic change in the country.

“At the time, Britain was still struggling to figure out that it wasn’t the world’s greatest power anymore, so my socialization and political coming of age was in a declined power,” he says. Additionally, Flint says being raised in the busy ferry port of Dover made a powerful impression on him by highlighting the country’s long history as a maritime nation.

Colin Flint, a CU Boulder PhD geography graduate, researches the rise and fall of great world powers.

“Dover definitely has influenced me, being so close to the water,” he says. “My high school was on a hill overlooking the harbor, which at the time was the busiest ferry port in the world, with ships going back and forth to France and Belgium. So, the notion was very much rooted in me that Britain drew its power, historically, from the sea.”

At one point, Flint entertained the idea of joining the Royal Navy before setting his career sights on academia. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Britain, then pursued his PhD in geography at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder thanks to fortuitous connections between his undergrad mentor and CU Boulder Department of Geography Professor John O’Loughlin.

“I moved to United States of America in 1990 to attend university, and the literature at the time and discussions were all very declinist. It was very much, ‘America has gone down the tubes,’” he says. “Broadly speaking, I moved from a declined power into a declining power, or so I thought at the time.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Flint says the idea of America as a declining power was largely replaced with a triumphalist narrative that saw the U.S. as the world’s only remaining superpower.

Ideas about what makes a country an economic and political superpower—and how a country can lose its status as a hegemonic power—had been percolating in Flint’s brain for years when he recently published his book Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower. The book specifically looks at the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States for context on how the countries used sea power to project their economic and political influence across the globe.

Flint spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about his book, while also offering insights on how current events are shaping the outlook for the United States and the world. His answers have been edited for clarity and condensed.

Question: What is the context for your book’s title: Near and Far Waters?

Flint: There are legal terms about coasts and the exclusive economic zone around the country’s coastlines, but I’m not using it in that way. I’m thinking about an area of ocean in which a country has interest and influence over and off its coastline.

"Near and Far Waters" by CU Boulder alumnus Colin Flint focuses on the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States for context on how the countries used sea power to project their economic and political influence across the globe.

That is an important piece of ocean for a country because there’s resource exploitation, but it’s also a matter of security. If a country wants to protect itself from potential invasion, it needs to control those waters off its coastline—it’s near waters.

Some countries, once they’ve established control of their near waters, have the ability and desire to project beyond that, across the oceans into what would then become its far waters. If you think about Great Britain in the context of the British Empire, once it fought off European threats to its coastline—its near waters—it was then able to develop the sea power to establish its empire. It was in African far waters, it was in Indian far waters, in Middle East far waters and so on.

Another good example of this would be how the United States of America, over the course of history, pushed other countries out of its near waters. The Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are good examples, where Spanish and British influence were ended over the 1800s and 1900s. And then by establishing control through annexation of Hawaii and the purchase of Alaska, America developed its Pacific near waters, too, which it expanded upon through the course of World War II, pushing the Japanese back and establishing bases in Okinawa, Japan; the Philippines; and Guam, etc.

Question: One of your chapters is titled ‘No Island is an Island.’ What do you mean by that?

Flint: I was talking about how the projection of sea power requires the control of islands. Often, the geopolitical goal and benefit of controlling an island is not the island itself—it’s how it enables projection of power further, or how it hinders other countries’ projection of power by being near sea lines of communication that you can have a base to try and disrupt. For example, when Hawaii became part of the United States, it allowed the U.S. to project power across the Pacific. Again, it’s not the island itself—it’s the projection of power across an ocean.

Projecting sea power is about more than just having a strong navy.

Question: If one country’s far waters extend into the near waters of another country, that would seem to be a recipe for conflict, would it not?

Flint: That is the kicker, of course, that a sea power’s far waters are another country’s near waters. And it has historically led to conflicts and even wars. It’s always involved violence—and not just between great powers and lesser powers, but also violence against the people living on islands or in coastal lands where sea powers are looking to establish dominance and exploit resources.

Question: China has been rapidly expanding its navy in recent years. Is it simply beefing up its sea forces to protect its near waters, or is it looking to supplant the U.S. as the dominant sea power? Or are there other motives at play?

Flint: You often see in newspaper articles written in the United States and maybe other Western countries that China has the biggest navy in the world. This always makes me laugh because, yes, it’s got hundreds and hundreds of tiny little coastal defense vessels, but even now that it has two aircraft carriers, it does not have the ability to project power like the United States of America, which has 11 carrier groups. So, I think that should always be recognized.

The other sort of trope that’s often wielded out there, which I think we need to question, is: The West is worried about China developing a navy, because it will allow China to disrupt trade networks. Well, wait a minute. China is very dependent on imports, especially of fuel or energy. Additionally, it is the world’s largest trading economy, and it’s worried about the robustness of its domestic economy. They cannot maintain their economic growth based purely on their domestic market, so they need to have a global economic presence for markets and for securing inputs into their economy.

Putting those two things together, it makes no sense why China would want to disrupt global trade. In fact, the country’s reaction to President Trump’s sanctions tells us that the last thing China wants is global trade disrupted. They’re very worried about the fragility of their own economy and whether that leads to social unrest, etc. The flip side of that is how the West could really hurt China by blocking those trade routes to prevent energy imports into China and exports.

China is definitely trying to grow its navy. I think what makes it so interesting is its simultaneous attempt to have a navy that can defend its near waters while perhaps preventing the operation of the United States in its far waters. To what extent China is attempting to establish a presence in its far waters is less clear.

"A sea power’s far waters are another country’s near waters. And it has historically led to conflicts and even wars," notes scholar Colin Flint. ("Naval Battle of 1812," Painting, Oil on Canvas; By Rodolfo Claudus; 1962/U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

Question: From your book, it seems like you have some serious concerns about the potential for a serious conflict arising from disputes over near and far waters?

