2019 Kansas Notables Books, Part One

today on k pr for a sense of the best new books about kansas or by kansans i'm kate mcintyre and on today's program it's a look at the two thousand eighteen kansas notable books selected by the state library of kansas kansas novartis will be honored at this year's cannes festival that takes place saturday september fourteen at the capitol in topeka event is free and the public is invited on today's program we'll visit with about half of this year's kansas notable authors i'll be interviewing the rest of the kansas notable others at the kansas book festival listen for those interviews part two of my endorphins as noble books program later this month and kbr presents this year marks the fifth time that alex creation has received a kansas notable book award his latest the saint of wolves and butchers it's the story of rudolph borman who lives in western kansas and it's hiding a deep dark secret alex tells about rudolph rudy is a year a nazi

who's been hiding out in western kansas since the early nineteen fifties successfully so when he started a church out there but he gets spotted by somebody who is in the camps with him finally and two thousand eighteen and a nazi hunter it is sent to sort of find him and bring him back bring in mandarin and finally have some kind of justice for for what rudy did during world war two alarm the nazi hunter comes to kansas and as soon as he is here he gets pulled over by a kansas state trooper and actually were named scotty foster she gets dragged into a cat and mouse game tied to the point where she really can't get out and her family isn't in danger so it's it's a contemporary thriller which is a little bit new for me this is your first novel set in kansas why did it take you so long to come home so to speak

well you know my first novel was set in london bomb and i had not been there before i didn't go to london until after i wrote my first two books at their ends i was writing my eyes but only sixty books set in london and it occurred to me i've never written about a place actually know intimately are mike i don't wanna write something here and see what happens what kind of challenges did that pose that writing about a place he'd never been to actually it was just as hard it i thought that the research of these years since i lived here since i know the area by its their assumptions we make about the places we live and i had to do just as much research about western kansas ii as i had to do about victorian london so it was a little easier though cause i could drive there it's also set in contemporary times so you know there's no kansas two thousand seventeen two thousand

eighteen right now but it's still you know it it's kind of fun it it i was able to do ride along with a kansas state troopers and they were so fantastic uncooperative and yeah i just i'm i was still texting a state trooper asking for specific advice on you know where does your badge go and you know how how did the handcuffs into this in this position and i think they were just fantastic and then i also met the corner who works in western kansas and has to go around all the small towns and to the autopsies and so that was really interesting i just wanted a couple of questions asked when i go to look and then i ended up making him a character in the book because his his job and his life are so interesting i might write a whole book about him at some point what was that about this storyline from the

idea of that nazi hiding out in western kansas what was it about that that appealed to you while i knew i wanted to write about a state trooper and i needed something kind of high stakes and that for most part but the troopers are there it to maintain order on the highways and the most we don't get involved in murders of the it is really the best high stakes thing you can have so i am as at a dinner party fretting about that i'm trying to figure out how to put her in real jeopardy although at the time she was a man she started out as a man and turned into a woman when i started writing and a friend of mine said you know i just read about a ninety five year old nazi was found in minnesota and they caught him and took him to get a leader to be tried i have and that's really fascinating i love to read a book about that nazi could be hiding in tech discuss why not

so then from there the nazi hunter came into it and i had two men trying to find a nazi and i realized i was falling into a pattern and two men you know it as cops in all of my previous books i need to change something up aaron so scotty became a woman and didn't immediately there was more chemistry between them and immediately she made more sense so i feel like it was right decision a visit with alex greece and he's the author of this scene of walls and butchers alex talks about scotty will scotty he came from western kansas and moved to chicago and then came back home and so she's she entered iran even if your state trooper as i understand it and another state if you come to kansas to be a state trooper you're not just transfer you still have to go through six months of training so everybody asked to do it even if they have previous experience so scotty came into it facing a whole bunch of hurdles coming back to kansas because you still

got to go through six months of training again and you know she's the only black woman who's a trooper again western kansas within the confines of this book on and i think i see in the book she's one of only five african american arm troopers in general in that area so she's she's definitely a minority and definitely feeling insecure in a lot of ways right off the bat but having spent time with the troopers they're very inclusive and very protective of their own and so to you there is no home there's no discrimination from within the trooper ranks against her but she still does face prejudice and bigotry in western kansas expressed be that state trooper spend a lot of time in their vehicles alone on the highway does that give you a

