2018 Kansas Notable Books, Part One

with the holiday shopping season upon us how about a good book or two for the readers on your christmas list i'm j mcintyre and today on k pr presents the best new books by kansans for about kansas instead two thousand eighteen kansas notable books chosen by the state library of kansas in the first of a two part series we'll hear from the authors of many of those books including fiction nonfiction poetry young adult literature and more our first kansas notable book may be an unusual choice for a holiday gift the man from the train the solving of a century old serial killer mystery is by bill james and his daughter rachel mccarthy james a shorter version of this interview was broadcast earlier this year may nineteen oh six reverend ackerman his wife and their seven children are brutally murdered in milton florida october nineteen eleven ellsworth kansas will so many his wife and their three children were murdered in their home june nineteen twelve the list that

iowa joe and serum or are murdered along with their four children and to house guess the connection the man on the train that's the name of our first kansas notable book by bill james and his daughter rachel mccarthy james who dig into the dozens of murders in the early nineteen hundreds and search for their killer bill rachel thanks for coming in today thanks for having us bases these murders took place over a hundred years ago what to you to their story now i was on the treadmill and on public television cat of kansas city there was eight show about the villas commerce it's called living with a mystery that's a it's an excellent documentary or it would not made on public television the am i became interested in them in and put in decided to put an hour and figuring out a little more about them and mr became to arsenic in three hours and eventually became ten years

he didn't hire me till halfway through the process basically until he'd already written a few chapters including the first chapter in this book i mean he thought that he just needed to you know make sure that there were none that he did you know about a lot of the ones that i initially thought were connected never made it into the book because while they were often interesting stories that turned out to be not connected to the series once you understood the series once you understood the things that this man did indeed committing a crime you realize you can see clearly that some of the early crimes that i had written up before rachel jointly actually weren't connected to the city it was really remarkable how start his pattern became after you look at a hundred or so workers once you look at a lot of these events it becomes very clear and it's much easier for the things you're looking for to standout nobody knows who did it done with the back of an accident in the middle of the night a large family things like that those hallmarks didn't come along that often there weren't

just families being killed with axes for reasons that for people who were not this guy basically a so you know once you started to understand the pattern it became clear that we had a lot of work to do but we knew what work was set out before us i would say you describe these murders and the man on the train as being random and yet not random what you mean by that what kinds of things were you looking for i would say that the first one that i looked for was used to use beyond just looking at family murders which i try to look at pretty much every family murder of a family between eighty ninety nineteen twenty the first thing i would look for is the method the ax used and specifically the back of the ax used that was definitely one of his biggest calling card he would occasionally use of player than acts but almost always it was the blunt and at the x at the other things we were looking for were locked doors that something that people would often note while describing the scene at the time of day we would look at where it was and try and figure out obviously how

far it was from the train how far it was from train tracks but in the cases where we had a lot of details the castaway is i the first crime gillespie obviously it was really about lining up the little details that were too much to deny i'm covering all the windows and mirrors the lamp without the chimney the makeup of the family i dragging the bodies after death in some cases and one big distinction that change from his early crimes to his leader crimes and dad recognized this early on with the meadows crime the first chapter in the book was he set fire to the house for the first ten years or so of his rampage and that show for the first crime where he tried to set fire but was unsuccessful in doing so which is how we have such good information about the positioning of the bodies and other things in the home when he switched from doing that from about eighty ninety eight to nineteen oh nine sued no longer

arm setting houses on fire it was another big shift that we looked for in terms of whether he what kind of families he was targeting was looking at more world families or was he in his later years ninety nine to nineteen fourteen he was spending more to stop small towns where a fire would create a much bigger commotion and make it harder for him to get away yet understand that the resistance to believing that crime could've been committed by a random stranger lump was is still strong now owes much stronger hundred years ago if there was any way they could hundred years you interpret a crime as being a something done by a local person it would say it wasn't they just didn't have a paradigm for serial killers you know we all grow up with serial killers we see see stories documentaries movies books about serial killer you've heard of the serial killer you have definitely heard a serial killer as your farmer i reserve facility will

