2015 Kansas Notable Books, Part One - Encore

the reader is a new prison i'm jane mcintyre and today we are a new book by kim and the state library of kansas like teen books has been notable books in the second 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 if you missed last week at our prisons are one of my two thousand fifteen campus program you can listen to it any time on our website k pr that ok you that ed you why you're there you can enter a chance to win the kansas notable books go to kbr that they knew that ed you that's available give away our first hand is notable book of the two thousand to fifteen years of waiting on the sky and it's a collection of essays by emporia writer cheryl and wrote her column fly over people appears in the emporia does that

these two essays were previously published images that and were heard on kbr is morning edition the small town is pieced together with alice as a teenager i ran through shadow filled alleys after dark playing hide and seek with classmates hung on in the back seat as a friend fish taylor suburban through snowy alleyways at night sometimes i rode my bike down the alleys its tires slowed by the fix and recently while looking at photographs of my hometown upon iraq because when i saw a picture of her family alley it wasn't actually our alley it was in the block to the south of us but i think our families to more than anyone else he was one of the pathways my mama's dead brother and i took to get downtown where my mom worked at the post office in the dress shop to my dad's woodworking shop to the grocery store when i was young we're skipping alongside mom or dad i might've chased a butterfly her

stopped at a patch of clover to look for four leaves the pairs of our childhood maybe where are poems began we can all think of areas pathways in our lives maybe we recall are walking around to grade school english wanna one perhaps you're thinking of the worn line in the grass between the parking lot and your office along these trails the sidewalks these alleyways with carried our thoughts our sorrows are joyce my favorite thing about this particular alley was that it was adjacent to what i call the forest in cans is if you hold your arm straight out and spend in a circle and had two or more trees with your hands at a forest i think the slot was originally a tree nursery before i was born but in my time it was a fairly dense tree filled place with shaggy underbrush and even a cajun seller one had to climb over a lazy fence to get in but the forest was it could hide out for a kid especially one who

watched the daniel boone and like to pretend that she was an indian the other day when i came across a photograph of that alley i've thought about how there is more meaning to this alley than is visible in a picture and their foothold there are things that only i can say i recall the day i turned eighteen i galloped down the alley to get mail felt like the luckiest kid on the planet my mom had just told me that i had a new cousin died and he had been born on my birthday i remembered one day walking home from the party rocker shop where i purchased for a dollar a pair of tiny folding scissors and red vinyl patch to give to my mom for mother's day i thought about how excited she would be to have this tiny pair of scissors occasionally mom put sixty one cents into my palm and sent me on a mission i care says grocery store and walked to the screen door and crossed wooden floor to order pound hamburger at the meat counter <unk> periscope ground beef into a paper tray weighed it wrapped it and broke fifty nine cents on the butcher paper in the front of the

store are so scarce collective my coins and i'd walk home with the main ingredient for supper and allie took me to the post office thousands of times to click mail from bach's number seven when i got letters from arkansas grandma or from a pen pal open the envelopes right there and read the letters while walking home we've each left our footsteps and our thoughts on various pathways and our lives and we can go back anytime to retrieve those memories are still there right that's cheryl andrew reading her essay that allen it's part of her collection waiting on the sky more flyover people as slaves the first of today's kansas notable books of two thousand fifteen and says this essay originally published in the emporia gazette tumbling trouble we

justice many of us like to roam across kansas russian vessels to our full of wanderlust i don't think about tweets often but i was reminded of them on a trip to dodge city with my friend tracy simmons russian vessels thrive in the western half of the state they grow like weeds there apparently it takes a lot of space and fresh air to raise these things i miss tumble weeks i told tracy when we first encountered them near colson i'm prep county she said when tom always blow across the fields they look like animals moving i imagine that tumble weeds often balance for miles crossing property and jurisdiction minds maybe we can take some of these tumblers and see just how far they do venture from their source but the lives of tumble weeds can get cut short with no road crossing skills they may wind up under the brutal tires of kenworth or get caught in the under carriage of a camera and scrape the highway for the next thirteen miles many tumble weeds are snagged by barbed wire fences where they remain imprisoned until they

