I’m Rebecca Koehn, Forum Leader for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. I’ll be hosting discussions about the current read in the 2016 Spring Read – A Sense of Place. We’ll be discussing Kent Haruf’s Plainsong in an on-line forum that you can join by following the simple instructions available at hppr-radio-readers-dot-org.
In the meantime, let’s talk about what we mean by a Sense of Place? The late author and professor of Landscape History for Harvard University's Graduate School of design, J. B. Jackson, says, "It is place, permanent position in both social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity."
In this day and age it could be argued there is very little permanence, especially in social realms. What does this mean for a person's sense of place? Is a sense of place something necessary for identity, or just one component of many that can influence who a person is? For those who have achieved permanence in both a social and topographical sense, perhaps the High Plains does evoke a Sense of Place. I think that much of our identity is shaped by our relationship, with this place.
The place in which we live is full of plains and grasses, large skies and small canyons. We can see and smell the weather come as it rolls across our landscape of fields and cattle pastures. Storms can take hours to roll in with their thunder and lightening seen miles off in the distance. Tornadoes strike suddenly and without warning; we are rarely sure when and where they are coming. What type of people has our place created?
Set in eastern Colorado, Kent Haruf's novel, Plainsong, uses weather, landscape, PLACE, to set the tone and mood in his story of a small town community and the types of people who inhabit it. Written in language and with dialogue as sparse as the landscape in which it is set, the novel introduces us to ranchers, schoolteachers, people who are a mixture of the two, kids, and life in rural America.
Human beings, no matter where we live, do have common experiences: births, deaths; loves, betrayal; acceptance, rejection; happiness, regret; a sense of duty. Depending on who we are and where we are, these common experiences and events can look different. Who and where we are can cause people to react differently than they may have in some other place, or at some other time.
Please join us, HPPR's Radio Readers, in reading and exploring the novel Plainsong and the people who inhabit it. I think you will find that you know the people who live in this novel. You pass them on the street and at the post office. You grew up next door to them; they were your teachers in school. The bachelor brothers with their cattle ranch, the schoolteacher who spends weekends and summers helping on the farm, a star basketball player who finds trouble everywhere, the pregnant teenager who has nowhere to go. You know them. They inhabit your place. Perhaps one of them...is you.
