What Kansas Means To Me

what this camp this mean to you i'm kate mcintyre today on k pr what has this means to me and affectionate look at the sunflower state through the eyes of twentieth century writers the kansas center for the book selected what can just means to me as its kansas read book for this asquith centennial year tom avril compiled and edited the book he joins us in the k pr studios welcome back titled how are you i'm doing great how are you today i'm fine thank you so how did the idea to write this book or to edit this but they recruited actually buy the university press of kansas and it is on that it got picked as the hundred and fifty at this as christine tierney only across kansas because in some ways it comes out of the last big celebration we had a hundred and twenty fifth anniversary of statehood minority chamber of commerce and you know hundred and twenty five in coming alive so we've been dead for all that time and the state had a budget and a commission and and so on and around that time

i think like a lot of times we're celebrating anniversaries and important for them important markers you have a lot of people thinking about the state of people writing about the state near hershey press of kansas have been published some of those books primarily among them on a book by robert smith bader called it seems more leisure and methodists with great title i love that in the twentieth century in egypt kansas and i think it's a brilliant book very well researched and i've used it in my cans and the movie's classes and other classes and enjoy like the book a lot but basically it is his thesis is that the twentieth century image of kansas has plummeted there's been controlled by people outside of state i am by hollywood by the publishing world new york by by journalists outside of the state and because of that the that extremely positive sense of why kansas was as a state say up through the nineteen twenties has started

to deteriorate and he just sort of documents that the client and and it is a bleak book toward the end an end fred water at the university press of kansas city a week we'd like to do a book of the twentieth century as a spy kansans almost like entering that called much control our own image let's see what people in kansas in the twentieth century have said about the state and he talk to me and said was this something you'd like to try to put together for us and i said oh yeah i love to do and so i started collecting and reading mounds and mounds of essays by kansans i asked for permission to include poetry because i think sometimes poets are able to say succinctly something that might take a prose writer blogger named to say that i also asked if i could illustrate it with some of the prairie pride makers

because of those people weren't great artists you did focus on the state of kansas so this notion of putting together a collection of a positive affection and essays not syrup year sappy or sentimental but just realistic looks at the state of kansas came out at nighttime broad humor she pressed kansas a stack of essays probably about a foot tall and said how you make my choices and in france where we went and we won a nine inch the future is to get rid of eleven inches of the manuscript which and we we did in and came up with the acting balanced in terms of gender a chronology the ease of reading historical versus person all on a nice a nice collection of essays times have you read from your introduction to the book i'd love to each working morning i rise at six am

with a cup of strong coffee into the private world of my upstairs study i write most often i write about kansas the setting of almost all my literary work the subject of almost all my academic work as i think i often glance out the east facing windows to check on the sunrise most mornings the sky begins with the faintest shades of pink moves to oranges and crimson then into the pale yellow of the morning sun also to the east the top of the state capitol its beacon light shining close radiant on the horizon washed in floodlights its presence diminishes only as the sun rises to full strength and turns into a gray silhouette finally it becomes what is a green copper topped don't backed by pale blue kansas guy instead of a show at a huge map of kansas discarded by the topeka school hangs in my window to block the glare of the morning sun most mornings it close

i don't know when the map was published it shows a kansas turnpike but not interstate seventy it shows cannot less cedar bluff and curlin dams and reservoirs but not total creep northward and perry it's joe's land elevations average rainfall population lee and land use and mineral resources it shows kansas towns some since given up the ghost dermot railroad routes the cb into expedition routes pikes trails chisholm historic sites carrying nation's home commercial sites world's largest natural gas field indian reservations pick a clue air force bases sherman and occupations strip mining though the map is outdated it is kansas nevertheless no matter its condition it always reminds me of where i am books about kansas reassure me from my shelves photographs of kansas

remind me of the past and present your art by kansas artists shows me some of the many responses to the place on the floors are hooked rogue rescued by a friend from a crumbling house where clinton the whole unit center will always be a whole i don't intend to update its condition anymore that i plan to buy a new map i like kansas in all its different stages of manifestations to surround me like many kansans afflicted with its affectionate identification i'm unsure of exactly when kansas took hold of me i was raised in kansas in topeka during historically conscious times i came here from san francisco california nineteen fifty three and went to kindergarten in nineteen fifty four the year of the territorial centennial in nineteen sixty one during the centennial of statehood i was in sixth grade we studied kansas during those years our teachers read to us from the books of laura ingalls wilder especially from little house on the prairie the wizard of oz was shown on television for the first