lot of room for certain internal dialogue with scotty thinking thinking through things or do you avoid that that part of the job and focus on worst effects are interacting with other people because a lot of time to think and he gives a lot of time to worry she's cats she's a single mother she's got a daughter who she also uprooted and brought to kansas they're living with this guy's mother who still lives in kansas and you know they can find their own home mom so she's just got to think about a lot to worry about not including nazis which word the farthest thing from her mind up until she pulled over the nazi hunter associate she says she fell i going on in her head and she's got the time to think about it tell me what the title the scene of wolves and butchers the nazis when he was in india he was the administrator of a concentration camp and they called him the wolf and they called him

that because of the way he treated women i'll know or they're in the camp by its he misinterpreted his own nickname and thought that they call them that because he was fierce and i dangerous and so when he comes to kansas and he starts his church he still identifies with wolves and with a sort of feral outlook the butcher's part died involves his basement under to church so it may be less about that the better until you read the book that's alex greece in his book the thing about wolves and butchers is one of the cancers notable books we're profiling today i'm kay pierre presents kansas public radio has got a copy of this same of wolves and butchers to give away along with a number of other cancers notable books for a chance to win leave a comment on k pr as facebook page you're listening to

kbr presents on kansas public radio cj gently as the author of no place like home lessons in activism from lgbt kansas city joins us from the studios of kcur in kansas city dj thanks for joining us and congratulations thank you so much for having me this start out with a quote from our former secretary of state kris comeback in two thousand twelve he said if a person wants to live as san francisco lifestyle they can go there if they want to live at kansas lifestyle they can come here is no place like home challenge that assertion we've just done maybe the inspiration for the whole book how i ate and that was that when we sit there chris kuc was running for something i didn't care at the time i had what office but that that idea of the san francisco lifestyle of the san francisco values is often been used by a more conservative politicians as a synonym for gay

and those of us who grew up lgbt q here in in the midwest or in places like nebraska or on prom in kansas which i wrote about know that that turtle we have those lifestyles to the kansas lifestyle and that a gay person a trans person can live that lifestyle just as noble e as anyone no place like home reminded me a little bit of profiles in courage telling the story of lgbt q activism through a series of essays that profile some other kansans involved cj have you choose who to include that's such a great question and i gather summary people whose stories should be in the book on and on on the book and if if i could tell every story will be thousands of pages long but the what i was most interested in was in twenty fifteen when the us supreme court legalized same sex marriage all across the country they knew

that there had been a very painful different painful for me and my lgbt brothers and sisters back in two thousand and five when seventy percent of kansans voted to pass a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage and so in the ten years for mandolin two thousand five to the supreme court legalizing same sex marriage in twenty fifteen i know that there had been a lot of surprising progress made by lgbt folks in kansas and so resilient i just went back and tried to find some some folks who had worked on that tip to try to stop that i'm a men from passing in two thousand and five and so i found a few of those folks and they told pretty painful stories and i am but the other people then you know they they told me to talk to other people and it just kind of snowballed and there were there there are lots of efforts and people's names were in the paper from spurring news coverage of some of these efforts in salon and hutchinson a manhattan and

so i started calling people i'm visiting with cj genevieve author of no place like home lessons in activism from lgbt kansas it's one of fifteen books named kansas notable book by the state library of kansas as the state capital and the home of fred phelps of the westboro baptist church it makes sense that no place like home starts in topeka but your story takes us across the state from tree go county to manhattan and dodge city the fight for lgbt q equality in saliva so why not like hutchinson in manhattan and a several cities in johnson county as we speak as an activist and sonner went to city hall and said you know i have this ep of these ordinances on the books to protect people from discrimination based on age race sex i am marital status religion and and these activists said can you you had sexual orientation and gender identity

to city's nondiscrimination ordinance and as has happened in states and cities and counties all across the country for the last thirty years or so when a group of citizens of the town go to city hall and say please at us to your own nondiscrimination ordinance the times's results in lawrence of controversy and debate and you know town hall meetings and city are long drawn out and city council testimony in that skin and sometimes he gets put to a vote of the people of the city and so that's what happened in saliva the city council passed it and then a group of opponents organized a petition drive in and got got it reversed and so there was this month long serve public campaign about whether lgbt people inside it should be protected and ultimately they lost at city hall a lost at the ballot box which is often what happens