dissolve into the dust from which they came gypsy like by nature it's not surprising that these vessels came all the way from russia michael john headache author of wildflowers and grasses of kansas describes them as such russian thistle is a prolific see producer the stems breaking ground level and roll in the way and causing the seeds to fall first the common name tumble week the seas require only limited moisture to germinate haddock wrote that the thistle was thought to have arrived in the great plains in the mid eighteen seventies with flaxseed imported from russia well i'm always are ours now on the way to dodge city tracy and i drove through strong cross women's wind speed is relative though it may not have been overly windy according to western kansas standards does city enjoys an average annual wind speed of forty miles per hour and is high on the list of twenty cities in the contiguous united states having grown up with the wind in the tumble weeds in barton county i'm a mess a companionship with these

rolling wheat i sure don't miss the nagging wind that day the wind a blessedness from the self steady at thirty miles an hour gusting even stronger wind breaks came in the way of semi trucks traveling in the opposite direction when an eastbound train pastors it blocked the southland momentarily pulling the car dangerously toward the center line but the suction was briefed when the truck passed the wind returned pushing a cart with a ditch it was a two hands on the steering wheel kind of day we are warned in the case of flash flooding that two feet of water can flow to vehicle that we are never told about dramatic wind currents which can also float your card across the highway a way and is an invisible element and it's something of a daily him in the western half of kansas you cannot see the way and that neither can you miss his presence can slam the card or shot oppression old barn to the ground and it's a worst hairstylist ever that wind has a

purpose the tumble weed would be nothing without the wind beneath its wings again that's marilyn monroe reading from waiting on the sky morris flyover people say it's the first of two days of kansas notable books of two thousand fifteen the best new books by cancer or about kansas joe schreiber walker rosette is the author of our second kansas notable book it's the kansas relays track and field tradition in the heartland welcome joe let's start back at the beginning how cancer's relays get it started it started because of a man named john allen at nineties was a was an all american football player for k you for two years and he went to university of pennsylvania where he was also an all american

while he was there the penn relays which had just gotten started in the eight the nineties caught his attention it out when you came back to kansas in nineteen hundred settled in topeka for year to a coach football or squirt in bandages and medical practice until you moved to kansas city in nineteen hundred and it was then that he was oddly athletic board pretty you along with four gallon infinite other notables it and he said what kaye huge needs is a track meet to attract people to the campus like the pit relays unfortunately there were no facilities available for that so the facilities became available in nineteen twenty one in eight in nineteen twenty four gallon that was a football coach oddly enough for one year and they

had a thrilling come from behind tie with an overpowering nebraska at twenty to twenty in the student body was so excited about that that they pledged lots of dollars for a new stadium and the students helped a kid to demolish the old stadium and they built a new stadium that was open for football in in nineteen nineteen twenty first victory was over a state and then by nineteen twenty three scotland in allen and the felling much letterman who would billie kay you coach for about four years and was billy up the k program were given the go ahead to start to release and so they did that then the first year despite a lawyer rein it still worked and they decided to keep it going one of the things i really enjoyed reading about that first relay is was that effort not just to get athletes to come but to get students to attend it it was the case were they fell like

go it would be disrespectful for students not become so be actually extended the easter vacation so it would not start until the end of friday and i wasted were not a bad time to go home and hopefully would stay for the ringlets and even universally bailey if a kansan later rather scolding column we've got thick the beard show support for these relays it otherwise if we did and that would be like an inviting people to your old and not being there to greet them and so that was one of the ways they try to get people involved the kansas relays has always been rich in traditions tell me about some of the early kansas relays traditions it was more of a spectacle in the early years it was a weeklong spectacle and for gollum was quite a promoter and he felt that it was not enough just to put on relays they had to be promoted answer some of the early things that they did they had a role days the rodeo on

friday night after the high school in may and they hadn't buffalo which they are allowed to graze on field emily richard m for the coaches and officials meal the next day they had a student's guess the weight of the buffalo and the ones that gets the most correctly got for free tickets to the relays the next day a second place got free tickets and third place also a few but there was a way to get the students involved other promotions were were lazy and they had actually had a golf driving part of it for both professionals and amateurs and they had nearly thirty entries and what they did in the morning and they would tea offered the middle of a football field and ocean drive shots to the camp an eel hill where they had a kind of agree or they were dischord records according to that and then

in the afternoon they took the top five and made repeated the process so from the fifty yard line of a football field the camp a deal they'll there was of course before that with that as the scoreboard another thing that was one of the things they did they also took a barnstorming flight two of rural kansas city's story hasn't been articles elder wasn't famous runner here that tells about this when he wrote about master's thesis on the first fifty years of katie track which goes correctly at the sixties and seventies but he tells about that that we can about how that airplane know i hit a tree and get damaged a little bit me had had taken and thirdly was abilene for repairs but they wore white coats a ten k really is on the back and were ambassadors for the relays in an earlier there was also a kansas freeway if queen there was a queen and there was a parade and there were all sorts of promotional things going on i pick your brain a little bit about some of the

various on campus really throughout the year people who run them in kansas relates to this day people compete in their glen cunningham i'll tell me about him good living him were completed in nineteen the race he ran a believe force the rim at the ringlets i think there's sixteen years i may be wrong about that it always had that big competition from other mother or competitors as well but there are a marvelous thing about been cutting him is that he overcame so much adversity with of the he was burned badly enough in his youth because he and his brother who was killed in the incident would go early to light a fire in a schoolhouse that they went to and he was so badly burned his legs were so badly burned that he was told he would never walk again and through sheer force of will of the mother that inspired imminent worked with a bid

challenge to people themselves local of defense one day got to crawl along the fences drug itself a long and gradually begin to read to try to prove his his legs in the brain became one of a world record holder and an olympian with an incredible story to really is let me go back a couple more years to nineteen twenty seven and what was called it one of the most ambitious kansas relay the promotions ok good mood of nineteen twenty seven the eu taro you more unions came to the relays in the way that all came about is that mexico just undergone a revolution and they want to do it to find places to promote national pride and one of the ways to do that was athletically and so the stage though a long run in texas texas relays got a hold of that and they ran an

eighty mile run boston from were really stubborn and let's hear that the fog algorithm promoters and this is something we can do and so he got in with the mexican government and the city so terry moore indians these are friendly copper kid in remote remote mexico they didn't speak the language or anything like that but the end they were afraid to run according to fog ali was sometimes prone to hyperbole he said that one came only because he was threatened by the chief and if he didn't come he would be killed that story cannot be verified but that some of the mythology that risen around this but three of them came three men and two women the men were to run from kansas city to memorial stadium in rome finish up on the track the women why there were only two of them sisters were to run from topeka

thirty miles well they did that in order to give them in competition to haskell runners also or an mc and that's the foremost runner he read it in under seven hours end of the second runner was a haskell runner had never run more than twenty miles is like cousins purcell and the third runner was a fellow named thomas who were when he entered the stadium these two mile relay was just finishing up a haskell runner at the top it has left aaron and was running in the stadium the oven mr runner they read with these long sticks are about there's almost a yard long tunnel why they did that but they did that and sort of the great pictures in the book is a picture of phobos if the haskell runner very good national class runner and the tarahumara running side by side with and he had to big stick and as write

in and because of that the little little second bomb was left the mexican runner didn't know that you were going to raise he thought he was in a race to leave after running fifty miles he sped up to try to drive away and then according to according to forego all of the crowd went wild and later on in an interview with vic snyder from journalists there those mexican runner stayed in and they thought they were there a certain it spoke of the world really a result we want the fog elders longer than that the girl runner set world records coming in from topeka over thirty miles or sister had a dropout blisters and she couldn't do you wonder that in him or issues a war with two more than dark reds but it was that there was quite a day up the very next year they decided that they would have a

marathon where mexico would choose to people united states which is do people in candidate would choose to do so the united states drew in native americans from all over the country are traded haskell the canadians had two runners but the mexicans the site and they didn't want to do it because they would run in anything less than eighty miles so it ended up that canadians get there to the united states entered eight and marathon went on without the mexicans a mexican government the patient the olympic committee to put in a hundred mile race and they wouldn't do it but you torres torres oh that was a torres out that the fellow who finished fourth did run in the twenty eight olympics and the twenty first that was unfortunate for

people to believe it was a paraphrase of the founders of the kansas relays father alan and he was quoted in a kansas city star article as saying moving the relays out of memorial stadium would kill them said that liberty sixties when to restore thoughts of movie get there and a lot of people thought that in twenty thirteen and in twenty thirteen the kansas realized did in fact in november out of memorial stadium that was what prompted me to start to write the book i don't want that tradition to be lost because it really is indeed would die i wanted people to know what a spectacular event it'd be an hour as it turned out the relays rock fell apart it has been just fine and will continue joe schreiber is the other of the kansas relays track infield tradition in the heartland it's our first kansas notable book for today books by kansans or about kansas selected by the state library

