This episode was recorded on February 6, 2026

Co-hosts: Fernando Varela, Kat Caribeaux

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Madison Jones, North Woods Project

The North Woods Project (NWP) blends art and science through an immersive multimedia “classroom in the forest” experience for the North Woods—a ~300-acre parcel of unmanaged forests and wetlands on the north part of URI’s campus. Through an open-access digital resource and ongoing research and teaching project, NWP celebrates the North Woods through social, ecological, and creative perspectives.

Madison Jones is an associate professor of science communication, jointly appointed in the departments of Professional & Public Writing and Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island.

Rasheena Fountain, Dropped Down Blues

Dropped Down Blues is a blue speculative fiction and poetry audio-visual project set in Pipers Creek, a 1.4-mile stream located in Carkeek Park in Seattle. It was on view in the “How to Carry Water” exhibit at The Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (PRAx) in 2024.

The project includes nature field recordings, speculative fiction, poetry, and guitar riffs based on fieldnotes, observations, research, and guitar performances during the November 2022 visits to the creek during salmon run. In the summer, Fountain spent time in the studio with a Jack Straw engineer to hone the audio (poetry, speculative fiction, field recordings, and guitar performance) for the project as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.

Rasheena Fountain earned a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MA.Ed. in Urban Environmental Education from Antioch University Seattle in partnership with IslandWood. Fountain has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle, where she is currently a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation focused on blues performance and environmental justice and a climate blues guitar and poetry album.

Radhika Subramaniam, Footprint: Four Itineraries

The book probes the long history of the footprint’s manifestation in the human imagination—testifying to colonialism, imperialism, and suppression but also to desire, persistence, mobility, and of lightness. Exploring why and what it means for our future, it asks if we can yet tread lightly on our world.

Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at The New School, New York. She explores crises and surprises in cities, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships.

Maya Jewell Zeller, Raised by Ferns

Raised by Ferns follows a feral girl born in a gas station, and a middle class educated woman; two of many selves the author inhabits as she navigates academia, motherhood, marriage, and American class systems—finding herself over and over again most at home in wild spaces.

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of several books, including The Wonder of Mushrooms. She teaches writing at Central Washington University and Western Colorado University MFA.