allow i definitely get daddy had a serial killer books all around the house but they just didn't understand what it was so they needed and they needed some way to place this unfathomable tragedy this horrible horrible act it's turned into something that they could understand so they look not to our random you know this probably fantastical singing random person who was coming through the country just randomly doing these things and it was in a way a random he would get off find a family get back on the train and that's part of how nobody was able to figure out his pattern but it ain't order for them to understand that they had to turn to their communities and turned to the you know the little grudges that come up in any life in any small town and exploit them so they could have some peace of mind and some conception of what happened to destroy nice times in many cases but

also it is shocking how obvious many of the connections are one should get away from being engulfed in the story that people were engulfed the story could not see the what happened here was just like something that happened a hundred miles away three months ago but once you step back the connections are so far for example a geographical patterns emerge you mentioned a crime occurs in kansas on the next crime occurs in kansas and the one after that in illinois and whether that's an island that's illinois there and this is of iran coast to coast to north the south but it is always some were it's not clear that there are the random woodward jobs and these were very clear in his later years when he was basically ice throwing caution to the wind and killing as many people as he could basically it was very clear for that and then put the same pattern exist with his earlier crimes which are in the southwest written about i'm harder to find

out a lot of information about the same connections exist there we see the same kind of patterns and the order of his crimes where that happened well it's helen says of investigating murders that took place over a hundred years ago the biggest challenge was a level of literacy in the south he committed a life prison cell and the south at that time had very low levels of literacy consequently had very few small town newspapers so when he committed a crime when he murdered a family near a small town in the south in nineteen eleven nobody said anything about partly that's an exaggeration it would make a newspaper would be in a few newspaper articles but it wouldn't set off the ripples are you would expect so it was hard to document those cases and some of those cases that occur in the south in nineteen oh nine you just he really had we really don't have much of a sense of what happened yet because it's just no newspaper articles that we could find about them and there was a kind of a sense of clarity though in that we just focused on the newspaper reports

we didn't go to and that's because there were so many crimes we couldn't go to in depth and trying to dig up hundred year old case files and things like that we basically rely on the newspapers because that's how we got a war to get the most information and so that's why we kind of focused on i mean a lot of people asked us any doubt any fbi profile is other than from the train have you i talked at researchers and that's a good idea and as a worthwhile endeavor but we haven't because we needed to focus on these newspaper reports and try to court made and make them into a story otherwise this five hundred page book within a thousand pages and we'd still be working on itself and you talk about him in investigating these murders some of the changes that took place in newspapers and in law enforcement and how technology that now was a challenge the murders occurred or over a time span in which america was changing very

very rapidly so the end of the sequence is is very different than the start of the sequence the outs in nineteen hundred small town newspapers did not subscribe to the associated press or the pri already some organization and what happened in a small town stayed there because news didn't travel very well by nineteen ten and nineteen twelve when where it more about the wire services were organized and that information travel rapidly around the country which is apparently what what forced the men from the train to decide it was time to leave the united states and go somewhere else because information about what he was doing was chasing him around the country people were you know we talked earlier about how they didn't have a framework to put these things in with serial killers but towards it and it was undeniable that somebody was running around the country killing families they were just that many happening in that short of a time

frame i'm pale at ellsworth alaska colorado springs i mean it was just too much did not really you were widely known as a writer about baseball this book is a bit of good departure yeah well i work with the red sox for the boston red sox in service since two thousand and two banned because i work with red sox are a lot of things i can say about baseball with not a lot of things i know about baseball teams like i can't right about public anymore that gets to be frustrating site that can still the gossip well right so i i started looking for so that ad as racial bias tonight i love this as a real crime stories and real watcher of it television so i knew something had jumped his previous book popular crime was also about crime but a lot of different criminal charges one i think they use

to buy their first and only father daughter team i've had of kansas notable authors what was your division of labor like and what was that like to work with your daughter yu slash your dad it worked out a lot better than we would've guessed leah first off tired rachel as it as it as a researcher initially and she became a co author because she found the guy was doing this basically her contributions to the book became too large for her to be just the researchers also jim gimpel author buddy and ashley will work a lot better than we have normal father daughter conflicts in a statement that with another that ever surface for wanting to know was really pretty snowy i would've i would've thought it would but i was a little bit you know wasn't sure about it when i was going and i needed a

