Using our conversation program format in a new, online way, we invite you to speak with people who might never cross your path but who are struggling with the same anxieties and preserving the same hopes as you. These online conversations unite people from across New York State to discuss …
Project Directors who are hosting a Reading & Discussion program for the first time (or who would like a refresher course) should register for this Zoom webinar.
To register for the webinar on August 27 at 2pm, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kce2orjsjGtBbNcxCd5GrAuXAxthLOWwV
To register for the webinar on September 9 at 11am, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrc-Cqpz0qG9d7EZMmnptiqPCsradHxCpk
Anyone who is facilitating a Reading & Discussion program is welcome to join this Zoom webinar, which introduces HNY’s facilitation method.
To register for the webinar on August 28 at 10am, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEude2qrj8rGde-Waq8aZSKcDPHeb99E7LI
To register for the webinar on September 8 at 3pm, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIscuyqrz4vE9VN0HWorWCQTA-Rbxe9nTe1
Anyone who is facilitating a Reading & Discussion program is welcome to join this Zoom webinar, which introduces HNY’s facilitation method.
To register for the webinar on August 28 at 10am, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEude2qrj8rGde-Waq8aZSKcDPHeb99E7LI
To register for the webinar on September 8 at 3pm, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIscuyqrz4vE9VN0HWorWCQTA-Rbxe9nTe1
Project Directors who are hosting a Reading & Discussion program for the first time (or who would like a refresher course) should register for this Zoom webinar.
To register for the webinar on August 27 at 2pm, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kce2orjsjGtBbNcxCd5GrAuXAxthLOWwV
To register for the webinar on September 9 at 11am, please follow this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrc-Cqpz0qG9d7EZMmnptiqPCsradHxCpk
We’ve gathered nineteen suggestions to commemorate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. All are available in ebook format, and most have audiobook versions as well. Be sure to visit your public library’s website! Your library card may get you free access to digital versions of these books via platforms such as Libby and Hoopla. Don’t have a library card? New York Public Library has expanded its online offerings — any New York State resident may apply for a card via the SimplyE app.
If you want to commemorate the U.S. women’s suffrage centennial. . .
…here are some recently published books that shed new light on the long journey to suffrage, and the many women of diverse backgrounds who carried the movement forward.
She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Harriet Tubman, best known as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, was a lifelong advocate for human rights, including women’s right to vote. With lively prose, Dunbar paints a fresh portrait of a woman whose fierce and relentless pursuit of justice and equality continues to inspire Americans today.
Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener by Kimberly A. Hamlin
In the first biography of suffragist Helen Hamilton Gardener, Hamlin demonstrates how Gardener flouted social conventions and transgressed gender norms, but also held racist ideas that shaped her views of who should vote. The complexity of her story helps illuminate why the Nineteenth Amendment failed to secure voting rights for all women.
Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote by Susan Ware
Using a collection of fascinating objects, from a suffrage cookbook to a pin in the form of a prison gate, Ware weaves together nineteen vignettes about the women’s suffrage movement.
The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss
The ratification of the 19th Amendment by the states came down to Tennessee. Weiss documents suffragists’ final push for ratification during the summer of 1920.
And don’t miss these great suffrage histories by two HNY collaborators, Susan Goodier and Sally Roesch Wagner, and current board member Laura Free:
Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era by Laura Free
Who is a citizen, and does a citizen have voting rights? Historian Laura Free outlines the evolving debates over these questions before, during, and immediately after the Civil War. When the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments established African Americans as citizens but only men as voters, a tentative alliance among equal rights advocates fractured. Leading suffragists used racist arguments to make their case, with implications for the women’s suffrage movement that reverberate to this day.
Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello
New York State passed legislation acknowledging women’s right to vote in 1917, almost three full years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Goodier and Pastorello highlight the diverse actors—from Jewish immigrant women to rural women to African American women—who helped secure this crucial victory.
The Women’s Suffrage Movement by Sally Roesch Wagner
In this anthology, edited by Wagner with a foreword by Gloria Steinem, readers encounter the long struggle for suffrage in the words of suffragists themselves. Wagner pays careful attention to issues of gender, race, and class.
If you want to be inspired. . .
…these books highlight the courageous efforts of African American and Chicana women to secure civil, political, and economic rights in the mid-twentieth century.
¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement by Maylei Blackwell
Drawing on rich oral histories, Blackwell details the evolution of Chicana feminism and leadership within the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom by Keisha Blain
Historian Keisha Blain demonstrates that an less-studied group of black women were at the center of black nationalist politics throughout the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. They forged alliances and deployed creative tactics to further their goals.
At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire
In this riveting book, McGuire recovers Rosa Parks’s legacy as an activist who defended black female rape victims. McGuire compellingly demonstrates that sexual assault was a core concern of civil rights activists, and that black women were leaders in crafting a strategic response to this facet of Jim Crow oppression.
Storming Caesar’s Palace by Annelise Orleck
Orleck details the incredible story of a group of welfare mothers in Las Vegas, Nevada, who founded a successful anti-poverty organization, Operation Life. They also took on leadership in the National Welfare Rights Organization and demonstrated that low-income Americans are experts on the causes of and solutions to poverty.
If you’re wondering what intersectionality really means. . .
…legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe the intersecting and compounding oppressions faced by women of color. What better time than women’s history month to learn more about black feminist thought? Any of these books might be a great place to start:
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper
In this collection of essays, Cooper explores black womanhood, respectability politics, pop culture, and more with incisive wit. She argues that black women’s eloquent rage is a superpower in their ongoing struggles against oppression.
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Gay unabashedly explores her relationship with pop culture and her journey to womanhood in this collection of essays that is both thought-provoking and funny.
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks
First published in 1981, in this classic feminist text activist and cultural critic bell hooks explores the impact of racism and sexism on black women from enslavement to the twentieth-century feminist movement.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
In 1974, the Combahee River Collective, a group of black feminist radicals, published the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” a manifesto that still speaks to today’s politics. In this collection of essays, activists reflect on the legacy of the Collective.
If you’re reflecting on identity. . .
…read further about how individuals and communities preserve their identities in the face of oppression. How do we honor our cultural roots in a globalized world? What does it mean to be “American”? These women have written about these questions through their personal and family stories of struggle and triumph.
The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui
After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, Thi Bui and her family escaped, ultimately relocating to the United States. Through her family’s immigrant experience, Bui reaches new understandings of family, home, and identity.
My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation, 1900-1940 by Brenda Child
Using the story of her grandparents as an entrypoint, historian Brenda Child describes how Ojibwe communities preserved and adapted their cultural traditions while resisting federal intrusions in the early twentieth century.
Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog
Mary Crow Dog (née Brave Beard) grew up on a reservation in South Dakota, attended a Catholic missionary school, and went on to be active in the American Indian Movement. In this memoir, Crow Dog depicts struggles both personal and political, leaving readers with an intimate portrait of the determination of Native Americans to survive and thrive in the twentieth-century U.S.
When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
In this coming-of-age memoir, Santiago recounts her childhood in Puerto Rico, her transition to life in Brooklyn, and the intellectual journey that led her to the halls of Harvard and a career as a writer.
Still craving more?
Check out these popular reading lists from our Reading & Discussion Program: “Your Silence Will Not Protect You,” which features the works of “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde, and the “Votes for Women” collection, which includes more great reads on women’s struggle for the vote.
To learn more about women’s history and our forthcoming podcast “Amended,” sign up for our Newsletter.
Reading list compiled by Scarlett Rebman, Director of Grants, with help from fellow HNY staff members.
Weighty book discussions at the barbershop? In Newburgh, located just across the Hudson River from Beacon, Naomi Hersson-Ringskog and Gabrielle Hill brought HNY’s Reading & Discussion program to places where conversation already hums.
Contextualizing current events, these conversations provided a opportunity for further community work. At times, these conversations led to other projects. In Newburgh, organizers look forward to the celebration of Frederick Douglass’ birthday bicentennial as an opportunity to deepen the ties they have started with these conversations.
In December, 2018, Humanities New York spoke with Naomi and Gabrielle to learn more.
HNY: How long have you lived in Newburgh, and what would you like people to know about it?
Naomi: In 2016, I was invited to speak at the Columbia University urban design program, which was doing a project in and about Newburgh. From that introduction, I just kept on coming back to Newburgh. Part of the reason I kept on coming back was the architecture, which a lot of people marvel about, but also the cultural diversity combined with the historical layers of the city–there’s George Washington’s headquarters, and the underground railroad, and the suffragist convention, and many more historic places. There is a rich cultural history that can inspire community pride and community collaboration in Newburgh.