Flint: In fact, I’ve never been so concerned or worried in my career, to be honest with you. When I started teaching my class on political geography many moons ago, let’s say in the mid-1990s, I used to start off with some structural model of global political change, which essentially says, we have cycles of war and peace, for the want of a better term.

And I asked my students to try and get them engaged: ‘Picture yourself in 2025. What are you going to be doing?’ It was staggering to me how many of them believed that they would be millionaires and already retired (laughs).

The point of that was that the model I was using predicted another period of global war, starting in 2025. I don’t do that exercise anymore, because it isn’t funny; it’s really quite serious. So yes, the risk of war is high, and I think it could emerge in a number of different places. One focus is on the South China Sea, the near waters of China, as that is clearly a potential flashpoint. Taiwan is the obvious focal point of what that conflict would look like.

I also wonder about potential flashpoints of conflict in Chinese far waters—and that could include the Arctic and the Northern Atlantic, because another factor that has to be considered is global climate change and the increasing possibility of a trade route through the North Pole, which would cut trade times from China into European markets considerably. Those waters represent U.S. near waters, so …

Question: Do you envision any sort of viable alternatives to a conflict between world powers over near and far waters, especially in today’s environment?

Flint: My motivation with the book was with an eye to waving some sort of flag about how to think about peace rather than war. Most of our lenses are national lenses. If we keep on this pattern of a national lens, then I see a strong likelihood to repeat these cycles of near and far water sea powers, which have always involved a period of global war.

We need to change that lens. We need to have a global view as to why countries are always seeking far waters, entering other people’s near waters and why that can lead to conflict.

Today, we’re facing a humanity-scale problem, which is global climate change. Is that the thing that will tell us we need to work together, rather than compete? I’m not saying it is; I’m saying, if I see a glimmer of optimism to your question, that’s it.

Question: Based upon your research, if a country loses its status as a hegemonic power, can it later recover that status? And, in the context of today’s world, what might things look like if the U.S. lost its hegemonic status?

Flint: The short answer is no, based upon past history, a country that loses its hegemonic status has not been able to reclaim it once it’s gone.

But to your second question, it goes back to the question about what China’s intentions are. In American popular culture, where every sports team has to be No. 1, even if they are eighth in some Mickey Mouse conference, there is this obsession that there has to be a singular winner or champion.

What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t just assume that if the United States declines there will be another emergent dominant power in the world. It’s quite possible that if the United States declines, what might emerge would be a multipolar world, although I don’t know what that might look like.

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Top image: A squadron of the Royal Navy running down the Channel and An East Indiaman preparing to sail, by artist Samuel Atkins (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

When the microbiome is a family matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 16:00:54 +0000

When the microbiome is a family matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/15/2025 - 10:00

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder researcher Jessica Finlay wrote and recently published a book with her father about how microbes unlock whole-body health

When Jessica Finlay moved from Canada to Minneapolis for graduate school, she didn’t expect microbes to be part of her academic journey. Now an assistant professor of geography at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder with a focus on health, neighborhoods and aging, she’s still an unlikely candidate to write a book about the body’s microbiome.

Yet, alongside her father, Brett Finlay, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at The �Թ�� of British Columbia, that’s exactly what she has become.

Together, the pair wrote The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality. Their new book blends cutting-edge science with practical advice for healthier everyday living.

Jessica Finlay (left), a CU Boulder assistant professor of geography, and her father, Brett Finlay (right), a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at The �Թ�� of British Columbia, together wrote the recently published The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality. (Photo: Jessica Finlay)

But hiding below the science is a family story that bridges disciplines and perspectives to give readers a better understanding of the hidden ecosystem within everyone.

From aging in place to microbial studies

Jessica’s primary research focuses on how environments affect health, aging and quality of mid- to later-life. She regularly delves into what it means to grow old in different neighborhoods and seeks to understand what people need to stay safe, active and connected.

“I’m a health geographer and environmental gerontologist,” she explains. “I’d never considered microbes as part of my research, but in conversations with my dad, I realized that they are everywhere and underpin many of the processes I study.”

Her interest in aging began during grad school, when she volunteered at community programs for older adults in north Minneapolis. That experience—and the changing urban landscape she witnessed—helped her to develop a dissertation focused on the lived experience of aging in place.

One recurring fear she identified while interviewing 125 older adults was the threat of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Hearing their concerns eventually propelled Jessica to study how neighborhood environments affect dementia risk.

But it wasn’t until she started talking more about her work with her father, a long-time microbial science researcher, that she considered an even smaller-scale environmental factor.

“Microbes are our invisible neighbors and lifelong partners that fundamentally shape our health and well-being,” Jessica says. “When participants in my study are able to exercise, get outside, and socialize, they are swapping microbes and picking up new ones.”

Eat dirt

In 2016, Brett published Let Them Eat Dirt: How Microbes Can Make Your Child Healthier, a popular science book focused on how early microbial exposure supports childhood development.

The public response was positive, but readers kept circling back to one question: “What about the rest of us?”

Preparing for a follow-up, Brett knew his daughter would be the perfect collaborator. Together, they set out to explain gut health in accessible language and explore how microbial ecosystems influence nearly every part of the human body.

The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality blends cutting-edge science with practical advice for healthier everyday living.

“This book talks about microbiomes all over the body, not just the gut. It also looks at most of the body’s organs and the effect of microbiomes on them. It also provides a list of prescriptive things you can do based on science to improve your health,” Brett says.

That holistic approach was important to both him and Jessica. While Brett reviewed thousands of publications across microbiology and immunology, Jessica took the lead in translating technical insights into clear, practical prose. She also infused the book with narrative storytelling, expert interviews and examples from everyday life.

“We wanted to distill an overwhelming breadth of information into key evidence and studies so that readers have the facts to make health decisions based on what’s right for them,” Jessica explains.

Their core message? Taking care of your microbial health isn’t inherently complicated, but it often requires us to rethink how we move through the world.

As Brett puts it, “Look after your microbes and they will look after you. Eat healthy, exercise, stress less, sleep well, and have a good community of family and friends. All these factors really impact the microbiome.”

