Jim Amidon — My friend and colleague, Joy Castro, a professor in the English Department at Wabash, gave the 27th Annual LaFollette Lecture in the humanities Friday afternoon. Being selected to give the lecture is quite an honor, to say the least.
The lecture was established by the Wabash Board of Trustees to honor their longtime colleague Charles D. LaFollette. The task: to address the relation of a faculty member’s discipline to the humanities, broadly conceived.
With a room full of students, faculty, staff, trustees, and community members, Professor Castro talked about her personal scholarship, life-writing, by which she means memoir and fiction based on the events of her life.
Last summer, she had published her memoir, The Truth Book, and completed a successful book tour and speaking circuit, and found herself at a crossroads. Having spent so much of her recent past honing her skills as a life-writer — and having published her own story — what was she left to do as a writer, as a scholar?
She told the crowd in Salter Concert Hall about her summer in Wyoming on an intense 10-day immersion with graduate students from the University of Utah. There she worked with her friend and fellow writer, Terry Tempest-Williams, to lead a course designed to teach students how to write about themselves in connection with nature and the environment.
While Joy admits to having little real knowledge of the environment, Williams hoped to bring together a group of people representing an assortment of academic disciplines. The way Joy described it, the experience looked closely at the environment through the lens of the liberal arts.
Joy was among those representing the humanities, but as I listened, I kept coming back to the notion of the LaFollette Lecture itself, “the humanities, broadly conceived,” and the way she was assembling science, nature, and writing into a neat package.
The experience appears to have served as a combination of a wake-up call and new direction for Joy Castro’s life and her life-writing.
She discussed her discovery of serotiny, the evolutionary gift that some plants in nature possess.
I had known of the botanical concept, but didn’t know the word or specifically what it meant. The way she explained it, elegantly, of course, is that a serotinous pinecone falls to the ground where it holds its seeds tightly until a forest fire disperses them. Non-serotinous cones release their seeds while still hanging in trees or as they fall to the ground, only to be lifted and placed where the wind takes them.
And some trees, she said, produce both types of cones. Talk about the key to survival: the lodgepole pine is an evolutionary wonder.
At this point in her lecture, though, I began to wonder if she wasn’t going a bit far with the “broadly conceived” aspect of her assignment.
Then, as she does with her moving stories, she brought it home.
“I wondered about a human brand of serotiny, about a kind of tightness or remaining closed to change so that only the most extreme adversities, when our very survival is at stake, can make us open,” she said.
There, last summer in the Grand Tetons, Joy Castro appears to have written a new chapter for her life. There, in one of the most naturally beautiful places on earth, she linked the metaphor of the evolutionarily advanced pinecone to our immediate environment, global warming, social justice, and making change at Wabash College.
Over the last half of her lecture, she imagined a greener, more caring Wabash. She imagined this community opening up to new ideas about how we might do our part to preserve our earth, to strive for peace, to act now instead of when the metaphorical fires are all around us.
She challenged students and faculty to be open to seeds of ideas like revised courses that study a culture’s relationship with nature; opening up the College’s nature park, Allee Woods, to an engaged public; and she even proposed an environmentally friendly student center.
“A problem-solving, opportunity-seeking, multidisciplinary approach to issues of social justice and environmental care is congruent with the way we think about the liberal arts: as multiple lenses, multiple disciplines, multiple ways of knowing, to help us lead good, effective, smart, humane lives,” she said.
Indeed, as I walked away from the lecture, I couldn’t help but think Charles LaFollette would have been proud of Joy Castro, for she carefully linked her own scholarship to the broader humanities, and in doing so imagined a new path for her own life and for Wabash College.