job and then once became my first book i was very excited about it but i did most the research which is where i really like to nestle up an old newspapers and see what i could find but you know it worked really well we would go out to breakfast to talk about it i never felt like you know with some bosses they take all the credit just mentioning any knowledge men's dad obviously didn't do that i don't think he would've done that that was not his daughter to i'm any always listen to whatever i had to say even if it contradicted his theories and we work on them and we just solution together sometimes we disagree about whether a case is now some cases he's like ninety percent sure on i'm like more like fifty percent sure on so there we have differences i think that is displayed in the book at times but overall worked really well you need to generate an answer from the man on the train cars i found the first crime on a cold january nine twenty thirteen i was not yet an author of this book just a research assistant bill it set me working backwards through the years trying to figure out where this series of crimes

being and he told me eventually i would find the first crime and that window murder committed the first crime unit make mistakes that would reveal who he was i didn't really believe it until told me later that he didn't really believe it either but it was a work in progress maybe confined the first time maybe to leave the door open to tell us who he what's when i begin my search for these murders bill asked me to focus on the years around the crime early in nineteen oh nine nineteen oh eight when i asked about looking earlier in the decade he told me that for arbor purposes crime at ninety nine be pretty far afield even if he found a case it would be hard to believe he was active that far back but my dad told me that he was already well practiced by nineteen oh nine civility follow my hunch it is nineteen hundred is the beginning point start coming through newspapers in those years for the reports of families murdered in the night soon enough i found the lyre least a hughes the hodges the kelly's or caffeine is balance i knew his crimes were backed nearly nineteen hundred but i haven't found a blueprint

that's rachel mccarthy james reading from the man on the train bill can i get you to read an excerpt of his triple book and kansas in the nineteenth century there were two hundred documented lynchings all of them the persons believed to have committed crimes the actual number of which person says two hundred hundred ninety nine to two hundred and one round and after two hundred the number of separate events is somewhat less in the twentieth century there were six inch cases three of those from nineteen hundred to nineteen twelve and it ate well when these murders occurred lynching had essentially ended in kansas but was part of the state's recent history a lynching is of course the ultimate example of an inappropriate involvement of the public in the process of justice we might expect then that when there were so many extremely inappropriate interactions between the public in the process of justice there would also be many other inappropriate if less dramatic interactions between the public and the process of justice

that's bill james and before that his daughter rachel mccarthy james they are the coauthors of the man from the train there's something of a century old serial killer mystery it's just one of their fifteen books chosen by the state library of kansas as the two thousand eighteen kansas notable books today and next week i'm katie are present will be talking to the authors of many of those cancers notable books kansas public radio has several kansas notable books to give away if you like a chance to win a copy go to our web site kansas public radio dot org and look under extras and available giveaways ok mary never i can't i can't say that i'll give it a try with that disclaimer of go to it and and this is me

head that's critic and that they get the title poem in a book by that name by carol marie of overland park carroll thank you so much for visiting with me today oh i'm thrilled to be here this book is a collection of poems about insects that it's not just poems it's also other information about those insects tell me about how you came to put this book together well it's sad it's about this poetry is and it's nonfiction as well so that the ideas there you and since then that she also learned a lot and there are arachnids and crustaceans and mostly in sex in this book so i first law i know a lot about batches because i lived in kansas on my

life and the books dedicated it sends who are now grown that and i asked them what their favorite bags were and they are a grasshopper agreeing inch worm and the firefly which didn't surprise me that he slept play with roly poly boy next to you you bet i am i wrote the poems and then the editor that i worked with christie or tabby on how at holt is the one who suggested that the factories on each page and also we ended up footing a pretty extensive gosar in the back so you can learn something while you're reading his book tickets and they can listen to it it's a lot of fun to talk to me about your creative process now i love poetry that i love it and i studied poetry and i taught that pitch community college for quite a few years as an adjunct professor so i still had time too

right so i've written on my life our families write poems back and forth like many of many of you all probably gave for special occasions says always been a part of my life that i had to get poetry that publish you really need to have a narrative arc as well as a team so it started writing about that was and then we arranged it so that it goes from morning till night and that's you know that's the way the book works there twenty nine palms senate that did that the senate that not sympathetic as ennis it's got a lot of humor in it which i like and it's also got some heart in a castle i so i think there's a great combination you mentioned that your favorite bike is a

