036 - Andrea Ross - Unnatural Selection

Writing Westward Podcast

A conversation with Andrea Ross about her new book, Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness (CavanKerry Press, 2021).

Andrea Ross is a writer who currently teaches in the University Writing Program at the University of California at Davis. Her writing has appeared in various popular outlets and has been supported by fellowships and awards from the California Arts Council, the Mesa Refuge, and other organization. In earlier years she worked as a National Parks Service ranger and a wilderness guide. In 2021 CavanKerry Press published her book, Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness, which we are speaking about today. In this memoir Ross relates formative experiences in the outdoors and wilderness of the American West. With the perspective of hindsight, she weaves these together with the concurrent life events she had as an adoptee searching for her biological family. She sees how outdoor Western spaces provided her with a sense of belonging, identity, and family as she searched for her biological roots. It is an intimate and vulnerable exhibition that invites all of us to pause and reevaluate our relationship with the outdoors and explore what unexpected roles it has played in our own life journeys.

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Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink
• Support provided by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University.
  
• Podcast Music was written and recorded by local Provo composer by Micah Dahl Anderson.
• Episodes are recorded via Skype or in person and amateurishly engineered and produced by Professor Rensink.
• To submit a book to be considered for a podcast episode, email [e-mail].