Nebraska Writers

Future Ames Readings Available On Demand

2011-10-31T12:14:00.000-07:00

Bill Luxford, operations manager for 5 City TV,5 City TV, has informed us that new Ames Readings will be available via Video on Demand, as of this fall.

Following the Heritage Room by Newsletter

2011-06-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

The Heritage Room publishes a newsletter, available via e-mail if you sign up here on the Lincoln City Libraries web page, or by clicking on the icon on the lower left-hand corner of the Heritage Room home page.

Reduced staff hours are making it hard for us to continue to blog here. The sidebar listings of links to Nebraska literature and to Nebraska writers' own websites and blogs will, for now, continue to be updated from time to time.

Poet James Cihlar will present Ames Reading on Sunday, April 17th

2011-03-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Poet and writer James Cihlar is the author of the chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House Press, 2010) and the poetry book, Undoing (Little Pear Press, 2008). Cihlar's poems have also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Bloom, Minnesota Monthly, Northeast, The James White Review, Water-Stone Review, Mankato Poetry Review, Plain Songs, and many other magazines and reviews. His work has been included in the anthologies Aunties (Ballentine, 2004), Regrets Only (Little Pear Press, 2006), and Nebraska Presence (Backwaters Press, 2007). Cihlar is also the former editor of Nebraska Humanities. He is the recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for Poetry. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, April 17th in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Please join us. We look forward to an interesting reading.

Marilyn Dorf will present Wednesday, April 6 Lunch at the Library

2011-03-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

Marilyn Dorf writes poetry, short stories and essays. She grew up on a farm near Albion, Nebraska, and acquired a lasting appreciation of nature, wildlife and rural life that is reflected in her writing. Her chapbooks include: A Tribute to Buttons (1985), Of Hoopoes and Hummingbirds (1998), Windmills Walk the Night (1992), This Red Hill (2003), I Know That An Owl Owns This Sky (2009). Her poems have been published widely in periodicals, including The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas Quarterly, Wholenotes, Poet, Plainsongs, Bitterroot, and Nebraska Life Magazine, among others. She lives in Lincoln and is the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association's Author Member for 2010-2011.

The Program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on Wednesday, April 6th , in the auditorium on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. Coffee provided by The Mill. Please join us for an interesting program.

Brent Spencer Presents Sunday, March 20 Ames Reading

2011-03-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

Brent Spencer is a writer of novels, short stories, screen plays and memoirs. His publications include a novel, The Lost Son (Arcade Publishing) and a collection of stories, Are We Not Men? (Arcade Publishing), which was chosen by the editors of The Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of the best books of the year. His most recent work is a memoir, Rattlesnake Daddy, published by Nebraska's own Backwaters Press, that works through the legacy of his father's cruelties and absence. Spencer directs the Creative Writing Program at Omaha's Creighton University. He is a recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, where he was also a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing, and the James Michener Award at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned his MFA. He has also been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and The Millay Colony. He and his wife, Jonis Agee, have won awards for their screenplays. Spencer's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Literary Review, Epoch, The Missouri Review, GQ, and Writers Digest, among others.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, March 20 in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Please join us.

56th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference

2011-03-02T12:29:00.000-08:00

The Willa Cather Foundation will host the 56th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference, Willa Cather and her Popular Culture, April 29-30, 2011 in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Their poster, right, shows Willa dressed as Peter Paragon in "The Fatal Pin," a Union Girls Dramatic Club production in October, 1892.

Lois Lewandowski presents Lunch at the Library on Wednesday, March 2

2011-03-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

Nebraska born writer and Lincoln resident Lois Lewandowski writes the Gillian Jones Mystery Series. Lois is a long time member of the Lincoln Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Both The Fatal Heir (2008) and The Burden of Truth (2010) received honorable mention in the Eric Hoffer Awards. Check Lois's reviews out on Good Reads. Lois will present our next NLHA sponsored Lunch at the Library.

The Program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on Wednesday, March 2nd, in the auditorium on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. Coffee provided by The Mill. Please join us for an interesting program.

The Nebraska Sandhills: A new Heritage Room Display

2011-02-22T10:30:00.000-08:00

A new Heritage Room display surveys the literary presence of the Nebraska Sandhills. Some of the most memorable work by Nebraska authors has emerged from this fragile and challenging landscape. Our new display includes memoirs and works of history, biography, natural history, fiction, and photography.

The visual star of this display are the very striking black and white photographs from Charles Guildner’s portfolio “Lives of Tradition.” Guildner’s work was purchased in 2007 by Lincoln City Libraries with funds privately donated for that express purpose. The silver prints depict life on the Haythorn Ranch, a storied Sandhills ranch where the owners have continued to find a profit in using horses to do jobs that were mechanized almost everywhere else.

Paul Johnsgard’s This Fragile Land: A Natural History of the Nebraska Sandhills (1995) provides a superb introduction to the ecology of the region, its geological history, its creatures and its conservation issues. Charles McIntosh, The Nebraska Sand Hills: The Human Landscape (1996) draws from a lifetime of study in presenting a complete scholarly historical geography of the region, its occupants and their conflicts, beginning with Native Americans. Superb sketch maps illustrate McIntosh’s discussions of different waves of occupation, settlement, conflict and economic development. Nellie Snyder Yost’s The Call of the Range (1966), her history of the Nebraska cattle industry, is still an excellent guide to the origins and history of the great Sandhills ranches and the cattlemen who built them.

But above all, the history of the Sandhills is the story of great characters. The history of the Sandhills lives in the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies of those who settled the area. Their histories are one of the grand themes of Nebraska literature.

Mari Sandoz’s great biography of her father, the irascible, violent, but indomitable “Old Jules” Sandoz would be the best known of the biographies. And Sandoz, settler, land-promoter, friend of the older generation of mountain men, wanderers and Indians, feuded incessantly with his neighbors, among them Bartlett Richards, the founder of The Old Spade Ranch, in its time, the largest and most famous of the great Sandhills ranches. The biography of Richards by his son, Bartlett Richards, jr. and Ruth Van Ackern reminds us that Richards, too, was an interesting and complex character.

The Sandhills are cattle country, the region was poorly suited to the small homesteads that settlers moving in from the East imagined they might establish there. The resulting conflicts over fencing, leasing of public lands, water rights, and land use by settlers and cattlemen could turn violent. And with every policy change, ranchers seemed to come out on top over the long haul, besting the homesteaders, and acquiring their land. The ranchers were portrayed as real villains in the Eastern press, because in the East, no one really understood the futility of the broken dreams that died in the dry lands beyond the 100^th meridian. Whether or not the story that Theodore Roosevelt told Bartlett Richards to his face that he would put Richards in a Federal Penitentiary is apocryphal, Richards died in the custody of the Adams County Jail, where he was being held on a Federal conviction for fraudulent land filings. But local lore remembers that in the Kinkaid era, settlers would often gather up in such numbers at the Old Spade Ranch for the noon meal that an additional table had to be put up for the cowhands. Richards felt obliged to feed such guests, and sometimes to loan them equipment, to keep them from starving on their homesteads. The landscape itself swallowed the dreams of the farmers, only the ranchers survived.

To the biographies of Sandoz and Richards, and Lawrence Bixby, the “Preserver of the Old Spade Ranch,” in the crisis of the 1920s, one might add the memoirs of James H. Cook (1857-1942), Fifty Years on the Old Frontier (published in 1923), friend of Red Cloud and of the Northern Cheyenne and founder of the old 04 Ranch, and of his son Harold Cook, Tales of the 04 Ranch, which recounts the (fossil rich) Nebraska boyhood of the famous paleontologist. Perhaps we should remember the outlaw Doc Middleton as well. There are many more genuinely fascinating memoirs and biographies from the Sandhills than can be mentioned here.

The Sandhills are featured in many mavellous photography books. A complete collection of these would overfill the display case: Margaret MacKichan and Bob Ross, In the Kingdom of Grass (1992), Michael Forsberg’s Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild (2009), David A. Owen, Like No Other Place: The Sandhills of Nebraska, Photographs and Stories (2010), Roger Bruhn (Foreword by Ted Kooser), Dreams in Dry Places (1990), Georg Joutras, Along the Edge of Daylight: Photographic Travels from Nebraska and the Great Plains(2005) would be among them. Michael Forsberg was a recent Ames Reader, and Lisa Norman’s Haythorn Land & Cattle Co.: A Horseman’s Heritage: A Pictorial Essay was also mentioned in an earlier post. I have used some of their covers to illustrate this posting.

The Heritage Room maintains a Nebraska Sandhills Book List on its home page.

The John H. Ames Reading Series Presents John Janovy, Jr. at Sunday, February 20th Reading

2011-02-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

John Janovy Jr. has lived in Nebraska since 1966. He holds the Paula and D.B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at UNL. He has been Director of UNL's Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the Nebraska State Museum and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists. He is a distinguished scientist, with a research interest in parasitology, and the author of over 90 scientific papers and book chapters.

In addition to his scientific career, Janovy has also pursued a literary career writing natural history and social and cultural commentary informed by the practice of the scientist. Janovy's 1978 Keith County Journal put him in the front rank of America's natural history writers, with reviewers comparing his work to writing by Loren Eiseley and by the pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold.
Janovy's publications span a wide range of topics, and include, besides natural history titles, Fields of Friendly Strife: The Relationship of a Father, Daughter, and Sport, and Conversations between God and Satan: Held during October, 2004 at the Crescent Moon Coffee House in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, Earth, Milky Way, a work of science fiction.

Janovy's literary career spans enormous changes in publishing. Janovy endured rejections by 22 publishers before St. Martin's took Keith County Journal, and a newspaper reviewer noted that a later book garnered 42 rejection slips before reaching a more perceptive editor. A local publisher who knew the writer and wanted him to write freely on Nebraska related themes solicited the manuscript for Janovy's 2009 Pieces of the Plains: Memories and Predictions from the Heart of America. Janovy has used CreateSpace.com and Amazon's Kindle to self-publish his novel, The Ginkgo, in both paper and electronic formats. Janovy is a writer who is interested in his audience, especially young people, and is willing to take chances and say what he wants.

Heritage Room collections, by the way, include Janovy's artwork as well as his books.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, February 20th in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Please join us. We look forward to a fascinating program.

Joe Starita to Present Wednesday, February 2 Lunch at the Library Program

2011-01-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

Distinguished journalist, author and University of Nebraska College of Journalism professor Joe Starita will present the Nebraska Literary Heritage Assocation's February Lunch at the Library Program here at Bennett Martin Public Library. As you may remember from a previous posting here, Joe's I am a Man: Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice was the One Book, One Lincoln book for 2010. An earlier book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995) garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Joe has broad interests, and along with Tom Tidball, he is also the author of A Day in the Life: The Fans of Memorial Stadium (1996), a book of photographs and observations on this aspect of our local culture. He delivers an exciting program.

The Program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on Wednesday, February 2nd, in the auditorium on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. Please join us.

2011 Nebraska Poet's Calendar will be introduced by Sarah Fairchild at Sunday, January 16th Ames Reading

2011-01-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

Sarah Fairchild grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, and studied English at Doane College and the University of Nebraska. Her Poetry has appeared in many publications, including Plainsongs. Sarah runs Black Star Press, which is once again publishing a Nebraska Poet's Calendar. At our Sunday, January 16th Ames Reading, Sarah and her friends, poets John Johnson, Mary K. Stillwell and Rex Walton will present an exiting program of poetry to celebrate the publication of the Calendar.

The original artwork used in the 2011 Nebraska Poets Calendar is being shown in displays at the entrance to Bennett Martin Public Library and on the library's second floor. Artists Connie Backus-Yoder, Sally Cox, Su Harvey, Sue Kouma Johnson, Tom Meyers, Max Miller, Marilyn Reynolds, Gene Roncka, Donna Schimonitz, Melissa L. R. Sinner, and Richard Terrell contributed to the Calendar and the displays.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, January 16, 2011 in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Come see the displays and join us for a stimulating reading and discussion.

Some New Titles in the Heritage Room, January, 2011

2011-01-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

What follows is a sampling of some of the new and notable titles acquired by the Heritage Room in the last six months.

Mari Sandoz "I Do Not Apologize for the Length of This Letter" The Mari Sandoz Letters on Native American Rights, 1940-1965, Introduced and edited by Kimberli A. Lee, with a foreword by John R. Wunder. (Plains Histories) Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009.

Kimberli Lee, who compiled this collection and wrote chapters introducing the volume and the four carefully chosen groupings of letters within it, became acquainted with the letters when she was a doctoral student as the University of Nebraska. Lee created the online finding aid for the National Endowment for the Humanities supported project that preserved some 20,000 pages of Sandoz letters, and some 32,000 of Sandoz's research cards on microfilm.

The selection that Lee has made focuses on four themes: Sandoz's concern with historical accuracy in the portrayal of Native Americans; her indictments of federal Indian policy; her criticism of the negative and simplistic stereotyping of American Indians in advertising, film, and fiction; and her support for Native writers and artists.

Sandoz was driven, to the point of obsession, by her concern for historical accuracy, with getting the details right. She hated it when she found the history that mattered to her most obscured by confusion, inaccuracy, and carelessness. Thus her raging contempt for the films that borrowed freely (plagiarized, she thought) from her books on Crazy Horse and on the Cheyenne, only to present, yet again, new and sensational versions of that stereotyped, cliché-ridden false history she worked so hard to correct. She was equally clear-headed about the economic and political forces that were driving contemporary Indian Policy. She was also remarkably prescient in understanding what historical materials and themes were going to grow in significance as the years passed. At times she came close, long before it became popular, to writing a sort of environmental history. On the subject matter in question here, Lee quotes Vine DeLoria, Jr. on her insights into Native history: "Sandoz had an amazing ability to develop themes and issues that plagued Indians during her time and that continue to disrupt us today."

While these attributes are perhaps not in themselves exactly the source of Sandoz's literary greatness, they are still very much part of what made her a great writer. This is an important book because it introduces a vast collection of material that reflects Sandoz's way of thinking about these matters. Perhaps it's worth noting, too, that well considered collections of this sort have been an important part of the intellectual landscape, but that may not be true any longer. As Lee notes in closing, such a collection of Sandoz's letters "may never again be produced on paper, given technological advances in digital and electronic communication." Will anyone take the trouble to do this kind of work, if the product is to be as ephemeral as a blog posting?

Several related works have come in over the last several months, including:

Wynne L. Summers, Women Elder's Life Stories of the Omaha Tribe. Macy, Nebraska 2004-2005, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009

Hugh J. Reilly, The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars (Native America: Yesterday and Today), Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

Linda M. Waggoner, Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. A fascinating biography of one of the first Indian artists to make it in the mainstream of American art.

We are now a bit behind in noticing new materials and hope to catch up in later postings.

"Great Books to Give as Gifts"--Vicki Wood will present December 1st Lunch at the Library Talk

2010-11-24T11:28:00.000-08:00

Our Wednesday December 1st Lunch at the Library will feature Lincoln City Libraries Youth Librarian Vicki Wood. Vicki will present her very popular annual review of books that make great gifts for all ages. We look forward to hearing her suggestions.

The program begins at 12:10 pm in the auditorium on the 4th floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. Bring your lunch and enjoy coffee provided by The Mill! Please join us!

2011 One Book, One Nebraska Title by Ted Kooser

2010-11-23T12:54:00.000-08:00

One Book, One Nebraska has chosen Ted Kooser's Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), as the featured title for 2011. Although Kooser is one of America's most distinguished poets, this is not a poetry book at all, but a kind of intimate travel guide to Kooser's backyard. Kooser, who lives in Garland, Nebraska, served two terms as United States Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 and has published many collections of poetry, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Local Wonders won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and Third Place in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in Nonfiction for 2002. The book was chosen as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends of American Writers. It also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. Like his poetry, Kooser's prose parses the details of a rural American landscape, illuminating the hidden lives of its natural and human worlds with humor and insight.

One Book One Nebraska 2011 sponsors include the Nebraska Center for the Book, Nebraska Humanities Council, Nebraska Library Association, Nebraska Library Commission, and University of Nebraska Press.

Cather Event at UNL, 7:00 pm, Wednesday, December 1

2010-11-23T12:31:00.000-08:00

The Robert E. Knoll Lecture Series is sponsoring a lecture by American novelist and editor Bradford Morrow. Morrow will present "My Willa Cather" Wednesday, December 1 at 7:00 PM at City Campus's Union Auditorium. Morrow, who currently teaches at Bard College, is the founder and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions. He is Kenneth Rexroth's literary executor. Morrow is also a prize winning short story writer and a distinguished novelist whose work has been published in Portuguese, French, German and Polish translation.

Joseph Wydeven will explore the work of Wright Morris at our Ames Reading on Sunday, November 21

2010-11-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

Joseph Wydeven, Professor emeritus of English and Humanities and former dean of Arts and Sciences at Bellevue University, has had an enduring interest in writer and photographer Wright Morris. Wydeven began to read Morris and study his photographs in the early 1970s. He wrote his Purdue University dissertation on Morris, and has since published numerous articles and book chapters on Morris, as well as the 1998 biography Wright Morris Revisted. He first met Morris and his wife Jo in California in 1979 and had at least six visits there with Morris before the writer's death in 1998. He presented a special program on Morris in the Heritage Room in 1985.

Wydeven has sought to give us a deeper appreciation of Morris, who is surely one of the most independent, original, and complex writers to come from our state. Morris was the most productive writer of his generation. He was one of the few who can claim the invention, in the photo-text, of a new literary form. Morris won great critical acclaim, but far less popular success. His works chronicled disquieting aspects of the American experience, and a post-Depression world in which anchors of history and place, seemingly renewed in the 1930s, were once again drifting away. Since Morris' book, The Home Place, has been the 2010 One Book One Nebraska selection, it seemed appropriate to invite Joe Wydeven back to talk about one of his favorite topics.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, November 21st in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Please join us.

Naturalist John Janovy, Jr. to Speak at Wednesday, November 3rd Lunch at the Library

2010-10-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

John Janovy, Jr. is a distinguished parasitologist and professor of biology who has the broadest philosophical interest in human encounters with nature and the education of young people.
Janovy is the author (and illustrator) of some of the most admired books and essays in American natural history, among them, Keith County Journal, Return to Keith County, and Dunwoody Pond: Reflections on the High Plains Wetlands and the Cultivation of Naturalists. He is also a gentle humorist that can offer up a book like Outwitting College Professors: A Practical Guide to the Secrets of the System as a guide to getting a good education.

Wednesday's program borrows its title from Janovy's most recent book, Pieces of the Plains: Memories and Predictions from the Heart of America, in which the author meditates on his experiences as a biologist, on our understanding of the natural world, and our future.

The Program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on November 3rd, in the auditorium on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. Please join us.

One Book-One Lincoln Display at Bennett Martin Library

2010-10-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

A new display on the second floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln celebrates the announcement that Joe Starita’s book, I am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice will be this year’s One Book/One Lincoln selection. Other finalists were worthy, but Starita’s book offers a riveting story with deep roots in local and regional history.

Joe Starita was born in Lincoln and studied English and Journalism at the University of Nebraska. He went on to become an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald and that newspaper’s New York City Bureau Chief. He is a former City Editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for reporting at the Miami Herald, and his book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995) won him critical acclaim, local and regional awards, and a second Pulitzer Prize nomination. Starita teaches in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Starita’s books are a distinguished contribution to a strong Nebraska literary tradition. Some of the earliest serious attempts to record and understand Native American experiences and to put the Plains Indians back into American history as real people were made by Nebraska writers. Our display represents a little more than a century of Nebraskans writing about the Plains Indians.

In the best of these works, writers struggled to present the true voices of Native Americans and record their side of history in stories that seemed about to be lost to old age and death, or overlooked in a strong tendency to convert American history into a dull monument to virtue and Manifest Destiny. Real history, interesting history, is meaningful conflict, complex people who deserve to be understood on their own terms, mixed motives and light and shadow. While recognizing that the simple moralization of history is a trap that leaves us ignorant, from time to time, Nebraska writers have gently suggested that much is to be learned from the struggles of native people that sheds light on some of America’s more persistent problems at home and abroad.

The display includes work by Starita, Eli S. Ricker, Mari Sandoz, John Neihardt, Melvin Gilmore, Amos Bad Heart Bull (introduction by Mari Sandoz), George Hyde, Donald Danker, Thomas Henry Tibbles, Hartley Burr Alexander, Alan Boye, John Wunder, and Stew Magnuson, among others.

Glenna Luschei to present October 17th Ames Reading

2010-10-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Glenna Luschei is a poet, publisher, editor, translator and (!) successful avocado rancher. Glenna grew up in Beaver City and Lincoln, Nebraska, and now lives in California. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. A well-published poet, see her book list here, she also founded the "ground-breaking" (Hilda Raz) poetry magazines Café Solo and Solo. In an appreciation of Glenna, Nebraska poet Ted Kooser recalls that his real success as a poet began with the publication of A Local Habitation & A Name by Solo Press in 1974. Glenna Luschei has been recognized as a pioneer in the small press movement, and in its effort to bring vital new work to the attention of readers. She has served as the Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo, as a national panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and as a member of the San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women, among other positions. She has pursued and interwoven an amazingly wide array of creative, critical, and social commitment and influence.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, October 17th in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Please join us to hear Glenna Luschei read.

Join us Wednesday, October 6 for "Lunch at the Library" with Lisa Knopp

2010-09-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Lisa Knopp will discuss her new essay collection, Three Rivers: Journeys and Junctures. A Collection of Essays about the Mississippi, Missouri, and the Platte Rivers. Knopp has gained critical acclaim for essays that mix natural history with personal and biographical perspectives to a achieve striking insights into the bonds between the natural world and our historical and psychological experience.

Knopp holds the Jefferis Endowed Chair of English, University of Nebraska-Omaha and is the author of four previous collections, including Interior Places (2008), The Nature of Home (2002), Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (1998), and Field of Vision (1996).

Lisa will present our Lunch at the Library talk Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 12:10 pm on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library. Bring your lunch and enjoy coffee provided by The Mill!

Rick Cypert presents September 19th Ames Reading

2010-09-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Rick Cypert was our 191st Ames Reader on September 19th. He presented a lively program about Nebraska mystery writer Mignon Eberhart and answered audience questions afterward. Cypert hails from Throckmorton, Texas and teaches at Nebraska Wesleyan (since 1987). He is interested in mystery and and suspense writers. His interest in Eberhart led him to write her biography, America's Agatha Christie: Mignon Good Eberhart, Her Life and Works, (2005) and put together a new collection of her short stories, Dead Yesterday and Other Stories by Mignon G. Eberhart, edited by Rick Cypert and Kirby McCauley (2007).

Cypert's most recent book is The Virtue of Suspense: The Life and Works of Charlotte Armstrong, (2008).

A Book Artist’s Vision: Rosekrans Hoffman--A New Display in the Heritage Room

2010-08-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman recalled for friends how her father, Jim, had

“shunned the finality of a paved road, as though Lewis and Clark had hired [him] to scout the uncharted territory of Denton. Instead, he preferred a steep mud hill in his Model A, for it put up a fight and they wrestled until he was on top. And in the 1930s the top was close to the sky.”

Her father also avoided “roads that were numbered like prisoners,” preferring to drive anonymous roads “met by farmer’s driveways, staked by mailboxes and crossed by animals.”

Photograph with, left to right, Rudolfo Gonzales, Marian Anderson, Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman, and Bob Hoffman. Ruth met Bob at a jazz concert. Photo by famed jazz photographer Jack Bradley, used here by kind permission of Jack Bradley. Bradley recalls that "both Ruth and Bob were dear friends." All rights reserved, reproduction by written permission only, Jack Bradley, 24 Skipper's Drive, Harwich, MA 02645.

Rosekrans Hoffman took her father’s independence and his love of byways to heart. Cosmopolitan as she became, after leaving Nebraska to pursue her artistic career in New York, when she found her artistic path pointing back along the roads of her childhood, she followed it. At first, she had painted, very successfully, in the style of the day. Her abstract impressionist paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum and in other famed collections. She changed direction in the 1970s as she began to illustrate children's books. Soon an agent suggested she write such a book herself. Anna Banana (New York: Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) settled Rosekrans Hoffman in a unique and successful career as an artist who wrote children’s books and provided artwork for children’s books by many other writers. She was always careful to say that she was an artist and not an illustrator. To her, this meant that the integrity of her artistic vision came first.

When she spoke to friends and interviewers, it was always apparent that Rosekrans Hoffman had unusually intense memories of her own childhood. She remembered the fine red dust that blew up from Oklahoma in the early 1930s, coming in through unsealed windows so thickly that was hard to breath indoors, so that her mother would put wet towels over Ruth and her brother’s heads to filter the air. The fortitude, ingenuity, and teamwork required for a family to survive the Great Depression years seemed to draw families and neighbors together. For a child, all unaware of her parents’ worries, those years could make for wonderful, and unusually intense (by contrast with the experience of later, more materialistic generations) childhood memories.

But all was not wonder. In the later summer of 1933, age of seven, Ruth developed a bone infection, osteomyelitis, treatable in those days before antibiotics only with painful bone drains. Most people with the disease died, Ruth spent 18 months in a full-body cast, armpits to toes, to immobilize her for the drains. She would spend many more months in partial casts, a wheelchair, and homemade braces that her father invented to enable her to become more mobile. The experience, she told Lincoln Star reporter Patty Beutler,

“gave me a new perspective on life… in bed in the body cast, horizontal I saw things I wouldn’t ordinarily see. I wasn’t a child looking up, but more like a part of the land. From my prone position, I used to eye my food like an explorer surveying the horizon. Piles of mashed potatoes took on the proportions of mountains against the skyline. Undersides of chins, nostrils, palms jumped out at me. I studied expressions, the details of wallpaper, and tiny hairs peeking out of people’s ears.”

She had been drawing since she was three or four years old, but in her long confinement in bed, she began to draw all the time. She began by copying the comic strip, “Tillie the Toiler,’ and others from the newspaper. “Good things can happen from really bad things, although you may not know it at the time,” she told a Connecticut interviewer. Her illness put her on the path to becoming an artist. She would go on to get a fine arts degree from the University of Nebraska.

As Ted Kooser recalled at her memorial, Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman “was in pain from the time she was a young girl to the day she died.” “How is it possible,” Kooser asked, “for a person enduring such suffering to create drawings and paintings so luminous with delight, to write stories with such joy and hope?” She seemed to draw on “an immense store of character” running counter to the self-centeredness that seems so widespread in our world. Kooser again:
“You all know how marvelously witty Ruth was, and how much she loved to laugh. At the end of her years, having lost her delightful and beloved husband, Bob, having lost the ability to care for herself, she could even find life in a nursing home amusing. I would go up there to visit her in part to hear what she had to say about the other people there. I would rather hear Ruth describe somebody down the hall or in the dining room than to see them myself…. She could snatch funny lines right out the air, like butterflies.”

Ruth never spent much time looking at other artists' and authors' childrens books. When she illustrated books for other writers, she favored the publishers’ usual practice of keeping the author and the artist separate until the book launch party. Her art drew on her own vision of reality, “if there is one thing I concentrate on,” she told an interviewer, “it’s expression—it never seems to lie… there is a facial expression and then there is the whole body as expression…“ Children, she noticed, “learn expression before words.” She never had children of her own, but seemed to draw from a deep well of her own childhood, on the muted colors of small town Nebraska in the 1930s, and on the quirky and independent spirit that sustained rural people in those years of trial.

The new display in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library includes selections from the original artwork (all in the Heritage Room) for Go To Bed: A Book of Bedtime Poems, Selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, Illustrated by Rosekrans Hoffman. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), following through the various stages of book art production through to the color proofs. The display also includes other books, sketches and cards sent to friends, and, as part of our permanent display, two of her dolls. The display draws on the Heritage Room's files of Rosekrans Hoffman's correspondence and on artwork she donated to the Heritage Room. From the 1970s on, Rosekrans Hoffman donated posters and drawings to the Heritage Room for our fund-raising purposes.

--Stephen Cloyd

* * * *

Sources:

Rosekrans Hoffman on her father, remarks made July 28, 1983 at a celebration of the artist's work in the State Capitol Rotunda, Rosekrans Hoffman Manuscript in Heritage Room (corrected and signed by the author), "Hoffman, Rosekrans, Capitol Celebration 7-23-83."

Patty Beutler, “Rosekrans Hoffman, Native Nebraskan Draws on ‘Peculiar’ Perspective,” in Nebraska Library Association Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 pp. 15-19. Beutler interviewed the author and artist about her unusual perspective and observed the connections between her childhood and her artwork noted here, especially regarding her choice of palette.

The most extensive published sketch of Rosekrans Hoffman (the name she used professionally) is Sue Williams, “Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman, A Renowned Lancaster County Artist,” in Tales and Trails Newsletter from Denton, NE and surrounding areas, Vol. 3, No. 3, June 2001, pp. 1-5.

Quotations from Ted Kooser are from “Remarks for Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman’s memorial service, December 2, 2007.” (Kooser MS in Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman vertical file, Heritage Room).

“I concentrate… on expression,” in Nora Fitzgerald, “Child’s World,” Connecticut Magazine, Vol. 52, No. 12, December, 1989, p. 115.

Small Presses and Little Magazines in Nebraska--A New Heritage Room Display

2010-06-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

Small presses and little magazines are lively participants in Nebraska literary life. These publishing efforts treasure independent judgment, fidelity to self-chosen ideals, the discipline of craftsmanship, and the desire--perhaps most intensely felt by poets--to create something wholly one's own. Small presses value freedom from commercial, corporate, and academic influence. Writers and publishers feel that literary ideals and craft can grow and prosper best in a small face-to-face community, where frankness and immediacy survive. Over many years, the activities of these presses have helped shape a genuine community of writers in the state. Everything in our display was published in Nebraska.

Books by these Presses/Publishers will cycle through the display:
Windflower Press (Garland), Backwaters Press (Omaha) , Morpho Press (Omaha), Cummington Press (Omaha), Black Oak Press (Lincoln), Sandhills Press (Ord), Lyra Press (Lincoln), The Prairie/Plains Resource Institute, The Center for Rural Affairs, and Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center.

Windflower Press
It is not surprising to find that Ted Kooser wrote the article on "Small Presses" in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. Kooser himself founded and operated the Windflower Press, which specialized in contemporary poetry. Windflower was a one-man operation. Kooser was its editor, publisher, and sometimes its book designer and illustrator. The Press gained international recognition for bringing new poetry to a wider audience and for promoting the work of younger poets. Windflower published Kooser's literary magazines, The Salt Creek Reader (1967-1971), The New Salt Creek Reader (1972-1975), and The Blue Hotel (1980-1981). The Salt Creek Reader received grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry was recognized as one of the best books from small presses for 1980 by Library Journal. Other Windflower anthologies have received regional and international acclaim. In 1999, Kooser published Roy Scheele's Keeping the Horses as a fundraising project for the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association. Kooser's Windflower Press is now inactive (though the name is being used by an unrelated California Press).

Abbatoir Editions:
Harry Duncan, (1917-1997) was one of the leading figures in the revival of printing by hand. In 1982 Newsweek Magazine called him "the father of the post-World War II private-press movement." He began printing by hand in 1939, and over the years he would print Robert Lowell's first volume of poetry and many other works of contemporary literature. Duncan came to Nebraska in 1972 to operate a press at the University of Omaha, for which he created the Abbatoir Editions imprint. Duncan's Doors of Perception: Essays in Book Typography, W. Thomas Taylor, 1987, is a meditation on his years of experience in book design and printing. Duncan received the Jane Geske Award from The Nebraska Center for the Book in 1994.

Independent Presses
Several of Nebraska's independent presses have been founded by poets. Ted Kooser founded the Windflower Press, Greg Kosmicki founded and runs Backwaters Press, Matt Mason created Morpho Press, and Greg Kuzma founded the Best Cellar Press. David McCleery runs A Slow Tempo Press. Poets commonly self-publish their own chapbooks, so it is a small step from that to publishing other work. Matt Mason told Omaha Reader interviewer Jasmine Maharisi that "the advantage [of having your own press] is being able to do things you like and think are good rather than what will make you a lot of money... My press has never made a dime of profit."

Among the most active independent presses at the moment is Backwaters Press, where Greg Kosmicki has been assisted by volunteer editors, including poet Marge Saiser and writer Lisa Sandlin. Backwaters Press publishes on average some 15 poetry books a year. Backwaters has received numerous Nebraska Book Awards for its success in finding and publishing work by unique and talented writers from Nebraska and from around the Midwest.

Other independent publishers of note are County Historical Societies, The Center for Rural Affairs, The Prairie Plains Resource Institute. Like the poets' efforts, these reflect the will of a small community of people to see something of special value find an audience, even though the effort might not be financially profitable.

Special hard to find items included in the display:

William S. Whitney and Jan Whitney, Microcosm of the Platte. A guide to Bader Memorial Park Natural Area. Aurora: Prairie/Plains Resource Institute, 1987.
This guide to Bader Park is a small masterpiece of graphic design and single color illustration rich in ecological observations about the Platte river and Bader Park.

Weldon Kees, The Ceremony and other stories. edited with an introduction by Dana Gioia. Omaha: Abbatoir Editons, 1983.

Ted Kooser, A Book of Things. Joseph M. Ruffo, illustrator. Lincoln: Lyra Press, 1995 Limited Edition.
A very elegant slip-cased limited edition of Kooser's poems.

Matt Mason, Coffee and Astronomy and other poems. Omaha: Morpho Press, 2001

James Magorian, The Hideout of the Sigmund Freud Gang. Lincoln: Black Oak Press, 1987.

Some New Titles in the Heritage Room, May 2010

2010-05-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

Joel Sartore, Rare: Portraits of America's Endangered Species. (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society/Focal Point, 2010) Lincoln resident Sartore is an award winning photographer for National Geographic. For 20 years or more Sartore has been making portraits of individuals of endangered species. This book collects these portraits of "the rarest of the rare." There are familiar Nebraska examples like the Blowout Penstemon and the Salt Creek Tiger Beetle. It is also fun to read about the wolverine who tore apart a one-inch plywood backdrop in minutes, then stepped gently across the surface of a thin and fragile backdrop of seamless paper to get his picture taken.

Marianne Beel, Sand in My Shoes: Four Decades of Sandhills Stories and History. (Sioux Falls: Pine Hill Press, 2008) Marianne Beel's first "Sand in My Shoes" column appeared in the North Platte Telegraph in 1977. Her columns tell of life in the Sandhills, and the challenges and rewards of ranching.

Robert Beum and Roy Scheele, ed. A Few on the Mini: Poems on the small, neglected and out-of-the-way. Lincoln: The Dolphin Press/Three Sheets Press, 2009. A collection of poems by Robert Beum, John Fandel, Maria Melendez, Rachel Palmer, Judy Ray, Christof Scheele, and A.E. Stallings.

Jeff Koterba, Inklings, a memoir. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) The cartoonist's haunting and generous memoir of growing up in Omaha in a conflicted family with an explosive and eccentric father, and becoming an artist. Go ahead and read all the praise from other Nebraska writers on the back cover (Mary Pipher, Richard Dooling, Jonis Agee, and Timothy Schaffert among others).

Don Schauffenberger and Bill Beck, The Only State: A History of Public Power in Nebraska. (Nebraska Public Power District, 2010). Nebraska is a peculiar place. It is the only State in these United States in which every electric utility is publicly owned. Perhaps this is something of a monument to the great George Norris. But above all it is a tribute to the foresight, courage and tenacity of businessmen, utilty managers, politicians and citizens who supported this system and the engineers who built it. This history shows how that system embodies, albeit in a very modern form, the realism and the intense community spirit of Nebraska's first settlements and pioneer generations. Informed by insider Schauffenberger's encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Nebraska's public power and business historian Beck's broad perspectives, this book is a delight to read, and wonderfully illustrated. In a period of American history that probably be remembered mainly for corruption, self-deception, waste, and hubris, this book reminds the reader that in Nebraska, it is sometimes possible to sustain virtues that are dying, or dead, elsewhere.

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (New York: Ballantine, 2009). Dan Chaon's own website surveys the great reviews this novel about identity and fraud has been getting in the national press. The book is on the American Library Association's list of Notable Books, The Washington Post's list of best fiction of 2009, and Salon's Top Five Fiction of 2009. Some of the novel has a Nebraska setting, out in the wind in the middle of no-where, near a dried up Lake McConaughy: "There was a soundlessness to this place, she thought, though sometimes the wind made the glass in the windowpanes hum..." My gosh, its doing that now! This reader enjoyed the novel, but did not think the profound thoughts about identity that occurred to reviewers in the national press.

Mark Griep and Marjorie Mikasen, ReAction! Chemistry in the Movies. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Griep is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his wife, Mikasen, is a geometric painter who has received support from the Nebraska Arts Council. With CSI enjoying a boom on television, and young people checking out everything on zombies and vampires they can get their hands on, this book should be a best seller, despite its esoteric subject matter. The film summaries and factual assessments of the science and chemistry that lie behind the films are often fascinating. Read about the real chemistry of a toxin that is supposed to produce a zombie. It looks as if the authors collected every movie that involved chemistry, poison, or a secret formula. Alas, flubber is not real!

Wright Morris Display Celebrates 2010 One Book One Nebraska Selection

2010-04-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

Wright Morris (right) signing his books in the Heritage Room.

A new Heritage Room display on the second floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln celebrates author Wright Morris. Morris gained critical acclaim as a novelist and as a photographer. He received a National Book Award twice, in 1957 for The Field of Vision , looking at how a visit to a Mexican bullfight alters the lives of a group of Nebraska tourists, and in 1981 for Plains Song.

Photography and fiction were equally important in Morris' extraordinary life-long effort to capture the soul of the Midwest. In 1942 and again in 1946 Morris won a Guggenheim fellowship to support his photographic projects. The support enabled him to return to Nebraska and to produce his first two photo-texts, The Inhabitants, and The Home Place. These ground-breaking works, combining photography and fiction, have been recognized as an attempt to create an entirely new literary form. In honor of the 100th Anniversary of Wright Morris's birth, the Nebraska Center for the Book has chosen The Home Place as the One Book, One Nebraska book for 2010. The Lone Tree Literary Society in Morris's birthplace, Central City Nebraska, will host many of this year's One Book One Nebraska activities.

Our display (snapshot above) includes signed Wright Morris posters, books and other memorabilia. Heritage Room archival collections include the Wright Morris-Victor Musselman correspondence and several original Morris prints. Wright Morris developed a close friendship with Loren Eiseley when when both men lived in the same building in Philadelphia in the late 1940s. Gale Christianson's interviews and correspondence with Morris are in our Gale Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials

Nebraska's 2010 Letter's About Literature Winners at the Heritage Room.

2010-04-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

"Letters About Literature" is a national reading promotion for children and young adults sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and locally coordinated through the Nebraska Center for the Book.

Contest participants compete on three levels: Level I for young readers in grades 4-6; Level II for young adult readers in grades 7-8; and Level III for readers in grades 9-12. Young readers are asked to write a letter to an author, living or dead, explaining how that author's work somehow "gave them wings" (Level I), became a part of their life (Level II), or changed their view of the world or themselves (Level III).

On April 7, this year's Nebraska winners gathered in Lincoln. They toured the State Capitol, met with Governor Heineman, were treated to a dinner, and closed their special day at the Heritage Room (where the winner from Alliance was present via video conference) and signed their submissions. Winning letters will be accessible online courtesy of the Nebraska Library Commission.

2010 Willa Cather Annual Spring Conference, June 3-5.

2010-04-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

The theme of the 2010 Willa Cather Annual Spring Conference in Red Cloud Nebraska will be "Food, Drink, and Willa Cather's Writing." Register online by May 27th at www.WillaCather.org. The keynote speaker will be Susan Meyer of Wellesley College. Cather's O Pioneers! and "The Bohemian Girl" will be specially featured at this year's conference. Conference dates are June 3-5, 2010.

Sunday April 18th Ames Reader will be Hilda Raz

2010-04-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

Hilda Raz is a native of Rochester, New York. She has lived in Nebraska since 1963. She has been editor of Prairie Schooner since 1987. In 1993 she was named the first Luschei Professor and Editor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She teaches English and womens' and gender studies. She has published poems, essays, articles and reviews. Her recent books include: What Happens (2009), All Odd and Splendid (2008), and, with Aaron Raz Link, What Becomes You.

The program begins as 2:00 P.M. Sunday April 18th, in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. All Ames Readings are taped for later broadcast on 5 City TV, Time Warner Cable Channel 5. Please join us.

The Loren Eiseley Reader Book Launch

2010-04-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Loren Eiseley Society presented a great book launch program at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln this past Saturday. Eiseley Society president Bing Chen chaired the event. In the snapshot above we see him thanking the folks at Infusionmedia Publishing for their contribution to the project. Ray Bradbury wrote the foreword for the reader and, since he would be unable to travel, Dr. Chen visited him in California and interviewed him on video to introduce the book launch proceedings. Bradbury's remarks about his long friendship with Eiseley were most striking and very memorable. We hope the Eiseley Society will make them more widely available in the future.

The main event was a theatrical reading of Jim Cook's script "Memory's Night Country," adapted from the Loren Eiseley Reader. The distinguished guest readers are seen facing the audience in the snapshot. To Bing Chen's left (moving nearer to the observer) we see Michael Forsberg, Jim McKee, and Matt Harvey (out of the picture are Lisa Knopp and Kam Veney). To Bing Chen's right (moving away) are Jennifer House, Patrice Berger, Polly Wimberly, Lora Black, W. Don Nelson, and Marge Saiser. Also in the picture are Jim and Gwen Cook (at the left, Jim is facing away from the camera), and (at the far right) Ruth Thone, founding president of The Friends of Loren Eiseley, the predecessor of The Loren Eiseley Society.

Beng Chen brought the formal proceedings to an end with a heartfelt invocation of Eiseley's importance in allowing us to see our relationship with nature anew, and change it for the better. The reader is designed to encourage teachers to introduce Eiseley to a new generation of readers.

April 7, 2010 Lunch at the Library with Jim Griess

2010-03-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

Jim Griess returns this April to continue the story of German Russians who came to Nebraska. Jim was our April speaker last year, and everyone agreed we should bring him back to finish the story. All four sets of Jim's grandparents were German Russians who came to the Sutton, Nebraska area in the last quarter of the nineteenth century from the Volga and Black Sea regions of Russia. He follows the story of the German Russian immigrants in his book length study: The German Russians: Those who came to Sutton (Henderson: Service Press, 2008) The book presents a broad portrait of German Russian history and culture and of the causes and history of this group's immigration to America, before focusing in on the German Russians around Sutton Nebraska.

Mr. Griess will present our Lunch at the Library talk on Wednesday April 7, 2010 at 12:10 pm on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library. Bring your lunch and enjoy coffee provided by The Mill! Anyone interested in history or genealogy will enjoy the talk.

Eiseley Society Sponsors April Book Launch Events

2010-03-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

The Loren Eiseley Society is sponsoring two April book launch events for the Society's new Loren Eiseley Reader. The reader, with a foreword by famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, is a special collection of some of Eiseley's most popular essays and poems intended to introduce new generations to his work.

Book Launch events in Lincoln and Omaha will feature local authors and Eiseley admirers Michael Forsberg, Margery Saiser, Lisa Knopp and others.

LINCOLN EVENT:
Date: April 10, 2010
Time: 7-9pm

Location: Lincoln, NE at Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St.

OMAHA EVENT:
Date: April 17, 2010
Time: 7-9pm

Location: Omaha, NE at The KANEKO / UNO Library, 1111 Jones St.

All are invited to attend!

Recently acquired collection of materials relating to Loren Eiseley is now open to public

2010-03-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

The Robert Franke Eiseley Research Collection is now available to researchers and the public at the Heritage Room. Of special interest are a seven page typescript by author Ray Bradbury, Franke's correspondence with nature writer Annie Dillard and with poet Howard Nemerov concerning Eiseley, and extensive correspondence with Caroline Werkley, Eiseley's long time assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. Werkley's snapshot here shows Eiseley playing with a cat.

Franke was deeply interested in the religious themes in Eiseley's writing about man and the natural world. Franke's published and unpublished explorations of this theme, including drafts, reprints, sermons, several book proposals and conference notes are included in the collection.

Sunday, March 21 Ames Reading with Dominique Garay and Oscar Rios

2010-03-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

Dominique Garay was born and raised in Lincoln. He is interested in writing and performing poetry, especially slam poetry, and in writing plays. Oscar, originally from Mexico, performs music with traditional South American instruments. Working together, Dominique and Oscar will bring us an exciting performance that combines poetry and music.

We welcome the dynamic duo as our Ames Readers, Sunday, March 21 at 2:00 P.M. in the Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln.

2010 Neihardt Spring Conference

2010-03-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

The 29th Annual Neihardt Spring Conference topic will be "Neihardt and the Short Story," Speakers will be Chickasaw author Linda Hogan, Dr. James Work of CSU, UNL Professor of writing Ricardo Garcia, and UNL professor of literature Dr. Karen Shoemaker. Dr. Neil Harrison, Dean of English Department at Northeast Community College will moderate. The conference takes place each year on the last Saturday in April, this year the date is Saturday, April 24th.

March 3, 2010--Lunch at the Library with Shirley Maly

2010-02-28T12:22:00.000-08:00

Shirley Maly will present the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association's March Lunch at the Library talk. Shirley is a lifelong Lincoln resident. After a long career in public relations, at age 60, she joined the Peace Corps and served for three years in Uruguay. That stay and other travel experiences were the basis of her book Love Affair with the Americas. Shirley's topic will be "Pictures Tell Stories: How Illustrations Enhance the Story."

The program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on March 3 on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. Feel free to bring your lunch, free coffee is provided courtesy of the Mill. We look forward to seeing you.

New Titles in the Heritage Room--February 2010

2010-02-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

New acquisitions over the last few months include these titles among others:

Lisa Norman, Haythorn Land & Cattle Co., A Horseman's Heritage. A pictorial essay by Lisa Norman. (introduction by Red Steagall). Kansas City: Trabon Printing, 2007. This coffee table book explores ranch history and work life through the seasons on the famed Sandhills ranch founded by Harry Haythornthwaite and his wife Emma in 1884.

The Haythorn ranch raises Angus, Hereford, and Longhorn Cattle and is especially famed for the quality of its foundation-bred Quarter Horses. The Haythorn ranch did not mechanize to the extent that others did, finding it more economical to continue to raise and use Belgian/Percheron work horses to stock hay in the summer and to feed cattle in winter. Author-photographer Lisa Norman has lived and worked on the Haythorn ranch since 1995. She does a wonderful job of capturing the working landscape and people of the ranch. Anyone interested in the Nebraska Sandhills, in the survival of traditional ways of life, or in horses, might enjoy this book.

Heritage Room uncatalogued holdings include Nebraska photographer Charles Guildner's album of photographs, Lives of Tradition, Vol. 2, Scenes. (9 in a limited edition of 20), also with some scenes from the Haythorn ranch.

* * * *

John Janovy, Jr. Pieces of the Plains: Memories and Predictions from the Heart of America. Lincoln: J&L Lee Co., 2009. John Janovy, Jr. is one of Nebraska's human treasures, a distinguished scientist who has also written for broader audiences. Seeking to show us what "there is to learn from nature rather than about nature," Janovy is the author (and illustrator) of some of the most admired books and essays in American natural history, among them, Keith County Journal, Return to Keith County, and Dunwoody Pond: Reflections on the High Plains Wetlands and the Cultivation of Naturalists. He has often written about how young people learn, and about the philosophical and social consequences of our contested and evolving understanding of nature and our place in it. This is a very personal book about the issues Janovy cares most about.

* * * *

The Loren Eiseley Reader, published by the Loren Eiseley Society, 2009, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury is intended to remind us of the work of the anthropologist, essayist, and poet, and to introduce that work to a new generation. Eiseley, who grew up in Lincoln and attended the University of Nebraska, was a pioneer in asking us to reconsider our place in the natural world and think about the limits of our scientific and technical mastery. Eiseley was a brilliant essayist, with a capacity to pull his readers into his own inward experience of nature, his "night country" and then carry them along along on his journey into a new scientific and humanistic understanding of the waking world. The Reader is a collection of short pieces and excerpts from Eiseley's best known works.

* * * *

Mari Sandoz, Capital City, a new edition with an introduction by Nebraska born writer Terese Svoboda. (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2007). This new (to our collection) paperback edition has a wonderful period cover photograph that could remind us, as Ms. Svoboda does, that when Sandoz was writing this in Lincoln in the late 1930s, some Lincoln families were finding their food at the municipal dump. Capital City contains some of Sandoz's most angry writing.

* * * *

Kwakiutl L. Dreher, Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing Autobiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), explores the popular autobiographies of well known Black women entertainers, including Diahann Carroll, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Whoopi Goldberg, and Mary Wilson. The author was our February "Lunch at the Library" speaker.

* * * *

George E. Hyde, Rangers and Regulars (Columbus, Ohio: Long's College Books, 1933, 1952). New to our collection, this book surveys Spanish, Mexican and American conflicts with the mounted Southern Plains Indians, especially the Comanches. Omaha resident Hyde was a prodigious researcher with a deep interest in Native American history and contacts in many tribes. Legally blind, he was sought out by George Bird Grinnell and assisted Grinnell in researching books on the Cheyenne and the Pawnee. He wrote several early tribal histories and was an early explorer in the field now known as ethnobotany. Having obtained and cultivated many of the old varieties of Indian corn, he was co-author with George F. Will of Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri, published in 1917.

Short Story Contest Winners on Display in the Heritage Room

2010-02-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

Winning entries from the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association's 2010 Short Story Contest are now on display in the Heritage Room. The age divisions for the contest are Kindergarten through 2nd Grade, 3rd through 5th Grade, and 6th through 8th Grade.

2010 Sandoz Conference, March 25-27

2010-02-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

The 2010 Mari Sandoz Heritage Society Annual Conference will be held March 25-27th in Chadron, Nebraska. This years conference is titled "Son of the Gamblin' Man: Identity on the Plains." The Conference will focus on Sandoz's 1960 novel, Son of the Gamblin' Man, and will explore concealed and conflicted identities in the American West and law and life on the frontier. Accompanying the Conference, the Mari Sandoz Heritage Center will host a special exhibit of materials relating to artist Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad).

Recently Received: Work in Progress at The Backwaters Press

2010-02-03T11:37:00.000-08:00

Greg Kosmicki writes that Nebraska based independent publisher, The Backwaters Press is planning several interesting projects for 2010. The press will publish new collections from 2009 Nebraska Arts Council Master Artist Award winners Marge Saiser and Brent Spencer. New titles are also in preparation from poets Roy Scheele, Linnea Johnson, Charles Fort, Brad Maxfield, Trevino Brings Plenty, Michelle Brooks-Love, Angela Kelly and Charles Gillespie. The Press is also working on:

Letters from Grass Country--"a collection of essays about poets from the Great Plains, edited by Mary K. Stillwell and Greg Kosmicki."

Lost Originals--"a collection of Greg Kuzma poems that have not appeared in book form, edited by Kathleen Cain and Greg Kosmicki."

Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees, edited by Christopher Buckley and Chris Howell.

Natural Theologies: Essays about Literature of the New Middle West, by Denise Low, past Poet Laureate of Kansas.

Talking Out of Turn: Poetry by Nebraska Women, edited by Sarah Mason, Heidi Hermanson, Liz Kay and Jen Lambert.

It looks like there is a lot to look forward to this year!

Postscript: Backwaters Press has announced that it will be accepting submissions for The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets through December of 2010, for publication in Spring, 2012. Contributors must be women born or currently living in Nebraska, or have previously lived in Nebraska for more than a decade. More submission guidelines on the Backwaters Press homepage, at the link above.

February 3, 2010--Lunch at the Library with Kwakiutl Dreher

2010-01-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

Dr. Kwakiutl Dreher will present the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association's February Lunch at the Library Program. Dr. Dreher is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches English and Ethnic Studies. Her interests include African American literature, and film and visual culture. She is also a writer and performer who has presented her own plays and musicals in a variety of venues from Georgia to California. Locally, she has served on the Lincoln Community Playhouse Reading Committee, on the Lincoln Arts Council, and as Editor of the NAACP-Lincoln Branch newsletter. Her numerous articles explore the roles of African American women in literature and the cinema. Her recent book Dancing on the White Page (SUNY Press, 2008) examines popular autobiographies of six well known black women entertainers.

The Program will begin at 12:10 p.m. on February 3rd, in the auditorium on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th and N Streets in downtown Lincoln. We look forward to an exciting presentation from Dr. Dreher.

The Loren Eiseley Society donates Robert G. Franke's Eiseley Research Collection to the Heritage Room

2010-01-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

Robert Franke had a strong interest in religious themes found in the essays and books of anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley. Franke was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Friends of Loren Eiseley, reorganized recently as The Loren Eiseley Society. The collection includes Franke’s publications, and his notes, proposals, and unpublished manuscripts for sermons, papers and books about Eiseley. Franke's research included numerous interviews and correspondence with Eiseley’s friends and colleagues. Of special interest are a seven page typescript by author Ray Bradbury, giving answers to Franke’s questions, correspondence with writer Annie Dillard and poet Howard Nemerov, and an extensive correspondence with Caroline Werkley, Eiseley’s secretary at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most of the documents in the research files were collected in 1981-1983, but there are later additions and documents overall date from 1959 to 1987. The collection is now in processing, and will be available soon.

The Franke Collection joins the Heritage Room's substantial collection of Eiseley materials, which, anchored by the Gale E. Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials, also includes books owned by Eiseley as a boy, the Nebraska Academy of Science Eiseley Donation, a Library Collection, and the Lazlo Kubinyi Collection of Eiseley Book Illustration.

Sunday, January 17th Ames Reading with Michael Forsberg

2010-01-03T12:24:00.000-08:00

Nebraska native Michael Forsberg is a professional photographer whose work has appeared in National Wildlife, National Geographic, Audubon, and Natural History and in National Geographic and Smithsonian books. He is a charter member of the North American Nature Photographers Association and Fellow, International League of Conservation Photographers. His 2004 book, On Ancient Wings: The Sandhill Cranes of North America has been called “the finest body of work on Sandhill cranes ever published.” His 2009 Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild, with additional text contributions from Ted Kooser, Dan O’Brien, and David Wishart is receiving rave reviews in the national press.

We welcome Michael Forsberg as our January, 2010 Ames Reader on Sunday, January 17 at 2:00 PM in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library.

New Titles: Getting acquainted with the Buffett family.

2009-11-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

(This is the second in a series of posts about recent books about history and business in Nebraska.)

In the Spring of 1867, one Sidney Buffett left Long Island, New York, where his family had lived and worked since the 1600s, and took a train West to Omaha. There his maternal grandfather, George Homan, owner of a livery stable and operator of the local stage line, gave him work and introduced him to the local business community. Two years later, in 1869, Sidney Buffett opened a grocery store on south 14th Street in Omaha.

The Buffett grocery business would last through three generations and 100 years. It supported and often employed Sidney's progeny, a large, hard working, prosperous, civic-minded, politically involved Omaha family. The Buffetts, always proud of their grocery's pioneer status among Omaha businesses, built their understanding of what mattered in life from their experiences as tradesmen. If family came at the top of that list, success in business was right beside it. In trade, they could not affort to be profligate, or greedy, or to seem so. They were careful with their money. They valued hard work. They were reminded every day of the value of their connections with customers, employees and other businesses. Day by day, in small things as in large ones, they cultivated good relationships with others. They were intensely practical, and when they saw troubles ahead, they saved enough money to sustain their business in hard times. By this means, they grew their business through two terrible depressions, one in the 1890s and another in the 1930s. Buffett's lasted until 1969, and closed then only as regional chains and supplier combinations threatened their profitability.

Bill Buffett's book, Foods you will enjoy: The story of Buffett's Store. (Concord: Capital Offset Company, 2008) is the story of the Buffett's Omaha grocery business. The author is Sidney Buffett's great grandson. The book draws on the family's letters and photographs, on local museum collections and old newspapers, on reminiscences by several generations of the Buffetts themselves and by their former employees and customers, and on the author's collection of contemporary advertising materials. All in all, this is very rich source material. For many years, Buffett's store was a community institution in a way that businesses once were but no longer seem to be.

The history of the store is told in three dimensions. The first dimension is a narrative, following family memories, letters and local and business history. A second dimension is the inclusion of many telling excerpts of the source material itself, including letters, contemporary newspaper articles, business documents, and letters and later reminiscences by former employees and customers as well as by the Buffetts themselves. A third dimension is a graphic history, integrating photographs, period media reports, and period advertising materials. Some of the advertising is seen displayed in the store in period photographs, some is now reproduced in color to give the book a real graphic punch. In each of these three dimensions, the book is strikingly well conceived. Each of the three perspectives could almost carry the story by itself.

Librarians and scholars are sometimes unjustly skeptical of self-published works. Although this book would be considered self-published, it was professionally designed by Book Designer Rick Rawlins. Not surprisingly, it won an AIGA 2009 "Best of New England" Design award for its designer. Throughout, the book is a reminder that technology now makes it possible to create very high quality books whose expected publication runs are so small that previously, they could never have been published at all.

Some of the more memorable things about the book, for this reader, include: The character of Ernest Buffett, as it shines through in the business and family advice he wrote to his sons. The very different way people used to shop, with a clerk gathering individual items from a written list while the customer browsed.
Credit too was handled differently. Like one of the Buffetts' customers, in the midst of the Depression of the 1930s, my own grandmother bought the family house outright with cash borrowed at a grocery store, and paid it all back with interest in a year, along with her monthly grocery tab.

Not every Buffett went into the grocery trade. One of Sidney's grandsons, Howard Buffett, went off to college wanting to be a journalist. Marriage, and evidently, an effective admonition from his grocer father, led Howard to the more practical, better paying business of selling insurance. In time, Howard moved on to be a stockbroker, then Republican congressman from Omaha.

Howard's son, Warren Buffett, the investor, would become the most famous Buffett of all. Warren has said that his start in business came at Buffett's Store. For some months in 1943, Warren Buffett lived with and worked for his grandfather. In his own short contribution to this book Warren Buffett recalls that his job at the time was to take dictation from Ernest, who was writing a book whose title was to be "How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Have Learned About Fishing." Grandpa Buffett, Warren recalls, "considered these to be the only two subjects really worthy of commentary."

The author is an insightful historian. He remarks at the beginning of the book that nowdays he buys his toothpaste at a chain store with more than 5,700 outlets in the United States, and he recalls a time when he bought that toothpaste in a local one-of-a-kind drug store. His book seems to remind us of aspects of character and community that we still need, but find hard to sustain as arrangements of work and family life that built them fall by the wayside.

********

This is Bill Buffett's second book. His first, also recently added to our collection, is a memoir of his mother, Katherine Armina Norris Buffett (June 13, 1906-August 17, 2004). Dear Katherine (Self published by Bill Buffett, 2005) is a family scrapbook. It combines Katherine's own memoir about her early life with family photographs, excerpts from letters she wrote and that others wrote to her, some of her recipes, poetry she cut from the newspaper, and so on. Scattered throughout the book are envelopes with onionskin sheets on which are printed the texts of various letters from people recalling Katherine or thanking her for some of the many things she did for others.

The book design is interesting. It evokes a family scrapbook with a precious archive of letters pressed between the pages, but the packets of onionskin letters are fragile, and in consequence the book will not stand up to use by many hands.

Like the later book, Dear Katherine succeeds in what it sets out to do. Katherine's warmth, generosity and sense of humor shine through. It is also an interesting portrait of a midwestern woman of her generation.

Almost all of the materials reflect Katherine's careful cultivation of the informal connections of kinship, friendship and community. These materials testify to the great value her generation placed on such connections, as well as to the way the women of that generation shaped their own lives in a time when the making of a healthy social world was largely women's work. The Foreword reveals the intensity of Katherine's attention to connection. Bill Buffett writes that in the last weeks of her life, when they had spoken openly about her dying, "She looked away, then at me and asked'How will we stay connected.' I assured her we would. This book is part of that effort."

********

These books are quite interesting and are valuable entirely on their own. They have much to tell us about life and business and community over the past century. But it is probably inevitable that some readers will be mostly interested in the Warren Buffett connection. Alice Schroeder's thorough and much admired 2008 biography, The Snowball. Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, covers some of the same territory, and shows that Warren Buffett is a very complex character.

Taken together, these books reveal many common threads and shared understandings between Warren and the larger Buffett family. The most striking, for this reader, grows from the family's consciousness of the importance of connection, and their realism, judiciousness and generosity in building networks of business associates and friends. Whatever its other resources, genius needs a firm grip on reality to succeed, and in schooling their generations in the care of connections with their community, the Buffett family created a kind of 'Buffett brand' of realism that appears to survive in Warren Buffett's way of doing business.

Stephen Cloyd

Sunday, November 15th Ames Reading with Jeff Barnes

2009-11-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

The Heritage Room welcomes Jeff Barnes as its November Ames Reader. Barnes has recently published his first book, Forts of the Northern Plains. In preparing this guide to the historic military posts of the Plains Indian wars, Barnes traveled some 13,000 miles to visit 51 historic sites making photographs, doing research and interviewing informants about the forts and their history. A freelance writer and fifth-generation Nebraskan Barnes has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. He is the past chairman of the Nebraska Hall of Fame Commission and former marketing director of the Durham Western Heritage Museum. We look forward to hearing about his adventures. The Reading will take place Sunday, November 15th at 2:00 PM in the Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln.

More New Titles: A book about the city of Lincoln--November 2009

2009-11-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

Among the new titles that came to the Heritage Room in the past several months are several that share an interest in local history and local businesses. These books address some of the many ways in which our local economy and the character of family life are interconnected. Heritage Room staff will share thoughts inspired by several of these books over the next month or so. We begin with:

Mary Jane Nielsen and Jonathan Roth, Lincoln Looks Back. (Foreword by Gil Savery) Lincoln: JMJ Inspirations, 2009.

This is a large format book richly illustrated with black and white photographs from the Edholm & Blomgren Collection and the Nebraska State Historical Society's MacDonald Collection. The book surveys Lincoln, Nebraska's social and commercial landscape, its neighborhoods, schools, businesses, restaurants, drive-ins, and bars from the 1950s to the present. It offers a kind of nostalgic celebration of the kinds of things people remember about a town after the years pass, things like teenage hang-outs, schools, interesting buildings, a big fire, a first visit to Robbers' Cave, meeting a local television personality, or a visit by a national celebrity like Gene Autry or Elvis Presley. The text is a collection of short vignettes and recollections by the authors and the many long-time Lincoln residents they corraled into contributing.

The authors have done a wonderful job of bringing the many photographs and individual reminiscences together. They seem to capture the spirit of a certain era very successfully. But their account thins noticeably in the late 1970s. What? No-one wants to look back at the 1980s? Well, anyone who lives in Lincoln now might realize that the book describes Lincoln during an historical era that was ending by the 1980s. In that time, Lincoln's businesses were still mostly locally owned, even along the then nascent "Miracle Mile" North of O Street along 48th Street. In that time, Lincoln still possessed, even on the "Miracle Mile," its most intensely commercial space, a distinctive local landscape, created by local businessmen. In that time, Lincoln still had a commercially viable downtown retail district, attractive to shoppers. If (local) business was better off in those years, community life and family life were also stronger, then, than they would be years later.

If we want to ask why the city of those times differs so much from today's Lincoln, we leave Nielsen and Roth's book behind us. But we will return to it.

By the late 1970s Lincoln was in trouble, but it was a kind of trouble it would not perceive or begin to pay for until decades later. Developer Joe Hampton was on the city council in the 1970s, and no one in city government was interested in the planning commission's doubts or the pleas of sometime city planner Doug Brogdon to limit suburban development, to keep the downtown area alive. As elsewhere in America, there were huge fortunes to be made in the suburban build-out. With so much money at stake, the build-out could not be slowed or moderated by planners who could see trouble ahead. The present writer recalls a neighbor, one of his mother's friends, crying in her front yard. Had her dog died? No, she was crying over the city. "They're just ruining Lincoln," she told my mother. This lady had attended planning commission meetings for years, but after that evening she stopped. There was no longer any point to that kind of involvement.

Like other American cities, Lincoln was transformed by suburban build-out. The downtown area lost most of its larger retail businesses. What remained were much smaller businesses catering to students from the University and downtown office workers, and lots and lots of bars and restaurants. Today Lincoln's commercial landscape is dominated by national chain big box stores and franchise fast-food joints. Money spent in these places leaves town right away.

The main shopping areas are now spread out over great distances: North 27th Street, South 27th Street, Cornhusker Highway, Highway 2, various businesses on O Street, both East and West. The sprawl makes Lincoln an ever more inconvenient and unattractive place to shop. Someone willing to drive the distance between these areas might easily remember that a bigger city, Omaha, is only 50 miles away. There, the big box stores are bigger, and there are more of them. Omaha's boxes are even, sometimes, closer together. Someone not willing to drive those distances can now shop online. As a poorly planned conglomeration of developments, built by different developers on different hillsides, with only the weakest of centers, Lincoln can expect its sales tax revenues to continue to fall.

America's suburban sprawl been described as plundering the future in order to raise production and consumption in the present. In his 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler (not a Nebraska writer) described the way this has corroded our sense of community. "The American highway... is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like another. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don't want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular."

This passage of Kunstler's helps me answer the questions I asked when reading Nielsen and Roth's Lincoln Looks Back. No, I don't believe anyone wants to remember the 1980s. In fact I doubt that anyone will bother to write the kind of nostalgic treatment of Lincoln as a community that these authors did for later decades. In the memories of Nielsen and Roth's interlocutors, and especially for those remembering their teenage years, Lincoln's "Miracle Mile," the city's commercial edges and homegrown fast food joints were exciting places. But when the edge metastasized, and became a cancer that ate everything else, it made a wasteland. Nielsen and Roth present us with a group photograph of the businessmen who built the Miracle Mile ("Those Magnificient Men of the Miracle Mile" is its title), just as an earlier generation presented us with "the 'O' Street Gang." Would anyone today bother to take a group picture of the managers of Lincoln's big box retail stores? And if they did, would anyone care to publish such a picture? Kunstler is right, we don't want to remember these places.

Lincoln made sense as a more compact city. If it had retained some of that compactness, it would been distinctive in comparison with Omaha. It might have been a more attractive place to live, shop, and to do business. Without that distinctiveness, Lincoln's future looks bleak, since Omaha, only a little ways down the road, has a bigger population and with that, more resources, including more interesting retailers. It still seems surprising that Lincoln did not do better over the years, given the twin advantages of the presence of State Government, and the University. Government workers and University students are an economic resource, and no doubt they have saved the downtown, which is only moribund, from becoming a deserted urban combat zone, as it might have become, in their absence.

In other times, the presence of state government and the University might have reminded us of the importance of public concerns. Adequate repect for public purposes is the essence of good urban planning. In his book, Kunstler observes that the "joyless junk habitat" that we see along our commercial highways and arterials is a product of our having discarded public concerns to pursue "a fetish of commercialized individualism." Unable to give anything but lip service to public needs, we had "nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars." So "we wonder what happened to the spirit of community." We discover that we "created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people." Our ugly, anonymous places empower those who lie, cheat and steal.

Kunstler laments suburban sprawl as a cultural and environmental catastrophe. He shows us that sprawl is now a physical embodiment, a map, of our character and of the poverty we will face in the 21st century. Sprawl embodies our lack of connection, it maps our lack of respect for public goods, it maps our hatred of nature, it maps our greed, it maps our lack of respect for each other (consider the way people drive on expressways like Lincoln's North 27th Street). Low density sprawl, with its monotony of housing types and strip malls, is utterly dependent on cheap energy, and "virtually impossible to retrofit with decent public transportation." Distant from productive economic actitity, these are future slums. Not every McMansion can have a second life as a money-making group home.

The sprawling mess of suburbia will be a monument to an America that imports almost everything and that has exported its skilled and industrial jobs of all kinds to other nations. Building the suburban wasteland has been a way to shore up employment, to store workers, and keep the country's economic decline from becoming too soon visible. Yet the historical period defined by low gasoline prices, and by complacency about trade policies and technology and the outsourcing of American jobs seems about to end. As the wreckage of suburban sprawl becomes increasingly costly to live with and remedy, we will remember this era with anything but nostalgia.

Lincoln already struggles to escape the problems brought on by this kind of development. Teenagers form their social networks not at the Drive-in, or any of the other places Nielsen and Roth describe, but on-line. Local business leaders and politicians are trying to remedy the sickening of the center with new development, a new downtown arena, the Antelope Valley Project, and retail recruitment. But many of these efforts seem to share the assumptions of the passing age of “happy motoring.” (Kunstler's term) Some, though, as in the Haymarket, try to build on the remains of an earlier and more attractive urban environment. The local trails network tries to make the place more livable, and sometimes succeeds.

For this reader Lincoln Looks Back served as a reminder of an entirely lost world, separated from us by a disaster--one we barely understood as it engulfed us. The contrasts between that world and today's are striking. It is scary to step back from the Lincoln we think we know, and realize that physically, it so largely resembles the landscape of "the futureless economy" that writers like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler described long before the recent mortgage crisis began.

Stephen Cloyd

Some New Titles in the Heritage Room--October, 2009

2009-10-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

This is the first of several notices sampling new books we received over the last several months. Among them are:

Nonfiction:

Michael Forsberg, (with Dan O'Brien, David Wishart and Ted Kooser), Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, copyright 2009 by Michael Forsberg. A photograpic exploration of the wild places of the Great Plains by Lincoln photographer Michael Forsberg, with a forword by Ted Kooser, chapter introductions by David Wishart, essays by Dan O'Brien, and essays and field notes by Forsberg. Like Forsberg's earlier book on the Sandhill Cranes, this work has received rave reviews in the national press. Its jacket includes high praise from such luminaries as poet Jim Harrison and writer Larry McMurtry. The Heritage Room will welcome Michael Forsberg as our Ames reader in January, 2010.

Lane Van Ham, Capitol Punishment and Other Ordeals: A History of Punk in Lincoln, '78-'86. Lincoln native Van Ham surveys Lincoln bands and musicians in the Punk genre.

John Sorenson and Judith Sealander, ed., The Grace Abbott Reader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Grace Abbott (1878-1939) of Grand Island, Nebraska along with her sister Edith, pioneered social reform and helped to shape the agenda of social work in the early twentieth century. Grace Abbott's career took her from work at Jane Addam's Hull House in Chicago, to the Chicago Immigrants' Protective League and on to head the Children's Bureau of the Labor Department under Presidents Harding, Hoover, and Roosevelt. When she left this post she remained an advisor to Roosevelt's Labor Secretary and served on Roosevelt's Council on Economic Security. This is a collection of her most influential writing, accompanied by a biographical introduction and timeline.

Don Holst, Famous Football Players in Their 4th Quarter. Chadron: Don Holst Art and Books, 2009. Chadron author Don Holst bases his book on face-to-face interviews with great players of the past, exploring how they look back on their careers and what they think about today.

Poetry:

William Kloefkorn, Out of Attica. Omaha: The Backwaters Press, 2008. A collection of poems inspired by the poet's youth in Attica, Kansas, by Kansas born Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn.

Fiction:

Sally J. Walker, Letting Go of Sacred Things. Corvalis: The Fiction Works, 2005 (2002). The book follows its heroine's trials of love and loss from 1910-1981 in a series of episodes.

Sally J. Walker, Desert Time. Corvalis: The Fiction Works, 2009. A historical romance novel situated in St. Louis and New Mexico in the 1850s and 1860s.

Sunday, October 18th Ames Reading by Amil Quayle

2009-10-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

Amil Quayle was born and raised near Henry's Fork on the Snake River in Idaho. He earned a degree in sociology from the University of Utah, ranched in Nebraska for seven years, and then got his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska. He is a poet with a deep appreciation for the land and the natural world gained from years of working on the farm and ranching. Grand Canyon and Other Selected Poems is his latest work. We welcome him as our October Ames Reader on Sunday, October 18 at 2:00 P.M. in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library

Some Upcoming Lincoln Events for October

2009-10-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

Those readers familiar with Lincoln's literary history will know that some of Lincoln's most interesting literary conversations have taken place among the graves at Wyuka Cemetery. Wyuka will celebrate its 140th Anniversary Celebration on Sunday, October 4, with a free day of fun family activities, to include walking tours, living history vignettes by the Flatwater Shakespeare Company, a photography contest, old fashioned toys and games, and a concert by the Southeast Nebraska Community Band. The entire Wyuka property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Time is 1:00-5:30 PM, Sunday, 10-4-2009. Tel: (402) 416-5056 or 474-3600
Wyuka Funeral Home & Cemetery
3600 O Street, Lincoln, NE 68510, USA

On a very closely related topic, Nebraska author Alan Boye's book, The Ghosts of Lincoln, is the most frequently stolen item at Lincoln City Libraries. Any librarians present will be looking sideways at folks who show up for the Ghosts of Lincoln Bus Tour on October 6th and 7th. Ghosts of Lincoln Tour Director Dale Bacon will tell stories about ghosts and what people saw. Lots of new ghost stories plus the best of the old. The tour is family friendly, but please do not bring small children, toddlers and babies. Do not bring purloined copies of the above mentioned book, either.
Cost:$10 per person. Times: 6:45-9:10 p.m., 10/6/09 - 10/7/09.
Telephone:(402) 770-8604 or 580-1402
Tour will depart from and return to: Here and Back Again, Indian Village Shopping Center, 3219 S. 13th Street, Lincoln, NE 68502, USA (View Map)
Phone:(402) 817-4177 No alcoholic beverages allowed.

Exhibits look at the 1930s

2009-09-27T14:08:00.001-07:00

As we discovered when when we put together our online exhibit on Nebraska writers of the 1930s, the hardships of the time caused deep reflection about American history, community and shared purposes. American intellectuals and the New Deal programs they helped create seemed uncomfortably radical to some at the time, but at heart, they opposed the despair and empty radicalism that triumphed abroad in same decade.

When the Nebraska History Museum opens its new exhibit "Out of the Despair of the Spirit: Nebraska's New Deal Art" on October 3, (See the Museum Events Calendar there will be three concurrent exhibitions of 1930s era artwork running in museums around Lincoln.

The other area exibits are:

Artists of the New Deal: Print Exhibition of WPA Artists
This ongoing exhibit at the Lux Center presents portraits of America in the 1930s by artists Harry Sternberg, Lily Harmon, Marion Greenwood, Guy Pene DuBois and others who worked for the New Deal's WPA (Works Progress Administration) division known as the Public Works Art Project.
The Print Exhibit runs from 9/4/09 - 3/3/10 at the Lux Center, 2601 N 48th Street, Lincoln, NE 68504. See http://www.luxcenter.org Phone:(402) 466-8692

Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists
Opening September 29, 2009 this Sheldon Museum of Art exhibit presents works done in the 1920's and 1930's by Mexican Muralists and artists in the United States' Works Progress Administration (WPA), all from the Museum's permanent collection. Included are works by well known artists Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Siquieros, as well as work by other Mexican Muralists whose names are less recognized. A description is here.
The exhibit will run from 9/29/09 - 1/17/10. See also http://www.sheldonartgallery.org Phone:(402) 472-2461

In addition, on the national level, the Smithsonian Institution Exhibit "1934: A New Deal For Artists" is ongoing through January 3, 2010.

Nebraska Writers and Film: A new display in the Heritage Room

2009-09-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

Nebraska writers’ encounters with Hollywood and film-making have been as diverse as writers are individual. Some writers sought attention from film-makers, others shunned it. Some Nebraska writers have been pleased by what film makers did with their work, others were horrified and hated it. Some writers came to write novels after careers as playwrights and screen writers, others specialize in screen writing, or have turned to it as a profitable sideline.

The display itself is mostly devoted to the books and writers themselves, but in preparing it, we also looked at the history of film-making in Nebraska, and careers of actors and directors from Nebraska. Usually we hide that sort of background preparation. This time we decided to summarize our notes on the history of film-making in Nebraska here. That history seems to encourage us to ask these questions: Does Nebraska make it onto the silver screen as a real place, or is it more often assimilated to Hollywood clichés about middle America and “fly-over country”? What role has film experience played in the careers of Nebraska writers? Has the work of Nebraska writers been well represented on film? What will Nebraska look like in the films of the future?

Made in Nebraska

The first “feature” film with Nebraska connections was William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s 1913 self-promoting epic, “The Indian Wars.” Cody borrowed cavalry from Fort Robinson to reproduce the “Battle” of Wounded Knee on the original battleground in South Dakota. The film, so far as is known, does not survive. Contemporary reviews of the film make interesting reading. There was some concern with authenticity. The Wounded Knee sequence showed the soldiers as aggressors, vastly outnumbering the Indians and crowding them into the ravine where they were mowed down. That scene had critics though, among them the wife of the Pine Ridge agency superintendant who commented that General Miles, the “technical consultant” for this part of the film, “would not allow them to show the women and children in the fight and that was left out.”

The first feature film actually made in Nebraska was made by Nebraskans in 1915. Chadron residents organized the Black Hills Film Company of Chadron, Nebraska to make “In the Days of ’75 and ‘76” or (in a different advertisement) “The Thrilling Lives of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane” entirely with local talent. The Twelfth Cavalry out of Fort Robinson appeared again, portraying troops of the earlier era. The film survives and the community effort recalls an enthusiastically presented high school play that is as much a local festival as an attempt to dramatize a story.

Early in the Hollywood era, most filming was done entirely in Hollywood, but beginning in the late 1930s scenes for some films were shot in Nebraska. The first such film was Boys Town (MGM, 1938) with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. Tracy won an Oscar for his portrayal of Father Flanagan, and the sequel, Men of Boys Town (1941) also filmed scenes in Nebraska. In 1940, background scenes for Cheers for Miss Bishop, the film adaptation of Nebraska writer Bess Streeter Aldrich’s novel Miss Bishop, were filmed on the University of Nebraska campus, and several hundred students served as extras.

In the summer of 1945 MGM filmed background scenes for The Sea of Grass (1947) on former Nebraska governor Sam McKelvie’s By the Way ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills. Martha McKelvie wrote about work of filming and the Sandhills people involved in the By the Way newsletter for Christmas, 1945. The action in the story, based on Conrad Richter’s novel, takes place in Arizona and New Mexico, so the Sandhills just served as generic “ranching country” landscape for the film-makers.

A fairly comprehensive list (http://www.neded.org/content/view/516/1256/)of films made (at least in part) in Nebraska is available on-line from the Nebraska Film Office, a department of the Nebraska Department of Economic Development. The Film Office’s interest is in how much money film-makers might spend in the State, and the economic boost such spending can give to local communities.

Looking at the Film Office’s list, we see some patterns emerge in films made in Nebraska. First, it looks like the relatively few big-studio films made here could have chosen any state or town in the Midwest as a setting. We remember Terms of Endearment (Paramount, 1983) now mostly because of then Governor Bob Kerry’s romance with Debra Winger. It’s fun to see bits of Lincoln on film, but similar scenes could have been shot in Des Moines, Kansas City, or Minneapolis.

Second, we encounter stories that reflect on real life or that have actual Nebraska roots mostly in smaller scale documentaries or television productions of work by Nebraska writers. Notable, among these, are the NETV-PBS 1987 documentary The Trial of Standing Bear, the 1992 Hallmark Hall of Fame O Pioneers!, and the 1994 filming of My Ántonia all for television. Sean Penn’s Indian Runner, 1991, and Omaha-The Movie (1993) also have Nebraska moments (well, for the latter, a visit to Carhenge, anyway!).

Finally, the list reminds us that screenwriter-director Alexander Payne has made more movies here than anyone else.

Payne grew up in Omaha, went to High School at Creighton Prep. He writes his own movie scripts, usually in partnership with writer Jim Taylor. Payne is not trying to tell Nebraska stories at all. Yet he is interested in a reality that big-studio, big budget films tend to miss. “I want my protagonists to be more like real people than like typical movie characters,” he told an interviewer, “I’m interested in capturing life…. I don’t do special effects.” Payne returned to Omaha to make his first film, Citizen Ruth, in 1996. His commercial breakthrough film, “Election,” a dark high school comedy with Reese Witherspoon and Mathew Broderick, filmed at Papillion-La Vista High School in Omaha. And most recently, his “About Schmidt, 2001, filmed in Omaha, Nebraska City, and Lincoln, and starring Jack Nicholson. Payne has won critical acclaim and many awards, including two Golden Globe awards and an Academy Award for his scripts. What is more, all his films have been commercially successful. Payne, reviewers have pointed out, has something of a formula: His small film, low budget strategy allows him to retain editorial control of the film. If he spent more, studios would want more influence. With his strategy he has been able to make profits from his films without being compelled to seek a mass audience. He seems to favor character studies that present something of the tragedy of the human condition with a biting sense of humor.

Might Payne’s example give us a look at the future of film in Nebraska?

The concern of the Nebraska Film Office, whose list of films we have been considering, is to explore motives that bring film-makers to the state and promote the state to film-makers for the sake of economic growth. To this end, the office commissioned the 2002 Nebraska Film Industry Development Study (available at the link as a pdf file). The document is a little dull—writers in this genre are obliged to collect facts, avoid thinking, and repeat whatever economic clichés are widely acceptable at the moment. But despite itself, the Study offers amusing observations. As in: “Wow, those folks really dropped a lot of money in Loma!” (No, no. Not an actual quote!) The 1994 filming of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar spent some 8 million dollars in the state. The film, with opening scenes in New York, New York and a San Francisco denouement, offered up the story of three bicoastal transvestites stranded in small town Nebraska. It wasn’t really a home grown story. But it did show that a big studio, this being a Universal/Amblin Entertainment production, can drop an astonishing amount of money to purchase pretty simple requirements.

The most interesting aspect of the Study, is that, though confined to the decade from 1991-2001, it tells us still more about Alexander Payne. Omaha—The Movie (Payne was executive producer) dropped $50,000 here, Payne’s first film, Citizen Ruth, spent $1,500,000 in Nebraska, Election, $1,252,840, and About Schmidt, some $8,000,000.

The choice of Nebraska for To Wong Foo, Thanks… can be seen as a rare, chance event, unlikely to recur with any frequency. This view is reinforced by the Study’s observation that, from now on movies that require a generic “Great Plains” landscape will be filmed on the Canadian prairies, because the cost there is so much less.

Payne, by contrast, chose to make some of his films here from real local knowledge and connection to Omaha. If we see much of Nebraska on film in the future, it’s most likely to be in films that have that kind of real local connection. We might expect such films to follow some of the patterns seen in Payne’s films. They would likely have smaller budgets, with more artistic control by directors who choose to film here. They would probably not seek to draw mass commercial audiences. They would be less driven by fantasy and sensationalism and more by diverse engagements with the fabric of real life. Such films will be made, if they are made at all, by people with direct connections to the actual local culture and the film culture of the state.

This would seem to be treacherous ground for the economic development frame of mind to tread. Nobody can simply promote a working culture into existence. The personal connections, institutions and funds that support local culture are either built and sustained over time by genuine community effort, or they will fall away and we will be lost in the “geography of nowhere,” where every street, every mall, every subdivision looks alike, and culture is reduced to a daily dose of frivolous spectacle whose only theme is distraction. But Nebraska’s film community now seems lively, though small. Alexander Payne continues to contribute, returning for special events and serving on the board of Omaha’s Film Streams theater.

Some notes on Sources:

The above is based mostly on these sources, or web resources already cited in the text:

Andrea I. Paul, “Buffalo Bill and Wounded Knee: The Movie,” Nebraska History, Winter, 1990, Vol. 71 No. 4, pp 183-190, describes Cody’s movie and contemporary critical responses. Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American Century, 1900-1948 (Nebraska State Historical Society, 2002) also describes the involvement of the Twelfth Cavalry from Fort Robinson in this film and in the Chadron film.

On the Black Hills Feature Film Company of Chadron, Nebraska and its seven reel epic, see Paul Eisloeffel “Preserving Nebraska’s Film Heritage” Nebraska History, Spring 1995, Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 28-9.

Alexander Payne, quoted in Bob Fischbach, “Pure Payne” in the Omaha World Herald, Arts and Travel section, October 24, 2004. On Payne filming in Nebraska, L. Kent Wolgamott in the Lincoln Journal-Star, December 30, 2005.

All the amounts given here are listed in the Nebraska Film Industry Development Study in a table titled “Direct Expenditures” under the column label “Revenue Generated.” The labeling is ambiguous because these kinds of studies sometimes fudge things by considering “revenue generated” to include the total economic activity. That would considerably magnify the amount actually expended by including the estimated circulation within the community of the original amount spent. This measure of “revenue generated” is also a legitimate measure of economic activity, but should not be confused with “direct expenditures.” That does not appear to be the case here, however, as far as I can tell.

Sunday, September 20th Ames Reading by Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes

2009-09-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Heritage Room welcomes Amelia Montes to begin our 25th year of Ames Readings. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Montes has been a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a decade. She writes fiction, critical literary theory, non-fiction and criticism. Most recently, she introduced and edited a critical edition of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel, Who Would Have Thought It? Burton was the first Mexican-American woman to write novels in English.

The program will begin at 2:00 P.M., Sunday, September 20th.

Some New Titles in the Heritage Room--June 2009

2009-06-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

New books this month include:

Harry Duncan, (translator) I come to that point on the wheel: Dante Alighieri, Io son venuto al punto de la rota. Bradypress, 1994. This chapbook was printed to present to Harry Duncan to celebrate his receiving the Jane Geske Award from The Nebraska Center for the Book in 1994. Duncan, (1917-1997) was one of the leading figures in the revival of printing by hand. In 1982 Newsweek Magazine called him "the father of the post-World War II private-press movement." He began printing by hand in 1939, and over the years he would print Robert Lowell's first volume of poetry and many other works of contemporary literature. Duncan came to Nebraska in 1972 to operate a press at the University of Omaha, for which he created the Abbatoir Editions imprint. Our collection also includes his Doors of Perception: Essays in Book Typography, W. Thomas Taylor, 1987, a meditation on Duncan's years of experience in book design, as well as a number of Abbatoir Editions of works by Nebraska authors.

Loren Ghiglione, CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism. Columbia University Press, 2008. Lincoln native Don Hollenbeck, a journalist who got his start writing for the Lincoln Journal and later, Hearst's Omaha Bee-News, is an important, and tragic, figure in the history of American journalism. This first in-depth biography of Hollenbeck has garnered praise from critics and from many now well-known journalists who knew Hollenbeck personally.

William Kloefkorn, Breathing in the Fullness of Time, University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Nebraska's State Poet has been giving us a multivolume memoir of which this is the fourth installment. Reviewers have noted that the poet's powers of observation and command of language make this a uniquely interesting account of life on the edge of the Great Plains from the 1930s to the present. How did Nebraska's official State Poet also become the Nebraskaland Hog Calling Champion? Read this volume and find out.

Ladette Randolph, A Sandhills Ballad, University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Nebraska author Randolph, who has received the Pushcart Prize, three Nebraska Book Awards, and many other accolades, has published many short stories and essays. She is now director of Ploughshares and Distinguished-Publisher-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. This is her first novel.

Artwork, book illustration and doodles by Nebraska writers: A new display in the Heritage Room

2009-06-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

A new display in the small case in the front of the Heritage Room looks at a selection of writers’ artwork, with the idea that such efforts are an interesting, but often overlooked aspect of their creative lives. Included are illustrations by Ted Kooser, Paul Johnsgard, Mari Sandoz, Rudolph Umland, Dorothy Thomas, Timothy Schaffert, and James Solheim.

Mari Sandoz (1896-1966), among the most celebrated of Nebraska authors, wrote about the character of the people of the Great Plains, the conflicts between ranchers and farmers, white men and Indians, all shaped, in turn, by the harshness and beauty of the Plains environment. She was before her time in understanding how global financial interests drove the exploitation of the American frontier, and in her appreciation for the resulting destruction of the ecology of the Plains, and of the lives of her protagonists.

In the idiom of her own time, Sandoz was a “regionalist” writer, if we understand by regionalism, not localism or local color, but a disciplined cosmopolitanism attentive to the specifics of the history, language, and environment of a particular region.When Sandoz signed a book, she often made tiny sketch, you could almost just call it a doodle, next to her signature. Perhaps it is a spot along the Niobrara near the Sandoz homestead, but this is speculation. That sketch seems more “complete” in some cases than in others, but when all the elements are present, they are always about the same.

On display: Mari Sandoz, The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire, 1964. Signature and dedication on the Half-Title page.

Ask to see:Other signed copies, Sandoz page proofs.

Paul Johnsgard: Paul Johnsgard is, at one and the same time, a world renowned scholar of waterfowl behavior and the world’s most published ornithologist (ever!). His monographs and reference works on North American birds and bird groups, and on birds around the world provide the most comprehensive and accurate view of bird life, behavior and ecology available to us. Over 250,000 copies of his works on birds are scattered around the world, in four languages. He is a powerful advocate for regional and world wide bird and habitat conservation. Johnsgard has also written several classic works of regional natural history, all devoted to Nebraska—on the ecology and natural history of the Platte river, on the Sandhills, on the Niobrara river, on Nebraska as a whole, and on the world of the Prairie Dog.

Altogether, Johnsgard has written over 50 books, and many of them, especially those on bird behavior and on natural history, are illustrated with his wonderful black and white pen and ink drawings. He prefers to do his own drawings, noting that it has been easier to publish because he does not have to hire an artist. Besides, artists may be prone to mistakes. “I can actually look at forms of bird and see flaws,” he told a 1989 interviewer. Johnsgard prefers, for the most part, to draft full, life-size illustrations. The artwork you see reproduced in his books is then shrunk to fit the page.

On display: Paul Johnsgard, This Fragile Land: A Natural History of the Nebraska Sandhills, 1995. Signed copy with dedication to Norm and Jane Geske, with an additional drawing across from the title page.

Around the room: Drawings and two bird carvings by Paul Johnsgard.

Ask to see: Johnsgard manuscript collection, drawings for Dragons and Unicorns: A Natural History, 1982 (with Karin Johnsgard). Johnsgard talks about his writing and his artwork in three installments of our Ames Reading Series (including a collaborative reading with poet Twyla Hansen).

Also illustrated here are drawings by James Solheim and Rudolph Umland:

New Titles in the Heritage Room--May 2009

2009-05-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

Some new titles in the Heritage Room collection include:

Nonfiction

Lisa Knopp, Interior Places. (2008), a collection of personal essays about nature and place. Knopp's earlier books include her critically acclaimed The Nature of Home: A Lexicon and Essays (2002).

The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854. (Lincoln and London, 2008) a collection of essays edited by John R. Wunder and JoAnne M. Ross. Contributors include Wunder, Ross, James A. Rawley, and some others with connections to the University of Nebraska.

Rick Cypert, The Virtue of Suspense: The Life and Works of Charlotte Armstrong (2008). Cypert is Professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Cypert has also published a biography of Nebraska Writer Mignon Eberhart, America's Agatha Christie: Mignon Good Eberhart, Her Life and Works (2005).

David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America. (Foreword by Douglas Brinkley), 2009. This book accompanies the Smithsonian Channel documentary of the same title. It has a chapter on Nebraska writer Rudolph Umland, uses some photographs from Heritage Room collections, and references our web exhibit on the Nebraska Federal Writers' Project.

Fiction

Stephanie Grace Whitson, Secrets on the Wind (2009), collects three earlier Whitson novels, Secrets on the Wind, Watchers on the Hill, and Footprints on the Horizon into one volume.

Peter Crowther, ed. We Think, Therefore We Are: 15 original tales about the nature of artificial intelligence (2009) includes the story "Three Princesses" by Nebraska writer Robert Reed.

Stephen R. Lawhead, Tuck (2009). This completes Lawhead's King Raven trilogy.

Victoria Alexander, The Virgin's Secret (2009). Another romance from best-selling author Alexander. One of these days the Heritage Room should do a display on bodice-ripping covers.

Sunday, May 17th Ames Reading by Harley Jane Kozak

2009-05-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

Former Lincoln resident Harley Jane Kozak is an actress whose film credits include Parenthood, The Favor, and Arachnophobia. She is also the author of a popular comic/mystery series featuring greeting card artist and amateur detective Wollie Shelley. Kozak's book titles include Dating Dead Men, Dating is Murder, Dead Ex, and most recently, A Date You Can't Refuse (2009). She will present the Ames Reading at 2:00 PM on Sunday, May 17th.

New Display for 2009 One Book, One Nebraska Author Bess Streeter Aldrich

2009-04-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

A new display on the second floor of Bennett Martin library draws on the Heritage Room collection to show the chronological progression in the covers of Bess Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand, which has remained popular and in print since its first publication in 1928 (it went through 21 printings in that year alone). A Lantern in Her Hand is this year's One Book, One Nebraska Selection. Other Aldrich books and foreign language covers are included in the display.

In a 1952 article in the Christian Herald (reprinted in 1975 in Nebraska History magazine), Aldrich explained how she had come to write the book. She recalled a long-ago conversation with her mother that led her to try to write about the particular kind of woman that Abby Deal, the heroine of A Lantern in Her Hand, would represent. Aldrich’s mother spoke of a time when snow, sifting through the chinks of the cabin, made grotesque figures on surface of the quilts within. Bess responded with some sympathetic words about how hard things must have been and how unfair it must seem that her daughters should have it so easy in an era (this was in the 1920s) with all the modern conveniences. Her mother took this sharply: “She looked at me with an odd little expression and said: ‘Oh, save your pity. We had the best time in the world.’”

Other notable influences on the book came from a live broadcast on local Nebraska radio station KFAB in February, 1926. Aldrich asked listeners for “true incidents of pioneer life,” hoping to use the material to flesh out the character study, drawn from her own family history, that would be A Lantern in Her Hand. She got far more than she bargained for. It took, she recalled, fourteen months to go through the correspondence, diaries, and scrapbooks that she received in reply. She worked many things from this material into the book, and did more interviewing and research besides.

The book has been admired for its authenticity, beginning with a generation of readers who had intimate family knowledge of what the first European settlers experienced, and it has been much loved by readers who found their way to it.

Our display looks at other aspects of Bess Streeter Aldrich's writing career, including her efforts to get Hollywood interested in her work. Here is a cover from her most successful attempt with the film Cheers for Miss Bishop, which premiered at the Stuart Theater in Lincoln in January, 1941. We also glance at Aldrich's international popularity, and the display includes a Hindi version, illustrated here, of her 1935 novel, Spring Came On Forever.

Some Lincoln Literary Events--May 2009

2009-04-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

Ongoing is the play Reviving Ophelia, based on the book by Mary Pipher (Lincoln). This continues through May 24th at the Loft at the Mill, see the Angels Theater Company web page for times and ticket prices.

On Saturday May 2, at 7:30 PM, the Loft at the Mill will host Look Both Ways: Artists and Writers Collaborate. Seven (writer:artist) pairs will share their collaborations, including Karen Gettert Shoemaker and Judy Martindale; Pam Barger and Susan Brasch; Twyla Hansen and Carlos Frey; Marjorie Saiser and Meghan Stratman; Amy Plettner and Janna Harsch; Kathleen Cain and Marjorie Saiser; Kelly Madigan Erlandson and Jaime Hackbart.

Also on Saturday May 2, Lee Booksellers events includes a book signing by former Lincolnite, and Science Fiction and children's author Brandon Sanderson, at 2:00 PM at Lee Booksellers in the Edgewood Center on south 56th Street.

The John H. Ames Reading series at Bennett Martin Library will offer a May reading this year (the series usually closes in April) with Harley Jane Kozak at 2:00 PM on Sunday, May 17th. More about this in a later posting.

On Monday, May 18th at at 6:00 PM writers will read from new plays they are working on at the Loft at the Mill, with writers to include Nebraskans Mary Douglass, Lou Leviticus, Michael Trutna, and new Hastings resident Robin Buckallew.

Joe Starita will present the Ames Reading on Sunday April 19, 2009

2009-04-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

Joe Starita was born in Lincoln and studied English and Journalism at the University of Nebraska. He went on to become an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald and the Herald's New York City Bureau Chief. He is also a former City Editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting at the Miami Herald, and his earlier book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995) won him critical acclaim, local and regional awards, and another Pulitzer Prize nomination. His new book, I am a Man: Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice published just this year, is gathering the same kind of attention and critical interest as his earlier work. We look forward to hearing from him at 2 P.M. Sunday, April 19 in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin library.

April 1, 2009-Lunch at the Library with James Griess

2009-03-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

James R. Griess was born on a farm in York County, Nebraska. All four sets of his grandparents were German Russians who came to the Sutton, Nebraska area in the last quarter of the nineteenth century from the Volga and Black Sea regions of Russia. He has a strong interest in history and genealogy and has recently published a book length study: The German Russians: Those who came to Sutton (Henderson: Service Press, 2008) The book offers a broad picture of German Russian history and culture and of the causes and history of this group's immigration to America, before focusing in on the German Russians in Sutton Nebraska. Mr. Griess will present our Lunch at the Library talk on Wednesday April 1 at 12:10 pm on the fourth floor of Bennett Martin Public Library. Bring your lunch and enjoy coffee provided by The Mill!

Postscript:(April 1, 2009): So many people came today and everyone enjoyed Jim's talk so much that we have already arranged for him to return in the fall to continue the story at another Lunch at the Library, at a date to be announced. Thanks for coming!

April 25, 2009 - 28th Annual Neihardt Spring Conference

2009-03-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

The 28th Annual Neihardt Spring Conference, Saturday April 25th, 2009, will focus on "Neihardt and 21st Century Native Realities." For more information, check the Neihardt Center Events web page. Presenters will include Delphine Redshirt, John Day, Judi Morgan-Gaiashkibos, and Walter R. Echo-Hawk, jr.

54th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference

2009-03-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

The 54th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference will take place Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25 2009 in Red Cloud Nebraska. The theme is "Wisdom in the later Nebraska Fiction: Obscure Destinies, Lucy Gayhart, and 'The Best Years.' Register on-line at www.willacather.org

Lunch at the Library with Evelyn McKnight

2009-03-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Evelyn McKnight will be this month's Lunch at the Library speaker on Wednesday March 4 at 12:10PM on the 4th floor of Bennett Martin Library. Evelyn is one of the one hundred cancer patients who contracted hepatitis C at the Fremont, Nebraska Cancer Center in 2000-2001. She is the author, together with trial attorney Travis Bennington, of A Never Event: Exposing the Largest Outbreak of Hepatitis C in American Health Care History (2008), and a co-founder of the patient advocacy foundation HONOReform. Lunch at the Library is sponsored by the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association

New Heritage Room display features crime and mystery fiction

2009-02-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

In Nebraska, the historical giants of crime fiction are Mignon Good Eberhart (1899-1996) and Jim Thompson (1906-1977). Eberhart was a classic creator of fictional detectives who combined her mysteries with elements of the romance novel. With some 59 novels to her credit, she is the most prolific Nebraska novelist ever. In her day, which stretched from the 1920s to the 1960s, she was very popular. By the late 1940s she was the third highest earning woman mystery writer in the world, right after Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Jim Thompson’s writing contrasted starkly with Eberhart’s. Growing up in Oklahoma and in the Sandhills around Burwell, Nebraska, Thompson had an intimate understanding of harsh realities of poverty and drink that could engulf the wished for gentility of middle class life. Thompson came to himself as a writer in Lincoln in the 1930s, under the tutelage of Lowry Wimberly. Thompson’s writing explored the dark side of the American experience, the inner world of the criminally insane, or the sudden fatal inspirations of a half-formed, trapped, and uncomforted American everyman. Thompson’s writing has a sharp bite. Readers and critics now have a greater appreciation for his work than they did during his lifetime.

If Mignon Eberhart’s heroines all find their way, from some exotic setting, to middle class dreams and ideals, Jim Thompson’s stories corrode middle class dreams and distort them into nightmares.

Along with books by Eberhart and Thompson, our display includes mysteries and crime fiction by these contemporary Nebraska authors who have gained recognition as being among the most popular and distinguished American writers working in these genres:

Omaha native and resident Richard Dooling is a lawyer who has written collaboratively with Stephen King. His scripts and novels are making their way into television and the movies. Dooling writes mysteries that offer a darkly comic views of contemporary cultural decay and technology, topics he also addresses in critically acclaimed non-fiction. His first novel, White Man’s Grave was a National Book Award finalist. His more recent Bet your Life is about investment, insurance fraud, and the corruption of cube life in an Omaha insurance company.

Sean Doolittle, from Hickman, is a master of the detective mystery whose books have won a number of awards, including an Amazon.com “best 100 books” award in 2001, “book of the year” awards from Forewords Magazine (2003), and Crimespree Magazine (2006), among others. Doolittle lived and worked in Los Angeles before moving, a few years back, to Omaha. His most recent books have Nebraska settings. Raindogs is set in the Nebraska Sandhills, and The Cleanup in Omaha. Both books have gotten rave reviews in the national press.

Alex Kava is an internationally best-selling mystery-thriller writer whose books have appeared on the New York Times best seller list, and on similar lists in Britain, Germany, Italy, and Australia. She has said that “I love using Nebraska as a setting because so many people have such a misconception of the state and it gives me an opportunity to share what it's really like.” Her gritty, carefully researched fiction is sometimes based on real events.

Omaha native and Omaha Westside graduate Julie Kaewert began to write mysteries after working for a London publisher. Her detective series carefully explores the intricacies of publishing and the rare book and manuscript trade. Famed London rare book dealer Ed Maggs, current proprietor of the famous Maggs Brothers Books, founded in Charles Dicken’s day by Uriah Maggs, has allowed Kaewert to include him as a character in her fiction under his own name. Kaewert’s books appeal to those who especially love literature and the book trade. Kaewert also co-wrote the novel that accompanied the screenplay for the movie, The Avengers.

Former Lincoln resident and actress turned mystery writer Harley Jane Kozak writes off-beat mysteries with a quirky comic bite and a romantic twist. Her work is popular with readers, especially with women, and has gotten great reviews from the national critics.

Falls City Nebraska native David Wiltse is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and tennis journalist. Wiltse’s acclaimed, prize winning plays have been produced in New York, London, Tokyo, South Africa and Sweden. He began to write for television to better support his family, he has said. He has written for a number of successful television series and movies. He began to write novels in the 1980s. His popular, fast paced thrillers include several recent novels set in the Falls City area. His awards include the Drama Desk Award for most promising playwright, and an Edgar Allen Poe Award for his television script for “Revenge of the Stepford Wives.”

Our crime and mystery display also includes novels by Lisa McClendon, Jean Potts, and Don Winslow.

Here is a link to our printer friendly crime and mystery fiction booklist.

dsc

The 2009 Sandoz Society Meeting and Conference

2009-02-05T12:08:00.000-08:00

The 2009 Mari Sandoz Heritage Society Conference will be held March 26-28, 2009 at Chadron State College. The conference will focus on Mari Sandoz and her literary contemporaries, with special attention to Nebraska writer Wright Morris, who will also be the subject of a special exhibit at the Mari Sandoz Center. The influence of John Neihardt, anthropologist Franz Boaz, and Amos Bad Heart Bull will also be featured. The conference program is available. A reading list, campus map, and links to lodging are available here, courtesy of the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center.

The 2009 International Cather Seminar

2009-02-05T11:47:00.000-08:00

The theme of the 2009 International Cather Seminar will be "Cather, Chicago and Modernism." The conference will be held June 25-28 2009 in Chicago. Conference sponsors are the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Willa Cather Foundation. The Conference Program is now available via UNL's Cather Archive. Online registration is available here, via UNL's conference link.

Stephanie Grace Whitson to be February 2009 Ames Reader

2009-01-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Born and raised in Illinois, Stephanie Grace Whitson has lived in Nebraska since 1975. Much of her historical fiction has a Nebraska setting.

A writer who loves story-telling and character, she has a strong following of devoted fans among readers of Christian historical romance. Her novels include a number of Christy award finalists, and ECPA best sellers. Though fictional, her characters reflect careful research into their historical settings. Many of her books focus on pioneer women and on life on the frontier. Well known titles include Walks the Fire (Prairie Winds Series), one of her first books, the more recent Unbridled Dreams, and her personal favorite, Karyn's Memory Box.

Check out her own Website at www.stephaniegracewhitson.com.

Stephanie is a lively presenter who gave us a wonderful talk on writing in our 2007 Lunch at the Library brownbag series. The reading will take place Sunday, February 15th at 2:00 PM in the Heritage Room. Channel 5 will record the Reading for later public broadcast.

Robert McEwen to be January 2009 Ames Reader

2009-01-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

Chadron State College English Professor and professional arborist Robert McEwen will be our 180th Ames Reader on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 2:00 PM. The reading will take place in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library at 136 S. 14th Street in Lincoln.

Robert McEwen was born in Chicago, Illinois, but has lived in Nebraska since 1978. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1984. His 1995 Slow Tempo Press book, Heartwood and Other Poems, was published to rave reviews. Ted Kooser, reviewing "Heartwood," wrote that that poem "is remarkable not only for its ability to catch us up and keep us flying with him," but also "for the immense distance McEwen establishes between this compelling, vital, third-person narrative and the narcissistic I-whining of his contemporaries." "This is, I feel, a very important work of art," Kooser concluded.

McEwen will read from his upcoming book (in press) From Corcaigh to Broken Bow. He has read for us before and we expect him to do a memorable job of bringing his poems to life.

A Strange Fascination: Stories of Violent Men on the Prairie

2008-12-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

Picture and background information for our current display.

Nebraska opened to legal settlement with the signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May of 1854. The settlement of the territory was shaped by the growing conflict over slavery embodied in that legislation, by waves of immigration, first across the Oregon Trail and then to the state itself, by Indian wars and raids, and then again by new waves of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. There was much in these origins that could be expected to leave a legacy of violence: Veterans of the Civil War would carry its horrors with them forever. Every wave of immigration included far more young males than women, and gatherings of unmarried young men are a prime source of wildness that may explode into violence. There were conflicts between farmers and ranchers, and there was a new gold rush to the Black Hills just to the north of the state.

In reality, however, the crime rate per capita on the Nebraska frontier was no greater than it was in those same years in the more settled cities of the Eastern United States. The homicide rate was slightly higher, the prevalence of other crimes, especially robbery, rather lower, than in the East. Perhaps those differences reflect the fact that so many men (and some women, too) carried guns.

Sometimes, in Nebraska, violent incidents and violent men are remembered with peculiar intensity. We may speculate about the reasons why this should be so, and perhaps see, in different kinds of fascination, evidence of a changing society. Mari Sandoz thought that after the Civil War, the country was unwilling to give up the emotionalism of the bloodletting, and so, in escapist fashion, the public took special interest in and made heroes of the most irresponsible of men, gunslingers and outlaws.

The killing of David McCanles by James Butler Hickok, at Rock Creek Station near Fairbury in July of 1861 earned Hickock (Fairbury legend says) his famous sobriquet as "Wild Bill." Some say the killing was over a debt that McCanles tried to collect from Hickok, though local legend mentions differences over a wild woman who "was commonly known" as Kate Schell. McCanles was a family man who died in the arms of his nine year old son. He ran a profitable station for the Overland Stage Company, and gained a local reputation as a great practical jokester, albeit one whose high spirited jokes ran into bullying those with whom he had differences. Yet he was also a southerner believed to be keeping his sympathies hidden because his business would suffer. That he was known as a bully and thought a southern sympathizer may help account for Hickok having been acquitted of the killing.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show celebrated in some of its most famous scenes a certain version of the settlement of the West and the Indian Wars, part of a struggle that the Poet John Neihardt sometimes compared to the Trojan War in its epic force. The show usually ended with a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand. Cody’s Native American employees seemed to enjoy the show as much as anyone, and certainly profited by participating. If his show offered a romantic vision of the Indian Wars and the conquest of the West, Buffalo Bill proved, surprisingly perhaps, to be a defender of Native American rights. He once said "every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government."

Doc Middleton—the "travelling name" of outlaw James Riley—was a Sandhills horsethief and sometime killer who made a reputation as a local Robin Hood, while selling horses stolen from Kansas to the Sioux and horses stolen from the Sioux in Kansas. Eventually he made peace with the law, settled down to have a family, and was supposed to win the great 1000 mile Chadron to Chicago horse race in 1893, but his horses gave out, and the anticipated cowboy operetta ending failed.

Finally, not to be overlooked, because present day fascination for him runs so deep (books about him are among the most frequently requested in this library), is mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. His appeal feeds on the sickness of the vacant soul. It manifests the suspicion that the only genuinely gratifying escape from the social and personal dilemmas of modern society is inward, in allowing our anger to make us sick. Interest in Starkweather only deepens the fog in the mind of his spellbound enthusiasts; poor empty headed Charlie had nothing inside worth the time already spent on him. --dsc

Official Poets? Nebraska Perspectives

2008-12-09T11:16:00.000-08:00

Pictures and background for a recent display on "Official Poets."

When the Nebraska State Legislature named John G. Neihardt as the State’s Poet Laureate in April of 1921, Nebraska became the first State in the nation to create such a position. Since then some 40 States have made similar appointments. In 2003 New Jersey abolished the office when its holder published a screed widely viewed as tasteless and anti-Semitic in its exaggerated political correctness. By contrast, in 2005, Oregon began the process of reviving its long vacant office. In 2006, in celebration of that effort, visiting U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser gave the invocation at the opening of the Oregon state legislature. By 2007, Oregon had found a new Laureate.

Nebraska Poet Laureate John Neihardt died in 1973. A committee was immediately established to begin the search for a successor. That search took nearly a decade, with Neihardt’s successor, William Kloefkorn, being chosen as State Poet in 1982. The long interregnum revealed conflicts that, while awkward at the time, led to deep reflection about what the office means and how a poet might be chosen for it. In the debate the state’s poets, on the one hand, and the public and its representatives on the other, revealed conflicting understandings of the office.

At the time of Neihardt’s death, Nebraska already possessed such a rich poetic landscape that it was hard to settle on a single candidate. There was talk right away of an impasse between candidates eminently suited to the office. A decade later, someone involved in a renewed search suggested that it might be easier to name three laureates than a single one—for there were by then three very strong candidates, each writing about a contrasting part of Nebraska, a poet for the farms and small towns of the eastern part of the state, one for urban Nebraska, and one for the Sandhills, ranch lands and towns of western Nebraska.

As poet and critic Dana Gioia points out, in our time poetry, once very much part of the mainstream of cultural and intellectual life, seems more isolated, more dependent on academic institutions and a well-educated, elite audience than it used to be. In a word, it is a subculture. Nebraska poets have generally been uncomfortable with that transition, and some have made very notable and successful attempts to reverse it. Still, as a group, Nebraska poets could not help being swept along by the almost irresistible fragmentation of American culture.

Within their subculture Nebraska’s poets know one-another rather well, they give readings together, contribute to the same anthologies, criticize and complement one-another, help each other publish or find teaching posts and get tenure. There arises then, in this continuous association—as Gioia again points out—a belief that poets are the best judge of poetry, and even something of a pecking order, a loose consensus about who is doing the most interesting work. In Nebraska this self-conscious community is both competitive and surprisingly generous. The generosity reflects the character of the real giants of poetry in Nebraska, their very genuine desire to help talent of all sorts and levels find its best expression, and their deep concern for the estate of poetry—for its quality, its audience, its influence in the world.

When, in the wake of Neihardt’s long tenure, it was proposed to name a new laureate, this community of poets grew alarmed. Would it be fair to raise one poet to such a position of eminence above the others? If there are many good poets and many different approaches to writing, might this not actually narrow the general public’s appreciation of poetry? Would poets not named sell fewer books? Was it fair to appoint someone to the position for life? Could a lifetime appointment turn into a curse, one poet wondered, for the writer given the appointment? Writers may be peculiarly sensitive, might not what was intended as an honor in time come to seem a terrible burden? Was the office just an honor, or would there be some expectation that the poet would have duties, however informally defined? Surely a poet could not be a trained seal, expected to produce something on demand for some state banquet or political occasion?

The worry that the office would become a burden led some well known poets, among them Ted Kooser and Don Welch, to withdraw their names from consideration. These fears eventually led eighteen Nebraska poets to sign a petition calling for the office to be abolished. For some, the most troublesome issue—because John Neihardt had lived to the ripe old age of 92 and had borne his office as Laureate for 52 years when he died—was the lifetime appointment. They suggested a shorter term, four years was the popular notion, so the honor or the burden could be spread around a bit more democratically.

In the end, the committee charged with making a recommendation to the legislature decided to keep the office and the lifetime appointment, and made an individual choice whose wisdom has become ever clearer over the years, if it was not already pretty clear at the first. The only concession—if it was a concession—made to the plea for a more democratic office was the determination to leave John Neihardt with the aristocratic title of Nebraska Poet Laureate for all time and call his successor simply "the state poet."

In the disputes that preceded the new appointment, the committee discovered that their own concerns about the position were different from the concerns of the worried poets.
Understandably, the committee, having found its decision difficult, did not want to pass the same task on to others in just a few years. They reasoned that their task was much less concerned with granting a literary honor, than about finding an appropriate voice to symbolize for us or remind us what language is for, what it means to us as human beings, and as a community.

The state poet will, one committee member wrote, "symbolize the importance of the written word, of precise language, and of cultural literacy, not merely as useful skills but as an essentially humane and civilizing endeavor, what Neihardt, in his irrepressible grandiloquence, called in his Laureate Address [the] ‘high adventuring of the human soul.’" That symbol, everyone hoped, might help educate the citizens of the state about our unique heritage, give a living voice to culture on the Great Plains in the work of a contemporary writer, or perhaps, give that writer a place in government for the purpose of furthering the arts.

Government, in its own sphere, often does not contribute much to the clarity or liveliness of language. But the quality of what a people are able to imagine and achieve through self-rule depends greatly on the artfulness, clarity, and honesty of its language. The purpose of naming a Laureate or State Poet is to remind us all of this dependency.

Then too, in the committee’s files, the public response to the poets’ doubts was strikingly negative. "How many ex-poet-laureates do you want hanging around? And who is going to make the choice next time? I believe it would mean the ruin of poetry within the state to turn it over to the poets. Let’s name a laureate…" one distinguished editor wrote in a letter to the committee. Letters to the editor in newspapers around the state excoriated the suggestion that the office be abolished.

This history reveals that the choosing of a poet laureate or state poet was a slow, painstaking, and fragile effort. The office recalls an earlier time, when poetry was a larger part of the literary culture of ordinary people. The choice of the office holder is fraught with the danger of error. Yet Nebraska has been stunningly well served by its poets laureate, and the office lives on in the recognition that the fate of generations to come depends on the quality and accountability of our language. -dsc