Collaborating for a cause

Collaborating on a book is never easy. Doing so across disciplines poses its own challenges, and during the years-long process, Jessica and Brett had to overcome many of them. But they both found the experience deeply rewarding.

Jessica says, “We wanted to continue the conversation from my dad’s first book. I was initially apprehensive to write together, since my depth of knowledge is health geography and environmental gerontology, not microbiology. But it was a true pleasure to collaborate and each [of us brought] distinct skills and knowledge to the book.”

Now, the Finlays hope their book will help people make informed choices about their health, whether it’s deciding if a probiotic is worth the hype or learning how to create healthier environments at home.

“Thankfully it’s relatively simple and hopefully affordable to support your microbes. Eat an array of plant-based foods. Get outside, move your body, and connect with people to swap both conversation and microbes,” Jessica says.

For her, science is about bridging the gap between research and real life—and it’s reflected in her work.

“Life throws us many unexpected situations,” she says, “and knowing the current state of science and what sources to trust can help us make the best decisions for us and those we care about.”

Brett agrees, summing up their shared hope for the book’s impact, saying, “I hope it makes readers aware of the microbiome and how it can affect our well-being.”

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CU Boulder researcher Jessica Finlay wrote and recently published a book with her father about how microbes unlock whole-body health.

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Secrets, spies and a stirred Vesper

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:53:24 +0000

Secrets, spies and a stirred Vesper Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/02/2025 - 13:53

Cody DeBos

CU alum mixes CIA career into newly published cocktail memoir

When Robert Dannenberg (IntlAf’78) began photographing cocktails against the backdrop of mountain views from his home in Nederland, Colorado, during the COVID-19 lockdown, it started as a casual hobby. He’d send the photos to a group of retired CIA colleagues, all of them still close after decades of fieldwork and covert operations.

“One of them suggested putting them together in a book,” Dannenberg recalls. “That was the wife of my co-author, Joseph Mullin.”

What started as a way to pass the time soon stirred up something more refined.

CU Boulder alumnus Rob Dannenberg (left) at The Fountain Inn in Washington, D.C., enjoying an Old Fashioned (the cocktail mentioned on p. 52 of A Spy Walked Into A Bar). (Photo: Rob Dannenberg)

“We were reminiscing about various points in our careers where cocktails were important in helping us get the mission accomplished,” he says.

Soon after, A Spy Walked Into A Bar: A Practitioner’s Guide to Cocktail Tradecraft was born. The book blends real-life CIA stories from Dannenberg and Mullin’s careers with the drinks that helped mark the end of a successful operation or the forging of a crucial relationship.

“Cocktails and espionage are linked in real life as well as in fiction like the Ian Fleming novels,” Dannenberg says.

But his book isn’t a James Bond thriller. It’s a memoir in disguise, served shaken, not stirred.

A Cold War toast

For much of his life, Dannenberg worked in the shadows. Before eventually becoming the CIA’s former chief of operations for the Counterterrorism Center, chief of the Central Eurasia Division and head of the Information Operations (Cyber) Center, he was a field agent with boots on the ground.

“I was mostly a Russia guy and did two tours of duty in Moscow,” he says. “I was responsible for the agency’s global collection operations in Russia. Truly important and fascinating work if you consider what is going on in the world today.”

Dannenberg’s career was punctuated by moments where toasting a drink meant more than relaxation. Lifting a glass meant trust, camaraderie or closure. The stories in his book don’t spill classified secrets, but they do offer a glimpse into the rarely discussed human rituals of intelligence work.

The Vesper and the Manhattan

While his book includes everything from the Vesper Martini to bourbon sippers among a carefully curated selection of 58 cocktails, two stand out for Dannenberg.

“My favorite from the book is the Vesper Martini—probably the cocktail most truly associated with Fleming’s James Bond,” he says. “If you watch the movie Casino Royale with Daniel Craig, you will know what I mean.”

But when Dannenberg settles in for a drink of his own, he switches spirits. “If I’m in the mood for a whiskey cocktail, I’m a Manhattan guy,” he adds. “There are several variations of the Manhattan presented in the book.”

These two drinks have special connotations for Dannenberg, who associates each with specific operations he took part in during his career. Readers can find those stories within the pages, he promises.

Rob Dannenberg began photographing cocktails against the backdrop of mountain views from his home in Nederland, Colorado, during the COVID-19 lockdown, sending the photos to a group of retired CIA colleagues. (Photo: Rob Dannenberg)

Better than briefs

After decades of writing intelligence briefings, reports and operational memos, Dannenberg says that A Spy Walked Into A Bar offered a new kind of writing freedom.

Mostly.

“Writing the book was a lot more fun than writing intelligence reports!” he says with a grin. “But one of the agreements you make with the agency when you have a top-secret security clearance is that you have to submit to them for approval anything you write.”

Dannenberg sent in a draft of the manuscript, and, in true CIA fashion, it was returned with numerous redactions.

“I thought the redactions might look amusing to the reader, so we went ahead and left the blacked-out text in the book,” he adds.

Making a difference

Dannenberg’s path to the CIA began at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder, where he studied international affairs.

“I grew up wanting to work overseas,” he says. “While at CU, I narrowed it down to three options: State Department, U.S. military or CIA.”

The CIA called first, and he answered. Dannenberg served through tense political shifts, cyber conflicts and counterterrorism operations during his career. Along the way, he learned the personal cost of the work.

“Being an operations officer (or case officer) in the CIA isn’t easy,” he says. “There is a lot of pressure, a lot of time away from home and family, plenty of risk and times that require patience and persistence.”

Still, Dannenberg believes it was worth it.

“I was privileged to experience things in my career, both good and bad, that I would not have experienced in any other profession. My time at CU set the stage for a career that was more than I could have ever imagined,” he says.

Now retired, Dannenberg remains in touch with many of the colleagues who shaped his career and the book. He also hopes that today’s CU students will consider international affairs and public service.