but people told me in the course of having that city wide conversation people came out people are ok with their names in the paper people stood on the sidewalks with signs and eventually this whole community came together and they put on their first pride ever and saliva and the organizers expected two hundred people but if either people showed up and so you're not a loss at the ballot box they they had this community that never would have existed before and when the guy said it's the best time to be gay and saliva so jo white you think this book needed to be written from why did you want to write this book once people talk to me i was so moved by their stories and the more stories people told me the more moved i was in the home projects are have gained momentum just on the power of these peoples' stories it and very quickly i just you know i don't want any other writer but i just saw a

good yarn you know you know there was a good a good narrative of a group of sort of ea no accidental heroes going on a journey and changing changing their own lives and the lives of other other folks and that's the classic hero's journey and sewing i knew that there would be inspiring moments i knew that there was a story that needed to be told because the whole world has the stereotype of kansas and we all those of us who worry here know that i'm amy porter that's to dare touch it might be a little bit true but there's also all of this rich complexity and imparts part of life in kansas that are completely opposite from the stereotype and i was eager for the world to diseases a little bit of that i'm visiting with cj genevieve the other of

no place like home lessons in activism from lgbt kansas cj you start the book with your own journey from your home state of nebraska to the east coast and then back again to the midwest you know have you read an excerpt about that journey sure i am greg lemond nebraska it finished college out in california i went to grad school in boston and i read this this couple paragraphs from the introduction by the time i was eighteen my feelings about the midwest were much less romantic my feelings for women much more so like so many other gay kids from mid america i lit out for the promised land of san francisco a college degree later headed for the east coast grad school seemed like a reasonable excuse to hang out in boston where we'll also discover them to a vacation mecca of cape cod xp province time but as soon as i got the credentials i ain't my little pickup truck a seventy five ford courier mustard orange

holes in the floorboards back toward the west coast i got halfway stopping in kansas city was a strategic decision that spent a lot of time in gay bars on both coasts and had grown friendly with some of the beer drinking athletes who competed every year in the national gay softball world series there are teams from all over the country and everyone said kansas city had the prettiest girls this turned out to be true enough as the prairie i remembered that i've always been in love with is it so inconceivable that a gay girl would give up the endless supply of lesbians or utopian politics of the bay area for the straight repressed midwest for no other reason than summers are supposed to be hot and humid whom is a complicated thing that's e j dionne of the other of no place like home lessons in activism from lgbt kansas the day thanks so much for visiting with us and again congratulations on being named a kansas never bother thank you so much clay this was fun

today and keep your prisons if the two thousand eighteen kansas notable books i'm visiting with several the kansas noble others including miranda acevedo of manhattan she's the author of the deepest roots the story of three friends growing up in a fictitious town of cottonwood kansas renda welcome and thank you so much for coming in today you know i'm happy to be here thank you the girls cut wood hollow have a special talents and gives tell me about the curse that they are under so they are under a curse from a woman that lived in the town over a hundred years ago oh i am and what the girls in the town discover is that they are they think that this is a curse that was meant to hurt them or to punish them because the woman that made the curse of deeply unhappy on the really the curse was meant to help them survive that sort of harsh kansas prairie environment during her time period but it's needed see kind of how would she deems as useful

or helpful i'm can be changed or misconstrued over those one hundred years as times change your purse had a nest from galveston her gift or curse is that she's a fixer tanya what that means it so she's a fixer and that means that she can fix anything that she touches now it doesn't seem like that would be a curse but if you've ever really wanted say a new refrigerator or a new car but you have that one person in your life that you just keep it just barely going sometimes that does feel kind of like a curse abba she can fix anything and that comes in really handy because she works part time to help her family as an auto mechanic and she's kind of obsessed with cars now her two best friends are also cursed or blessed with with special guest her friend lux is a us iran i think we all know what that means her for mercy is an enough tell me what that means so she is a mouth and that means that she can always make

enough of what is needed so for example if you're driving in your car was on empty and mercy was in the car the car which is keep driving you know you don't just sell a fuel ounce you get where you needed to go i am an example the romney is in the book is that mercies a very generous character she loves to help people and she was to give them things and says she'd be pouring say a glass of lemonade from a pitcher and she'll just keep pouring and there would always be enough for however many people she wanted to help it's like the lows and the fishes in the rubble and it is the deepest fruit is at its heart a story of friendship and i am a bond between these three young women take all the magical aspect the way and they still have this really special bond talk to me about that and what you wanted to convey in the deepest hurts shur i wanted most of all for the city a sisterhood story i feel like the media is always for trying an especially young women as rivals and i think in my

