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Patrons will find everything from Louis L\u2019Amour to CJ Box and Charles Dickens on the shelves of the diminutive Yablonski Memorial Library in Hudson. (Katie Klingsporn\/WyoFile)<\/p>\nAs a newcomer to Wyoming in the 1980s, I earned my living \u2014 if you can call how little I earned a living \u2014 as a freelance writer and teacher. One of the most satisfying jobs I held was as a book discussion moderator for the Wyoming Humanities Council.<\/p>\n
Each year, council staff designed thematic reading lists \u2014 sports, mysteries, western American literature, science fiction, history, biographies. Any not-for-profit group could go through the nearly 40 different book lists to find one it wanted to use. The Humanities Council mailed out the books as loans to be returned when the series ended, so they could be read by another group. There were six books in a series. We read and discussed one book per month. There was no charge to the local group and if there was no series that appealed to a group, people could design their own list and request funding for it.<\/p>\n
The honorarium, travel expenses and lodging for the book discussion leader were also paid for by the council. It wasn\u2019t a lot, but it helped me to both pay the bills and get to know my new home. I met groups in Buffalo, Newcastle, Sundance, Casper, Cheyenne and Jackson. All the driving gave me a physical sense of Wyoming, along with the time to think about why and how books help us make sense of our lives, how they help us to understand each other and our history.<\/p>\n
Back then \u2014 the 1980s and 90s \u2014 the Humanities Council received no funding from the state. Rather, the budget came almost entirely from the National Endowment for the Humanities. With NEH support, we were given the opportunity to know ourselves and others more deeply, and to examine our society in ways that were both serious and pleasurable while building communities of mutual respect.<\/p>\n
I worked with a group in Newcastle for five years running. At our first meeting, there were 25 participants, all women. \u201cWhere are the men?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you kidding?\u201d one woman said, \u201cOur husbands? Read books?\u201d<\/p>\n
Patrons will find everything from Louis L\u2019Amour to CJ Box and Charles Dickens on the shelves of the diminutive Yablonski Memorial Library in Hudson. (Katie Klingsporn\/WyoFile)<\/p>\n
This was pretty ironic as I was a reader, a man, and the only person in the room being paid to be there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That first Newcastle series focused on women\u2019s autobiographies \u2014 another irony. One of the books told the story of a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to travel throughout Iran after the 1979 fundamentalist revolution that led to severe restrictions on the rights and activities of women. Many of the Newcastle women spoke of their own experience of disguise \u2014 pretending to be someone you\u2019re not in order to get by in society. The woman in disguise story resonated powerfully with the women in our group.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Jackson, we read books on water and land use issues in the West, including Marc Reisner\u2019s Cadillac Desert, which briefly mentions James Watt, who served from 1981-83 in the Reagan administration as the Secretary of the Interior. Reisner described Watt as \u201cthe environmentalists\u2019 anti-Christ,\u201d and as, at age 30, \u201ca fire-breathing evangelical Christian from Wyoming.\u201d While Watt was said to be a central figure in conservationists\u2019 \u201cannals of villainy,\u201d he was also dismissed as having \u201chopped around so much with his foot in his mouth that he didn\u2019t really have a chance to do much that the environmental movement regarded as awful.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time of the book discussion series, Watt lived in Jackson and, wanting to defend himself, signed up to participate. I was surprised that he would feel a need to do this and at first thought it self-centered and small. But as he talked in the group, it hit me that he felt vulnerable, that he\u2019d been hurt by Reisner\u2019s book. I\u2019ve felt that way, too, and saw that prior to our discussion, Watt had been for me only a distant \u2014\u00a0not quite real \u2014\u00a0figure, I believed had done a disservice to the country through policies and actions that endangered our land, air and water. As a result of the book discussion, Watt was transformed into a person for me. I felt a little ashamed at how I had dismissed him from afar.<\/p>\n
The Newcastle and Jackson book discussion series, indeed all of the Wyoming Humanities Council book discussion series, were eye-opening experiences for me and, as far as I could tell, for nearly everyone who took part in them. I\u2019m grateful that public officials supported this use of public funds. It helped us to know one another more fully so that even when we disagreed, we were able to feel kindly toward each other, almost as if we were friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a newcomer to Wyoming in the 1980s, I earned my living \u2014 if you can call how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-23624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}