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Let's talk about the High Plains sense of place

Kathleen Holt

This is my first on-air, on-line book club, and I’m looking forward to exploring Kent Haruf’s Plainsong with you.  I currently serve as Division Chair of Humanities and English professor at Dodge City Community College where I teach, but the book club is my meeting you as a fellow reader.   

Admittedly, I am somewhat of a newbie to the High Plains having lived her for just over a decade, but in that time, I’ve driven to numerous small community for  Kansas Humanities sponsored book discussions or to vacation in a favorite small Colorado town very much like Haruf’s Holt. Traveling has given me a deep appreciation for the vastness of the High Plains as wel as its beauty – the muted palette, the skies – cloudy or clear--the panorama and for its temperamental weather.  More importantly, I’ve learned to ask, not “how many miles is that,” but “how many hours is that.”

Living several hundred miles away from the High Plains, I was recovering from earning a graduate degree in an urban university, when a friend gave me a copy of Haruf’s Plainsong.  Reading it, I felt a sharp jab of recognition – for the landscape, the weather—that Haruf so lovingly describes.  And I fell a little in love with the McPheron brothers, who, in their dedication to hard work, their spare language, their routines, offered ennobling perspectives on my own father, as well as old farmers from my hometown. Haruf’s novel also reminded me, bittersweetly, of my own growing up in a small central Kansas town – riding bikes and horses,  flattening coins on railroad tracks – and of  the painful struggles as a teenager to fit it, to find a good crowd, of working in local diners and cafes.  And, most importantly, of the ways small towns  folk can support and do help each other.

I’ve been a fan since then, and in a way, wonder whether that initial sense of place inspired by Kent Haruf’s Plainsong” didn’t  enhance my own appreciation for my own, central Kansas hometown of Lindsborg or even lead me to my now-chosen hometown of Dodge City. I wonder, where has your sense of place taken you?