ladybug yes can i get you to read the poem about ladybugs little bit about about them talk a share are relating to it it's called lady bed head everyone lets a lady that she's cute and small and shy a bright delightful friendly sort in pleasing to the eye a charming little creature bringing polka dotted fan so should you want to have a bag this lady is the one that i like i love the fact to economists the surprise that lady that may actually be mail it's hard to tell later beds are said to be good luck and gardeners halpern it begs rick garnett eighties which can damage clients so that you know that there were malay defense i guess i assume that there must be at that anyway so i try and i try to have those

surprises in these poems and alanna fan and then some facts karajan had you go out on another poem well the last time he is and the fireflies sound i think and this is the eighth in a firefight that now it going we rise again we made snow he says so it's very short but i like them as ccd is week later and grammar and put on a show in honor of earth kammen share an

archive that's lovely lady carol thank you so much for sharing your poetry with us today and congratulations on being named a kansas notable one or you're very welcome i'm i'm thrilled i'm a left kansas and anger and very happy a part of this sir thank you very much i'm kay mcintyre today i'm katie are present its best two thousand eighteen kansas notable books part one each year the state library of kansas likes fifteen kansas notable books including children's books like cricket in that they get non fiction like the man from the train and poetry like our next book its feet of the messenger by h c palmer of lenexa back from the two were in

afghanistan the soldier says have my foot is gone dark but i'm still in the guard a peacetime soldier now i take his foot stub crafted as the arch trace the spongy edges with my fingers no fooling us beautiful work don't you think he tells me his boat was blown off by an are pg they were isolated five days in a valley called cornell noel see for a medivac so the medic dressed his wound then commandeered ability from a body bag searching for bags for one that fit that need smelled of rotting flesh but it was a gift from heaven he said that i'm a little more fame let me stand a fight it does good for and compare side to sign before and after recalling the scripture perhaps these feet i say here's what you mean and i say isaiah

who was isaiah said how beautiful upon the mountains or the feet of the messenger who announces peace that's dr h c palmer of lenexa reading from his first book of poetry feet of the messenger welcome aid see pretty good ear many of the poems in your collection reflect on your time serving in the vietnam war take us back to nineteen sixty four and how your experience as an army doctor has found its way into your writing well i was drafted in nineteen sixty four for my residency after one year residency from cave along with fifteen hundred other doctors didn't know when i got back two years later after your fourth rally near big bam the head of the department of internal medicine dr may and open as a building named after him is my favorite doctor of all time so across me and his desk on my first day back which was like two days after i

landed in kansas city from saigon or saigon and serves as co kansas city and he looked at me in and i remember looking over at his shoulders behind him and the pictures on the wall above his credenza hand there was a photograph of him there or at the battle of abortion was a colonel in the hospital there and he's standing there with his arms crossed looking at the camera and pretty impressive figured he looked at me and he said and they see is raising our talk about and i truthfully was too stupid to understand he wanted was to give me an opportunity to talk about the war and i said no i'm just going to get back so on the bass or set the tone for the next several years i just put the war behind me probably nineteen ninety five i decided i wanted to write fly fishing stories because my wife and i are both fly fish and so the second story i wrote

a viet nam that appeared in and i had no intention of doing it just the sky turned out to be a big number because i guess and things you want to do and he needed to have a reason to do so i went and wrote the story and some other stories and then in the end including more more about the amendment especially the wall that had given him a lot of voters were more award the martian dc which is a beautiful place a wonderful place a terrible place and i went to a writing workshop in squaw valley and a poet named gary snyder wrote a poem there and i realize that if you read this poem called hey forces that he had told superman story and about a hundred and fifty words his entire life story and uttered fifty words a nice and that piqued my interest and writing poems and i asked aren't so many years later writing a poem in the first

poem i wrote the publishers in the foothills reviewed for emporia state university press in and there was about it with my dog down the flint hills as first poem in the book and copy of coral got up and i shot this bird that was closest and bluer apart little him and when i picked her up her feathers were all blown off her skin was blown off was buoyant and guts and sticky stuff and i couldn't go off and i can remember call sometimes two or three times i was applying pressure today our guys who'd had wounds to stop bleeding and how the how the us threats of the cost of the jungle fatigues tucked my fingers in and that they're not as first poem in the book that was first on my right not that many poems and tell them to write about could you read that poem for us sure this poem is called bird hunting in the tall grass