personal experience that that's not the way it is that all i mean ah young woman or are supporting each other area know building each other up and i really wanted this to be a story of these three girls are going through each of them a difficult time in their life and how can they help each other to get through it and that was really the core of the story was that that didn't need necessarily these talents or these gifts or curses they just needed each other when a couple weeks ago i had the chance to interview brennan greenwood about her latest book the reckless both we made and we talked quite a bit about some of the unusual names of the characters in that but you're but the deepest truth also has some kind of unusual names there's roma there's lux bearers the love interest jet talk about how you selected their names sharing records i love i'm a big believer of finding a name and kind of building a character around death row whose name i just selected because awesome romance kind of a cool name but as they built her character

her name became a really important symbol because her name is made up of two places in rome and galveston and that the bee ironic part for her is that she's never been across state lines and so it's sort of a as a joke to her that she's named after these you know beautiful places but she's never been anywhere and when they came to you at lax for example her name means light and then she's in a really dark place inside i thought that was a nice thing for her to have we really laugh about my family and i i mean the characters jet rodriguez i and i didn't realize that when a name that i thought it was a cool name but later on we were watching the sand lot with her kids and is a character named benny the jet rodriguez and if so rarely subconsciously i was still thinking about this a lot the movie from my childhood it was back in your mind somewhere nowhere with them their miranda acevedo is the

author of the deepest roots run two to read an excerpt for us absolutely i'd sort of started midway in the story here i and the girls are talking about a character named emeline running ten and this is the woman that supposedly curse the town of cottonwood hollow to say you kind of know what's going on it's an online remingtons diary i whisper the lights flicker mercy tenses are you sure she takes a cautious steps forward and picks up the diary with one small trembling hand i'm sure i read some of it before i came over and the stories are wrong about almost everything lux picks herself up off before we mean wrong she asks her eyes darting out the lights to see if they will flicker again emmeline was left by her husband but she had a baby a daughter who was stillborn mercies face falls that's so sad oh how awful for her still not a good reason to curse us though likes points out that's what you

have to read this i tell them as show the memo lines wish for the girls of cottonwood hollow mercy traces a finger across a spidery handwriting reading emma lines words i don't know if the tornado woke her up or what but i think she wants us to know this she wants is to know that she never met for our talents to be a curse i whisper they were supposed to be gifts all of them i've never thought of my talent for fixing things as anything but a curse simply because it was such a need but to see it as a gift changes that shifting it ever so slightly how many times had my ability to fix things in the difference between eating and going hungry it had certainly help me to get the job and reds audio so that i could help pay the rent and even before that the very first time i fixed that microwave so that we could make supper it wasn't supposed to make me an outcast an oddity that was supposed to keep me alive it's funny isn't it

mercy asks looking at luxe an enemy to think of how differently you could live if you knew you were supposed to be blessed and not cursed you could just spend all your time walking around doing good for other people like emmeline tried to do for us that's the deepest roots by miranda acevedo manhattan's the deepest roots is one of fifteen kansans noble book selected by the state library of kansas renda thank you so much for coming in and again congratulations thank you for having me mexico is the author of elevations a personal exploration of the year kansas river it's one of fifteen kansas notable book selected by the state library of kansas max it is great to see you again yesterday ck thanks for having me donations is the story of your seven hundred mile trip from the headwaters near the continental divide in colorado all the way to the oklahoma bore order in your attempt to write a

biography of the river i start our interview with the same question that your wife have when you propose this journey why if you had asked me before i begin i would've given you a long explanation that would be full of justifications and rationalizations an intellectual as asians about culture in history and i was going to take a look at that historic photographs at the same point in the river and how to photograph from the same vantage point and once i got it actually on the water the book began to change because i realize that even though i had set out to find the river this is my stated goal that i was going to find the river what i ended up doing was finding

myself because the person will encroach so heavily upon the research in this always happens for journalists i mean normally doesn't make it into the finished product but when you have a piece of brooklyn for nonfiction and my purse full response was so strong to what i was going through both what i encountered on the river in my struggles with the water in the mountains in the snow and the sand and the hail and everything else and also my reaction to that history of where our culture has changed the river and where the river has changed us that it naturally took a different form in this structure the book revealed itself as it went on it was a little like discovering a tapestry that you were unaware of that you've passed by every day and of course

