Hello, friends. I’m Jane Holwerda for High Plains Public Radio Radio Readers with a friendly FYI: the end is near for this most incredible Spring 2023 Read, “In Touch with the World…At Home on the High Plains.”
As we’ve read our way around the world the past few months, reading novels and memoirs set in Bosnia, Syria, China, Mexico, France, Pakistan, Norway, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, and Russia, we’ve encountered people pressed by poverty, war, inequality and violence. As we’ve explored their lives and the cultures and conflicts of nations within and beyond our own national borders, we’ve been introduced to histories and ways of being in the world previously unfamiliar. We’ve reveled in learning about and feeling for even as we’ve grieved our own knowledge gaps about historical and current events. This collection of books offers much to think about.
For example, in the face of war, oppression, inequality, extreme deprivation and isolation, how do so many maintain their humanity? I wonder, when confronted by such challenges, what each of us would do to keep the world we want to live in from fading away? How are wounds of prejudice healed? Will the causes of prejudice and hatred ever die? In a world where displacement and removal of peoples from their homelands is commonplace, where does anyone find a sense of belonging, of home?
Yes. Many of the books in our 2023 Spring season provided heavy reading, depicting lives deformed by war, armed conflict, and violence. The cellist who plays daily under threat of sniper fire; girls who walk to school knowing they could be beaten or killed for doing so; refugees who walk hundreds of miles seeking safe places; journalists who write stories despite threat of torture and death; everyone who risks life, limb and liberty for food, water and shelter for loved ones. The narrative arc of most all of these stories underscores the profound determination of a few heroic individuals committed to sustain human value and dignity despite unimaginably adverse, demeaning conditions, and threats to life.
So what possible meaning can the books in this series bring to us, living and working on the High Plains, USA, in 2023? I mean, these stories are set in places and situations unlike our own. Our lives are substantially safe, secure, not so much imperiled. Aside from deepening our literary and global understanding—no small feats, by the way--what difference to our world can all this reading and talking possibly make?
To explore questions like these, please join us on Sunday, May 7, for the Radio Readers’ live, on-air discussion. That’s Sunday, May 7, starting at 1pm, at HPPR on your dial. Several of the Spring Read slate of BookByters will participate in what promises to be an especially lively exchange about the ways books set in places far away from our own hometowns can inform our lives on the High Plains and keep us in touch with the world.
For HPPR Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda, a world-class armchair traveler, from Dodge City, Kansas.
