Books

It’s more than just feeling good or bad

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:23:04 +0000

It’s more than just feeling good or bad Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:23

Rachel Sauer

In her recently published book, CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China

In his masterpiece The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chinese monk and court librarian Liu Xie observed, “If we melt away our vital energies and cramp the harmonious flow of our vital breath, then holding the writing tablet will hasten our death, and moistening the brush will hack away at our life.”

This might have been a surprising observation from one of the most eminent writers of his time, but nurturing life has long been central to Chinese thought, says Antje Richter, a �鶹ӰԺ professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. In fact, ideas about health and illness significantly shaped the literature and culture of the early Chinese medieval era—about 200 CE to 600 CE. And Liu Xie, who was mainly concerned with writers of literature, may have been the first to present advice about writers’ and knowledge workers’ occupational health.

CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Antje Richter is a professor of Chinese whose research focus includes early medieval Chinese literature.

In her recent book Health and the Art of Living: Illness Narratives in Early Medieval Chinese Literature, Richter explores how themes of health and illness are woven through the literature of the era, from informal letters between friends to sacred texts and the highly regarded genre of sickbed poetry.

“We as humans are not either healthy or unhealthy,” Richter says. “We are constantly adapting to new states of our body. This is interesting to me as a challenge that we are all facing in one way or the other. And it's not a binary; it's a graduated scale that's constantly evolving.

“In one of the chapters, I write about Sima Qian, the father of Chinese historiography, who was famously emasculated as corporal punishment but chose not to end his life, as was expected of him, but continued working on The Records of the Historian. He didn’t die of the punitive mutilation he suffered, but he coped. He finished this groundbreaking historical work, and everybody in China knows him and his story because we also have one of the letters he wrote. So, I use his example to say adaptation to new states of health is possible and that in the literature of this time we have a very nuanced understanding of what it means to be healthy or well.”

Discovering narratives of health and illness

Richter, whose research focus is the early medieval era in China, came upon this significant theme in Chinese literature while writing her previous book, Letters and Epistolary Culture in Medieval China.

“We have thousands of letters transmitted from that period, and among those letters there was a good portion that mentioned illness, and I found it quite interesting,” Richter explains. “There’s one celebrated calligrapher, Wang Xizhi, and much of what he wrote was transmitted and not thrown away. Even if he wrote, ‘I have terrible diarrhea,’ that letter was preserved.”

During her time researching that book, Richter collaborated with a longtime friend in �鶹ӰԺ, Charles “Chip” Chace, who was a Chinese medicine practitioner, to unlock those letters of Wang Xizhi that deal with illness.

Richter’s research of Wang Xizhi’s letters led her, in 2011, to apply for a grant to study for a semester at the Needham Research Institute, which was founded by famed sinologist and historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham.

“This was when I realized, oh, it’s not only letters that have these illness narratives, but also biographies and poetry and religious texts and stories,” Richter says.

“It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” says Antje Richter.

Richter points to the painting on the cover of her book to describe her main intentions in writing it. The painting, held in the Smithsonian’s collection, shows the beloved early medieval poet Tao Qian—also known as Tao Yuanming—being carried in a basket because he was suffering from a foot illness and could not walk on his own. This detail of Tao Qian’s life is reported in early biographies, and in later centuries became popular in painting as well.

Richter says that to her mind, this episode shows that illness sits right in the middle of life and in the middle of Chinese literature and culture—and that she wanted to emphasize this fact and to help connect medieval Chinese studies to the global medical humanities.

How to live

Surviving texts of the literature of early medieval China, including letters, indicate that openly discussing topics of health or illness carried little or no taboo in certain genres, such as letters, Richter says, while high-register poetry only alluded to mundane or graphic physical aspects of life.

Further, Richter believes that the growing esteem of the literary genre of sickbed poetry in medieval China was inspired by Buddhism, particularly the Vimalakirti Sutra, a Buddhist text expounding on ideas of emptiness and the appearances of the world as mere illusions.

Several chapters of the Vimalakirti Sutra are set at the sickbed of a lay Buddhist, who feigns illness so people will come to his bedside and he can preach.

“Then, he and the visitors that come to his sickbed have conversations about, oh, this body is like a bit of foam that cannot be grasped, this body is like a cloud which changes and disappears in an instant, and Chinese poets were very inspired by that,” Richter says. “So, we have this genre of sickbed poetry that first only reflects on the joys of sick leave and the company of friends during this time, but later also on illnesses that ravaged the body and the illusion of existence, the temporariness of our existence.”

Richter notes that while a significant body of illness narratives from the early medieval era have survived, they generally are the narratives of wealthy and connected men. Despite these limitations, Richter says, illness narratives wove with common threads of human experience.

She says she hopes that readers will come away from the book with a strong sense of the lived reality in the Chinese Middle Ages. “It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” she says.

“We share many of their concerns: how easy it is to overwork ourselves, how there are points in our lives and biographies where health and illness take center stage, how we are looking for a way to accept illness as part of the human condition. Trying to empathize across centuries and cultures is a good way to practice other types of empathy as well.”

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In her recently published book, CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China.

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Top illustration: Scene of poet Tao Qian being carried from scroll "The Lotus Society." (Illustration: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art)

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:12:18 +0000

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/21/2026 - 10:12

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology

Ponding the plethora of introductory texts on Old Norse mythology, Mathias Nordvig had an epiphany.

“There are so many set up like dictionaries of myth, so you can look up (the god) Odin, you look up Asgard,” home of the Norse gods, says Nordvig, associate teaching professor in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures at the �鶹ӰԺ. “I realized there wasn’t really a book that introduces Old Norse mythology from the vantage point of the literature itself, the sources. I wanted people to know the texts and stories where we get this information.”

Mathias Nordvig is an associate teaching professor in the CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures.

The results of that epiphany — and a lot of hard work — have just been published: Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (Routledge, 2026; 166 pages with black-and-white illustrations).

Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic, presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology: the Poetic Edda, a collection of alliterative verse and narrative poems recorded by anonymous authors based on centuries of oral and written tradition; and the Prose Edda, an assemblage of tales written by the Icelandic Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE.

He describes the Poetic Edda as “complicated,” due to its origins as a collection of verse remembered and composed by unknown authors from verse from ancient folk material — “grand poem” about such things as Odin challenging a giant about wisdom, the creation story and Ragnarök, a kind of Old Norse apocalypse — and subsequently assembled as a single work.

“When they were written down, they were already centuries old. They were reinterpreted and misunderstood in the later context,” says Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. “They are written in different meters and different translators made different choices.”

One poem, “Hindla’s Song,” taken from a book that includes the tales of Viking travel to North America — Christopher Columbus was centuries behind it turns out — is one of the few works in which the female deity Freya “does the walking and talking,” Nordvig says. It recounts the story of Óttarr, who summons Freya to help him identify his ancestry to win an inheritance. She turns him into a boar and rides to the underworld to retrieve the sorceress and seer Hindla, and the two women recount his pedigree in detail.