time in nineteen fifty six and that book its copyright expired was we published in all sorts of newly abridged an illustrated editions some weekends using maps printed in the sunday newspaper my family still new to kansas took trips to historic sites like the beach or bible and rifle church and rossini crowds like the mill creek skyline drive through the flint hills still it wasn't until i tried to write a historical novel set in kansas that i first began studying kansas novels in history for my own novel was a miserable failure but the literature folk lore and history of kansas infected me with the state of mind some years later when i attended the university of iowa in nineteen seventy five seventy six i realized i would never live outside of kansas again so here i am in here i plan just day a love that intervention it seems like it really captures your affection for the state what i do think

growing up coming here first avant during that time when you just sometimes sell because gretchen tenure and having your teachers you know i haven't grow wheat and buckets in and really study the state of kansas doesn't affect a campus some some high spirit about the place and that like that trip we took to the beach or bible and rifle church remember it so well because my father the impact the center are hard when the station wagon three boys in the back with with strict lines not to cross back into before their seatbelts it and we drove with what was then a pretty long ways toward betty kansas in any talks with the hallway about kansas history and we've all seen by john brown girl with them but the bible unearthed and the bitter rifle in each hand outstretched hand any talk is about the underground railroad and knows those slaves or huddled behind john brown a mammal that quote abolitionists in that mirror own and we all sing that we

couldn't wait to get there and like see an actual rifle when we got there in the church was closed and the screen was painted over with whip paints a day before those airconditioning to keep it dark and then we squeeze pretending tired that we can see through a little hole in the screen and see him see a bible and see a rifle and then returning to have sooo so where's the underground railroad and of course that had to be in our imaginations to that tends to state and that and i think you see it all through what kansas means to me in which you can imagine an awful lot of you have to imagine an awful lot you go up but denise loaders into the hills and in the end those bluffs and in your beer next two years three hundred million years of fossils and you're a tiny speck in terms basin you're a tiny speck in terms of time and and you have to just believe that

kansas was once an inland sea in the dance where the seat fossils come from is so it's all about imagining what is there and so the best i think the best of kansans have that sense of being able to imagine the past under the new atomic a girl editor of why kansas means to me to me slow of lawrence is one of the writers included in tom's book she reads an excerpt from her essay touching the sky a car trip across the state is four hundred miles but it also traces almost three hundred million years in the missouri border to colorado as elevation increases rainfall declines the damp cold stream full of rain clouds has hastened the erosion of eastern kansas exposing an older rock deposits and this deepening valley and covers even some cambrian rocks

further east into missouri fossil remains a jazz drummers says survival and failure a writer has daily reminders of survival immortality and stones used for buildings fences and landscaping the campus of kansas state university is to build of this for neck killer limestone of eastern kansas and a nineteenth century coffee shop where i like to write as rock walls filled with enigmatic fossil fuels pennsylvania and limestone includes corals one celled animals the size of wheat kernels and many mollusks these muscle like animals appear to have dug into solid stone as a last how eighteen place more unusual either cry no it's see animals that look like ferns this segmented stem support a lily like flour form by tentacles we can only wonder at the original color in primitive

sharks were marauders in the warm seas of this time and if you last rule by its can be found here these tiny crab ancestors forest and said early cambrian times and died out gradually also remarkable are fossils of the next period the cretaceous nih over a chart in western kansas holds in suspension many reptiles large fish an early birds swimming just below an apparently planned service of wheat fields are moses ours sees reptiles that resemble large snakes with fans and other menace was the place the us are an alligator like reptile many varieties of shark developed a feed on clams ammonites which are related to today's nautilus and shark tooth fish is humans would have no chance in this violent competition these forgotten animals embedded in rock provide mental sustenance for kansans they force the

mine to re envision the daily landscape they testified to a dimension of time that carries each locale through remarkable transformations they give prospective division virtual life as well as a life cycle of an entire species and the bones and shells of past ocean life softening year by year into topsoil them magically nourishes the present generation that's denise low reading from touching the sky one of the essays in time it rolls but what kansas means to me to me is how did you get interested in exploring the kansas landscape i had children i ate it went to the natural history museum at the kia campus and i ate it ended up coming back in again and again to the case of things under extraordinary from the sand

bars of the kansas river and from western kansas and i was thinking oh my gosh you know this could be a horror movie and i certainly imagine it and you know it's kind of creepy down the basement anyway are counted down in the earth with all of these things and you try to turn into a fossil yourself ethic is not exactly a cough and thirty on the next thing to notice like going down there and ask you know the smell the suffering and that i have now oh my god how come no never told me about this and i felt cheated it and so i'd get on this kind of metal crusade to educate myself destiny a slow one of the writers whose work is featured in time they've roles but what kansas means to me the book begins with a writer from a different era carle becker is a historian who lived in kansas from nineteen oh two to nineteen sixteen he wrote his essay kansas in nineteen ten some years ago in the new england college

town when i informed one of my new england france was preparing to go to kansas replied rather blankly kansas humanities of casual intercourse demanded a reply certainly from the point of view of my new england friend i suppose there was really nothing more to say and in fact standing there under the peaceful new england elms can distancing tolerably remote some months later i wrote out of kansas city and entered for the first time what i always pictured as the land of grasshoppers drought and social experimentation nbc just ahead were two young women girls rather my afterward saudi university as we left the dreary yards behind and enter the half open country along the kansas river one of the pair breaking abruptly away from the season's chatter that had hitherto engrossed them both began looking out of the car window her attention soon fixed for perhaps a quarter of an hour upon something in the scene outside fields of corn or it may have been the sunflowers the line the track

but last turn into or companion with a contented cyber attorney exile she said dear old kansas the expression somehow were called my new england friend i wonder vaguely as i was sure he would have done why anyone should feel moved to say dear old kansas i suppose the kansas even more than italy was only geographical expression but also not infrequently since then i've heard the same expression miles from mosul young girls to understand why people saying dear old kansas is to understand the kansas is no mere geographical expression but a state of mind or religion and philosophy and one am has this really first fifty years of history behind it and the kind of history that that was really a landmark i mean first of all this

the native american migration into and through kansas with the end in lakin in eighteen thirty assad then you look at the santa fe trail being surveyed eighteen twenty five and an oregon trail in the motor field overland dispatch and then you get into the territorial struggles of the eighteen fifties and in the civil war a presence in haiti sixties and then the railroad building in them than mass immigration to kansas in the late eighties and sixties an aging and seventies and eighties that the chisholm trail in the cattle drives and you all these things that that everybody in america knows about not just not just kansans and then you get the prohibition in early women's suffrage and women's rights and then the populist movement of the eighteen nineties where you really have one of the first

being third party movements almost un seats mckinley and at ninety six election and so six years after that this young historian has just come into town and trying to figure out kansas and money many many years to the young coeds have been sharing stopped and science a dear old kansas he's trying to figure out really what makes kansas kansas and in what what makes it one of those states that's more than what he calls more than just a geographical expression as a state of mind a philosophy and religion and and i think that sense of a place where if you say the name of the place and it's more than just a two hundred by four hundred rectangle in the middle of the continent with him as well you know i sit with that year to draft part of the surge over tobacco china figure out what what makes

that work any result he only is teaching at the university of kansas from nineteen to july nineteen sixteen and then then he goes on i think to cornell university retired from from cornell in nineteen forty one you write a lot about kansas but wrote about the midwest and was a prominent historian during his time but we were lucky that he spent those years in kansas and had that experience and really i think rogue one of the iconic it is probably the classic essay about kansas and the myth it creates another pattern for certain people to come in and observe the state in a very insightful an interesting way that maybe we wouldn't be able to ourselves either again kansas by historian carl becker idealism as an essential ingredient of that his spirit in the few communities is the word progress more frequently used words meaning less frequently

detach from a material basis this may explain why every kansan which is first of all to tell you that he comes from the town of aix and then that is the finest town in the state does not mean that it is strictly the finest time the state has will appear if you take the trouble to inquire little about the country at soil as climate its rainfall about the town itself from a chance to use free to members of this hot there but the story was inclined to bake when there's no rain that there is rarely any rain all of which however and nothing point because the ocean of water by irrigation which is after all much better than rainfall and then he described the town which you have no difficulty in picturing visibly a single street flanked by nondescript wooden shops and one and a railroad station at the other post office side streets lined with framed houses painted or not as the case may be a schoolhouse somewhere and a church with a steeple it is such a town to all appearances as you may see about a hundred anywhere in the west a dreary place which you think the world would willingly let die but your man is