shot at close range the little hinges come apart her feathers what was her blood and cling to my fingers a pro the femoral artery were fragments of the sergeants fatigues penetrate the wound after is over and for a long time i pick up my fingers threads and congealed blood on my knees beside the spring creek i washed the feathers away not all of your poems in feed a messenger are about war and vietnam you write beautifully about kansas and the landscape here i'm wondering if you could read the poem titled time for me was one of the most fun poems but i wrote because of my dad and i raise richard keller for years and my dad had a cup of milk cows when we're a kid and i remember in nineteen forty eight there was a superman and my dad took me on

the slow five acre pasture we ever rebel council we watched it come up and so what we really to spend some time looking at that the cow herd at night in the sponge called tide as curzon and it's under the time of the superman when the mayor's parity which is closest to the years the sun is in line with that so these are king kaiser's drew protest and my father always vote was a man of the land and he loved what was below him the soil rocks and so forth believed of course rightly so that we owe a lot to the land and how he got here the name has promised heightened and has an epigraph from jim jim harrison who just it remains one of my very favorite american writers may be one of the best ever american writers and poets and apparatuses the earth was forcing me not to forget her tied my father believes the bedrock the nays are ranch once an immensely was still alive

that natural rhythms persisted in it's sluggish consolidation he taught me to listen for echoes of breaking surf but i couldn't hear them even at night with the wind quiet and mightier pressed to an outcropping he believed the gravitational pull of a full parity moon could still move the old limestone he called it land tide i thought that to improbable and job one night the moon rose so full of light we could have counted the carrots or pasture then when its bottom edge caught the crest of a hill and just as i felt a pre lift sideways beneath my feet he said there that says i've never recover from that night or the weight of his hand on my shoulder that's h c palmer of lenexa reading from his book feet

of the messenger id psy thank you so much for sharing this with us today you're welcome thank you for having me dr h c palmer was one of twelve vietnam veterans featured in kansas stories of the vietnam war broadcast last month on k pr presents if you missed that program it's archived at our website kansas public radio dot org kbr has a copy of feet of the messenger by h c palmer if you'd like a chance to win this or another kansas notable book go to our web site kansas public radio dot org check under extra is an available giveaways i'm kay mcintyre we'll hear from more kansas notable others coming up right after this from the university of kansas this is kansas public radio we're ninety

one five lawrence and eighty nine seven emporia we're outlining kansas public radio or if you own a smart speaker like the amazon alexa you've got yet another way to enjoy a kansas public radio all you have to do is tell your smart speaker to enable the keep your skill then anytime you want to listen just say play k pr its that easy you don't need an antenna or radio just a good wife i connection support for kbr come trouble account and historical societies christmas in wisconsin over a hundred and sixty eight christmas trees with vintage and antique ornaments of the territorial capital museum now until the new year details into account in kansas dot com you're listening to take your presents on kansas public radio i'm j mcintyre if you're just joining us today on k pr presents its that two thousand eighteen

kansas notable books part one each year at the state library of kansas selects fifteen books by kansas authors or about kansas our next cancels noble author is merrill crabtree of mission she reads from her book of poetry fireflies in a gathering dark the testimony of western kansas hamlets fake land sturdy tongued the young thoroughly church elders ways but not afraid to add their own midwestern gesture of two fingered hand waves from passing trucks gays squinting against an open son coffee plaid shirts with pockets genes that still huddled close to the waist sox in all seasons wind and dust play their perpetual tunes piano of brown and gold keys and a flat land orchestra of wheat and cottonwoods

conducted in god's time that's a testimony western kansas hamlet my marrow crabtree of mission meryl thank you so much for coming in to keep your today i'm delighted to be here i think common threads that runs through your poems yes and i think the tidal surge of refers to them because i see the fireflies of course there are the fireflies we all remember as children chasing around in the dark and they were always magical to me but it's to me it's a metaphor also for the sparks of light that inspire us all the time difference parks for different people that this book i've tried to together some poems that talk about things that might inspire people and part of that of course is the kansas landscape on almost a native kansan i came here at the age of seventeen to go to college