the ark river known all my life driven along a travel on that panel that sometimes that saying you're in a fallen from the headwaters as far as you can down to actually o'connell on the seven hundred miles in doing it gives you quite a different perspective on it and you realize that this tapestry that there are threads that connect other parts of the tapestry that when you tug on them that it changes the ship and this is what happened to me and also have sympathy news along the river in the mountains about my personal relationships and one of the things i discovered is that i have a tendency in and i suspect this is true of many others as well of using the geographic distance and work and projects to put emotional distance between myself in those that i love and that seems not terrible way i think surprising to say

but it was surprising to deal with it in some honest way in the book in so that that shaped the book as well in addition to that there was i wasn't prepared for the book to be a slice of a debate at a piece of time in recent history in the end it worked on this for a few years and it i didn't do it all in one trip there was a bunch of episodic journeys but the last trip my last trip on the river before i finished the book was on the weekend before the general election in two thousand sixteen and so the book is not just where i'm at a motion labor that's also a slice of where we're at here in the midwest during that time and where we've come from you so that say write a biography of the river but this book isn't about far more than the river you write about the present

system organized labor world war two internment camps marijuana your own person all struggle with depression and how did all of that come into play as you're traveling the mark river it came from when i fell on the river and all of the stories are connected by the river in the one way or another but it really informed the journey in that i've done lots of research of course and i tend to do the research is the fun part for me i love research and some of the actual turing was not so fun but what i discovered is that places along the river that i had researched how were not exactly what i had expected them to be you know an oddity a couple quick examples one example of this is and this is true for for just about any of the un populated places along the river that we tend to mediate a river that we tend to fit the river in two park's river walks carefully manicured places

where we can interact with at that when you're actually paddling the river or on western kansas walking the dry bed of the river what you see are those places you can see from the highway and often there trash dumps we are places where the cottonwoods are large guard down in the river heading in and dying for its places were you have to confront and speaking you're particularly of camp a march in granada colorado enemies were concentration camp because the historic term for it i know the point that i have caught some heat afford in the book that this was the terminal or two not a death camp not enough to get him but it was a concentration camp and what we did to american citizens at that time i was it's one thing to read about intellectually it's another thing to read in the actual letters and the accounts and experiences of people in the case of camp

monti who were taken from their homes near san francisco only way out to carry two suitcases and their business is taken from them their homes taken from them and work that out in the middle of that playing with a wrist there is nothing in behind barbed wire this is what i find amazing about camp emerges it is is that is that they made the place better than they found it in one a testament to one is the real american when a testament to faith that that we will eventually treat each other the way we should i would like to read a little bit from the valedictorian speech at the high school in canton marching and marion counties she was eighteen years old at the time and i think her speech is remarkable for her cautious optimism and her honesty and here's what she wrote

one and a half years ago i knew only one american in america they gave me an equal chance in the struggle for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness back then she said and if someone asked her what american mentor hirschmann of unhesitatingly answered freedom equality security and justice and here i'm reading from the book but in nineteen forty three she wasn't sure what her answer would be quote i wondered if america's still means and will mean freedom equality security and justice with some of its citizens were segregated discriminated against and treated so unfairly i knew i was not the only americans seeking zucker so in mindful of the search lights reflecting in my windows i sat down and tried to recall all the things there were taught to me in my history sociology and american life classes she said and then she goes onto to recount what she thinks are the best parts of

america that tour of america being really a beacon of hope in a dark world and the thing with max mccoy he's the author of the elevations a bristle it's poison ivy are kansas river next candidates you to read an excerpt from your book that describes your first night in the mountains fifth after it got dark i strum guitars brought along and so for sure wave radio and chatted with another hammering operator about seven hundred miles away in arizona both versions were practical of course but now they think that by planning even impractical and largely based on some emotional fantasy of what i wanted the trip to be would that be nice to write some new songs in the mountains or pursue my amateur radio hobby on the side while exploring the river i knew the guitar was a bad it almost right away because i failed the composer anything even spent the night worrying about what the thirty degree temperatures would

