It may sound like an odd benchmark, but to Maureen Hearty it was telling.
On the day the Wray High School football team played their state quarterfinal game against the Highland Huskies, 18 people showed up at the Wray Public Library to discuss the Willa Cather novel “My Ántonia.”
That’s a big deal in a town of 2,300 where “local sports are kind of a key element,” Hearty said. But there were other indications that the co-director of the High Plains arts initiative Prairie Sea Projects had started something important.
Between the beginning of August and Nov. 16, 50 people checked out “My Ántonia” from the Wray library and another 30 plucked it from the Yuma Public Library.
The colcha embroidery session tied to the book sold out, and the associated poetry comic book class was also a hit.
Several residents went to Yuma’s Orphanage auto museum for a librarian-facilitated discussion and to hear a trio play book-related music. Several attended a separate Wray librarian-led discussion about the history of homesteading and Bohemian culture, with first-hand input from their neighbors. And several participated in a creative writing workshop led by Loveland author Claire Boyles.
From it all, conversations and creative expression sprouted up — about community, the land, the past and the future.
But it’s not like Cather’s 1918 novel about immigrants who moved to Nebraska from Old World Bohemia for better opportunities had infiltrated the collective consciousness out of nowhere, or that libraries were giving away free copies.
It surfaced because Hearty had been selected by the Big Read program from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest to bring a book tied to the theme “Where We Live” to the region.
Started in 2006 in the U.S., the Big Read seeks to inspire meaningful conversations and cross-cultural understanding “as a means toward improving health and well-being and reducing isolation and loneliness” in communities. It counterbalances plunging national literacy rates, partisan book-banning battles and a crisis of reading deficiencies in Colorado kids due in part to declining student enrollments, state funding reductions and the closing of some schools.
“My Ántonia” and a second book Hearty chose — the 2014 literary sci-fi novel “Station Eleven,” which follows a theater troupe struggling to survive after a swine-flu epidemic wipes out most of the population — aren’t intended for grade school-age audiences. But her choices address adult topics young adult readers can also process.
She calls “My Ántonia” a “fairly comfortable and familiar book about homesteading and the High Plains that’s pretty easy to engage the community on,” with “timeless themes like community, immigration and feminism.” And she said she chose “Station Eleven” because “even though it’s not so connected to the idea of High Plains rural living,” it’s about how to “redefine community when what you know collapses.”
Each community chosen to participate in the Big Read gets a grant ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 as well as outreach materials and tools to help them develop public relations strategies, collaborate with local partners and lead meaningful book discussions.
Programs can be as short as a week or as long as a month, and grantees are expected to deliver add-ons. Hearty chose the colcha, poetry comic book and creative writing classes, which she said helped the community engage on different levels.
Trent Segura, an artist and collaborator with the San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project, taught the colcha class at the Wray Museum. And even though colcha is associated more with southern Colorado than the High Plains, Hearty said she felt it was appropriate to bring colcha into Big Read programming, “because Trent talked about the history of colcha and how it has evolved and adapted based on place.”
“Then our conversation was, ‘When we think about grasslands, and prairies and the rural agricultural landscape in northeast Colorado what does colcha look like in that landscape?’” she added.
Kate Marie Rose, 68, who has lived in the town of Eckley, population 230, just east of Yuma and north of Joe’s, her entire life, missed the colcha class but attended the poetry and creative writing workshops as well as the “My Ántonia” discussion the night the Wray Eagles walloped the Huskies on the gridiron.
She’d read “My Ántonia” before, but said in the large group gathering consisting mostly of descendents of Bohemians who had immigrated to Colorado, “what people brought to the table was so much more.”
Rose’s family is among them, but what captured her about the book, she said, “wasn’t ‘these are immigrants and these are people who are trying to make a go,’ I think because that was just a fact of life in my family when I was growing up. My sense from the book was completely around the environment. The change of the landscape that I had seen over the years as a girl and then into maturity and today. What was on the land, and where the heck did you get water.”
The group was a mix of ethnicity, ages and cultures, “so it gave us all something to relate to,” she added. “Some had photographs and things that they brought up later.” But what impressed her the most was the partnership between Prairie Sea Futures and the Wray museum and the libraries, because it “gave them a great opportunity to be visible. You know, libraries don’t sell anything. So they just kind of get lost if you don’t remember them. So I was really pleased how visible they were,” especially during a time when some libraries seem to be in a bit of trouble.
Ashley Espinoza attended the book discussion and a two-hour writing class led by Boyles, a former farmer whose debut short story collection “Site Fidelity” won the 2022 Whiting Award in fiction and was longlisted for the 2022 PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
Espinoza said she loved how the discussion focused on “the cultural conversation of immigration” that’s been unfolding “since the beginning of America,” and the “intentionality” of having a band that played Bohemian songs during dinner.
“We didn’t realize those songs came from Bohemian people,” she added. “So the conversation was around ‘some of the things that we think are American are not.’ They have an origin different from America, and maybe have been adapted by Americans so long ago that it just feels very American, but sometimes the origin goes further back than that.”
Hearty expects “Station Eleven,” which participants will begin reading and discussing in January, will be a bigger challenge than “My Ántonia,” because “it’s sci-fi, it’s postapocalyptic, and it doesn’t immediately connect to our homesteading roots,” she said.
But her reasons for choosing it from the list of books the NEA offered for the 2024-25 Big Read extend beyond ease of accessibility.
“The reason I’m pushing outside of the usual book styles is because I don’t feel hugely optimistic about the future of running water and its impact on agriculture and rural life in northeastern Colorado. It’s like the elephant in the room that’s not being discussed,” she added.
And in “Station Eleven,” while some of the characters “aren’t working cooperatively and are more extractive and violent, some are redefining ‘how do we support each other,’” she said.
This post was originally published on here