and have lived here for sense and no western kansas is one my favorite places debates are there some points they're kind of home place points about kansas but there are also other points as for the bigger as chance of inner landscape syfy world that most of us have lived on earth for a while you do eventually get around exploring can use your one of those columns with me okay i was in ireland about four years ago and it was really yeah so start with actually there's a similarity in the feeling that the landscape gives you in ireland or gave me and the feeling i get when i'm out in the western part of our state where things are just so wind swept and so open and i wrote this poem when i was

hiding in the hills of ireland and that just came to me and it's called irish lullaby for the end of the world when the last of the stars wink sell out when times constant hum falls silent with a last breath of midnight will pipe the old tunes and whistled a jigs fingers will snap and probes will click and we'll find each other in the dark and to me that's works on the best of poetry can do for us is to connect us and so that's some that's what i tried to do with this whole book was to find ways of connecting with people with landscapes with relationships with the past with whatever is out there one of their

poems that really connected firm he was on the very next page in my mother's house could you read that for me please yes i'd be delighted to in my mother's house stacked ceiling high boxes deeply reli labeled quilt scraps old clothes tablecloths everything has its place it's as if she believes that as long as her shelves are full she won't die meanwhile i try to sort things out i bring home bowls four little ones one big one things i don't need and don't want nevertheless it's five fewer things in her house and find more in mind before i die may my room to be anti picked clean as old bones may i have the courage to where last year's dresses find

comfort and old books let go let go and say a clear that by looking for anyone who has lost a parent or who is home to a parent go through their possessions this time is very powerful family the point is actually from a real experience that i had with not so much my mother who died much younger than my mother in law who became like a mother to me and so we helped her over a number of years to get to the place emotionally and psychologically where she was ready to let go of a few things but now i'm facing that same downsizing dilemma myself and it's just a tough one you don't just communicate through your poetry you're also very active on social media and twitter

about your project can poetry save the world yes well i don't it performance actually what inspired the question but i was asked as part of the kansas nobles present haitian to be doing i was asked to give them the topic and so out popped this question can or will poetry save the world and that one guy shot better start thinking about that so what i have started doing as a project for me and for others if they want to join certainly is to put a few lines of poetry or quote about poetry on twitter every day with hash tag poetry can save the world and it's really get a centering exercise for me really puts me right there are with the ponds that i love that speak to me but i really hope that other people will also take the

opportunity to put some poetry on their own we'll see where that goes meryl thank you so much for coming in today thank you for having me merrill crabtree of mission is the author of fire flies in the gathering dark i'm kate mcintyre today on k pr present we're hearing from many of the two thousand eighteen kansas notable winners including prominent selman of long beach calif her debut novel to the stars through difficulties pays tribute to kansas libraries and the women who made them possible this interview previously aired on k pr presents in october two thousand seventeen to the stars through difficulties tells the story of three women in salina tracy ass and gail talk to me about the three women and those characters as you see them what they've come to kansas where they're in kansas for three different reasons i angelino has come to work on her phd dissertation which is on the carnegie libraries are fifty nine pretty high

priest from kansas and the early nineteen tens and she's been fascinated by them she's been struggling with his dissertation for over ten years and she just has to get it done tracy ashes i'm a very a challenge to personality she's an artist she was found in a trash bin and times square as a newborn just hours old and was adopted out and has never really felt at home where i had any kind of loving atmosphere and then gail her house in fact our entire community has been wiped out by a tornado so they end up together at the new hope art center armed with a bunch of quarters and that's where they start interacting so the but as you say it opens with an ef five tornado that destroys the town of new hope kansas to extend was this story of modeled after greensburg kansas a lot but i have to tell you i was probably for years and to have before the greensburg tornado happened and so it galas was the

newest character who has added about a secret now and get all of your listeners know i am but certainly all of the information about the tornado came from greensburg so talk to me about how how does that tornado act as a catalyst to bring this story together one other thing that was really important for me was to be able to show it as a contemporary story that even though it was these communities and nineteen tens that had fascinated me i wanted people to really understand that even today we all need to get together and build community and so that was the sermon part of it if you will and so i really wanted that component to end up and the most dramatic way to do that is with a crisis of course this week is worsening here with hurricanes all around us and we see the validity of that the town of new hope there's a quote in your book that some would say it's in the middle of nowhere