do to the neck with amateur radio would eventually arrive at a more portable and practical solution to operating in the wild but only because i'm a magazine assignment to write about it after a time waster the guitar and power down the radio it's close to midnight i switched off the battery powered light that hung from the ceiling intact and crawl into sleeping bag but after five minutes discovered that i hadn't picked a perfectly flat spot which the tent and that my head was appointed someone downhill sunday the mattress the bag until i found a spot where my feet were downhill i wasn't too close into the walls of the tent what i discovered leaked during a sudden sprinkling rain i was so tired the marlins brought i could taste blood in the back my throat my sinuses i close my eyes and concentrated on being very so i'm trying not to think about the great amount of crap that i drag with me from kansas then i slept at two o'clock the morning according to luminous

hands of my watch awoke i crawl into my bag hangs at the tent and stumbled outside to conduct the necessary business the rain had stopped and there was an abrupt way and the sky was mostly clear in the milky way arched overhead like a celestial bridge i stood there contemplating the couple of thousand stars we can see with connected i am thinking of the billions of others we can't that's when i heard the whisper for a moment i wondered you to be out here conversing ever so gently and motown's then i realized the sound i heard was the river not a quarter a mile away the voice was definitely feminine what was she trying to tell me that's max maguire reading from elevations a personal exploration of the r kansas river max thank you so much for coming in to talk to us today it's always delightful thank you kansas public radio has got a copy of the elevations to give away along with many other cancers notable books for a chance to win a copy go to k pr as

facebook page and leave a comment i'm kay mcintyre we've got more kansas notable others coming up as katie our prisons continues right after birth from the university of kansas this is kansas public radio we're ninety one five lawrence and eighty nine point nine acheson we live stream kansas public radio and katie are still at our website kansas public radio dot org support for k pr percent of kansas public radio comes from the us spencer museum of art hosting knowledge is an exhibition featuring installations by for contemporary artists now through january fifth more information at spencer are you ed is

today and keep your prisons if the two thousand eighteen kansas notable books the fifteen best new books about kansas or by kansas authors selected by the state library of kansas this year's list of kansas notable books includes buried in the suburbs a collection of poetry by jamie lynn heller of what next said jamie thank you so much for coming in today they spy i think you start out by reading one of my favorite poems in your book what whispers in the night great again tell your little that the sun comes from some recent insomnia and died when you wake up in the middle of the night and your brain is going in your thinking that you can also things seem very clear at that time of the night i knew here creeks in the house that you don't normally hear you hear the neighbors crestor opening at three am and you're wondering why iron and it's also this time so sometimes my imagination can get

away from a little bit and things that i'm worried about scrape to the surface glee to the surface and it's also sometimes time for needed a dream as well so this is about peace captures what whispers in the night in the darkness sounds skip easily across a porcelain of cooler air in this hush placed small things have their say house creeks mouse shuffles fears and dreams get their due i can see where that when spoke to me read the time off your book is buried in the suburbs you yourself live in the kansas city suburb next us what that title means to you cindy when they reflected back on what i've been writing i write a lot about how not to get buried how to maintain your own identity and while you're living your life and all of their routines that happen and all of the expectations in all of the deadlines that have to be met

and it can be easy to lose yourself in those things and so i tend to write a lot about being a connection with nature as one way to not lose myself i will write moments that occur with my family kind of a verbal photographs if they help me hang on to the here and now and appreciate the moment and not let it slip by and then there's some more effective pieces is kind of thinking ahead on down the lines that really it's about how you may be living in the suburbs and living with a minivan and all of these things that are supposed to be doing that high tech hang onto who i am in the middle of all of that i love that nature is a common theme and have that that tension that you find between nature and civilization yeah i love the weeds currently sidewalk cracks a low rates for seeing that you know that the street along the side

and there's a poem in here about having to cut the trees in order to make way for the power lines and you get these oddly shaped trees and how we band teacher sometimes that in the end is going to come back to take us over so i'm ok with that i'm okay with recognizing those moments we have fox that come through our backyard in the middle atlantic side had stacks and during those sleeping in my backyard in the middle of one ex that we can pretend we're in this city environment that nature has not left us you know i always had that same reaction when i catch a whiff of us guns debate but nobody likes the smell of the skunk that i always feel like that's a really powerful reminder that nature is out there right around us and haven't gone away even though we think we have these beautifully manicured lawns and the roads had recently been done and the kurds and all of this but nature is there as something that is always rejuvenating for me and i love spending time outside as much as they can let's go back outside with another poem read kansas