“We live in dangerous times, and you can make a difference,” he says.

If A Spy Walked Into A Bar proves anything, it’s that even in the secretive world of espionage, stories still find a way to be told— even if the best parts are blacked out.

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CU alum mixes CIA career into newly published cocktail memoir.

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We’re still tasting the spice of 1960s sci-fi

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:00:00 +0000

We’re still tasting the spice of 1960s sci-fi Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/29/2025 - 07:00

Bradley Worrell

With this month marking Dune’s 60th anniversary, CU Boulder’s Benjamin Robertson discusses the book’s popular appeal while highlighting the dramatic changes science fiction experienced following its publication

Sixty years ago this month, a novel about a galactic battle over a desert planet valued for its mystical spice forever altered the face of science fiction.

Authored by Frank Herbert, Dune would go on to sell more than 20 million copies, be translated into more than 20 languages and become one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time, spawning several sequels and movie adaptions that have further boosted its popularity.

Benjamin Robertson, a CU Boulder associate professor of English, pursues a research and teaching focus on genre fiction.

In retrospect, it’s hard to quantify how important Dune was to the genre of science fiction, says Benjamin Robertson, a �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder Department of English associate professor whose areas of specialty includes contemporary literature and who teaches a science fiction class. That’s because the status Dune attained, along with other popular works at the time, helped transition science fiction from something that was primarily found in specialty magazines to a legitimate genre within the world of book publishing, he says.

Robertson says a number of factors made Dune a remarkable book upon its publication in August 1965, including Herbert’s elaborate world building; its deep philosophical exploration of religion, politics and ecology; and the fact that its plot was driven by its characters rather than by technology. Additionally, the book tapped into elements of 1960s counterculture with its focus on how consuming a spice harvested on the planet Arrakis could allow users to experience mystical visions and enhance their consciousness, Robertson says.

Journey beyond Arrakis with a different kind of dune

“There’s also the element of the chosen one narrative in the book, which is appealing to at least a certain segment of the culture,” he says. The book’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, suffers a great loss and endures many trials before emerging as the leader who amasses power and dethrones the established authorities, he notes.

While Dune found commercial success by blending many different story elements and themes in a new way that engaged readers, it’s worthwhile to consider the book in relation to other works of science fiction being produced in the 1960s, Robertson says. It was during that turbulent time that a new generation of writers emerged, creating works very different from their predecessors in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which is often considered the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Whereas many Golden Age science fiction writers tended to set their tales in outer space, to make technology the focus of their stories and to embrace the idea that human know-how could overcome nearly any obstacle, Robertson says many science fiction writers in the 1960s looked to reinvent the genre.

“The 1960s is probably when, for me personally, I feel like science fiction gets interesting,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of what’s called the Golden Age of Science Fiction—the fiction of Asimov or Heinlein. The ‘60s is interesting because of what’s going on culturally, with the counterculture, with student protests and the backlash to the conformities of the 1950s.”

New Wave sci-fi writers make their mark

In 1960s Great Britain, in particular, writers for New Worlds science fiction magazine came to be associated with the term New Wave, which looked inward to examine human psychology and motivations while also tackling topics like sexuality, gender roles and drug culture.

“This new generation of writers grew up reading science fiction, but they were dissatisfied with both the themes and the way it was written,” Robertson says. “One of the New World’s most notable writers, J.G. Ballard, talked about shifting away from, quote-unquote, outer space to inner space.

“That dovetailed with other writers who weren’t necessarily considered New Wave but were writing soft science fiction that was not focused on technology itself—such as space ships and time travel—but more about exploring the impact of technologies on humanity and on how it changes our relationship with the planet, the solar system and how we relate to each other.”

New Wave authors also wrote about world-ending catastrophes, including nuclear war and ecological degradation. Meanwhile, many British New Wave writers were not afraid to be seen as iconoclasts who challenged established religious and political norms.

“Michael Moorcock, the editor of New Worlds, self-identified as an anarchist, and Ballard was exemplary for challenging authority in his works. He was not just interested in saying, ‘This form of government is bad or compromised, or capitalism is bad, but actually the way we convey those ideas has been compromised,’” Robertson says. “It wasn’t enough for him to identify those systems that are oppressing us; Ballard argued we have to describe them in ways that estranges those ideas.

“And that’s what science fiction classically does—it estranges us. It shows us our world in some skewed manner, because it’s extrapolating from here to the future and imagining …what might a future look like that we couldn’t anticipate, based upon the situation we are in now.”

American science fiction writers might not have pushed the boundaries quite as far their British counterparts, Robertson says, but counterculture ideas found expression in some literature of the time. He points specifically to Harlan Ellison, author of the post-apocalyptic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” who also served as editor of the sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions, a collection of short stories that were notable for their depiction of sex in science fiction.

Robertson says other American sci-fi writers of the time who embraced elements of the counterculture include Robert Heinlein, whose Stranger in a Strange Land explored the concept of free love, and Philip K. Dick, who addressed the dangers of authority and capitalism in some of his works and whose stories sometimes explored drug use, even as the author was taking illicit drugs to maintain his prolific output.

“Dune definitely broke out into the mainstream—and the fact that Hollywood is continuing to produce movies based upon the book today says something about its staying power,” says CU Boulder scholar Benjamin Robertson.

Meanwhile, Robertson notes that science fiction during the 1960s saw a more culturally diverse group of writers emerge, including Ursula K. Le Guin, the feminist author of such works as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven; Madeliene L’Engle, known for her work A Wrinkle in Time; and some lesser-known but still influential writers such as Samuel R. Delaney, one of the first African American and queer science fiction authors, known for his works Babel-17 and Nova.

At the same time, even authors from behind eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain were gaining recognition in the West, including Stanislaw Lem of Poland, author of the novel Solaris, and brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in the Soviet Union, authors of the novella Ashes of Bikini and many short stories.

Impact of 1960s sci-fi remains long lasting

As the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the 1980s, a new sci-fi genre started to take hold: Cyberpunk. Sharing elements with New Wave, Cyberpunk is a dystopian science fiction subgenre combining advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, with societal collapse.

Robertson says the 1984 debut of William Gibson’s book Neuromancer is widely recognized as a foundational work of Cyberpunk.

While works of 1960s science fiction are now more than five decades old, Robertson says many of them generally have held up well over time.

“Dune definitely broke out into the mainstream—and the fact that Hollywood is continuing to produce movies based upon the book today says something about its staying power,” he says. “I think the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly the Left Hand of Darkness, is a great read and a lot of fun to teach. And Philip K. Dick is always capable of shocking you, not with gore or sex but just with narrative twists and turns.”

If anything, Dick is actually more popular today than when he was writing his books and short stories back in the 1960s, Robertson says, pointing to the fact that a number of them have been made into films—most notably Minority Report and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was re-titled Blade Runner).

“At the same time, I think one of the dangers of science fiction is thinking what was written in the 1960s somehow predicts what happens later,” Robertson says. “It can look that way. But, as someone who values historicism, I think it’s important to think about cultural objects in the time they were produced. So, the predictions that Philip K. Dick was making were based upon the knowledge he had in the 1960s, so saying what happened in the 1980s is what he predicted in the 1960s isn’t strictly accurate, because what was happening in the 1980s was coming out of a very different understanding of science, of politics and of technology.

“What I always ask people to remember about science fiction is that it’s about more than the time that it’s written about—it’s about what the future could be, not about what the future actually becomes.”

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With this month marking Dune’s 60th anniversary, CU Boulder’s Benjamin Robertson discusses the book’s popular appeal while highlighting the dramatic changes science fiction experienced following its publication.

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Top illustration: Gary Jamroz-Palma

Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:37:22 +0000

Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/25/2025 - 15:37

Clint Talbott

CU Boulder’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Once upon a time, a professor volunteered to develop a college course on German fairy tales. She did as she promised, but that was not the end.

“Once I prepared the course and began teaching it, I was just smitten,” says Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder, now a world-renowned scholar of the Brothers Grimm.

CU Boulder scholar Ann Schmiesing is author of The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London.

Schmiesing has written two books on the Brothers Grimm. The most recent, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, was published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London. It is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) are widely known as collectors of fairy tales, but they were also mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants and philologists who, among other things, strove to preserve key elements of German culture.

They produced a vast body of work on mythology and medieval literature, launched on a monumental German dictionary (which they had completed through the letter F by the time they both died), and made groundbreaking linguistic discoveries.

“By and large, people don’t know a whole lot about the Brothers Grimm, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book,” says Schmiesing, who is also the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at CU Boulder.

While teaching the course on the Grimm fairy tales, she noted that students were often familiar with some version of the tales, principally through Disney versions or other contemporary retellings of stories like Snow White.

Teaching moral lessons

The Grimms released seven complete and 10 abridged versions of the tales, and the brothers revised the tales over time. Starting with the second edition, for instance, doves peck out the evil stepsisters’ eyes in Cinderella as a punishment for their wickedness. Violence in the tales is rarely gratuitous, Schmiesing says, but in Cinderella and other tales, the Grimms sometimes added violence to teach a moral lesson.

As they edited and revised the tales, she adds, they mediated among different versions and revised them to reflect 19th-century bourgeois norms. For instance, female characters in some tales contribute less dialogue in later editions, Schmiesing says: “Their thoughts are simply paraphrased.”

Similarly, the Grimms adjusted “Hansel and Gretel” to reflect then-contemporary notions of women. In an earlier version, the culprit was their biological mother but in a later version of this tale, a stepmother abandons the children.

“They change that because they feel like they can’t possibly suggest that a biological mother would abandon her children,” Schmiesing says, adding, “Again, that's playing into their 19th-century ideas of women and motherhood.”

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by CU Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Additionally, some female characters are initially more independent than they appear in later editions, “so the Grimms kind of lessened their independence and increased their dependence on male characters,” Schmiesing says.

Over time, the Grimms also made the tales folksier, adding rhymes and idioms. And the Grimms did not think the tales were just kid stuff. They saw the tales as being interesting to all ages and relevant to German culture, Schmiesing says.

Germany in the Grimms’ lifetime was not politically united, and it was wracked by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Their own part of Germany was occupied by the French for a time, and “so they see collecting and publishing fairy tales and other texts . . . as a way forward for Germany,” Schmiesing says.

In the Grimms’ view, if Germans could appreciate their cultural heritage, perhaps they’d be able to assert themselves as a politically united entity: “So it might seem to be naive, but they really thought that their scholarly works, their collections, would also be a path out of the wars,” Schmiesing says.

Asking deep questions

Their scholarship was even broader, however. The brothers were interested in deep questions, such as how languages developed over time, how customs developed over time, how literary texts developed over time, “and that to them is all interwoven.”

Jacob Grimm, in particular, devoted much of his scholarly life not only to literature, but also to legal customs, linguistic study and his German Grammar, which includes his discovery of what is now called Grimm’s Law.

“It’s been said that Grimm’s Law was as important to the humanities as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to the sciences,” Schmiesing says.

They did all of this on top of full careers as librarians, university professors, and, in Jacob’s case, a civil servant.

“It’s just extraordinary, the volume of scholarship that they produced,” Schmiesing says, noting their “sheer accomplishments” of “incredible breadth.”

Of the tales themselves, Schmiesing says Rumpelstiltskin is among her favorites. “It is one of the most enigmatic tales in the Grimms’ collection.” The tale can be viewed as being about the forced labor of female characters, disease and disability, or the meaning of spinning straw into gold.

In addition to these and other possible meanings, the tale changes significantly between versions, she notes. In an early version, the woman despairs not because she can’t spin straw into gold, but because she wants to spin yarn but can spin only gold.

“Also, who is Rumpelstiltskin, and what does he represent?”

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CU Boulder’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

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Top illustration: by Walter Crane from "Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm" (1886).

‘There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:57:35 +0000

‘There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 12:57

Chris Quirk

In new memoir, CU Boulder alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans eschews narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity

Of all his childhood memories, one in particular sticks in the mind of Tony Tekaroniake Evans (DistSt'86, focusing on cultural anthropology, biology and geography): In his third-grade class in Georgia, while making decorations for Thanksgiving, his classmates began asking about American Indians.

“Where are they? Can we meet them?” they asked.

“I’m an Indian!” said the young Evans, who had recently begun to learn more about his Mohawk heritage. His teacher replied that, no, the Indians were gone. “The teacher said Indians were extinct,” Evans recalls. “That was a little traumatic, and I realized I was going to have to take what I was learning in school with a grain of salt. After all, my grandmother spoke Mohawk in our house.”

In his new memoir, CU Boulder alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans explores history, identity and society through a personal lens, encouraging readers to eschew received and narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.

Evans recounts the episode in his new memoir, Believing in Indians: a Mixed-Blood Odyssey, published by Basalt Books. In the book, Evans explores history, identity and society through a personal lens. Along the way, he encourages readers to eschew received and narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.

The author of three books, Evans is also a journalist, historian, columnist and public speaker. He began his career writing for the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Taos News newspapers and since then has written for A&E Networks, History.com, High Country News and Smithsonian’s American Indian magazine. In addition, he has thousands of reporting bylines over the past three decades for the Idaho Mountain Express, his hometown newspaper in Ketchum, Idaho.

“People are so much more interesting than we can realize by glancing at their appearance, or making stereotypical assumptions about someone’s background, knowledge and interests,” he says. “It’s important to hear the details, because details bring us together as human beings, and that’s what I hope I’m doing with my book.”

Telling family stories

The jarring incident in the classroom spurred Evans to ask more questions about his family and background.

“My mother started telling me stories, and that my name, Tekaroniake, meant ‘two skies’ in Mohawk,” he says. “My Aunt Nadine had a medicine pouch made for me, and my mentor, who was also my mother’s childhood friend, Ed Two-Axe Earley, sent me some books from the reservation. That’s where my life journey began—but it didn’t end there.”

One of the questions about identity that Evans weaves through the book is who decides, and on what grounds? “If you tell people you’re Indian, they’re often going to have all these boxes to check—language, fluency, culture. Are you from the reservation? Do you know your history? It just goes on and on,” he says.

“When do you stop being Indian in somebody else’s eyes? When you get a vacuum cleaner? When you do yoga? There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous. My Jewish grandfather was taken in by the Mohawks. He married my grandmother and worked with them building the Manhattan skyline. Did he stop being Jewish?”

In his book, Evans tells ironically of receiving his official registration “as an Indian and a member of the Mohawks of Kanawà:ke Band” from the registrar of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development of Canada. “Becoming Indian is no simple process,” he writes. “Today, as a newly minted official Indian, I could go down to a nearby reservation and legally take peyote, stay up all night and visit with ancestors in the spirit world. Or I could just stay home and watch PBS Masterpiece programming and have a glass of wine.”

Time spent at CU was rewarding

His interest and investigation of his own identity led Evans to study cultural anthropology at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder.

“I learned a lot of wonderful things at CU and absolutely loved my time there,” he says. “I found that I could learn from many cultures, not just my own. And I learned to interpret Iroquois traditions in my own way. Our Great Law of Peace, perhaps a thousand years old, stems from an experience of compassion and understanding for the pain of others, and how to heal from violence and move on from retribution to a better way of life.”

Evans’ book ranges across cultural topics and religious traditions, and provides numerous history lessons along the way, but stays firmly in the personal throughout. “I realized that the book needed to be about my story and emerging sense of Native values, and all of its quirks and weirdness, and heartache and humor,” he explains.

“Memoir is a really important art form. It is personal and subjective, and also specific. It gets deeper than the ethnographic generalities that people recount in much of the scholarly writing on native history and culture.” Evans also makes a case for what Indigenous people and traditions have to offer the world in a turbulent and uncertain moment: “Indigenous cultures can provide spiritual renewal and a sustainable path forward for humanity.”

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In new memoir, CU Boulder alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans eschews narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.

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The ‘happy haunting’ found in letting words lead

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:30:00 +0000

The ‘happy haunting’ found in letting words lead Rachel Sauer Thu, 07/24/2025 - 07:30

Cody DeBos

For poet Stephanie Couey, the inspiration for her new chapbook began with a walk

Some poems begin with grand ideas. Others start with a walk.

For Stephanie Couey, an assistant teaching professor in the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder’s Program for Writing and Rhetoric, inspiration often strikes when her feet are moving. The rhythm comes first, and meaning follows.

For Stephanie Couey, an assistant teaching professor in the CU Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric, writing inspiration often strikes when her feet are moving.

“Some cluster of words that feels good or rhythmic or perhaps gross in a good way comes to mind,” she says. “I’ll record it in my phone, and everything else usually unfolds outward from there.”

That’s how many of the poems in her latest chapbook, “Quiet Pulse,” began. Fragments of sound or texture unearthed through movement and slowly shaped into verse according to their natural rhythms.

Feeling the language

Rather than starting with a theme in mind, Couey trusts her internal response to language—how syllables feel in the mouth and rhythms pulse on the page—to guide the outcome. Couey’s is a deeply embodied approach to writing that treats poetry not just as a literary act, but also as a physical one.

“I approach the writing process as rooted in the body, which it is,” she says. “I write focused mainly on sound, but I’ll almost inevitably see narrative threads emerge in the process.”

This sensory foundation creates space for emotion, memory and meaning to filter in organically.

“I never set out to write a poem about, for instance, gendered violence, late-stage capitalism or the endangerment and loss of arctic wildlife. But if it’s whirring around in my mind, it will likely come through.”

As Couey penned the poems that would eventually become “Quiet Pulse,” she started to notice they shared textures, recurring images and a certain emotional tenor.

“I don’t know that there’s an originating story or idea in particular,” she says. “But as the writing of these poems happened, I started to see something that a grouping of them was doing that felt related.”

“The title is intended to reflect some of those threads,” Couey notes, “a state of being near death, of being underwater, and/or having the body be silenced—all of which are states the speaker of the poems inhabits throughout the project.”

No shortcuts

Despite their spontaneous beginnings, Couey’s poems are far from effortless.

“They all took a long time to shape, but some came out in draft-form much faster than others,” she admits. “I think it’s like running or any kind of exercise. Some days you are just faster or more efficient, even if you prepared in all the same ways. I wish I knew what made the difference!”

Her willingness to move at the poem’s pace, rather than forcing her own deadline or structure upon it, mirrors her approach to teaching.

“Hopefully these poems create an experience of both beauty and abjection that lingers. A kind of happy haunting,” says Stephanie Couey.

In the classroom, Couey encourages students to pay attention to what their writing is already doing rather than make it conform to a formula.

“When student writers put any amount of effort into their work, they are almost always doing something worthwhile, and I want them to see that and focus on that, then figure out how to move outward from there,” she says.

The same ethos guides her as a poet.

“I try to treat my own poems in the same way, asking: What is the work on the page already trying to do, and how do I make it do that thing more effectively?”

Couey and her students also share a practice that’s become one of her favorite parts of the writing process: embodied journaling. The exercise encourages students to write freely and regularly, without self-editing or judgment, while tuning in to their bodies and surroundings.

“They often speak to the value of writing unself-consciously and engaging with their bodies, their breath and their surroundings,” Couey says, “and of slowing down and truly processing their thoughts and emotions.”

This sentiment, which frequently appears in students’ end-of-semester reflections, reminds Couey to keep her own notebook handy to scribble a thought at the bus stop or capture a mid-walk rhythm before it slips away.

Happy haunting

When “Quiet Pulse” found a home with Dancing Girl Press, Couey was thrilled. Now that her chapbook has been published, she hopes readers walk away from it with a lasting impression, if not a fully definable one.

“Hopefully these poems create an experience of both beauty and abjection that lingers. A kind of happy haunting,” she says.

While poetry remains a core part of her creative practice, Couey is also working on a long-gestating essay project about grief, suicide and the ways stories take shape around loss. She isn’t in a rush to finish. Like her poetry, the project will take the time it needs.

For now, whether she’s drafting verse or guiding students through journaling, Couey will continue to let the writing lead.

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For poet Stephanie Couey, the inspiration for her new chapbook began with a walk.

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Alum thinks about crime the write way

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:01:33 +0000

Alum thinks about crime the write way Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/20/2025 - 18:01

Doug McPherson

What happens when a freshly minted film studies graduate heads out into the world with no particular plan? How A&S alum Patrick Hoffman went from taxi driver to private investigator to successful author

Back in 1998, Patrick Hoffman had just finished his degree in film studies at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder when he decided to head back to his hometown of San Francisco with no real plan in mind for a career.

“I was very green when I came out of college,” says Hoffman. “I didn’t have much street smarts. I’d lived a pretty sheltered life.”

Author Patrick Hoffman, a 1998 CU Boulder film studies graduate, located his newest novel, Friends Helping Friends, in Colorado.

He ended up landing a job as a taxi driver at night and working as a private investigator during the day. “Driving cabs at night in San Francisco and investigating murder cases are very quick ways to learn about the seamier side of life.”

Those lessons in the seamy side of life informed his recently released novel Friends Helping Friends, a thriller set in Grand Junction and Denver, Colorado, that sees its main character infiltrating a white-supremacist compound on the Western Slope.

Before writing his newest novel—or any of his previous and acclaimed ones—Hoffman realized that what he was seeing in his jobs as a private investigator and cab driver might make good grist for fiction.

Easier said than done, though. Hoffman would get started, but after a day or two, his motivation would melt away.

The best writing advice Hoffman ever got came from a friend who asked him what he wanted to do with his life. “I told him I wanted to write thrillers. He asked what was stopping me. I told him that whenever I started something I felt great at first … but then on the second or third day, the inspiration would go away, and I’d feel like a complete fraud.”

Hoffman’s friend then told him that the bad feelings were actually a good sign, and that the secret was to just embrace those feelings and keep going. “I literally started my first book the very next day and everything that has followed can be traced directly back to that conversation.”

It all started in film classes

Hoffman adds that his film classes were “where it all started.” Those days, he was thinking about very basic things like story and plot. “But those were important questions, and you really get to wrestle with them when you’re studying something like film. I had great teachers, too: Jerry Aronson, Marian Keane and, of course, the legend Stan Brakhage. I also had wonderful philosophy teachers. Gary Stahl, may he rest in peace, comes to mind. The English and Humanities Departments were wonderful, too.”

Following his friend’s advice, and armed with the basics from his CU Boulder classes, Hoffman turned out his first novel, The White Van, set in San Francisco and about a troubled young woman wanted for bank robbery and hunted by a corrupt cop who wants the money more than justice.

CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hoffman drew on his experience as a private investigator to write his new novel, Friends Helping Friends.

Hoffman is adapting that book into a movie. “Hopefully that happens,” he says.

His second novel, Every Man A Menace, was also set in San Francisco. Clean Hands, his third novel, was set in New York City, where he lives now.

And his latest novel, Friends Helping Friends, takes place in Denver and Grand Junction, Colorado. “For this one, it was time to come back home to Colorado,” he says. “There is a certain comfort in it. Also, Denver makes a great setting for a neo-western noir.”

He admits that before his last novel, he was kind of blocked for about eight months, having a hard time coming up with ideas. “One day I literally just started typing. I thought, ‘OK, there’s a woman in Denver, she’s a lawyer and she’s using steroids, and that was the start of the book. I went blindly from there. That’s how I do it, though. The tricky part is getting started.

“For me, writing fiction is 100% about overcoming self-doubt, being able to see something through to the end. The hard part is always starting the book. But then the middle and ends, of course, are hard, too.”

Part of Friends Helping Friends takes place in a white-supremacist compound. To understand that arena, Hoffman says his 20 years working as a private investigator (he still does it) and handling many murder cases helped.

“So, all of that, of course, informs the fiction. But also, I’ll just Google around and look for federal cases.” And he searches public records for indictments. “I love talking to journalists, too. My wife is a journalist, so she gives me introductions to her friends and colleagues, and I force them to answer all my questions.”

Up next for Hoffman is another book—this one set in Boulder, a place he’s now reminded of regularly when riding the subway in New York.

“It’s been amazing to see Coach Prime make CU trendy. I see people wearing CU Buffalo jerseys and jackets. I’m just like wow! It’s amazing. Go Buffs!”

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Dropping perfectionism and embracing purpose and joy

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:22:31 +0000

Dropping perfectionism and embracing purpose and joy Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/07/2025 - 09:22

Pam Moore

CU Boulder alumna Julie Chavez reflects on her new memoir, which chronicles her journey through a mental health crisis to finding a new motto: ‘Be adequate’

When Julie Chavez (Span’00) graduated from the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder with a major in Spanish language and literature, she didn’t see herself becoming an author. As a self-proclaimed “lifelong reader” who blogged for fun, she’d been told many times that she should write a book.

Although flattered, Chavez, who lives in Pleasanton, California, with her husband Mando Chavez, a 1999 CU Boulder graduate, and their two sons, was comfortable in her role as a librarian at her sons’ school. And besides, she says, “I didn’t know what I wanted my story to be.”

CU Boulder alumna Julie Chavez (Span’00) describes learning to advocate for herself and let go of her perfectionist tendencies, embracing the motto “be adequate,” in her memoir Everyone But Myself.

That is, until her story found her.

When anxiety and perfectionism culminated in a debilitating panic attack and a paralyzing sense that she was always falling short no matter how hard she tried, Chavez’s world irrevocably changed.

After navigating many obstacles to accessing mental health services, working with a therapist to put her own proverbial oxygen mask on before tending to her family and finally learning to advocate for herself and let go of her perfectionist tendencies, she emerged with a new motto— “be adequate”—and the idea for the book she needed to write.

Told with humor and honesty, Chavez’s new memoir, Everyone But Myself, released last year and named a Washington Post noteworthy book and a USA Today bestseller, chronicles her journey from the depths of a crushing mental health crisis to a life filled with joy and purpose. Chavez spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to explain the story behind the story.

Question: What motivated you to write Everyone But Myself?

Chavez: I knew that if I was going to write a book, it would have to have value for readers. Even though I loved writing, I didn’t see myself as a fiction writer and I didn’t think I had a story to tell.

But then I had my annual review with my principal. Over the prior year, my mental health had taken a nosedive, and I thanked her for having shared her own struggles with me during that time. Her candor really helped me through what I call my ‘mid-mom crisis’—which I later learned is something that many over-extended working moms struggle with as our elementary grade kids grow into humans who don’t need us intensely as they once did.

She said, ‘That’s what you should write your book about.’ That was when I realized that my story could truly be helpful for someone else.

Question: Who is Everyone But Myself for?

Chavez: I wish it hadn’t taken debilitating anxiety for me to finally understand that my self-care and creating boundaries around my own happiness was not only good, but necessary.

So, I wrote this for all the readers who see themselves in my story. It’s for the perfectionist moms, the anxious moms, the moms who, in trying to do their best for their families, have inadvertently abandoned themselves.

In her memoir Everyone But Myself, CU Boulder alumna Julie Chavez chronicles her journey from the depths of a crushing mental health crisis to a life filled with joy and purpose.

It’s also for all the moms who feel they don’t ‘deserve’ help. I love my life and my family so much. I feel grateful that I get to live a relatively comfortable life. And yet, even with all the privilege I’ve been afforded, I was taken aback at how aggressively and how quickly my mental health declined—and how hard it was to find a therapist when I needed one.

We tend to put our suffering on a ‘sliding scale’ or to minimize it by comparing it to other people’s problems but the truth is, when it’s hard, it’s hard, and it’s OK to ask for help.

Question: What challenges did you encounter on the road to publication?

Chavez: The book you have in your hands is my fourth rewrite. I can’t tell you how many times I asked myself whether it was worth it.

I started writing in the spring of 2019 and by the end of the year I had 30,000 words, which I thought was a book. It wasn’t. Then, I attended a class on publishing, where I learned that without a platform, it would be extremely difficult to find a publisher, particularly for a memoir.

So, I started working with a hybrid publisher, who recommended a rewrite. Meanwhile, [publisher] Zibby Owens’ Book Club published an essay of mine, which was an excerpt from the book, which did really well. Zibby ended up taking me on as one of her first acquisitions, and I parted ways with the hybrid publisher.

Following advice from Zibby’s team, I started a fresh rewrite. Instead of a memoir, it was an essay collection, but it just didn’t work. So now, I had an agent and I was starting with a blank page, which is actually kind of backward. Usually you get an agent once you have a fully written manuscript. I finished that version in December of 2022 and the book was published just over two years later.

Through it all, I had to re-learn the same lesson I learned in the pages of my book—that I had to keep showing up, remember my “why,” and not be too attached to the outcome.

Question: What has surprised you over the course of your publishing journey?

Chavez: There’s been a surprising number of women who have said, ‘You are telling my exact story.’ So many have said that after reading my story, they understand what they’re going through, which has been wonderful.

That was always my hope—that my book could be a friend to them and to open the door to the kinds of conversations we need to have.

But my favorite thing is when someone says they’re giving it to a friend or asks me to sign it for their sister.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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CU Boulder alumna Julie Chavez reflects on her new memoir, which chronicles her journey through a mental health crisis to finding a new motto: ‘Be adequate.’

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