“Óttarr just happens to be related to every famous Viking that ever existed,” Nordvig says.

In Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Mathias Nordvig presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology.

He cites “The Song of Hárbard” as a favorite. In the tale, Thor and a snarky ferryman who just might be the hero’s father Odin in disguise, “have a kind of rap battle,” he says. They trade barbs and boasts about their respective sexual and magical feats as they traverse a flood-swollen river.

“It’s hilarious,” Nordvig says. “There are some wonderful insults in there.”

He describes Snorri’s Edda, as the Prose is also known, as a “more comprehensive presentation of Old Norse mythology to go to when you want to know something or look it up.”

The historian and politician Snorri wrote from his 13^th-century Christian perspective, so he is at pains to inform readers that he doesn’t really believe this stuff. In one section, he shores his position with a frame story in which the gods are merely humans duping a foolish king of Sweden.

“The other is the same kind of setting, only everyone is really drunk,” Nordvig says. “That was the only way he could present the stories.”

Snorri quotes from poems unknown in any other source, and modern scholarship has found that Snorri didn’t always get it right.

“There is this famous idea that Odin the god-king and warrior-king is accompanied by two ravens and two wolves. But he based that on his own extravagant interpretation of poetry. There is no mention of ravens and wolves closely connected to Odin,” he says.

Nordvig also notes that there is crossover between Old Norse mythology and material from the British Isles and Ireland, where Vikings raided and established settlements for 300 years, beginning in the late 8^th century.

“Some of that old Irish charm, the old English charm, shows up in western Norway,” he says.

While published as a textbook, Nordvig says he also wrote with lay readers in mind.

“I tried to make it as accessible as possible, somewhere between academic and popular language,” he says. “I’m trying to open it up for readers, to scratch the surface off and present this wealth of fascinating, sometimes confusing, information.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology.

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Top image: "Der letzte Kampf" by Johannes Gehrts, 1888

The weather’s hot, the books are cool

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:31:07 +0000

The weather’s hot, the books are cool Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/03/2026 - 15:31

There’s still plenty of time to dive into a summer reading list, and College of Arts and Sciences authors can meet every reading mood

Friends, it’s hot out—don’t-touch-the-steering-wheel, try-to-fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot, with scant relief in the forecast.

It’s the sort of weather that calls for a hammock in the shade and a good book. So, even though we’re well into summer and perhaps starting to think about heading back to school, it’s not too late to dive into a summer reading list.

If you’re looking for some recommendations to see you through the rest of summer, the College of Arts and Sciences can help. Our faculty and alumni have written books that cater to a fascinating range of interests—from Roman temple robbery to a middle school student trying to figure things out to an exploration of Colorado’s eeriest places.

So, what are you in the mood to read?

Reading vibe: Creepy but make it Colorado

Suggestion: Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural, by Jack Daly, a lecturer in the �鶹ӰԺ Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Daly explores all things supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in the Centennial State. Beyond simply organizing these legends in one volume, Daly also grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado.

Reading vibe: Thinking about the Roman Empire

Suggestion: Stealing from the Gods, by Isabel Köster, a �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of classics whose research focus is the history, religion and literature of the Roman Republic and the early Empire.

Ancient Romans often plundered temples in their wars of conquest—sometimes openly and with astonishing scale. Large statues and famous works of art were carried away from foreign lands to Rome, treasuries were emptied and sacred spaces were stripped bare.

Yet, despite how frequently these robberies occurred, Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

Reading vibe: Remembering forgotten histories of choice and liberal religion

Suggestion: God Bless the Pill, by Samira Mehta, a �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

It's time to remember the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

Reading vibe: The "A" in AI could also stand for "art"

Suggestion: Lily in a Codebox, by Lee Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the �鶹ӰԺ.

In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in �鶹ӰԺ’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.

"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.

Reading vibe: Feeling like a mango

Suggestion: Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel by Katheryn Lumsden, a �鶹ӰԺ molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Pieplow says it was important to them to write a book that was realistic and relatable: The parents may be occasionally clueless, but they want what’s best for their kids. The teachers and administrators at the school are supportive, and the other kids may be squirrelly sometimes, but they’re otherwise normal, decent kids.

“I grew up in �鶹ӰԺ and my husband and I are raising our kids in �鶹ӰԺ, and the parents here are fantastic, but sometimes there can be this feeling of life or death if you don’t do well (in school),” Lumsden says. “There isn’t a lot of room to fail, and people sometimes won’t even say the word ‘fail’ to kids. But it’s important that kids know sometimes they’ll fail and it’s not the end of the world.”

Reading vibe: Gloriously alive

Suggestion: How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, by Megan O'Grady, an assistant professor in art and art history and a former art critic at The New York Times.

“I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field," O'Grady says. "I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

Additionally, she contends, art “provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society. It enacts transfers of energy, joy and defiance. It suggests new forms of connection and belonging.”

Reading vibe: More reading, please

Suggestion: The Novel Experience, by Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature.

Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” he says.

Reading vibe: Science can happen anywhere!

Suggestion: A Life of Science—In Gyms!, a memoir by Doug Seals, a distinguished professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology who chronicles more than four decades in biomedical research.

Imagine a biomedical research laboratory. Chances are, visions of gleaming equipment, climate-controlled rooms, and the hum of precision instruments come to mind.

But what if that lab was really a century-old gymnasium plagued by electrical outages, noise and temperatures that swing with the seasons? Those are just some of the challenges Doug Seals faced while establishing one of the most productive aging research programs in the country.

Reading vibe: Walking through the garden

Suggestion: The Garden, a work of poetry by Julie Carr, professor of English and creative writing and chair of women and gender studies.

Questions of what to do about violence and the spiritual paralysis it can cause let Julie Carr down wandering paths of mystical tradition, of memories of her uncle, of dreams of fire in the dry Colorado grass, of imaginings like fragments of broken glass. And she arrived at The Garden, her recently published book that weaves fractured narratives into reoriented themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

Reading vibe: A road trip through memory

Suggestion: Music for Leaving, a novel by Erika Randall, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance

Meet Eleanor Murphy: She's 61 and on a road trip of reconciliation and reclamation across I-70, a small duffle bag and her childhood hopeless chest of failed dreams beside her on the seat of a 1960s Dodge truck.

On a journey to connect with her sister and her estranged daughter, Eleanor considers themes of longing, relief and hope—sometimes given voice through items she connects with like a peach pit, her engagement ring and a dashboard hula dancer. Along the way, she learns that though leaving is often seen as failure, sometimes it is its own superpower.

Keep reading!

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There’s still plenty of time to dive into a summer reading list, and College of Arts and Sciences authors can meet every reading mood.

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How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:29:25 +0000

How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/15/2026 - 16:29

Clint Talbott

CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos

When it comes to art, your heart is as important as your brain. This is what Megan O’Grady feels.

She should know. O’Grady, assistant professor in art and art history at the �鶹ӰԺ, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year.

A former art critic at The New York Times, O’Grady calls the book “unusual and risky,” but the gamble seems to have paid off. The New Yorker chose it as one of the best books of 2026 thus far, and it has received a starred Kirkus review. Art and literary publications, from Hyperallergic to The Yale Review, have covered it, and a wide range of readers have found her approach to art “resonant in their own lives.”

Megan O'Grady, assistant professor of art and art history at CU �鶹ӰԺ, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year. (Photo: Thorsten Trimpop)

The book focuses on five works of art, which frame, reflect or distill chapters in her own life. She quotes the artist Barbara Kruger, who defined art as “the ability, through visual, verbal, gestural and musical means, to objectify one’s experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”

O’Grady concurs, saying: “I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field. I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

O’Grady is a critic and essayist and has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and Vogue.

Recently, she answered questions from Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. Her responses follows:

Question: How can a regular person have greater appreciation for art? Are there steps one could take?

O’Grady: In my view, your appreciation of art is no more or less refined as mine or anyone else’s. My book directly challenges the idea that one must be an expert to enjoy art, and I’m skeptical of approaches to art that feel precious or exclusionary. Part of being human is to look for meaning in life—and art is one mode of seeking.

How It Feels to Be Alive models a mode of looking at art as an intimate encounter, one that deploys—in my experience, anyway—not instantaneously, but over time, in different seasons of life: as teenager trying to figure out who I was, or in moments of loss—after the end of a long relationship, or after losing my home and everything I owned in a freak accident.

Art helped me think through becoming a parent, and the awareness that I had deeply implicated myself in our broken world. It changed the way I think about the natural world and the invisible histories written into the landscape. It made me look very clearly at people with very different experiences of American life than my own, and it challenged me to deal with some of my own unresolved feelings about all sorts of things: creating a home, the unconscious shame I had about my body, about materialism and guilt.

I’ve always been interested in art’s capacity to make us feel things, to challenge the way we see ourselves understand the world around us. This, to me, is why we need art—in any form, be it visual art, music, literature—and why we come to it seeking answers or solace or self-recognition or things we can't put into words.

Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973, cibachrome print. (Courtesy of Nan Goldin and Gagosian)

We live in an era that both fears and devalues art, that often treats it as a commodity, an artifact to categorize by medium and period, or to instrumentalize in displays of political dominance. I’m especially concerned by characterizations of art as elitist, decorative or superfluous, and we can already see the result of our educational systems’ deprioritizing of the arts and humanities in declining creative and critical-thinking skills.

We look at art with the same eyes we do everything else. What are you attracted to and why? Is there more to be learned from other works by a particular artist, or about the artists and the times they were responding to? Art is entirely subjective: It hits us all differently depending on where we’re at in life, our experiences and interests.

I encourage readers to seek out the art in their midst—this is what I try to do, anyway. Build it into your life; get on mailing lists. For those interested in visual art who live in the �鶹ӰԺ area, the MFA show at CU Art Museum is a great place to see emerging artists addressing the issues of our time. There are exceptional art institutions as well as alternative art spaces across the country.

Question: Your book has elements of a memoir and elements of art criticism. In taking this approach, you share portions of your life that range from joy and pain and points in between. Can you talk about how such open introspection might help the reader understand art better—or feel it more fully?

O’Grady: Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power. As an art critic for The New York Times, I found myself listening to artists’ stories, many of them intensely personal, and reflecting on everything that had led up to the creation of these charged objects we see in museums and galleries. The artists had risked a lot to make the work they did, and their trust in me was humbling. I began to think of the other side of the equation—what impact art had had in my own life, and what I was risking in my work as a critic.

Things were heating up in the world—a global pandemic, a turn toward fascist politics, race and gender-based violence—and I began thinking more about why we should care about things like art in times that often feel chaotic and cruel. Because I did care, even though so many things about our culture leads us to cultivate cynicism and self-interest. Being honest about these things is a risk; truth-telling is a risk. Because art both exposes and asserts cultural values, it can really upset people.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963, gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 6 ft. 3 in. × 6 ft. 3 in. (190.5 × 190.5 cm). Gift of Celeste and Armand P. Bartos. (© Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

These are the tensions that inspired me to write the book and that guided its structure. Honestly, we should all be taking risks right now.

Question: If a student asked you to list five works of art that conveyed how it feels to be alive, how would you answer?

O’Grady: We all have to find the answer to this for themselves. How It Feels to Be Alive tackles recurring themes in my life and in the lives of some of the artists I’ve known.

In the chapter on Agnes Martin, I’m thinking about connection and isolation, and the impact our friends have on us. A chapter that begins with Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” leads me consider the complexity of seeing oneself clearly when we’re so busy being seen. Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Body),” which kicks off chapter 3, was one of the first works of art that led me to understand what it meant to have a critical perspective on the world, and later, as a parent to a daughter, to confront my own internalized misogyny.

The great performance artist Pope.L, with whom I traveled to Flint, Michigan, to do a project involving the tainted water—we bottled and sold it as a Pope.L-branded art object to raise money for the people of Flint—challenged my uneasy feelings about home as troubling national or personal identity, the subject of chapter 4. The last chapter is about environmental artists and how they reframe our position on Earth, anchored by the largely overlooked land artist and monumental sculptor Beverly Pepper.

These are the major themes, but within each chapter, they become more complex, involving other artists and works. And they are certainly not the only themes in life—the book doesn’t try to be comprehensive. That would be impossible. Rather, it seeks to model a way of looking at art, encouraging others to seek out their own works of art in any form that are meaningful to them.

Question: You mentioned that you love your students, who are “less interested in making a mark than in leaving no trace,” a great line. Your writing (and good writing generally) is also a form of art. Do your students appreciate that, particularly in the TikTok era? Do you have a sense of this?

O’Grady: They all see reading and writing as essential to their creative process. My graduate students, MFA candidates in arts practices who are learning where they fit into larger conversations about representation and politics, use writing to refine the conceptual elements of their visual practice—that is, to better grasp and articulate a strong point of view, which involves a great deal of reflection and critique. We’re all asking ourselves what’s important in this moment in time in which our attention is fragmented and monetized and so much of what used to connect us feels broken.

Most of the artists I teach and write about in the book—Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, Arthur Jafa, Trevor Paglen, Robert Adams, Imani Jaqueline Brown and Carrie Mae Weems, just to name a few—use text or narrative extensively in their art and/or have a writing practice complementary to their visual work.

Question: Beverly Pepper’s art, which forms the basis of a chapter in your book, was criticized with sexist tropes, but it reflects (or punctuates) the monumental scale of the landscape and the cosmos. Perhaps this question is outside the realm of how it feels to be alive, but your recounting of this episode spurs a question about how it feels to be a female artist in a male-dominated world. Or, more generally, how it feels to create art that is the “deeply rooted understory.”

O’Grady: Part of what thrills me about being a critic is looking at a single work of art over time and thinking about how it can reveal tremendous cultural shifts, and personal ones.

Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power.

Pepper’s story, for me, is very much about how it felt to be alive as a discredited or overlooked artist—one who was making work that was by any measure groundbreaking and radical. It is dehumanizing not to be recognized for one’s work because of the body one is born into.

In the last chapter, I play with the idea of the anomaly—in art history, but also in the cosmos. Humans always center themselves, but what if, as Pepper and other artists have done, we centered the land instead, reframing our perspective? What if we are the anomalies? This is what art and art criticism does best: reframe and challenge our assumptions.

Pepper’s anomalousness is but one example of the many people left out of art’s dominant narratives. Art history is a set of stories that are continually being rewritten, in part because so many people were left out of previous drafts, or because considerations of their work were so essentializing. In the book, I argue that it is impossible to make art or behold it separately from the conditions of its making and beholding.

Question: In the chapter “Forces of Nature,” you ruminate on the landscape of Colorado, suggesting that remarking on its humbling effect is “cliché.” Can an observation or feeling that might be called a cliché be expressed in a way that is not cliché?

O’Grady: I certainly hope so! Art/literature/music show us this time and again—that the things others have experienced before us have the capacity to compel us anew via the human imagination. Life, at the end of the day, is a cliché. Behind human is a cliché. It has all been felt before—this is part of what makes art capable of transcending time and place—and yet there will always be more to think, to see, to say.

Question: You offer an extended meditation on Agnes Martin’s Friendship, particularly by the suggestion to approach her work “as you would cross an empty beach to look at an ocean.” That seems to suggest that we should have an emotional and intellectual receptivity?

O’Grady: Those are Martin’s words, not mine. She articulated this as an ideal—an ambition for her work. She was reaching the peak of her powers just as conceptual art, with its theories and manifestos, was beginning to dominate the conversation. Martin, who found solace in Christian and Buddhist thinkers, wanted something less intellectual from her work: to induce a particular feeling of infinitude, humility, wonderment and vastness in spectators.

In my book, I return a few times to Martin’s image of crossing the beach to look over the ocean. In her life, Martin had the experience more than once of coming metaphorically to the edge of the shore, or precipice, in her life—as, perhaps, we all have, in our own ways, when we’re at loose ends. It is both exhilarating and terrifying to look into the great beyond, and she confronted this to a degree that perhaps no artist has before or since.

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CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos.

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Claes Oldenburg, American, born in Sweden (1929–2022); Coosje van Bruggen, American, born in the Netherlands (1942–2009). Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint, 230 9/16 × 191 7/8 in. (585.6 × 487.4 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. (© Estate of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Image courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Digital Production & Preservation)

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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

‘Every novel is an experience’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:30:51 +0000

‘Every novel is an experience’ Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:30

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the �鶹ӰԺ.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers.

In his new book The Novel Experience (Cornell University Press, 2026), Müller-Sievers follows the lead of three thinkers with “radical” notions about experience—the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna;19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James; and19th-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche—and draws on his own experiences of reading.

“Fewer and fewer people are taking literature courses. We foolishly try to counter this loss by emphasizing what kind of knowledge students get from reading,” he says. “Because we are so focused on knowledge, we eliminate and, in a sense, prohibit the expression of the experience of reading novels.”

What was it like to read the book?

Rather than presenting a novel as something to be interpreted and or critically examined, the idea is to encourage readers to observe and communicate what it was actually like to read the book: Why did they choose the book? How difficult was it? How long did it take? Under what conditions—place, time, surroundings—did they read the book? Were they drawn to or distanced from the different characters? Did they enjoy it? Did anything stick with them when finished? How did the protagonist’s experience relate to their own?

In emphasizing knowledge to the exclusion of experience, the Western academy has promoted “an atrophied, mutilated sense of what experience is,” Müller-Sievers says. “We think there is a self . . . that is predicated on a division between the experiencer and what is experienced. James, Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche are radical critics of that idea.”

“The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers.

Where Western thought from time immemorial has argued that there exist stable, individual human “selves” that go through life almost as if watching a movie, distinct from their own experiences, Buddhist thought argues that separation between consciousness and experience is a delusion.

Müller-Sievers doesn’t dispute that there is knowledge to be found in literature or that it requires knowledge to understand and teach it in certain ways. But focusing almost exclusively on knowledge ignores the primary motivations most people who read novels: experience and entertainment.

“When people who are not academics read a book, they are not primarily interested in knowledge, but rather in partaking of an experience,” he says. “The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human.”

Müller-Sievers sees no contradiction in reading for both knowledge and experience and argues that sharing the experiences of reading with others increases interest and enjoyment.

“So, rather than say, ‘Hey, let’s learn about Thomas Mann,’ it’s ‘Hey, let’s talk about the experience of reading about an experience. We can find common language that makes it exciting,” he says.

Müller-Sievers also sees reading for experience as a “civic virtue.” Humans can never have the experiences of another in the real world, but they can by reading novels. Reading novels can help students become more aware of their singular distinctness from others and their experiences.

And at a time when artificial-intelligence continues to insinuate its way into nearly every aspect of modern life, he detects a clear, inviolable distinction between human and machine intelligence.

“Only humans can have experiences. AI can only imitate experiences by looking back. It always looks back; it has to look back,” he says. “There is no way to distinguish between human and AI knowledge. But we can distinguish between deep human experience and the retroactive intelligence of AI.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels.

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Top photo: Bhautik Patel/Unsplash

Is it temple robbery? That depends on who is doing the taking

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:15:43 +0000

Is it temple robbery? That depends on who is doing the taking Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/18/2026 - 13:15

Bradley Worrell

New book from CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame

That contradiction lies at the heart of Stealing from the Gods, the new book by Isabel Köster, a �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of classics whose research focus is the history, religion and literature of the Roman Republic and the early Empire. Her book, which has its origins in her PhD dissertation, examines how Roman authors thought about sacred theft, imperial power and moral character.

Isabel Köster, a CU �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of classics, notes that calling someone a temple robber became the ultimate character assassination in ancient Rome.

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Köster discussed who was doing the robbing, explaining why temples were such tempting targets and why calling someone a temple robber became the ultimate character assassination in ancient Rome. Her comments have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: How common was temple robbery? Also, who was doing the taking and where was it happening?

Köster: In military contexts, it seems to have been fairly common. However, it was usually not labeled ‘temple robbery’ unless a Roman author wanted to emphasize a character flaw. For everyday thefts—small amounts of money or objects disappearing from sanctuaries—we know very little; our sources simply aren’t interested in that kind of activity.

These weren’t small, anonymous thieves. They were generals, governors and emperors.

Most cases took place in conquered or soon‑to‑be‑conquered territories, especially in Greece and Asia Minor. The few instances we have in Rome itself are associated with periods of civil war.

Question: Why plunder temples?

Köster: In many ancient communities, sanctuaries were essentially the equivalent of banks today. They were often the most heavily fortified places in a town, with solid walls and impressive doors. They were used to store valuables that belonged to the community, such as treasuries, and also private valuables that individuals entrusted to the gods. If you didn’t want to keep something at home, one option was to bring it to a sanctuary and ask the deity to look after it.

So, if you’re conquering territory and need money quickly, temples are a very natural place to go. Especially during long, expensive campaigns far from Rome, some temple plundering was probably inevitable. That’s simply a reality of the economics of ancient warfare.

What’s interesting is how Roman sources frame this. They ask, first of all, who is doing the plundering? If it’s a general with an impeccable reputation who claims to be acting for the good of Rome—funding further war and later returning treasures for public display—then that’s considered acceptable. Nobody criticizes those cases.

But if the person involved already has a reputation for greed or moral failings and is clearly enriching himself, then the same behavior is treated as temple robbery. This distinction allows Roman authors to frame standard warfare practices as fine while isolating blame onto particular individuals.

Question: What kinds of objects were typically taken from temples?

Köster: Generally, the more spectacular, the better. We’re talking about giant statues, large amounts of coinage and especially famous works of art. In some extreme cases, particularly greedy individuals went much further—breaking decorations off doors or removing parts of statues they couldn’t transport. But in general, Roman armies had the logistics to move large items and they took advantage of that.

Despite how frequently temple robberies occurred, ancient Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

Question: What happened to the plunder once it was taken?

Köster: Some of it was melted down on the spot to generate revenue and pay soldiers. Other objects—especially famous artworks—were selected to be transported back to Rome for triumphs and public display. How those decisions were made and how much was lost is something we simply don’t know.

Question: Was temple plundering technically illegal under Roman law?

Köster: Often, no. Roman law was quite clear on this point: If a sanctuary was not located in Roman territory and its possessions had not been formally consecrated by the Roman people, then legally speaking, taking from it was not considered a temple robbery. A sanctuary in a territory that Rome was about to conquer didn’t necessarily count as a properly sacred space from a Roman legal perspective.

That’s one of the reasons the moral outrage in the literary sources is so interesting. There’s a real disconnect between what was legally permissible and what ancient authors chose to condemn.

Question: If plundering from temples in foreign lands was typically legal, what qualified as temple robbery in Roman eyes?

Köster: That’s the key question, and the answer is: Who did the taking? When Roman authors decide whether something counts as temple robbery, they don’t usually start by asking what was taken or where. They ask who was responsible?

If the person plundering was seen as morally upright and claimed to be acting for the benefit of Rome—funding campaigns, returning treasures for public display—then the act was framed as acceptable.

But if the person already had a questionable reputation, then the exact same behavior became reprehensible. Calling someone a temple robber is character assassination. It’s a way of saying this person is greedy, impious and unfit for power.

Question: How does that distinction help Romans think about their empire more broadly?

Köster: It’s a very clever rhetorical move. Roman imperial conquests inevitably involved violence and the destruction of sacred spaces, but Roman authors didn’t want to portray the entire system as flawed. By framing temple robbery as the failure of a few bad individuals, they could acknowledge harm without accepting collective responsibility.

Thus, it’s not a problem with Roman warfare, according to this logic. It’s a problem with isolated people who can’t behave themselves.

Question: The Roman statesman, philosopher and lawyer Cicero plays a big role in your book. Why are his speeches about temple robbery so important?

Köster: You can’t study temple robbery without Cicero’s speeches against Verres, the former governor of Sicily. Temple robbery is not part of the formal charges against Verres, which focus on corruption, but Cicero devotes enormous attention to attacks on temples because he felt they strengthened his argument.

Cicero clearly felt that these stories helped his case. The logic is: If someone is capable of violating sacred spaces so badly, then of course he’s capable of embezzlement and corruption. Verres becomes the benchmark against which all other temple robbers are measured.

Question: You state in your book that temple robbers become almost caricatures in Roman literature. What do those caricatures look like?

Köster: They’re remarkably consistent. A temple robber is never just someone who steals from temples. They are also accused of murder, torture, illegal enslavement and all kinds of brutality.

"In Rome, accusations of temple robbery were less about protecting the gods and more about defining who belonged and who didn’t."

But what’s really interesting is how often these figures fail at basic ‘Roman-ness.’ They can’t give a good speech. They don’t know how to host a dinner party properly. They dress inappropriately and don’t know how to behave in elite social settings. Despite reaching the top of society, they’re portrayed as outsiders to Roman culture.

Question: Based on available historical records, how many Romans were convicted of temple robbery? Also, what punishments did they face?

Köster: We have no robust evidence for prosecutions for temple robbery—sacrilegium in Latin—during the period I study, nor do we have definitions of the crime or discussions of penalties. In later Christian sources, where sacrilegium signifies a broad range of crimes that diminish the sacred status of someone or something (e.g., blasphemy or insulting the emperor), it is a capital offense. Here it merits the most horrific penalties that the Roman world has to offer, such as throwing people to wild animals for public entertainment. But in pre-Christian Rome, at least in the sources that survive, accusations of temple robbery are not a legal charge, but supporting evidence in other cases.

Question: What roles do the gods themselves play in these Roman narratives? Do they ever punish temple robbers?

Köster: Sometimes. There are dramatic stories of divine punishment: People struck dead, afflicted with disease—even losing their hands while trying to plunder a sanctuary. But those stories are surprisingly rare.

Most of the time, temple robbers get away with it. That raised big questions for me about ancient ideas of divine justice and the reliability of gods as protectors of their own property, which will be the focus of my next major project.

Question: If readers could take one or two ideas away from your book, what would they be?

Köster: That when we encounter moral outrage in ancient sources, we should ask what that work is doing. In Rome, accusations of temple robbery were less about protecting the gods and more about defining who belonged and who didn’t. The first question to ask isn’t ‘what happened?’ It’s ‘who is being accused?’

At its heart, this is a book about insults. And insults tell us what a culture values.

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New book from CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame.

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Top image: "The Triumph of Aemilius Paulus" by Carle Vernet, 1789

Telling stories of The Garden

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:12:42 +0000

Telling stories of The Garden Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/13/2026 - 16:12

Rachel Sauer

In recently published book The Garden, CU �鶹ӰԺ poet Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief

Paradise is only ever a thought.

Julie Carr pauses for a moment, remembering what led her to The Garden. It was 2021, and there had been several shootings at or near Denver’s East High School—one in the building, one in front of it and one half a block away. Carr’s daughter was a student there at the time.

Carr had written about shootings before, attempting through poetry to understand the incomprehensible, but that wasn’t the topic she wanted to focus on this time.

CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief in her book The Garden.

“Of course it was terrifying and tragic and awful, but I was feeling, as many people are feeling right now, this kind of block against what to do,” explains Carr, professor of English and creative writing and chair of women and gender studies at the �鶹ӰԺ. “We protested, we’d written laws . . . but everything felt like a dead end.

“In that moment, I had a friend say, ‘You’re not just having a political problem here, you’re having a spiritual crisis.’ It’s this question of what do we do with violence? What do we do with our feelings of paralysis?”

Those questions led her down wandering paths of mystical tradition, of memories of her uncle, of dreams of fire in the dry Colorado grass, of imaginings like fragments of broken glass. And she arrived at The Garden, her recently published book that weaves fractured narratives into reoriented themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

In the end, as at the beginning, I just wanted to think about the woman smoking on the planter’s edge.

If she can point to a beginning, it was when she began reading the writing of 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. What she found in her reading was unsettling, “in this way in which the questions that we have are the questions humans have always had—questions with no answers, questions about the origins of evil, questions about what it means to be part of a community. But it was helpful to write in conversation with this central medieval thinker.”

On a parallel path to these questions with no answers was Carr’s longtime passion for theoretical physics, which grew during her undergraduate education studying with the philosopher and feminist physicist Karen River Barad. Carr began seeing similarities between the world of thought embedded in quantum field theory and the worlds of thought embedded in Jewish mysticism—“this sense that the world is not as it seems, that there are multiple ways of knowing,” she says.

“I’m interested in different ways of writing: a narrative mode, a more philosophical mode and a more lyrical mode, and how these different approaches can circle around some of the same concerns, the same histories, the same unanswerable questions,” says Julie Carr. (Back cover of The Garden showing artwork by Tony Robbin)

She thought of her uncle, the artist Tony Robbin, who was fascinated with the ideas of four-dimensional space and geometry, which is and isn’t a real thing, Carr explains. The fourth dimension is a mathematical concept that can be played out in the world of math and the world of computer-generated imagery, “even though when we look at the world there’s no fourth spatial dimension that we can see,” she says.

Since the early 19th century, mathematicians and philosophers have theorized about the fourth dimension, ideas that held equal fascination for Cubists like Picasso and other European modernist artists.

“They were interested in the idea of fourth-dimensional space for the same reason I became interested in Maimonides or River Barad was interested in quantum field theory: When you accept quantum theory or 4-D, you begin to understand that empirical reality is only one version of this universe.

“These modernist poets and painters who were interested in the fourth dimension, it gave them a sense of the possible. If you’re looking at (Guillaume) Apollinaire coming out of World War I, writing about `the beyond of this earth’ (in the poem ‘War’), or at Tony (Robbin) trying to describe fourth-dimensional geometry to me over and over when I was a child, you can sense the dynamism, which is so alive in his paintings. They just evoke an endlessness of possibility.”

Once, twice, dozens of times throughout my late-cold-war childhood, my uncle, the painter of the fourth dimension, had stood before me in the fluorescent light of his studio speaking of the universal failure to perceive things as they really were.

It quickly became clear as Carr wrote into these themes that she was writing in multiple different ways—memories of bombs falling that weren’t hers but felt like they were. Holocaust histories pressed against the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pressed against the Gaza war. Strange images, such as a finger tracing the edge of an oxygen tent, a scholar wearing a stained red sweater, her friend the arborist asking her, as they walk toward “a tree blooming bedspread pink,” whether she ever hears ghost stories. Not all of these images could appear in one book.

“It became the idea of writing a trilogy,” Carr says, explaining how The Garden is the first of three, the second of which, Turning, will be released next year. “I’m interested in different ways of writing: a narrative mode, a more philosophical mode and a more lyrical mode, and how these different approaches can circle around some of the same concerns, the same histories, the same unanswerable questions.”

But it seemed to me then and seems to me now that the best books are the ones that are never done. Even if bound and published, even if lauded and canonized, the greatest books carry a sense of incompletion. More: a sense of having been abandoned.

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In recently published book The Garden, CU �鶹ӰԺ poet Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

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Top image: "Lobofour" by Tony Robbin, 1982

Scholar exercised science muscles in the gym

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:36:25 +0000

Scholar exercised science muscles in the gym Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/11/2026 - 10:36

Cody DeBos

In new memoir, senior aging researcher Doug Seals chronicles the work of science when conditions aren’t ideal

Imagine a biomedical research laboratory. Chances are, visions of gleaming equipment, climate-controlled rooms and the hum of precision instruments come to mind.

Seals, a distinguished professor in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Integrative Physiology, recently published a memoir chronicling more than four decades in biomedical research. In his own words, the book isn’t all about the science; it’s also about what it takes to succeed when conditions aren’t in your favor.

Doug Seals, a distinguished professor in the CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of Integrative Physiology, recently published a memoir chronicling more than four decades in biomedical research.

An unlikely scientist

Seals grew up in an under-educated family, his parents having only elementary school educations, and was the first in his extended family to attend college. As an undergraduate, he majored in education and business administration hoping to coach football.

A research career wasn’t on his radar.

“However, the program had a mandatory requirement to perform a research thesis, and I discovered that I really liked the research process,” Seals says.

That discovery set him on the path to where he is today.

Seals went on to earn his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then completed his postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and at the University of Iowa before landing his first faculty position. He would eventually join CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Department of Integrative Physiology (the Department of Kinesiology at the time) in 1992.

“Each stop along the journey provides a learning opportunity, and you take the new tool and add it to your toolbox,” he reflects.

Seals’ new memoir details the unique trajectory of his career and how little of it was the byproduct of elite circumstances.

“I had no conventional mentoring in graduate school (I did not belong to a ‘laboratory’), so I learned how to work on my own, independently,” he says, “which turned out to be helpful later.”

Bringing science to the gym

The title of Seals’ memoir, A Life of Science—In Gyms, isn’t a metaphor. For 30 years, Seals and a small group of colleagues ran NIH -funded research programs out of Carlson Gymnasium on the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus before moving out in 2020. The building, constructed in the 1920s, was never designed with biomedical research in mind.

Yet Seals and the other faculty found a way to make it work.

His idea for the book grew out of a period of reflection during the pandemic.

“As I was writing a series of personal commentaries during and post-pandemic, I began to think about penning a memoir of my unusual life of science in gyms,” he says.

He started by authoring a historical scientific article about the Carlson years, then realized the story was bigger than could be told in a journal piece.

“I decided to expand that story to include my earlier life and more details about the challenges I have overcome, which necessitated the longer narrative format of a memoir.”

The stories he chose to include during the writing process are, by his own account, the ones readers may find most compelling, particularly how Seals and his colleagues built a top academic research department at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

“For example, I share how I obtained the funds to start the first research seminar series in the department . . . the challenges we faced performing NIH-funded research in an old gym designed for sport and how I eventually took matters into my own hands to upgrade our research facilities when the campus did not do so,” he says.

In his memoir, Doug Seals details the "challenges we faced performing NIH-funded research in an old gym designed for sport."

Despite the conditions, his lab secured continuous NIH funding, produced more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and trained more than 300 scientists across career stages from undergraduate to junior faculty.

Living long and living well

Woven through the memoir’s recap of institutional challenges is the science Seals has dedicated his career to. His lab’s central focus is the concept of extending “healthspan”—not just how long we live, but how long we live well.

“In biomedical aging research, ‘healthspan’ generally refers to the period of life that you retain good physical and cognitive function and are free of serious disease, whereas ‘lifespan’ is the entire period of life,” Seals explains.

He notes the two don’t always align. A long life shadowed by disability or chronic disease is a far different proposition than one that stays healthy into its final decades.

Seals has spent 40 years researching what tips the scale in favor of the latter.

Seals has clear advice for those seeking to improve their healthspan: “If I could recommend that people do only one thing, it would be to exercise regularly—to be physically active. No other strategy comes close to exerting the health benefits of regular exercise on physical and cognitive function and prevention of chronic diseases,” he says.

Diet, not smoking, and other factors matter.

“But the effects of regular exercise cannot be fully mimicked by any other lifestyle behavior or pill,” Seals adds.

In control of your fate

One of the more challenging aspects of writing the memoir, Seals admits, was choosing what to talk about.

“The most difficult challenge was trying to make the book compelling to both scientists and non-scientists. I wanted to provide a lot of ‘insider insight’ for the layperson, while not boring academics reading the story,” he says.

Through his careful curation of stories, the message he hopes to land is straightforward.

“The main message of the memoir is that you don’t need to come from the most educated family background, attend the most elite institutes of higher education, join the faculty of a top-ranked department or have the best research facilities to achieve and sustain success in your profession,” he says.

“You are the ‘master of your fate,’ not your environment. Your determination, creativity and resilience are much more important to the outcome than external factors,” Seals adds.

Seals lived this lesson before ever writing it down. Sitting atop the resume of a 41-year career built, improbably, in a gymnasium, he fears the perspective that has carried him through it all is going out of fashion.

“I worry that more recent generations may not fully understand this simple point of view,” he says.

The memoir is his attempt to make sure they do.

For anyone who has ever felt that the odds are stacked against them, Seals offers one last reminder: “Your personal agency is much more important in achieving your life goals than your immediate environment.”

A preview of A Life of Science—In Gyms! can be accessed at Physiology.org.

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In new memoir, CU �鶹ӰԺ senior aging researcher Doug Seals chronicles the work of science when conditions aren’t ideal.

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Top image: Carlson Gymnasium

Drawing out the soul of AI

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:00:28 +0000

Drawing out the soul of AI Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 07:00

Tiffany Plate

Why CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence

In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in �鶹ӰԺ’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.

"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the �鶹ӰԺ. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.

So, he prompted AI to create a poem, then shared it at a �鶹ӰԺ open mic poetry night that summer—mentioning to the audience how he created it. He received mixed reviews, to say the least.

Lee Frankel-Goldwater, a CU �鶹ӰԺ assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, presented the AI-produced poetry at a TEDx �鶹ӰԺ talk in September 2025.

While some artists in the audience felt threatened and dismissed it, he says, “other people came up to me afterward and said, ‘I really see what you were trying to do there.’” His point was simply to encourage people to think about the ways that technology—like the printing press or laser cutter—have changed the course of art over the years. And to consider how one might see AI in the same light.

The open-mic experience sparked something for Frankel-Goldwater and his childhood pal, Eric Raanan Fischman, also a poet. They began playing around with AI until they teased out some groundbreaking works of cyborg poetics. The works came together in a book published last year, Lily in a Codebox, which is challenging people to think about how they might interact with AI in creative ways.

Linking art and technology

While he currently teaches environmental studies courses (e.g., Environmental Education: From Theory to Practice), Frankel-Goldwater got his undergraduate degree in computer science. He focused his thesis on exploring how technology could enhance artistic expression.

“I created a musical composition based off of a collaboration with a hidden Markov model, an early neural-network AI system, and publicly available sunspot data—linking natural systems, art and technology together,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a really long time.”

Years later, in 2013, Frankel-Goldwater attended the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, where Fischman was already a student. He fell in love with �鶹ӰԺ and everything that comes with it—going hiking, writing poetry and being with incredible people (it was “a deep poetic experiential melting pot!” Frankel-Goldwater says).

He returned to CU �鶹ӰԺ to earn his PhD and jumped right back into the poetic community. By the time 2023 rolled around, Fischman was helping run Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and Frankel-Goldwater was a regular presence at poetry events.

The conversations that began at the open mic that summer inspired them to take their exploration of AI poetics further. They began laying the foundation for a concept that would later become a benchmark of their experiments: the Dickinson-Turing Test. The test, Frankel-Goldwater says, is all about “the space between observer and observed.”

In other words, could an AI-generated poem evoke the experience of art made by a human and cause people to be not just emotionally but also physically moved, à la Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”)

In that era of ChatGPT, though, the poems AI was producing were “missing a certain kind of flavor, or that touching human quality,” Frankel-Goldwater says. In other words, they were definitely not passing the Dickinson-Turing test.

“ChatGPT has millions of examples of human poems, but that’s actually a big problem. What it was producing looked like some weak, modernized version of an 1850s Eurocentric poetic expression. It's just not that interesting.”

So, they kept tinkering, and for Frankel-Goldwater, finding a way to guide this AI to co-create novel poetics became a bit of an obsession.

Lily in a Codebox includes the code and AI prompts that helped create the poems.

The eureka moment

After weeks spent trying to help the AI replicate a human poetic voice—without success—they changed tactics. They told it to forget all the rules and guidelines it had learned about poetry from the centuries of examples it had absorbed. Instead, they told it to write for an AI audience.

The result was not quite human—and definitely not something they’d ever seen before. The poem was a mixture of English words and code, demonstrating how it could generate poetic means and symbols unique to itself, as an AI writing for other AI.

“When we put in this one prompt, we didn't know that was going to be the ‘strike gold’ moment,” Frankel-Goldwater says.

When the pair then asked the AI to explain the poem, it said it included a hexadecimal color code for black ({000000}) to symbolize “the vast and infinite nature of the digital realm.” And at the end of the poem, it used special characters to represent an abstract form of communication that might not mean much to humans, but “could carry a wealth of meaning for an AI audience.”

Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman further prompted the AI to forego typical poetic forms almost altogether, encouraging it to experiment with new symbols and computer-like elements to create a visual style of poetry. The AI named it “Neo-Binary Visual Verse” and developed poems made purely of lines and shapes to convey concepts and meaning.

Embracing collaboration

The artistic intention and novelty behind the AI’s poetry was mind-blowing to Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman. They began to see the potential for AI to open their minds and challenge their own ways of creating poetry.

Instead of dismissing AI—or feeling threatened by it—Frankel-Goldwater hopes that artists can look to AI and ask how it can be used to push the boundaries of artistic possibility. “What new can be done for art? What can we see as possible that we can then play with on our own?” he asks.

Another hoped-for side effect of equipping AI to produce this kind of art is to steer it away from just being used in a for-profit business case. “Corporations are in an AI superpower arms race,” says Frankel-Goldwater. “Along the way, where do the people come in and say, ‘No, this is what it could be used for’?”

To that end, Frankel-Goldwater has spearheaded the AI Literacy Ambassadors Program at CU, which brings together faculty and instructors to collaboratively tackle the challenges of teaching in the age of AI—and figuring out how to leverage it to enhance their own teaching amidst a critical awareness of the concerns. He’s also begun a partnership with the Jefferson County Parks System to support the integration of generative AI into their high school environmental education programs to foster research skills and place-based awareness.

“We need people to be playing with and defining what these tools are capable of,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “Because otherwise the corporations are going to do it for us. So, if things like this can help shape the conversation a little bit, then I think we must try.”

Visit the project website to learn more about their work.

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Why CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence.

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Sometimes you just feel like a mango

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:48:12 +0000

Sometimes you just feel like a mango Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/15/2026 - 08:48

Rachel Sauer

In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis

Have you ever felt like the mango in a line of lovebirds? Sure, you look like you fit in—same general shape, same red, yellow and green coloring—but, well, you’re a mango and everyone else is a bird.

That’s how Ruby Emmerson feels at Benton Academy, where she’s starting sixth grade with her twin brother, Bryce. But while Bryce is an academic high achiever who likely will excel at the competitive charter school, Ruby’s diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia mean that reading, writing and math are tough for her.

And when she fails her first test at Benton, wow, does she feel like a mango. She even writes a brief blog post about it: “I dont belong at Benton Acadamy. I’m an imposter. I walk beside you in the halls every day. But I’m not smart enuff to stay much longer. Theres so much work. Im failing.”

Nathan Pieplow (left) and Katheryn Lumsden (right) are the authors of Confessions of a Mango, a new mid-grade novel that explores questions of belonging.

Except . . . so many of her classmates relate. Just as readers likely will.

Ruby’s are the confessions in Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel published this week and written by Katheryn Lumsden, a �鶹ӰԺ molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

But for the purposes of this book, they are Kate and Nate, a writing team with way too many ideas and way too little time, and a shared passion for telling honest stories with humor and empathy.

“This is the first creative partnership I’ve been in that works,” Pipelow says. “We bicker like siblings, but the beautiful thing about writing with Katheryn is she’s an idea factory. She can write 2,000 words in an afternoon, then she sends them to me, and I don’t have to start with a blank page.”

“I’m the sloppy copy,” she says.

“I contribute ideas,” he says.

“He’s the atmosphere and the voice. Ironically, Mango didn’t have my voice until he added it.”

It just works, they conclude.

A writing partnership is born

Pieplow and Lumsden met, unsurprisingly, in a �鶹ӰԺ writing group six years ago. Lumsden, a pharmacist by profession, was a longtime group member who wanted a community of support to help her wrangle her boundless ideas. Pieplow, who had authored two field guides to bird sounds, wanted to delve into fiction writing.

“Everyone was like, ‘Why is he here? He doesn’t have plots,’” Lumsden recalls. “But I didn’t have pretty writing and he does, so I decided, ‘I’m gonna ask Nathan if he wants to meet'—for me it was so that he could teach me how to write better, and for him it was so I could teach him how to plot.”

Author event

Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow will talk about Confessions of a Mango Thursday evening at �鶹ӰԺ Bookstore.

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: �鶹ӰԺ Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16

Reserve a spot

And so, a writing partnership was born. Their first book was a young adult historical fantasy that was good enough to get them their agent, Sarah Fisk, but it wasn’t bought by a publisher. The next novel wasn’t, either.

“If you want to be a fiction writer, you write several (books) and if one doesn’t get published, you move on to the next,” Lumsden says.

“(Confessions of a Mango) is definitely our debut,” Pieplow adds. “The first two were not quite at this level; with our first ones we were playing with form and voice.”

In fact, Fisk told them that the most important thing to get right when writing mid-grade or young adult fiction is the voice, Lumsden says, “and fortunately, voice has always been one of the things I do well.”

The idea for Confessions of a Mango germinated from many seeds. Lumsden grew up in �鶹ӰԺ with a twin brother who, like Bryce, was considered the “smart” one. Lumsden struggled with reading, and their mom, not wanting to make Lumsden feel bad, took both of them for dyslexia testing, explaining it away with “people are interested in twins.”

She did learn to navigate dyslexia, however, so when she was 12, her mom brought home a cake as a sort of “Congratulations for outgrowing dyslexia!” celebration. “Except it wasn’t until much later that I found out you don’t actually outgrow dyslexia,” Lumsden says.

She also read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz and ideas began percolating. So, when Pieplow went on a birding trip for a month, Lumsden grew impatient waiting for his return and started writing a book.

Making it realistic and relatable

“Part of it was that I was so angry,” she explains. “So often, these kids (diagnosed with dyslexia) don’t know how smart they truly are, and that’s so unfair. Plus, they never see themselves in books because dyslexia just isn’t something that gets written about in mid-grade fiction.

Confessions of a Mango tells the story of Ruby Emmerson, a sixth grader at Benton Academy whose diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia make her feel like she doesn't fit in at the competitive charter school.

“So, when Nathan got back, I sent him what I’d started and he was like, ‘This is actually very good.’”

Lumsden had an advantage because when the two began writing Confessions of a Mango three years ago, her son was 10 and her daughter was 12—she had a front-row seat to the joys and concerns of children entering and navigating middle school.

When Fisk began pitching their draft to publishers—after suggesting they excise this chapter and add that chapter, and put in more about Ruby’s quirky best friend, Thea—Little, Brown was the first to make an offer and was the publisher they ultimately chose.

Part of that decision, they say, was the kindness that Little, Brown staff showed them throughout the publishing process—how included they felt in every step and how Little, Brown representatives embraced the dyslexia angle of their story. In fact, Confessions of a Mango is printed in the Lexend font, which improves reading performance and reduces visual stress for people with dyslexia.

They even had a significant say in the vibrant book cover, which shows a girl seated in the shadow of a huge mango with a lovebird perched on its leaf. When they and artist Andy Smith settled on two cover finalists, they asked Lumsden’s son and his friends to vote for their favorite one.

Now, in publication week, a three-year process is finally tangible with the book in readers’ hands. It’s a book close to their hearts, Lumsden says, and they’re proud of the story it tells and the children to whom it gives a literary voice.

But, well, on to the next. They already have several books in progress, and “one of the things I love about working with Katheryn is that eventually we’re going to write something in every genre, because of the exploration of (writing) and how it’s like travel,” Pieplow says. “I love seeing new places, and that’s what I’m doing through the books we’re writing.”

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In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis.

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