august evening which is a poem that speaks quite well that this time of year this is that time of the year and this is almost a direct conversation between my oldest daughter and i and it was late teens isn't it was one of those days we had a couple of the lady with the cicadas are still hot out which we associate heat but it was cool enough to have the windows open so you have that power hot sound of cicadas that's cool enough to have the windows open and then right before bad this is a conversation she had with three piece about this is a couple years ago and there were some new to pursue came through the state and they were choosing upon per state and they were recording videos of that poem i had no idea they'd picked this one up off the canvas puts website and then they'd made a little video of them reading it on their weight you had no idea some i think my daughter came across an e juice really fun for me those services kansas august evening opened my window money she

said i want to hear the cicada lullaby its own sword and it's so evocative it's a great example of those times when something happens i wanna hang onto it make your sister that's a real conversation and they could easily pass by that you could think of that was skewed by i wanted to remember it and i also wanted to honor it for what it was a recognition of art of the hunters windows open of that lullaby that bad time with your children and not wanting to lose those moments so i do write a lot about how to capture those on the stage like a verbal photographs are better than a photograph speaking of those verbal photographs kids you've read another one about your daughter i denied her two daughters and so they didn't hear a lots and they're good they're getting used to it i am in this piece comes from my own yeah when you come to the year in the summertime we're so excited to have ice cream store and we never went much as kazin you'd get a cone and drop

back on the ground and they're like little kid disappointment and the world is just ended and so then you have that memory and then here you have your own child and this is what i get caught i denied her i denied her ice cream cones for many years memories of anticipated sweetness landing on hot sprinkled sidewalks kept me insisting hers would be served in a bowl i denied her the lesson of liking softly consciously planning how to tackle a bomb and balance the whole audience precarious perch hot anticipate melting the satisfaction of licking the back of a hand to get a runaway drop earning the crunch of the cone using her tongue to get the last vets are buried deep that's jamie lynn heller reading from her collection buried in the suburbs jimmy your poetry has won the kansas notable book award its been nominated for the prestigious pushcart prize it's been nominated for best of them that figured

dave's odd is teaching at gartner edgerton high school how is your writing influence your teaching and how has your teaching find its way into your reading on a question it had been like in math that are high school our first son writing courses so i teach english town and i also have the opportunity teach creative writing one creative writing to you in a poetry course that are all semester long classes and my writing has has come into play they are because i can share with kids right off the bat that i'm a writer myself and i played around with in high school for a while and it's something that i kept doing and it's been important to me and the other thing i like to do is show then works that are in progress because so often we study writers in the classic you're looking at perfection think you're looking at something that has mastered the art is it when you give it walt whitman a robert frost langston hughes to a

student and then you like try this one you're looking at a masterpiece and so i'd like to bring and drafts of things along the way so that they can see what mercy looks like and that there's a lot of work that goes into it i also freely share the hundreds of denials that i receive va rejections i share those with them and just to show them the process and that it that it's a real process and you can write things and you can stumble along the way you're not going to get everything except that all the time but to carry and make you for them might call for all those courses is just to get them to write these are these are high school since i have a lot to say and the biggest gift i can give them this practice explaining themselves well enough that somebody else can understand they're trying to say i'm giving it new and heller of live next to her collection of poetry buried in the suburbs has received thirty thousand eighteen kansas notable book award we're featuring about

half of the cancers notable book award authors on today's k pr preserves genetic like you to go out on another poem about your family and this is your family passed yes one passed on those this piece is called as their life and that it's actually based on my grandmother island and watching that older generation as they got older and health issues came out they eat killing behind this piece was how disturbing it was that their whole life became about that illness about that deterioration and end that it was easy for us as family members to kind of lose who they were and what they had then as we worried about the end of their life coming and and the illness is in the doctors' visits in the end what was going to happen to them and we got so content that they think for a while at that grieving period we go through ten that we have forgotten the rest of their life that led up to that and like a second life is

so dramatic and we tend to forget all that life they had had a time and so this piece as a reminder that it's not just about the trauma at the end so this is an entire life there's nothing like going through great actress of the us house after hospice has renewed its equipment and you've donated a wheelchair down the walker flesh the pills debated what to do with an open packets of adult diapers in her prosthetic breasts open the blinds and windows to let it might be an error found her old set of dentures her package of hearing aid batteries her crazy beat a chain attached to or reading glasses and discovering elysee read nightgown stuffed in the back of their drawer and a style a couple of decades older a couple of sizes too small to remind you of her life before that jamie lynn heller reading an entire life sees the author