let's travel west for a second campus notable book the oglala wrote a memoir of love and reckoning is the story of one woman's struggle to keep her family farm and the toll that modern agriculture is taking on our water supply julian there was the keynote speaker earlier this year at a water symposium in topeka i spoke to her at washburn university when i was living out in california i got very interested in wilderness areas in california i would go up to the sierra nevada mountains and then i actually fell in love with the desert so much the mojave desert that i moved there and the reason that desert pulled me so much is because it was as wide open arid sunny climate like the one i grew up in so i had a natural affinity for that those wide open spaces so i always loved western kansas and the buffalo grass prairies and so on and i had a deep

concern over water simply because i knew how rare and precious it was in western kansas and in my travels to wilderness areas there's nothing i had ever loved more than diving into clean clear mountain lakes in that sort of thing so when i discovered that we were using up the water under our land that was a deep concern to me and it always troubled me quite a bit tell me about your family's farm kit when i grew up we were living in the northwest corner of the northwest corner of kansas and we were raising sheep and wheaton my father was a dry land wheat farmer and he was very expert at nurturing the moisture in your soil because that's what a dry land farmer has to do and we were living within our climactic limit by it in that light nineteen sixties in our case it became possible to irrigate their because irrigation was being developed in our area and what my father heard what i think of as the call of

the pope allow a siren i there was no turning back at that point and we began at first we use group sugar beets and that was quite profitable until the sugar beet plants closed down and then we began growing corn and soy beans pinto beans eat just use the phrase the call of the oglala fire and i get that that old laila siren name from a painting by the lawrence artist named nancy marshall i ran across it on the web and i was taken by this painting and depicts this evocative woman very seductive image of this woman trailing water out of her fingers and behind it you can see circles of irrigated corn fields and its she calls the painting of a lull a siren that pretty much captures why was happy what did happen in western kansas when it became possible to irrigate the farmers

just could not wait to get their hands on that water and continues to happen to this day write and more so than ever because since the ethanol mandate went into effect in two thousand and seven corn prices went up at one point they quadrupled at one point so that man dead more farmers grew more corn in kansas five hundred thousand more acres of corn have implanted since two thousand and seven and corn is the thirsty as crop we grow in the region so it takes fourteen inches of irrigation water to grow a crop of corn and that's many times more than biographer gets in recharge each year from natural rainfall and snow melt some of the efforts to try to preserve doubt water in the oglala aquifer understandably have met with a lot of a lot of pushback from people in that area and in your book the oglala road you mentioned an

old family friend then i you talk to in goodling kansas and he says i'm a quote you here if they put through that zero depletion you could shoot a ball a down main street and not hit anyone right it was his contention that issue we conserve the water in the arc of her by requiring that we take no more out of it than it got financial reached charge each year which was one proposal at one point that was getting quite a lot of traction he said that that the population would leave western kansas it's my contention that irrigation is part of the reason that western kansas has lost so much population and that is because in order to have the capital to be competitive in order to drill irrigation wells and buy all the equipment necessary to irrigate you have to be a big farmer so farms and god ain't got larger and larger and the number of people used to live and the counties as naturally diminished as a result of that hold go

big or go home yell get bigger get out that was the phrase that earl butz the secretary of agriculture for eisenhower used julie you wrote this book the oglala road as someone who was returning to kansas from wyoming where you were living at the time did you find a problematic at all that you're trying to educate people western kansans in particular who have a stake in this system of agriculture but you're doing this as an outsider well my family still owned our farm at the beginning of this book i'm writing from the point you set of someone whose father has died and who's is now holding the bag so to speak i was deeply embroiled in this whole issue on a very personal level and i was also deeply identified with our land on so deeply identified it with that that ever since i decided i was going to become a writer that's just about all i've ever written about as western

kansas it was there the formative in my own personality and and my own sense of who i am and who my family is so i was feeling this push pull of these conflicted can strikes on the one hand wanting to preserve the land in the water for the future and on the other hand wanting to make as much money as was possible from and so i think that's why i had to write the book is because of my conscience was engaged and i couldn't i couldn't work out that paradox i couldn't figure out how to work that out so i tried to write my way to a solution we also have the press pool of the message your father gave to you which was to hang on about land right that was his first commandment hang onto your land and my brother and i always assumed that we were two we could not even imagine selling the land but by the time he had died it was now two

thousand and one when the book open said that was four years later and we were starting to see a crisis forming on the horizon we had a farm manager there on the land who was doing a great job for mean and my brother was doing the financial management from a distance by the fire manager ways ill and older and it wasn't likely that he was going to be able to keep doing this much longer so we knew we were going to have to make a critical decision one of us was going to have to come back there to work directly on the lander we were going to have to read it out or we were going to have to sell it so all those things were running for my mind when i was out there doing the research as the book opens and at that point i met someone out there who was a local rancher who it turned out had read my first book i met him out in the middle of a cow pasture well i was tracing them flow of the little beaver towards out lenin the republican river and drowned when he told me he'd read me of my first book i

was just stunned because i didn't know anybody out there besides my second grade teacher and maybe my my freshman english teacher and my mother who had read that work so our conversation began and pretty soon a romance in sudan i think what was going on for me there was i i was thinking this was going to be an opportunity for me to maybe get live back there again and maybe do some of the things that i wanted to do on that land which way which i thought would conserve it better an aunt you know conserve the water better i want to talk about the rancher for a minute of florida and i tell you when i picked up your book i was expecting one kind of book and as i started reading like that oh this is a life story i just decided to let er rip and tell the truth you know because it was all interrelated and it was all relevant i would not have been so attracted to that man were it not for this crisis of conscience and that was going on a meaning was a very smart and wonderful person bed

i didn't wanna lie back in western kansas again and i had a life elsewhere i didn't think i wanted to lie back in western kansas again that subconsciously i don't think i'd ever longed for anything more than two it kind of unite these two divided selves and i'll get back in right relationship with the place that i was from julie do you have an excerpt from your book that obama read that i can get to read ok with this so when we were on the family farm we were living a very integrated existence we were in may stay in that world and it was a way of life so when ai family moved to town that began to change and have changed rather suddenly obviously it changed our family psychology so the passage i'd like to read is one that illustrates how that happened what those changes were on the carlson farm we'd all been part of the tapestry of

weave there were animals and grains vegetables and prairie trees and people play and work mud and stars the sense of manure and of flowers i choose these things at random and it doesn't matter what order a list the man a specific list of the ten thousand things to use a phrase from the doubt a chain but phil many pages they were all entangled of a piece but when we traded that farm and moved to town then when i left cannes is altogether i became alone thread while i was trying to bleep myself back into the natural world in the mountains and deserts of california my family's relationship with our land back home was continuing to unravel that drove to it every day he didn't live on it it's meaning had shifted from the seed of our family's life to solely a source of revenue dead success growing crops still affirm been satisfied him but his land had become more of a thing to him and to us it had become a financial asset not

who we were it is no mistake that we use the same word in english to denote both financial worth and a moral principle we hold dear and one line of reasoning i would actually be obeying my father's a value system by violating his first precept hang onto your land that's too lean bear reading from her book the oglala rohde thank you so much for visiting with me today was a pleasure if you're just joining us it's our annual kansas notable books so the first two part series showcasing some of the best new book spy kansans or about kansas and kinect entire you're listening to k pr prisons and kansas public radio alex creation of topeka is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed scotland yard murder squad thrillers the first in that series the yard was named a kansas notable book back in two thousand and thirteen

the sec and the black country made the list in two thousand fourteen and no surprise the two thousand fifteen kansas notable books list includes his third in the series the devils workshop i spoke with alex greece in haiti pierre statehouse bureau about the series the scotland yard murder squad books are set in great britain primarily london around eighty ninety as a writer and what is that about that flooding that speaks to you well it's a couple things it's familiar to us all because we've seen it so many times in movies and television and in books i grew up reading about victorian england was constantly all of the classics that i read when i was a kid were set in england and most of them were said in the past i'm so that felt familiar to me when i was writing but is also eerily an alarm their customs of practices are so different from ours and in some ways it's difficult to understand why

they did some other things that he hadn't thought the way to god so i can comment on things in our society now or weekly one of the things that i found really interesting reading about this time period was that evolution of detective work and some of the practices that we take for granted now in terms of crime scene investigation were just in their very earliest stages you know and when i started reading is the series i was going to write in fact i had written a couple of contemporary industries and there's so much out there the success of csi and all the spin offs hi everybody uses csi now and so do some of the things that i found most fascinating about the technology of catching criminals have contended that so i thought it would be interesting to see if you could still apply some of those things when the science was in its infancy and day and how many of those things that we take for granted now actually you were in use there and most of

them but they're enough things that that said i can play with a little bit like the cutter fingerprints and the fingerprints what's interesting about that is scotland yard in adopt fingerprinting until nineteen oh six so i'm fighting the history a little bit like i do we didn't know about them back their identity ninety we just we're using them people didn't believe that everybody's fingerprints were different yeah so the fact that the technology or the science of it did exist meant that i could have sort of a rogue forensic investigator i go and adopt that practice even though it's not official the two main characters in the murder squad mysterious fire inspector while today and starts and noble hammersmith talk to me about their relationship not only starred in the series i wanted to be able to bounce the characters off of each other i wanted each character to represent sort of a different sector of who we are as people so that day

is very much the middle character he's day he's third to strengthen the physical aspect of of who we are ree smith is the emotion that he's all about the action he's bruce willis in victorian england so he's a scuba dive in and take care of things and he has no patience for victorian customs mr eyes and kingsley doctor kingsley's the intellectual aspects so i can play them off of each other depending on what tennessee know when i write i you know i can pick and choose and enjoy the back and forth and then a prisoner a recurring character in his books is jack the ripper you how do you bring a fresh approach to someone who's been written about so many times so many times to write and i was originally going to include him in the series it was just going to be about the aftermath of of what he did and innovative very hard when i decided i needed to actually show him to figure out how i could

change him enough to use them and make my own arm isn't really is named stryker a burn a series but he's my own character i get because i did my serial killers in my bookstore victimize when an arm and i try to steer away from that because i think it's just it's at ugly and grow since been done to death and i'm tired of it so funny is a serial killer alone about something different going on and i won explore his psyche so i needed something happened or jack the ripper to give them a different agenda and a different motivation and so and so that's basically why attack the devils workshop is about particularly by saddam everything that goes on from the yard forward it he's he's in the background somewhere just waiting to spring out of us each of these murder squad books opens with a nursery rhyme which in the context of these books they're really sinister right and i

chose them for that and ended the black country i wrote the nursery rhyme myself tom actually i'm getting my books confused might be the deals regional but i think it was what was it ok and then an almond the harvest man my new wine eyes robert louis stevenson a lockdown because i thought a child's garden of verses i always thought was creepy even when i was a little kid i am but so many people love those poms and don't see the creepy aspect of them cited the beef industry them into the mix and give them a different resonance it's connected you to read an excerpt of pain the devils workshop the beginning are concerns a year a train being used to plow through a prison wall and free some prisoners so the rest of the book is about tracking down and trying to catch the prisoners so it starts this way the locomotive brockton bounced along the tracks swaying from side to side and picking up speed as the last load of corn it's fire box burned

away the track approach southwest corner of age in prison brian wells outer wall thinker of sharply to the east but there was no driver to slow the engine any zip around the bend the train accelerated to forty miles an hour by the time the prison whole interview and the engine slam through the curve dragging ten characters behind it the loose couplings between them contracted and then quickly stretched taut as the characters move forward and back to accommodate the sudden turn seven characters from the front the middle link in the chain snapped were given weekend the back of the train tilted been slammed down onto the rails a forward we'll jump the track an unwritten emptied the final three characters left the rails in power down the embankment toward the prison walls as the front half of the train continued through the curve and away alex reason to keep their reading from the devils workshop it's the third in his

scotland yard murder squad series of borat the harvest man was released in may two thousand this year's cannes is notable books list includes fiction nonfiction and as always a bit of poetry our next quote is a collaboration between former kansas poet laureate here and miriam goldberg and photographers steven law it's called ceasing whether tornadoes campus and thunderous guys in word and image talking to the weather all my life i mean what is fascinating and i tear up in new jersey and brooklyn occasionally get a hurricane but nothing like listen i couldn't i didn't have such a good view of the skies out back there but when i first moved to the midwest i was just blown away by the skies by the weather how things changed and spoke to me through the weather and i realized that i'd been writing about whether most of my life and my

poetry it has been a guiding force especially wind which makes it very wise to live in kansas if you like to write about with that this book is rather a new czar its its a bit of a departure in that it's not just poetry it is beautiful photographs that illustrate these incredible images about the weather and its presence in kansas what was it like working with steven like an and how did you bring those pictures and words together stephen is somebody i met before i met in person on facebook and i was looking at his photographs he friendly to me and you know my friend did him in he would look at my palms and i was poet laureate at the time and i didn't realize that he had been thinking about doing a collaborative with writer and many thought well why not try the kansas

poet laureate let's start at the top why not be well i know thats the top but it's somewhere in the field and i'd been thinking about collaborating with the fatah are for i had actually asked when he turned me down and one day stephen posted an image and i just wrote this is so poetic and he wrote me right then and said would you like to do a book together and i wrote back and said yes and a few months later we met in person plea we first met at prima toss up and we just started working on the semitic about four years and he let me have access to his photo collection and he was stephen is probably out right now shooting storms he travels throughout our big tornado tore inadequate storm season in march april may june july and just evokes himself to making these photographs that are alike photographs of whether i've hardly ever seen before he's not a close up storm chaser he shoots from enough of the distance to get of this

stuff and he really looks at he's really a ball with his camera to capture many new ways for us to see the sky the more you look at his photographs the more you start to see the sky in new ways and i know it's a little abstract to describe incredible photographs on the radio but people if you're listening and you got a device near you it's tempest gallery dot com t e m p e s t gallery dot com and you can see what i mean by how he shoots super cells and tornadoes and sunsets and fog and all kinds of other things so you just said really resonated with me which was and that he takes pictures of these storms from a distance and that you get a kind of a larger perspective and maybe that's what you're doing with your poetry when you write about the weather as well oh thank you that's a wonderful compliments and

i think william blake said something about how the way at the universal's through the specific but you need to have the right perspective at the same time so the more as a poet i can kind of zero in on what specifically needs to be sat here trying to clear my mind in my ideas out of the way and bring to the surface the palm island that whole process is about gaining that perspective and then try to go through the specific to be universal what is epic you think that image is as stephen like bring to your poetry or conversely what isn't your poetry or the hopi your poetry brings to his pictures all there's nothing like a good collaboration and i am i am just so lucky in this life that when i'm a main collaborators as kelly hansen we write songs together and now i work with steven law can we do have photographs and poetry together when you're working with another artist

he's willing to hold your hand and jump off the cliff with you you know sometimes you can land and very new places usually crash as the old saying goes sometimes if like that with visual art i find that when i'm really engaged with a certain image it starts to change the way i see it mean it does really expand your peripheral vision an example is that pain teams of the late john foust one of my favorite painters she did a cover of prairie earth one of her paintings is on my birth the sky began to your feet and she does these kind of layers of color to show sky skates that has helped me to understand the layers in the sky with stevens photographs when i look at the cover photo which i'm holding out for you out there in radio land or you can see it now it's a giant super cell it's like a

just all huge round column of the thing turning in you could see lightning coming outside when i look at these photos the not only help me to understand weather patterns more but how whether occupies the sky and land and how it kind of sweeps through our lives karen connected to to and to read us one of the poems from chasing weather and perhaps describe the photograph that accompanies that okay i would love to this is a photograph that can incidentally was on the cover of my novel the divorce carol and if you're a writer it's really good to be friends with a target for free and it's actually an osage orange tree and behind it the tree takes up maybe half the photo just the top of the tree and you can see the stars burning through these wispy clouds the remnant clouds of a huge storm

and this actually was taken in two thousand eleven and perry oklahoma the night sky following the tornado outbreak and it was a tornado that did a great deal of damage and tragically killed eight people i'm and stephen was in a campsite nearby to shoot in the sky so this is called after the storm the stars rise from the osage are inch wheeling overhead as if nothing has changed in the fresh heart of the air cleansed free of all but winter without and lashing leaf against leave the rays are ramming cloud spurned translucent exposed eric ages and the wind the grass tangles a slap from a child star cradle paper from two towns away lipstick very important words nowhere the sky x hails waits drops to the disturbed rich where flowers rock