but we prefer the center of everything i'm just curious without an allusion to laura moriarty spoke not consciously amabile it's really love her book and i read it on that i've seen a few other references along the way and i think it's just such a wonderful comparison so tell me what that means to be in the middle of nowhere versus the center of everything i think it's my book is a lot about self esteem and how we think of ourselves and how we think of are places in the world and i think that sometimes kansans arm and i'm one of them can come across as being defensive about where we live and our decisions to be here and and other times we realized that we you know and i am not letting kansas now i'm in southern california but that we haven't rounded nurse that comes from having been raised in kansas that really does make us the center of everywhere the town's library which is a carnegie library is really at the center of this story telling how this carnegie

libraries came about in kansas and what was the role of women in making that happen but that's the essence of the book and arm they happened one by one arm interested women are interested people the community but they were mostly women would come together and approach on andrew carnegie for a grant to build a library in their communities but there wasn't any state wide effort particularly although that there was a kansas library association that would help them find how to do that but it was one by one these communities would determine that that's what they wanted they would write him a letter and thats the community itself had to pledge to provide the land and provide ten years' worth of operating expenses which those ten years would add up to the total of the grant that was given to the community and then he would only give two to three dollars per person so a few communities kind of stretch their population numbers to make sure they got the maximum amount of money from him but there are fifty nine of them

don't mistake which i think is just you know incredible you grew up in kansas he attended yale but you know i live in california why come back to kansas for your first novel oh it's still in every cell of my body kansas is you know is very definitely there and like i said the story is just stayed with me i really that was a very important part of my life and i think that it's a very fascinating era i think the way kansans make things happen is unique and i really wanted to tell that story to read a passage from your book ok distance of the very beginning it's in the voice of angelina ominous another three voices and in angelina is coming back and largely because she fell in love with his carnegie library as a tie i'll end and that's been the inspiration for a dissertation so i'm reading from her very first entrance into kansas

i've been fascinated by carnegie library since my first and only visit to kansas that trip to visit my father's mother over three decades ago would remember most is reading little house on the prairie with my father we sat close look at the drawings by memory small sunshine because when we were in kansas my father was changed his shirt before he read to us and the church had always spent the day flying on a clothesline outside what i remember most about the book or conestoga wagons conestoga wagons filled with families leaving everything behind to start a new back then more than anything i wanted to be a war to wear pigtails play with corn cob dolls drink from a tin cup and when spelling bees the halloween after our visit i convince my teacher to help reconstruct a pioneer girls costume a bonnet made from around quaker we are heartened and a cal coast's kurt held in place with a hula hoop i could hardly walk and that's a hula hoop and i wanted to run run away from home when i dreamed of running away from home i dreamed of running to kansas

it was grandmother told me andrew carnegie built fifty nine libraries in kansas in the early nineteen hundreds before he was done he'd spent eight hundred and seventy five thousand dollars in communities that donated the land i'm committed to raising ten percent of the capital costs for ongoing operations of a public library as i look at the wide open space it's hard to imagine how literary move that would've taken hold here at the turn of the twentieth century grandmother described carnegie is a benevolent johnny appleseed kind of guy and i was only later that i discovered his speckled treatment of mineworkers including the murder of seven men in his attempt to break up the union a few kansas communities refused to take is tainted money even for the promise of a library should we or should we not forgive and forget was retained because he gave the country sixteen hundred and eighty nine libraries have served thirty four million people by nineteen nineteen i became fascinated by this man who was both a philanthropist and robber baron obsessed as if he'd been a bad boy a boyfriend on the one hand he believed the wealthy should live without extravagance give away their excess money to promote the welfare and

happiness of the common man on the other hand he was shrewd to the point of ruthlessness my grandmother talked about the man as if she'd known him personally she was as proud about libraries if she'd built as herself when she thanked her journal and said the stories in here that you and let me read it not now she said it's a secret that's from all until men reading from a to the stars through difficulties we've got one last kansas notable book to go this week that is my dream traces the day of a young african american boy facing segregation and discrimination juxtaposed with a beautiful message of hope the book is illustrated by daniel mijares of lenexa and based on a poem by langston hughes daniel how did you come to this poem well i'm baz my dream is based on dream variation by langston hughes and you know partly it started with at my artist route judy sue goodwin sturgis she said have you ever heard of this point