Afterwards, I was invited by Michael Green, the founder of the Fullerton Center–a historic mansion on Grand Street that belonged to a very curmudgeonly lawyer, Judge Fullerton–to join the board. They have a strong conviction that history can be a tool for revitalization. We had an intern take the history of the Fullerton Center and the Fullerton Mansion and make it into a guided tour, asking: can you draw connections to present-day issues or contexts through the history of the Mansion? This experience led me to move up to the Hudson Valley in February, 2018, as the rich history of Newburgh has led so many others.
Gabrielle: I am a lifelong resident. I was born here, I’ve been here my entire life and I’m proud of that. Geographically we have the Hudson River, Mount Beacon, and George Washington’s Headquarters. We have many historical buildings, but more importantly we have such a wide variety of people, unlike many other small towns. Now more than ever it’s very exciting to experience different cultures and foods and share each other’s family stories. I think it’s really special how we come together as a diverse community. At the end of the day we all want to come together to discuss what matters to the community.
HNY: What are some of those matters, or challenges that Newburgh faces?
Naomi: Newburgh is very diverse. It’s 50% Latino, 30% African American, and 20% Caucasian, with a steady flow of newcomers from New York–whether it be Harlem and Brooklyn, or the Bronx. One of the things that I have noticed is the silos or the social fragmentation. You don’t see a lot of collaborations that are attracting a diverse, mixed audience in the way that the city is mixed and diverse. Many of the organizations in Newburgh are volunteer-only. They don’t have paid executive directors, they don’t have staff.
HNY: What role can the humanities play in addressing Newburgh’s challenges?
Naomi: I myself feel that the humanities jumpstart a conversation. The humanities are timeless. Finding that solace and strength and inspiration and reflection on current day issues. That belief is what lead us to HNY’s Reading & Discussion program.
HNY: We’ve had partners hold Reading & Discussion programs in a wide variety of contexts but yours are the first held in barbershops.
Gabrielle: It is a challenge sometimes to reach our youth and engage them in civic opportunities. The barbershop conversations opened up a new door. It actually met them where they are and where they feel comfortable. Because a challenge in other gatherings is the absence of the male voice, but here, they would be reading aloud or being heard in what they had to say. The old way was: invite them to come somewhere and then tell them why voting is important; the new way is: ask them “Is voting important to you? What would you like to see change?” By doing it this way we made a path for them to want to be involved because we put the ball in their hands, as opposed to just telling them what to do. The humanities have been helpful in allowing them, through these readings, to have a dialogue in the community.
Naomi: The barbershops have always been a place where African-American men spend time, they come to get a haircut or a shave. They have been visiting the same barber for many, many years. It’s a place where your son is introduced and gets to hear men speaking. People are usually very loyal to their barbershops. Recognizing this sanctuary, it was important for us to offer this conversation where people are, as opposed to the reverse: trying to get them to come to other places. The barbershops are a very important audience precisely because they serve African-American men. Already these topics are being discussed in these barbershops; we are just complementing that discussion by bringing in humanities readings.
Props to Humanities New York! The readings are short, they include a biography, and they have guiding questions. That’s great! It makes it easier for us to facilitate the conversations, and to encourage others to go back to them on their own time. There are some people who have requested the readings and are going to use them for their own purposes.
From the book [The Civically Engaged Reader], we selected six seminal African-American authors, both women and men. That’s also an important point for the general public, to not just recognize the names, but to know the biography and the image as well as the readings and the powerful quotes. The barbershops have been anchors of the communities where men have come to discuss, to confide, to learn, to decide, to observe, to spread the word. Recognizing that barbershops are just as important as a church or a library or a city hall I think is way of strengthening the discourse. Applause to Gabrielle!
These barbershops are black-owned businesses. That’s something really exciting. The barbershops are beautiful in terms of the interiors. I feel very privileged that I’m able to sit there for two hours and to soak it all in. Someone’s sitting in this stool and their getting their hair trimmed. They’re hearing the words of Langston Hughes.