upside down the pebbles from elsewhere dream of the old days and in the often on cadence of the trains whistle someone cries tomorrow not so far from here search dogs and careful lifting of sheet rock and broken furniture bulldozers power saws rented u hauls to unearth sort of dry out and say the nuclear whatever's left months ahead to measure what was lost calculate this day's weather and read the braille of the story's left behind the new world and that conjured arrives here anyway and over the sprawling tree of life the stars can get us a poem about our theory real weather event as are a number of the poems and chasing whether but i would like to what extent

when you write about whether e you're using it as a metaphor for for what is greater than all of us i often mm of palms and it actually read another example there was much more metaphoric you know on one hand you don't want to be cheesy about it you know like this means this this means that because we don't really know what anything means you know we all have our own ways of naming it and i think we're on this earth to name and claim and an experience at as our own but what they're weather is kind of like our emotions you know what every feels like this big prima di mille you feel depressed and that oppression acts like he will never feel anything again it's raining cats and dogs and it seems like it will never stop and then of course something else sweeps and so this is a poem that goes with an image from victoria kansas way out west where there's that beautiful church on end it's

basically this it's a re are flying down draft which include jack for those of you whether enthusiastic and what it looks like is this dark cloud over the land you can see a little light and part of it is coming down and parts of the left are clouds on the ground to rising up's there's clouds meeting in them at all and that's probably close to sunset you rise up to meet the falling world whenever you live to the sky at the sky covers middle of the night exaggerations dissolve to slippers of sadness on your pillow middle of life jolts compress the heavens into one streak of sleep fine into softer ground like the rain cycle that obscures the view you can lose your way in old ground or forget the inmate blue light in everything ready again the surface of the tall grass spins in the breeze it twirls into existence the

present twist down to meet you each time you capture firth stars informed daylight or its absence we are made to catch the falling world just as the year of that shaped perfectly to catch us that's karen miriam goldberger reading from chasing whether tornadoes tempest and thunderous skies n word an image it's a collaboration between the former kansas poet laureate and photographer stephen lot kansas public radio has a copy of choosing whether to give away along with several other cancers notable books if you'd like a chance to win in kansas notable book go to our web site to a pr that kay you died edu qui gon extras and then available giveaway is again that's k pr that kay you that edu our next campus noble art there is another familiar voice to k pr listeners tom april

is writer in residence at washburn university and is a regular contributor to kansas public radio his holiday themed book is a carol dickens christmas this book in many ways it is a collage or a tribute to charles dickens' a christmas carol and even the title of course is this sort of a mixed up version of that which i thought was clever but which if you google a carol dinkins christians where thomas falk several you get three pages of charles dickens' a christmas carol lee for you ever get to like a humble book but that the whole idea for the book really started because my family would make christmas trips to dallas texas to visit grandparents and when our daughter was young we we wanted to entertain ourselves and we start a green christmas carol allowed and takes about eight hours to read charles dickens' was joined us in the christmas spirit and we started doing some meals from their non

warm engineering meals and every we started we still read segments of the christmas carol but on christmas eve every year so we it will take treasury at each other texas about an hour terry what what we've got it down to so i know the book quite well and in a lot of those those phrases and a lot of the structure of the book is true of came naturally out of that so did you get the idea too riff on a christmas carol what made you think you know and i think i could have some fun with charles dickens will chris for christmas is a wonderful structure if you think about is the writer we all have our rituals and our traditions and we all start getting intense about them is sometime after sometime after thanksgiving and then we put them all away some of us the day after greece some hours after the new year's loans after the twelfth of

christmas and so i just i was attracted to it as a structure but we all know what it's like to have to think about other people in that way when hoover who's coming to dinner who are we giving gifts to who are we sending cards to this year are we traveling are we staying home buying a tree or weaker have decorations and every year you get out the same decorations and only hope that you know there's all there's this sense of that of the past that comes into there so i thought well if i so if i get a christmas gnome one which shows were giving her son killed a canadian her son finn his sort of last traditional all the way through christmas at home before he goes to college that this would be an interesting look at traditions versus transitions and this moment in someone's life where things are changing law that's tibi got father tom april

talking about carol dickens christmas gifts this year's kansas notable books for the book lover on your christmas list featured a tune in next week when we'll hear an excerpt from a carol dinkins christmas on iraq at our present holiday show i'm kate mcintyre at our present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas that's right