Department of English Professor Christina Jarvis continues to share Kurt Vonnegut’s social justice and environmental legacies with new audiences.
Since the publication of “Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship,” Dr. Jarvis has been busy doing podcasts, interviews and community events. She’s also found time to contribute to an important archival collection of the Hoosier icon’s high school journalism.
On Jan. 23, Jarvis appeared on Northeast Public Radio’s “The Roundtable,” an award-winning nationally recognized show hosted by acclaimed broadcast journalist Joe Donahue and features news, interviews and in-depth discussions of music, books, arts and culture “to explore the many facets of the human condition with civility, respect and responsibility.” Jarvis was especially honored to speak with Mr. Donahue, who was one of the last journalists to interview Kurt Vonnegut before he died in 2007. To listen to the interview, go online
Jarvis gave a brief reading from and talk on “Lucky Mud & Other Foma” on Jan. 28 at Barker Library in Fredonia. She discussed Vonnegut’s nonfiction writings about vital human communities and place, focusing on his rich but complicated relationship with Barnstable, the quiet village on Cape Cod, where Vonnegut lived with his family and wrote prolifically for nearly two decades.
Also in January, an important archival Vonnegut project Jarvis assisted with was published on archive.org. Principally collected, curated, cataloged, arranged and introduced by Vonnegut scholars M. André Z. Eckenrode and Dan Crocker with Jarvis’s help, “High School Journalist, Promoter, Jester – Kurt Vonnegut In the Shortridge Daily Echo, 1937-1940” provides Vonnegut fans with a 109-page collection of the writer’s earliest publications.
Created in collaboration with Digital Indy, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, and Shortridge High School, the archival collection has already garnered more than 2,000 views in its first weeks.
Most recently, Jarvis’s interview with Chuck Augello, “Citizen Kurt,” was published in “The Daily Vonnegut” on Feb. 14. Laced with Vonnegutian humor and whimsy, the interview provides an overview of the ways “Vonnegut addressed myriad social and environmental problems, from pollution, racial and economic injustice and war to dehumanizing technologies and ecological collapse.”