of buried in the suburbs one of the winners of the two thousand eighteen cancers notable book award to me thank you so much for coming and stay charming today on cape pierre presents its the two thousand nineteen kansas notable books part one each year the state library of kansas selects the fifteen best new books about kansas or by kansas authors are alas kansas notable book for today a girl stands at the door the generation of young women who desegregated america's schools by dr rachel dublin this interview previously aired on k pr prisons on february twenty fourth two thousand nineteen girls are outnumbered boys in volunteering to de segregate all white schools why was that force you have the losses leading edge of brown were girls were plaintiffs in lawsuits beginning in nineteen forty seven almost all

those lawsuits from rural texas to washington dc or have filed on behalf of girls and then after brown ah everywhere happen especially in the deep south and black girls outnumbered boys anywhere from three one to one hundred percent and girls walking into these formally all white schools and the deep south there are a few reasons for this it requires first total commitment you have to believe that you can walk into a white school and handler girls just a portion only were able to look at the evidence of a white school and say to themselves or their lawyers to the parents yes i can go over to the school and speaker hostile principle i can hold my own with those white students and a couple days are behind the first guy you have to believe that is a morally urgent task

to desegregate the schools in the late nineteen forties and even in that early nineteen fifties this is actually not at a universal agreed upon goal it was a divisive issue much less set much more so rather than be segregating lunch counters public libraries or party segregating the schools was always divisive issue the girls believed in it a second reason is that girls i have the skills necessary to disagree at schools i disagree getting a school takes both physical courage and social dexterity girls have both so they had to be a poised polite diplomatic and patients while also remaining unyielding and steadfast girls were able to do this and our parents saw this assault on us especially suited to this kind of work and they themselves believe that they can do this kind of work that's especially interesting given that timeframe this was well before the second

wave of feminism in the late sixties and yet it was young women girls who felt empowered enough to take on the establishment of all white schools yes i mean there are a couple reasons for that i mean one when i interviewed said i've barely ninety six he said she said you know there were a lot of other opportunities that girls had to leave and so it may be that we really jumped on this land it was clear that we would need if they were itching to do to take some forms of leadership leadership but the more important quality about black girls in in the forties fifties and sixties is that they came of age in a society where verbal and sexual harassment is omnipresent aspect of their lives walking down a city street in the south

of working and why homes they were constantly dealing with insults and harassed and from white men and boys they were already well schooled in how to respond to this kind of harassment before they ever reach the schoolhouse door you're prepare and they were prepared by their mothers by their teachers by their ministers by other older sisters who from the time they could walk ins you know advice then you'd be very self aware hold yourself in a way that works that that compares look people not high a hair stand up straight it's self possessed never talk back in a way it is respectful but for years and they have to learn how to do this to survive bolten white house where they had to defend their dignity and on the streets where they also had to defend their dignity defending their destiny was an ongoing part of their lives and so it was a it was an advantage when i walked into the schools and dealt with

hostile administrator journalism and that is when they were inside ids hostile spaces i'm glad you brought up the whole issue of the people that they were learning these lessons from tuck little bit more about the role that their mothers played in the early twentieth century the vast majority of african american women worked at some point in our lives in a white harm even educated women they do put themselves through college and when they want to work they brought their daughters with them from the time that they were three or four years old and what they remember their mother saying to them is don't act out and you have to learn how to act around the mall white people of both genders and of all ages so they said they saw their interactions with white people as a former acting and once you're in acting my load how you can work on your self present haitian and think very self consciously about what you're saying to this person and you learn strategies for head actor and white people that's dr

rachel devlin sees the other out a girl stands at the door a generation of young women who desegregated america's schools it's one of fifteen kansas notable books that will be honored at this year's kansas but festival in topeka saturday september fourteenth find out more about the book festival on facebook or at their website kansas book festival dot com tune in later this month for part two of my annual kansas notable book show featuring the rest of this year's authors meanwhile kansas public radio has a number of kansas notable books to give away if you'd like a chance to win a copy leave a comment on k pr as facebook page i j mcintyre kbr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas are