Matt Kliewer
HPPR Radio Readers Book Club ContributorOriginally from Cimarron, KS, Matt Kliewer is a Professor of Humanities at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Matt is a scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, and he holds an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in English with a certificate in Native American studies from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
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In 1902, my great-great-grandfather H.B. Kliewer gained his U.S. citizenship. He had been living in Hillsboro, Kansas, ostensibly orphaned when his father died shortly after the family emigrated from Russia in the late 1880s. Until a few days ago, I had only a vague outline of this story. I knew my family had emigrated from Russia as part of the larger Mennonite migration discussed in David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard, but I was unfamiliar with the texture of this family’s settler story. -
In The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin seeks to unpack the complex history of Anabaptist emigration to the Great Plains and the eventual tragedy of the 1888 blizzard, which took the lives of hundreds of people, many of them children. There are many points where Laskin might impart some sense of cosmic morality to these events, such as when he repeatedly notes that the land that lured these settlers from their Mennonite communities in Europe had been violently seized from the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited it for millennia by the U.S. military and railroad companies. -
It takes a lot for us to embrace an outsider writing our stories. I sat with Duane West, the prosecutor of the murders of the Clutter family, in his living room for three hours in 2017, and he had quite a bit to say about his distaste for Truman Capote. While I don’t have the same personal animus that our mournfully departed Mr. West had for In Cold Blood, I’ll admit it’s tough for a New Yorker to “get it,” and the readers of this book club often just know when someone has it right. -
Bonar Menninger's and Hell Followed with It takes readers through several documentary perspectives of the 1966 EF-5 tornado that decimated parts of Topeka. Menninger’s clear interest throughout this book, beginning with the title and epigraph, is attempting to find the “why” and the “how” in the metaphysical explanations residents reached for in the storm's aftermath—the stories people sometimes must tell themselves to make sense of something so catastrophic. -
I’m Matt Kliewer, once from Cimarron, Kansas, now from Austin, Texas, coming to you from San Diego, California. So many of the characters in Lauren Groff’s Florida are separated from their landscape. They are walking, running, dreaming of a way away from where they come. -
I’m Matt Kliewer, once from Cimarron, Kansas, now from Austin, Texas, coming to you from San Diego, California. In Nick Hunt’s introduction to Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Hunt argues that in this book “[a]ll the winds of the world are inside. If you open it, you will be blown to places you never expected.” -
In his seminal work Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud argues, “We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it’s like to be you from the inside. And no amount of reaching out to others can ever make them feel exactly what you feel. -
Like many of the books in our series on humor, Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half is so specifically temporally located that a less generous person, or even my younger college-aged students, might call it "dated." There is something about the freneticism, vulnerability, and seeming universality of "adulting," to crib a similarly dated phrase, that calls to mind BuzzFeed quizzes, Onion horoscopes, and the early days of YouTube virality. -
Sometimes, being an adult just means being a larger version of the tiny little monsters we were when we were children. In Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, the book-length collection of Brosh's popular mid-aughts webcomic and blog, readers encounter the familiar struggles of getting up in the morning, compulsive behaviors, and everyday absurdities. -
We started with the Puritans, traveled the 1950s, visited the New Yorker and now we’ll explore blogger and web-comic creator Allie Brosh in a graphic novel. Bill Gates, said, “I love her approach—looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian.”
