By nature, Plains people share what they have with
neighbors. It is how we survive and thrive. This opportunity for readers and
lovers of ideas to explore and discuss our common landscape and the stories it
generates is a gift. Each of us brings original perceptions to a collective
experience. Our differences strengthen or weaken bonds necessary to make life
good in a hard land. This group offers a venue for us to learn who we are because
we value life on the Great Plains.
Over a billion years ago, a collision of tectonic plates in
the Precambrian period initiated our current geological status. The Black Hills
and the Eastern Wyoming and Central Texas uplifts make evident usually hidden metamorphic
and igneous rock deep below us. Following the massive impacts that created the
continent we recognize, reoccurring shallow oceans deposited layers of
limestone, shale, and sandstone that wind and water carved into the geography
we awaken to each morning.
The natural forces-- collision and erosion--that formed this
land also shape the people who live here. Throughout time, this region has
experienced ethnic, religious, political, economic, intellectual, and social impacts
that affected its development every bit as much as that first crash of
continental plates did. While two or more independent units melding together create
a new form, erosion wears it away bit by bit to unveil hidden realities. Just
as nature constructs and deconstructs, our selected texts will examine these pileups
between humans and nature, cultures, and ideologies. Working much like sand and
wind, authors’ words will shear away layers of confusion to reveal core truths
that help us answer Wallace Stegner’s question, “Where do I belong in this
country? Where is home?”
Kiowa/Puebloan author
and poet N. Scott Momaday further guides us with his wisdom, “A word has power
in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning. It gives origin
to all things.” Our authors gift uswith tales in which landscape plays an
integral role. As readers, we learn how existing on this ancient seabed adds
complications to our lives. Stegner states that writing about this arid country
west of the 100th meridian requires new insights. “Perceptions trained in
another climate have had to be modified. That means we have to learn to quit
depending on perceptual habit. Our first
and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was
to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had
learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to
communicate them. And our fourth, unfortunately out of our control, was to
train an audience that would respond to what we wrote or painted.” He’s thrown
down a gauntlet, a challenge to this book club to find meaning by looking at
our world through others’ words.
Plainsong, Empire of the Summer Moon, and the
memoir A Strong West Wind deliver
multiple genres through which to view the western third of Kansas, eastern
Colorado, western Nebraska, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. Each writer
examines the emotional and physical impacts of place on those who make a life
in its dust. Their craft validates Cather’s statement that “There are only two
or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if
they had never happened before.” While we read, we peel away strata, striving
to uncover our common experience.
People who write about the Great Plains and its inhabitants
acknowledge that an endless horizon paired with unpredictable weather that can
produce howling blizzards to raging tornadoes and moisture sucking droughts
possesses as much if not more power than any towering mountain range or surging
sea. These bards know the real magic of this place manifests itself in the
shade of a porch on a hot afternoon, in watching dusk silhouette rows of red
cedar, in discovering a meadowlark nest in an old buffalo wallow on the
prairie, or in seeing a community unite to overcome nature or human induced
trouble.
Enjoy this
opportunity to steep deeply in words about a place you call home. Relish the
collisions and the unpeeling of layers to find our truths. Momaday probably says
it best: “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the
remembered earth. I believe he ought to give himself up to a particular
landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to
wonder about it, to dwell upon it.” Inhabit this space and delight in it.
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