Gabrielle: We had discussion members as young as six! A boy and his father were both getting their hair cut. The oldest attendees were 88 and 78, and they attended all six conversations. We had all backgrounds, all ethnicities: Black, White, Spanish-speaking, German. It was just beautiful.
What we’re trying to do with the Barbershop Reading Group is to encapsulate a quote or reading that can be a source of strength or inspiration to whatever we confront. The current readings that we’ve done thus far are James Baldwin and W.E.B. DuBois, they have framed our issues very clearly. James Baldwin talks about a consumerist society and what that does to one’s self. He also asks: how can we act if we don’t know ourselves? Those are two things that came up in our first conversation.
HNY: How do you create a space or situation where people will feel comfortable discussing a text?
Gabrielle: My experience as a Circle Keeper at the Restorative Center gave me the skills to create an atmosphere that is inclusive. I give people the freedom of choice. I do a lot of preparation to set the mood. Before beginning we do a little breathing exercise and I let everyone know that this is an opportunity to speak and share your thoughts but you’re not obligated. I make sure I have enough printed copies for everyone to get a copy. The first person would start reading aloud, and we went around the room. People felt comfortable even though they hadn’t met the other folks before. If you welcome people with a smile as they arrive, and treat people with respect then people can feel that, and it makes them more willing to be open.
HNY: Tell us a little bit about what a Circle Keeper does.
Gabrielle: At the Restorative Center in Newburgh, which is a restorative justice program where we host a variety of conversations in conflict resolution, family, and community building circles, I am the program director. When we host these conversations we don’t know who is going to show up. You have to be ready to receive resistance, anxiety, and hostility depending on the topic. We learn how to understand ourselves and how we feel, and not put ourselves in the conversation but just be ready to receive the energy with a smile. I treat everyone like they are my relatives. That’s how I train my mind to think of it. I’m starting from a place of love and compassion. The Restorative Center has been in Newburgh for a few years now. Participants come and sit and have their voices heard. It’s a safe space with other community members.
HNY: What’s next for the barbershop discussions?
Naomi: We have a Facebook page and a gmail account, we don’t even have a website. As a run-up to the event we sent it to our personal contacts and on Facebook. Right now we are figuring out how best to sustain the audience. We’re collecting the emails of attendees and continuing our personal outreach. We’re looking to build a paper trail or living blog to disseminate the information. We’d like the event to happen again. Already there are some ideas coming from the barbershops themselves which are hugely important as community stakeholders. One of them is interested in giving free haircuts to boys who read a passage out loud. We’re hoping this can happen on an individual basis without an organizing entity. We’re hoping other barbershops will hear about it and be interested in the future.
Gabrielle: We are working on a photography idea along with the Newburgh Community Photo Project that would go into barbershops to ask questions about civic engagement. The barbershop is where it’s at. The interest generated is amazing, people continually send me stories about barbershop conversations. So many different stories are coming out of this. We wanted to continue that because we feel that it’s an area that needs a lot of work. Minorities, especially men, are not as civically engaged as they used to be. Many feel like it doesn’t make a difference.
HNY: The Women’s Suffrage Centennial–both state and national–and the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth are important historic anniversaries that you’ve helped Newburgh plan for. What are you working on?
Naomi: Through Johanna Jung, who is the Orange County Historian, and Cher Vickers, who writes the Newburgh Restoration Blog, I learned about the suffragists who held their convention in 1898 in Newburgh in the beautiful Palatine Hotel, which is no longer there. I got connected to a local artist, who two years previously had done a little intervention. I got excited to use this history and to amplify it. Together with Wolf (the local artist), Chuck Thomas, who is the library director, Gabrielle, Willa Free, who is the [head of] Orange County Democratic Women, and a few others, we organized a multi-faceted event to commemorate this history. I think it’s universal that sometimes you can live in a city that has such rich history and not be aware of it. That’s the role of projects about suffragists or Frederick Douglass: to revive that and to find new interpretations, or new meanings, or new relevance to who we are on an individual basis, but also as a community.Community engagement is a muscle that needs to be constantly exercised. You’re constantly finding different ways to do collaborations or community outreach.
HNY: What is the vision for 2020? What do you hope to achieve?
Naomi: Some of the ideas that we’ve floated for the 2020 celebration include a reenactment of the Jubilee March, which attracted 4,000 people, and to put permanent markers in the city of Newburgh. We’re talking about civic engagement. We may find that people are getting involved in this particular project or starting their own. Seeing a constellation of other activities that are responding to that shared history and shared community pride would be a major success in Newburgh.
HNY: Why celebrate Frederick Douglass in Newburgh?
Gabrielle: Several reasons. Douglass was such a positive speaker and a man of determination. He taught himself to read. He freed himself from slavery. Pursued his rights as a human being. He is a role model to us all. In the times we are living in now we worry about so much negativity and hatred. It’s important that we stay grounded and return to the roots of humanity and pursue those things that don’t just benefit us, but see how Douglass could impact America for the better and change the lives of people who weren’t even born yet. I think it’s very important that we are reminded, that we keep others like Frederick Douglass at the forefront of our conversation. We are people that pursue our dreams and not let anything hold us back. The 15th Amendment was the right thing to do and he would not give up that fight. We need to fight for the things that we want and follow in the footsteps of leaders like Douglass.
It’s also good for Newburgh. It gives the community an opportunity to come out in a different way, instead of just music and fun and food, that we also sit with each other and talk about a meaningful topic and gain collective wisdom, from the youngest to the oldest. My dream is to do a reenactment of the speech. We have a couple of community members who have volunteered to play the role of Frederick Douglass. I’d also like to see one of our children interview him. We want to prepare them to feel comfortable speaking out and asking questions. I see a lot of wonderful programs coming out of the celebration. I don’t want it to end in 2020.
Interview by Scarlett Rebman, Grants Officer
Keep up with us, join our newsletter.
Host your own Reading & Discussion Program.
Naomi Hersson-Ringskog is the founder of the Dept of Small Interventions (DoSI) which launches place-based projects to amplify cultural assets, galvanize collaborations, and build social infrastructure. Before launching the firm, Naomi co-founded No Longer Empty- a New York City non-profit. where continues to serve as a board member. She also serves as a member of the Awesome Newburgh Foundation, Storm King Art Center’s Young Council and Institute for Public Architecture. Naomi earned a Masters Degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University and completed the CORO Leadership program. She also co-chairs the American Planning Association’s Arts & Culture subcommittee.
Gabrielle Hill is a Program Director at the Restorative Center and she works for McDonald’s Corp at two locations as a Crew Trainer. At night you will find her home snuggled with her youngest daughter while sharing stories and reading books to her granddaughter. Gabrielle is very much involved in her community. In addition to The Restorative Center, she is on the Police Community Relations Board and is a mentor at The Center For Hope for local teens.
By Rick Bass
We are pleased to share the introductory essay for our newest Reading & Discussion theme: “Place and Story.” Humanities New York commissioned noted novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Rick Bass to curate a selection of texts that explore the manifold ways the American landscape influences our experiences and way of life. As with all R & D groups, the texts selected–which include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry–explore the theme from a variety of perspectives. We also ask our R & D Scholar-Advisors to pen an original essay contextualizing the selected readings. Below, in the “Place and Story” essay, Rick discusses each reading in the series within the context of the American environmental myths that persist in today’s culture, whether problematic or enlightening. If you are thinking of hosting a conversation, or need some book recommendations, this essay abounds with inspiration.
At the risk of sounding like an old hippie, railing against the cultural paradigm—which is to say, The Man—I believe that stories matter more than money, and that heart’s desire can matter more than brawn. That in dreaming there does lie responsibility, to paraphrase Delmore Schwartz. I’ve selected texts—though there are so many more than these!—to remind us of the vast differences between dreams of selfishness and bounty and the duty to realize, and act upon, limits: as if there burns bright yet in the genetic templates of our species the almost always-present recognition of how tenuous our existence is. And through it all, to remember how we all belong to what the poet Mary Oliver calls “the family of things.”
It is the dream of excess, I think, which has done the most damage to the American landscape, particularly in the often-vulnerable West, where resilience can often only be measured in geological terms rather than human-years. I have no quarrel with Genesis. I find it soothing in its loving, and, to this scientist’s eyes and ears, accurate, explanation of how the world came to be. And I do not find it ironic, only bittersweet and instructive, that the same text that instructs us to be stewards in our new and briefly empowered arrival to this green earth (and even in the story of The Flood, of getting a second chance), also presents, in its evocation of Edenic bounty, the idea that there are but two original inhabitants in the story: not seven billion-plus of us, now.
One particularly damning American myth is that one can cut all the timber in a forest, or a country, and that it will grow up so fast behind the cutting that the sawyer can turn around and work his way back, ceaselessly cutting, the forest replacing itself as fast as it is cut down. This is the myth that the rain will follow the plow, and that nature bends itself to our desires and our machines and even our primitive tools. These are, among many other flawed and failing myths, myths of technology. So, as William Kittredge reminds us, stories matter, hugely. Right or wrong, true or false, we tend over time to believe them. This is both a great power and a great danger.
Bounty and excess versus scarcity and paucity. How we think of ourselves—and others—determines our destiny. These texts have been selected in the spirit of James Joyce’s admonition that literature should forge in the smithy of one’s soul the consciousness of one’s race. And yet, as we know, evolution, like history, is alive, ever rising and falling—”Descent, With Modifications,” Darwin initially called his treatise on the matter.
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is an underappreciated masterpiece, if such a thing can be said of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It may well have sold a million copies across its now half-century lifespan, but because it is one of the foundational stories of our country—how we got to where we are—I feel it should be read by hundreds of millions, across generations. It will be relevant for as long as we dig and scratch at the earth for sustenance, and then dig for more than sustenance. It will also be relevant for as long as we dream, and hope; for although the book is about many things—masculinity and femininity in landscape; serving-the-self versus service to others; friendship and family—as it travels east to west, the Atlantic to the Pacific, it is perhaps most about what it states itself to be in the title: the balance between uplift and erosion, between mountain and plains; between the frenzy of ambition and the contentment of rest. A settling-out occurs with the dreams and passions of Susan and Oliver, one which it might be argued our country has not yet achieved.
How much further, one wonders, must we go, to reach that restful, tolerant condition that might be said to be a kind of wisdom?
Winter in the Blood, by James Welch, pushes the edge of loneliness and estrangement even further than does Angle of Repose. It’s a triple-braided evocation of cultural, economic, personal, and familial fragmentation, loss, diminishment, absence. This is a perfect slim book—the small, eloquent novel in its way as wondrous as the big sprawling adventure-book of a novel—with writing so spare that metaphors travel through it like birds, and as distinctive, if ever-fleeting.
Of course Virgil’s prize relic, touchstone to his family, must be a rifle, the instrument which, paired with alcohol, more than any others destroyed his birthright and ushered him into the new one, wrought with violence and dissatisfaction.
In 1989, I was fortunate enough to explore a story that was making itself, and not so much in need of a writer as instead simply an observer and a landscape to provide room for all the elements of story: structure, space and time, and, always, active characters—protagonists who want something and go after it.
The characters in The Ninemile Wolves all wanted pretty much the same thing—ecological restoration, recolonization of lost territory, recovery of lost identity—but were coming at it from decidedly different angles, and with plenty of obstacles between them and their goals.
One lone Rocky Mountain gray wolf, filtering back into the U.S. after sixty years’ absence, and then another, somehow finding her. One lone biologist, Mike Jimenez, committed to their recovery, and to the human community. The mother wolf, and her mate, chose to first return to the Ninemile Valley, to one particular meadow owned by two old cattle ranchers, Ralph and Bruce Thisted, who had the humility and curiosity, and the stewardship ethics, to not freak out when the wolf showed up in their pasture one day, green eyes blazing as it stared at their cattle. Not to give the story away, but it was the biologist’s creativity and determination, the ranchers’ tolerance and compassion, and the wolves’ ferocious fire to do more than survive–to prosper, and raise their young—that allowed this to be somewhat of a rarity in environmental sagas, one with a happy ending, or at least a happy middle.
The foundational business of life is one of the pursuit-and-gathering of calories—energy—and of territory and its resources. It’s how we treat one another that makes the journey and struggle worth the price of admission. Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park, by Marie Winn, brings this paradigm to Central Park, a small island within a small island. The rapture, and hunger, not just of the hawks themselves, but of humans finding a single long-eared owl existing amongst pigeons in a quadrant of the park with no permanent water and very few trees, speaks to the need by all of us to glimpse, taste, know, that filaments of the rank or even feral are still alive in the world, pursuing the ancient skills by which all have arrived at this point in time.
There’s so much else I want to recommend that’s not in here. To possess an ecological awareness, wrote Aldo Leopold, is to know that we live in a world of wounds. John Graves’ Good-bye to a River, as clear-headed and bittersweet an elegy as exists yet. David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction, which expands on Darwin’s and Wallace’s observations about the perils of fragmentation, took me a full year to re-read, but is well worth the investment.
As Doug Peacock—whose voice, says Terry Tempest Williams, is the ethical benchmark for wilderness in the American West—reminds us, big wild country is the healthiest, and the more of it there is, the healthier it is, often still capable of holding that most iconic of American megafauna, the grizzly bear. I consider Peacock’s Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness (along with Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place) to be one of the two most important works of place-based writing in the canon. I do not find it coincidental that both these books twine illness (PTSD and cancer, respectively) and grief with the restoration, even salvation, to be found in wild country not yet broken. These latter two artists are especially noteworthy in our times for their incredible commitment to activism, not merely as writers, but as front-line battlers in the daily grind of meetings, lobbying, protesting, resisting. They are active. (For more information and examples of their activist work, visit www.savetheyellowstonegrizzly and @TempestWilliams on Twitter).
A burning world elicits, from those who love it most fiercely, an impassioned, creative, and determined defense. None is more inspiring or impressive to me than Diane Wilson’s, as chronicled in An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos and Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas. Victories can be few and far between, and hers—a one-woman wrecking ball defending her home-place of Seadrift (what a name for our times!), against a multinational corporation, with Wilson teaching herself on-the-fly everything she needed to know about courts and law–is so fantastic as to at times read like a dream.
Deep soul’s beauty in the presence of what many might call bleakness is, if sentimentality can be avoided, as it is in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” evidence of strength of character. This poem’s beauty is an earned one, and what in the hands of a lesser poet would fall prey to sentimentality is instead presented, line by line as if in cinematic frames, as a humbled existence-in-the-moment, and awareness without nostalgia. Instead, we are led to understand, between the lines, the hard-gotten realization of time’s progression, and time’s and circumstances’ shaping of those lives.
I continue to be fascinated by the manner in which place shapes things: first an individual, then the larger population, then the culture, and from that, its destiny. This is again why stories matter. In Pattiann Rogers’ wise poem, “Animals and People: ‘The Human Heart in Conflict With Itself,’” which is written, in my opinion, with just the right amount of indictment, an aggrieved lamentation that takes its power not even so much from the usual source, specificity, but instead the accruing litany, Biblical in voice—like Commandments in reverse—we are hypnotized by the incantatory style into seeing the true nature of a relationship and then, from that, through her artfulness, the transformative understanding of the why of things. There are entire books, thick books, that accomplish far less than this amazing poem.
“Circle, Montana,” by Carter Walker, is, among other things, a heart-filled contemporary examination of the way distance affects individuals—the physical distances of open space often in tension or conflict with the emotional, personal, and familial distances—and, again, affecting ultimately the cultural distances. It’s not “simply” a portrait of two cultures—Native and Anglo—in conflict, but conflict at so many other levels: affluence versus poverty, parent versus child, the fragmentation of divorce, the conflict between friendship and lovers. All these explorations are given space to roam in the expanses of eastern Montana, and yet are compressed by season—winter, of course, and a blizzard—and, again, by place, the predominant cover of darkness that is one of the northern tier’s geographic primary signatures.
The selections in this curriculum are stories of land, and of the wild current that runs through healthy land. An entire other semester could and should be given to stories of the sky, in these carbon-heated times, as the forests burn, and to stories of water, as the oceans rise and the snows and wild creeks and rivers disappear, in a plot and destiny familiar to any reader of the Book of Revelations. In this series, however, we begin at the foundation: the stone, the land, across which the water flows and the air moves and the characters in the stories of life—people, and other animals—first traveled, and still do. Some of our culture’s stories possess deep ecological as well as artistic integrity—including those listed here—while others, coming at us daily, and still others passed with toxicity across the generations, are just whack. They all matter, however, some for better and others for worse, more than ever. It is past time to deny the flawed and failing ones, and to rebuild a culture with the stories that will endure: stories which possess in their center an ecological rightness, an ecological integrity, with its ever-present and animating spirit of all that which is wild—not entirely able to be controlled or even always known, but respected, even revered. And nurtured.