and i said i'm i love like so his work but i've never read this point and i went in i looked it up and then does come and knocked me back and i said ok you know i need to think about this and i spent some time thinking about it that then really what i was doing was comma revisiting you know why his work was it was so powerful to me right and when it had become a walk back in my life and i'm a way back when i was a teenager and english class in high school and we were studying the harlem renaissance in and i was the first time i had ever come across like sneezes work in the first poem i've ever read of his was seen for english b ends you know here i was this and strength kid you know or become a closet poet you know like to get my emotions out of poetry didn't whine biden no i was an

ark and i was more comfortable expressing myself pictures and but then there is this poem about this kid you know processing you know his place in this world through this assignment and but but the way he likes to use he used words to cut cut to the quick literally peel back this facade that i don't know if i was fully aware of how it existed in people's lives and then i felt like you know all at once empowered the bomb come ashamed you know for not having that experience myself ers like oh my gosh here he was using you know using all the same words i knew it you know in a way that could really cut to the core of a kid like me i understood the power of poetry through that so

anyway that that was the it didn't take much for me to say ok you know that i've got something here that i wanted that i wanna go after they immediately thought of you know why would i do this i mean you know i'm not african american and i'm not he's not speaking you know alongside of me he might be speaking to me you know like how do you how do you change your level and three how do you understand what i'm going through you know maybe that's reasoning to me but i immediately thought of my children and i think a lot of other children and me as a child when i was a teenager that feeling of while you know it i needed to side can appeal back knocked down pulled away and then i thought well that's my dream for my children you know that they el lot earlier than i do i learned as a kid growing up in south carolina and

that you're not everyone's experience is like your own and the more you can internalize that and understand that i think we have so so that's the best the wise seen and that's the big question mark for me and that and that allowed me to jump into this project in state a moment and come on may end an effective for me it felt like a bit of a risk you know that that content like this but but it's too important not to and these are the kinds of stories that ran that i can either lie awake at night thinking about where i can stay up at night and make them and this was one of the you know you can't get away from it so daniel your contribution of this project is obviously the illustrations that can you read a poem for us and then you get a picture and describe what's happening this is dream variation violence and use as a picture book

combat is my dream by me to find my arms wide and someplace of the sun two worlds and to dance to the white day is done the unrest that cool evening twenty foot tall tree one night comes on gently dark like me that is my dream to fling my arms wide in the face of the sun dance swirl the world to the quick day is done rest of pale even a tall slim tree night coming tenderly black like me that that is my dream by langston hughes read by daniel mijares of lenexa daniel can you describe one of the illustrations you done for this book yes so i am a hub of it to be cut so so as the pom builds on you know and this this young boy and his family

are meeting up the time to have dinner at the spark come a picnic in and then this this bird the boy has this bird on his hand this common management handed and then when when the wind comes that is my dream and the boys throwing his arm up and the birds fly away and then immediately transitions to the next that were assessed to fling my arms wide <unk> the second time you hear that in the face of the sun this time the boys flying his arms wide but he his sister and two other children are flying on these larger than life birds in the in the glow of the sun over the park itself kind of taking off on this magical journey and you know for me i think this is one of the most important parts of the book when there's that you know that transition that you know the boys strong with all these all these feelings and thoughts about what's going on and why why

i'm living this way but they're living and then at this point it becomes this great can equalize moment and and he's leading the way on his on his trusty steed of the bird and you know i like the exuberance of the island that was really important to make that transition you know kind of abruptly that's daniel mijares of one ex so one of the authors honored this year by the state library of kansas that is my dream to the stars through difficulties fireflies in the gathering darkness feet of the messenger cricket in the thicket and the man from the train that's all the time we have today for the two thousand eighteen cans of notable books and we've still got money to go join us next week and keep your prisons when we'll talk to more of this year's camp authors we'll hear about the role of president eisenhower during the mccarthy era a look at the golden age

of baseball in the sunflower state we've got several cans of notable books to give away if you'd like a chance to win a copy or website kansas public radio dot org look under extras and available giveaways i'm j mcintyre haiti are prisoners is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas