Books

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 Boulder 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 University of Colorado Boulder, 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 Boulder, 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.”

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.”

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

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,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says CU Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame

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.

That contradiction lies at the heart of Stealing from the Gods, the new book by Isabel Köster, a University of Colorado Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 University of Colorado Boulder. “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 Boulder 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.

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.

Seals, a distinguished professor in the University of Colorado Boulder 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 Boulder 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 91��Ѽ University School of Medicine in St. Louis and at the University of Iowa before landing his first faculty position. He would eventually join CU Boulder’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 Boulder 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 Boulder.

“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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder’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 University of Colorado Boulder. 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 Boulder 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 Boulder assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, presented the AI-produced poetry at a TEDx Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 University of Colorado Boulder 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 Boulder 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 Boulder Bookstore.

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: Boulder 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 Boulder 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.

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 Boulder and my husband and I are raising our kids in Boulder, 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.”

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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Historical novel marks latest chapter for CU Boulder alumna

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:21:46 +0000

Historical novel marks latest chapter for CU Boulder alumna Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/13/2026 - 14:21

Megan Clancy

Author Rebecca Rosenberg’s latest book continues her literary work highlighting the often-overlooked stories of remarkable women

With the release of her newest historical novel, University of Colorado Boulder alumna Rebecca Rosenberg (Engl; Psych'76) is adding another chapter to a writing career focused on uncovering the lives of extraordinary women that history has often overlooked.

The award-winning novelist’s latest work, Silver Echoes, tells the story of Silver Dollar Tabor, the daughter of Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known at Baby Doe Tabor. This newest historical novel builds on Rosenberg’s first book, Gold Digger, the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Baby Doe, who navigated the worlds of wealth, power, politics and scandal in the wild days of western mining.

CU Boulder alumna Rebecca Rosenberg with her historical novel Silver Echoes, which is based on the story of Colorado's own Silver Dollar Tabor. (Photo: Rebecca Rosenberg)

CU Boulder laid foundation for writing career

Rosenberg credits growing up in Colorado and her time spent at CU Boulder with nourishing her interest in the American West, particularly stories about pioneers in the Centennial State.

“I grew up in Colorado,” says Rosenberg, “and being in Boulder and in Hallett Hall, looking out at the mountains all the time, it was just really inspiring in terms of just living in Colorado and the pioneers and the people that came before us there and their incredible stories.”

Rosenberg was a theater and psychology major while on campus but was drawn to classes in multiple departments.

“I loved my humanities courses. I got a bigger perspective,” she says. “I think that got me excited about the whole world and the stories of the world. And pretty soon I realized that people don't tell stories about women. They tell stories about men. So that's where I got my inkling that I would like to tell those stories.”

After graduation, Rosenberg continued to feel the pull toward story. She eventually found her way to a two-year novel-writing course at Stanford University, where she learned how to combine her interest in storytelling and her background in psychology.

“A novel is always about conflict,” she says. “Every scene is what is the conflict and what does each character want? What do they desire? So yeah, psychology is instrumental in that.”

From her time at Stanford, and the work of 10 years after, came her first book, Gold Digger, which brought to life the story Baby Doe Tabor, a beautiful young woman who married the son of a wealthy miner in 1878 to save her family from poverty. The book won plaudits for its mix of historical detail and fiction, with the Historical Novel Society calling it “a gripping story of female grit and resilience.”

Since then, Rosenberg has gone on to win accolades for her novels The Secret Life of Mrs. London, Champagne Widows and Madame Pommery. Rosenberg and her husband, Gary, are lavender farmers in Sonoma Valley, California, and they are co-authors of the nonfiction pictorial book Lavender Fields of America: A New Crop of Farmers.

In Silver Echoes, CU Boulder alumna Rebecca Rosenberg (Engl; Psych'76) continues the Tabor story she began in her novel Gold Digger, based on the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Baby Doe Tabor.

Telling the overlooked story of Silver Dollar Tabor

In Silver Echoes, her most recent novel and Gold Digger’s sequel, Rosenberg uses her psychology background even more extensively, finding the story she wanted to tell through a discovery about one of history’s most misunderstood women, Silver Dollar Tabor. Silver Echoes is told through a dual timeline, following Silver Dollar, Baby Doe’s daughter, in 1920s Chicago and Baby Doe in 1930s Colorado searching for answers to her daughter’s disappearance.

“It's really an intense novel because I feel like Silver had DID, or dissociative identity disorder, what used to be called split personality,” Rosenberg says. “I found that in my research of the letters between mother and daughter, how dissociated Silver was from several realities. Every time she'd write a letter, she'd write about a whole different reality in her life.”

For her first novel, Rosenberg studied Baby Doe's diaries and the letters between her and Silver Dollar, who was in Chicago in the speakeasies and an actress in movies. She noticed the mother’s worry over Silver and knew there was a story to tell there.

“I was reading these letters and I saw that Silver Dollar was asking her mother to write her a letter under a different name to a different address in Chicago every other week. And so I thought, ‘What is going on there?’” says Rosenberg. “Nobody had really explored that. Everyone was saying that she just fell into being a prostitute. But I didn't see that. I saw that she was telling her mother that she was going to open a flower shop with this girlfriend and that she was working for Marshall Fields. And then she was a hat check girl at a speakeasy and all these different things. And then she would be engaged to one guy and she was going to get married and then you never heard about him again.”

Rosenberg started studying what Freud and Jung wrote about multiple personalities. She noticed that all of Silver’s inconsistencies—paired with a childhood filled with multiple traumas—pointed to DID. With that diagnosis, Rosenberg proceeded to tell the story of Silver Dollar Tabor with new insight and creativity.

“I always do really extensive author's notes, telling exactly what's true and not true and where I'm making a leap,” she says. “No one ever diagnosed Silver Dollar as having DID because they hadn't even identified it then. But throughout the book, I have segments of what Sigmund Freud says during that time and what Jung says about women that sound exactly like her. I made the leap that she had that. And that's definitely a leap. No one has ever said it before.”

It's these deep dives and creative exploration of story that Rosenberg enjoys most about writing historical fiction. Finding the unknown stories and uncovering what’s remained untold until now.

“I will always write about extraordinary women,” she says. “They fascinate me. The research takes me a long time. I have to read a lot of books about their background before I can even start on a project. It's a very fun and very satisfying kind of work if you love to research and telling stories.”

Rosenberg’s newest book, License to Thrill, is set for release this month. Another dual timeline novel, the book tells the story of Lily Bollinger, the “Dame of Champagne,” who refused to surrender to the Nazis during WWII and to other enemies for decades more.

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Author Rebecca Rosenberg’s latest book continues her literary work highlighting the often-overlooked stories of remarkable women.

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Praise the Lord and plan the family

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:20:01 +0000

Praise the Lord and plan the family Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/06/2026 - 11:20

Rachel Sauer

In new book God Bless the Pill, CU Boulder scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America

A little more than 100 years ago, the Episcopalian stance on birth control was this: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of contraception, together with the grave dangers—physical, moral and religious—thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.”

Even acknowledging “abnormal cases” in which birth control might be necessary, Episcopalians were just one of many Protestant denominations that, in the early 20th century, “reacted to contraception on a continuum from skeptical to disapproving,” writes Samira Mehta, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

This aligns with commonly held ideas about how contraception—specifically the pill, which received FDA approval in May 1960—became broadly available in the United States: that first- and second-wave feminists pushed for accessibility, policy change and social revolution while religious leaders erected roadblocks and preached against it.

CU Boulder scholar Samira Mehta's new book, God Bless the Pill, explores how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

Except this doesn’t actually tell the whole story.

In her new book God Bless the Pill, scheduled for publication April 14, Mehta details 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.

“In a society that overtly thought of sex as something inside of marriage and that was inappropriate outside of marriage, the way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families,” Mehta says.

“This didn’t happen because (as a society) we care about women but because children have a better start if their mother doesn’t die in childbirth, if their family doesn’t have more children than the parents can provide for. The goal was to create healthier families—to use birth control to create healthier families—not just a healthy mother. And there’s concern that if you have more children than you can afford, you become dependent on the state. This is the United States, where we don’t want you to need a school lunch program, so you can’t have more kids than you can afford to give lunch to.”

The role of liberal religion

The idea to research what became God Bless the Pill, Mehta says, germinated from a desire not to lessen the significant influence that first- and second-wave feminism had on making birth control broadly available to women, but to understand what, if any, influence liberal religion had on the accessibility of birth control.

Book release and Q&A

What: A reading from God Bless the Pill by author Samira Mehta, followed by a Q&A facilitated by Phoebe Young, chair of the CU Boulder Department of History

Where: Waldschänke Ciders + Coffee, 4100 Jason St. in Denver

When: 6-8 p.m. Monday, April 13

Who: All are invited to this free event.

Reserve a spot

Mehta was inspired by social historian Elaine Tyler May’s America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, in which May assesses how access to the pill did and didn’t fulfill utopian dreams of liberating women, eradicating global poverty and supporting stable and happy marriages.

Mehta understood that the history of contraception is not simply a feminist history and found herself wondering what “that story would look like if one fully included religion in the narrative? I hoped and assumed that, as in May’s title, the promise and liberation might outweigh the peril. I also saw in May’s narration the assumption that religion was always conservative and opposed to birth control,” she writes in God Bless the Pill.

But what about liberal religious congregations? Where were they in the aftermath of oral contraception becoming broadly available in 1960?

Mehta took that question to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, where she found documentation of her childhood minister, the Rev. Al Ciarcia of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Bridgeport in Connecticut, publicly supporting birth control during the Griswold v. Connecticut debate—a landmark 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court found that a Connecticut statute forbidding contraceptive use violated the right of marital privacy.

This decision came 25 years after the American Birth Control League, formed by Margaret Sanger in 1921 and renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, assembled a national clergymen’s committee.

“These clergy talk about the importance of sex in a marriage and how a marriage that is sexually dynamic is less likely to result in divorce,” Mehta says. “The rhetoric around sex and marriage starts changing, and clergy members start talking about the sacred nature of a marriage bond and how sex is part of that bond through which two become one—regardless of literally becoming one in the form of a new person.

"The way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families," says Samira Mehta.

“They also advocate for marriages that are economically stable, and more kids can strain the economics of the household.”

Making the moral choice

Though Mehta begins the narrative in God Bless the Pill during World War II, the story of religion and contraception really gathers steam after the war’s end and the Cold War’s beginning. During this time, the value and sanctity of the American family was touted as one of the best weapons against the communist menace.

“There’s talk about Soviet women who have to go out and work in factories and put their kids in daycare,” Mehta says. “But a family that can control how many kids they have—where the mother can stay home and the father’s income is enough to support the family—can control their discretionary income. They can get a KitchenAid stand mixer, they can replace the dishwasher when a new and better model comes out. Limiting the birth rate becomes a way of increasing capitalist consumption.”

Messages highlighting capitalism as a way to defeat communism often occurred in the same breath as messages of moral behavior: “It’s the idea that if you can’t control something, it’s not moral,” Mehta explains. “Nobody wants to argue you should be celibate in marriage, so liberal religion begins framing birth control as a tool that allows us to make moral choices about how to structure our families.

“These clergy members believe that you can lay out the evidence for a compelling moral choice and then everybody will want to make a compelling moral choice. They were arguing that this is an access problem and an education problem, and they thought people would see that the best choices for their families are these choices (the clergy members) are suggesting.”

Mehta notes that even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that people would make the moral choice if it was presented to them—arguing that big families may be appropriate for the farm, but they work against African Americans’ self-interest in the city. “He laid out the argument that African Americans have a right to these tools as well to lift themselves out of poverty.”

Ultimately, Mehta adds, there was and continues to be backlash on both the right and the left, with the right not anticipating the feminist potential of contraception and the left questioning whether birth control is a tool of liberation rather than of racial and patriarchal oppression.

“And then the center isn’t necessarily super comfortable with prolific non-marital sex,” Mehta explains. “They may be OK with married-like relationships, but they’re generally not OK with an emotionally unencumbered and mutually satisfying one-night stand. And the center wasn’t on board with men needing to pull their weight at home and women being in the workforce and kids being in daycare. We’re still seeing a course correction from the center.”

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In new book God Bless the Pill, CU Boulder scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

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When the mountain becomes a mirror

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:42:33 +0000

When the mountain becomes a mirror Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/19/2026 - 11:42

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder alum Jason Kolaczkowski’s new memoir reveals lessons found in the mountains and in life

Jason Kolaczkowski (PolSci ’99) didn’t know if the Himalayas would bring him clarity, but he knew he needed to attempt the first ascent of an unclimbed peak. Diagnosed with leukemia just a year earlier, he boarded a flight to Asia in 2019 with a plan.

The goal wasn’t to make history as a mountaineer. For Kolaczkowski, the trip was about defying the notion that his time was already running out.

“There was a moment when I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to die a lot younger than I thought I was, and so I want to go and do this thing.’ There was no going back from there,” he recalls.

Jason Kolaczkowski (PolSci ’99), shown here at basecamp, attempted the first ascent of a previously unclimbed Himalayan peak after being diagnosed with leukemia. (All photos courtesy Jason Kolaczkowski)

In his forthcoming memoir, Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer and Family, Kolaczkowski chronicles the lessons learned leading up to and following that expedition.

“It started as internal processing for me. The process of writing the book was really then an act of compulsion,” he explains. “I wanted to archive a snapshot of my life for my kids, who were too young to understand at the time. Maybe when they’re 14 and maybe again when they’re 24—maybe they’ll care.”

The mountain becomes a mirror

Wrestling with risk, fatherhood, identity and a cancer diagnosis layered with unknowns, Kolaczkowski thought of climbing as a reprieve.

The type of slow-progressing leukemia he had been diagnosed with can remain asymptomatic for years. Treatment wasn’t recommended yet, so he entered a “watch-and-wait” phase that included taking precautions to protect his compromised immune system.

But Kolaczkowski’s internal clock was ticking.

A climber since the late Aughts, he had long dreamed of attempting a previously unclimbed route. He started planning the Himalayan expedition before his diagnosis, but after it came, the trip felt more urgent.

“The first big question was: Well, should I even still go?” he says. “I ultimately reached the conclusion that I still felt healthy enough to do it.”

After finding the right group, the pieces fell into place, but the climb itself would soon be a wakeup call. In Notions of Grace, Kolaczkowski describes the peril of fixing lines in a gully littered with rockfall. The terrain, though not inherently difficult to climb, was deadly in its indifference. The mountain didn't care if Kolaczkowski died.

“What I came away with was a new sense of self-awareness. Just being in that amount of danger for that amount of time shifted my mindset into a much more forward-looking place again,” he says.

The expedition didn’t end in a triumphant summit photo, but Kolaczkowski flew home counting it as a success.

“I was really looking forward to going home and doing things with my kids.”

Writing for who matters most

Kolaczkowski describes his emotional state before the trip as grief for a life transformed by factors beyond his control.

“I guess you could say that telling a private story in public is another form of accepting risk,” says Jason Kolaczkowski of writing his memoir.

“Getting a cancer diagnosis really is a grieving process. You’re giving up a life that you had—an understanding of your goals and your family dynamics that you had—and you have to let it go and shift into the acceptance eventually of what is reality now,” he says.

Writing became his way of documenting this shift. His sons remained the intended audience for a while, but after sharing early drafts with friends over time, Kolaczkowski’s outlook on the project changed.

“People started telling me, ‘I think there are some universal themes here that other people would be interested in.’ So, I started thinking of ways to maybe get this published,” he says.

He kept writing, bringing the meticulous habits learned in planning expeditions and climbing rugged peaks to the page.

“Rather than focusing on getting the book done, my goal was to put in effort consistently. Some efforts will be great; others won’t be,” Kolaczkowski says.

“If you think about not making summits, and when to turn around and all that sort of stuff, having enough self-forgiveness to accept that, it translates well. Maybe today was hard to write and it just isn’t coming out; that’s OK as long as I’ve made the attempt,” he adds.

The calculus of risk

The title of Kolaczkowski’s memoir mirrors its tone. Grace isn’t something he claims to possess in abundance. Rather, he jokes that it’s often a goal he stumbles toward, describing several moments in the book as a “series of misadventures rather than adventures.”

The throughline connecting mountains, medical challenges and fatherhood is a series of lessons on living life with just the right amount of risk.

Just a few months after Kolaczkowski returned from Nepal, there were new obstacles to overcome as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Strict precautions for protecting his health became necessary, leading the Kolaczkowskis to the decision to homeschool their sons.

“We were shrinking down the world in order to keep me safe, but 5-year olds need their world to expand. What are we willing to do from a mitigation perspective when it comes at a cost?” he asks.

At first, the choice felt aligned with his family’s needs. But after watching one of his sons be afraid to touch playground equipment, Kolaczkowski knew it was time to rethink his approach to risk.

“And that’s what the book is about. How little risk is too little risk? How much is too much? Because we had taken too little risk and it was visibly stunting the character development of my kids,” he says.

Fortunately, in his years of climbing, Kolaczkowski had already developed a mental framework for managing uncertainty.

Jason Kolaczkowski approaches a couloir entrance on his Himalayan climb.

“You’re constantly building in these points where you are having the meta-conversation about the thing that you're doing,” he says. “You're talking about how to talk about the climb.”

That same approach became essential to not only navigating the pandemic but rebuilding his family’s relationship with adventure. Because his wife, Kristina, had often accompanied him on climbing trips, she shared some of the same language.

“The ability to sort of coalesce around that sort of meta-conversation—how are we going to talk about how we're going to deal with these new risks—was a big part of our family life,” he says.

Return to adventure

Eventually, Kolaczkowski and his family began venturing out again. Hiking, climbing and reconnecting in the relative safety of the outdoors during the pandemic ultimately led to a 100-mile family hike around Mont Blanc.

“I’ve never seen them quite so happy,” he says, recalling his sons’ experience on the trip.

Today, Kolaczkowski is planning many more adventures, some with his sons and some on his own. He recently joined an expedition in Kyrgyzstan and is looking ahead to more climbs, including a return to Nepal in 2027.

Telling his story publicly, he says, was another kind of healing.

“I guess you could say that telling a private story in public is another form of accepting risk,” he admits.

But as Kolaczkowski sets his eyes on what the future will bring, public opinions aren’t what he worries about.

“That’s one of the nice things about having cancer. It puts other stuff in perspective,” he says with a smile.

Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer and Family is available for pre-order now through DAP Books and will be released March 31.

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CU Boulder alum Jason Kolaczkowski’s new memoir reveals lessons found in the mountains and in life.

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Top photo: Jason Kolaczkowski at an 18,000-foot camp

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