enthusiastic he can talk of nothing but the town of aix the secret of his enthusiasm us discovered in the inevitable but it will be a great country some day and it dawns upon you that after all the man does not live in the dreary town of aix but in the great country on sunday sutter kansans like st augustine they have their city of god the idealized chance of some day it is only necessary to have faith in order to possess it that's from kansas mike harle becker in what can't this means to me of course no collection of essays about kansas would be complete without a word from one of the most prominent kansans of all time william allen white born in emporia raised an older radio he bought the emporia gazette in at ninety five and gained a national audience in at ninety six with his famous essay what's the matter with kansas historian fred crowds of johnson county community college has portrayed william allen white for several decades he reads here from white's

nineteen twenty two as a kansas a puritan survival what we like most keenly as a sense of beauty and a lot of nothing is more gorgeous in color and formally kansas science or yen is hidden from the kansas for a czar of mysterious and moody is to see in their lovely image yet we graze them and plow them and mark them and wrote that do not see them the wind in the cottonwood lift song just for the meaning as though the tide saying and we are death the meadowlark a red bird book whale live with a certain type to it all through the year when our mutual musicians have not returned the song the wide skies of night present the age old mystery of life in splendor and baffling magnificent yet only one camp says poet eugene where has ever worn our courage

as a blueprint the human spirit whatever it is god's creation here under these way and then brought and wintry blast here under the career and gloomy circumstances of life has battled the roof was fate as bravely and this tragically years locked phone yet the story is unfolding at life in all richer for the mobility that has passed un titled your marble oren broadened or approach he was a rider that richness and low but bout about if william powell why was a fantastic writer and you know you read this kind of prose from him even in the early editorial like what's the matter with had little those twenty year low oh

he has a sensible repetition and alliteration he has a tremendous sense of old contracts year old of this series like this series year here under these winds and brought a wintry blast here under the rarer and gloomy circumstances of life or me take physical other and turns into a mental state that that speaks to every tangent fact when you know portrayed william allen white what is it about him that if you really try to convey to your audience as far off usually same people call me inconsistent if he changes mind off my miley why boys showed that what emotion meyer about why was usually costs of state to grow and learn and i recognized a better idea when he sought to do a story about how he met the laurels until roosevelt

change improve business conservative true progressive us a famous story of the story about how he wrote editorials huge carrie nation any thought to the cracked by and they came out for over five years probation only well he writes what's the matter with kansas and goes after the populace in their ideas in you know at ten years you know ten years later fifteen years later he he and roosevelt were supporting it our day and minimum wage in government ownership of the railroads and regulation of the banks in at a all it all the claims that they are graduated income tax for roosevelt and in his speech that that he gave adults water male our story first nineteen ten the new national jewish reach basically you've gone through old

pop bottles a white writes the editorial my team twelve called the truck we socialists were you would say oh of your social issues are destroying all of this going on no illusions you show and travel noland oh yeah he would chuckle give each are the same group that did announce all lebanon came along and of that why goes on to say well you know there are three things in life no one person can do the satisfaction of another person in these reports of fire make a lot of them and their families and this is all all of this key fob just keep on going veg year and it's always the humor you know underneath everything he does serve there is a sense of of out of self laughter of love of inner laughter the good that

he'd sure what could be your the show friday jewish in and accomplish small time provincial paper into something that becomes a process of people growing in finding and so then the fight that day i think it's that i mean the more associated with and the mr moore i feel that he has so much to say and is he really is a fellow wish people were more familiar with the not so sure i would recommend people read the novels in the shore shore even probably not morse who portray all or stranger i personally get a big kick out of that but he does write things about what it is to be a cancer the really have a sense that kansas was a kind of a constant challenge

and shrug law i kind of hope even uses the metaphor a kind of a of a presence in the four drew only he was an industrial he would talk about how we were being partners where polio whip into shape by the wind and the drought and and the hot and the cold and and how the same repeal leah kansas character and down the bottom of that character where were you was a sense of sacrifice of not giving up if you could call it icy icy we allow white and sally sitting around the table and talk about how something is tougher border got this problem or that problem and one the other would turn blue to the yellow one say just a

test of character and then they get better and you know it doesn't need to have that you know we believe in this guy i keep feeling like you know real all white want to we would hurt at work thank you so much fred mogul you that's fred crabs johnson county community college a historian who portrays emporia newspaperman william allen white i'm kay met entire you're listening to k pr presents on kansas public radio if you're just joining us we're talking about white canvas means to me by tom a girl a collection of seventeen essays and poems and twenty five illustrations what kansas means to me was selected by the state library as the

kansas reid's book for this asquith and her new year our next essay is from robert de perhaps best known for his nineteen eighty seven novel the last cattle drive they teach is outside washington dc but still returns to western kansas for summer's sabbaticals and hunting season i had the chance to visit with robert day last year and asked him about this as a not in kansas anymore opening of it has to do was just me being in and washington dc and under section on what really is a section that has to do with the leading northwestern kansas and it begins is that true bobby heads the sun and the ranchers call it is i say i'm talking to my neighbor banger their lives in the back of a sixty two pontiac station wagon that is buried nose first in the side of a low hill on his hardscrabble ranch the buffalo

grass is resistance itself over the trench america did if there is language brunch more per flowers bloom on the ground above the word you don't know byron as carla alicia come at them from the asian you can shoot back and open and the hill the tailgate down where western kansas it was late summer already has been under insurgent son we'll measure in michigan wasn't and it's because we don't have much it which is why bears bears station wagon they are the ship city that shocked his big suburban station where has less how spanish irish which in the middle say raids in the front and what is the world all above the back beijing worship x ray room deals he calls in and water barrier motion sheltered one man egg from complete with a wood worker to windows and not much more than a drop so the november through april when does an animal in some final version of buyer's

dream a state he wants to have his entire deal underground the earthly shows as a thermal battery cool shower warm in winter is money she's wonders though koch ticking up to the shark pup in cottonwood schmoke into the who wage earners but the best things in life take time that's okay for a buyer time for it so bowers shows just do straight when they carried out a building in our nation's capital they wave of the wall that's on the straight buyers ask about the saudis on the distinctly urban partners a gun a few years back were by washington and other cities started saving difference of the historic buildings will turn down everything else that's right i say and kansas was in bases always called our nation's capital or phrase we learn in high school shows cause i continued to use it in the hope that the line was a lot more people shoot shergill city of government troops i am being question about life in washington because i'm eleanor there among them though i spent twenty years and in our nation's

capital and they're curious in a direct way woes law is also true of the spent the previous year among them living with my wife and small cabin which people are planted on the lot against the fear of solution why we're just gave of the site is and how he's come to know about a little while officially there's no survey the month before when there are helpful friend lou pallo you wanted to know about the hill of capitol hill as sharon orchestration which you could shoot from their once you go over the top now buyer considers his new one question but there is fear and then for a moment the oboe for grabs this two thousand acre lawn and the reason i live the front that's on the street shrugged when a tear down the building as a flat voice ok are his pay it because they've made themselves a law that tells them to do that they're trying to say is to get the postal lot of history where a silent for a moment

all by things about this you know the personal knowledge there's roads miles a word the station wagon as elaine to canvas porsche out the back of it but insurers surely must know that i'm set in a stock sell dried don't square go just beyond us is a foot long section of guatemala that has been converted into a cooking grow and often the shoulder belt a short lived through the projects on pledges against a weapon it has to show a rule for parish were down over to handle if you walked up the hill to the west of a buyer's do you like cats the distant ocean dr laura's orwell apollo oregon trail that's the sky for a while and for a local rural nothing at this passage of this country is remembered coming and going russian always dust issues of the shoulder belt if you're a girl or you could hear them crowing now says buyer suppose you wonder how a vacant lot behind the building you'd

tear down in our nation's capital or you get people more fashionable yes i said would you still have to leave the thunder buildings standing you wouldn't say has traditionally us and the windows is that with a still when the building's history they would i say in the front judge you know when i would look at her horse on the show to block the polish aides in the window you can i show and that would be against a lot of history in the front of the building here shows no it should only would have a way of for sure that on the top floor they'd be gone the grounds the drug out there is not too well exactly what shall fall in polish enjoy polite i'll be home late tonight he doesn't share it shows barrow i've known is over a long time is war the living on that is coed one rearrange the bond market was that was shown on point when someone has lost life of the singular medicines necessary to get from jen were blizzards to may tornadoes and from there to the august brown and fall on being

to rise a little whiskey you know that's a group of cigarettes don't listen to phone in your head get down and headphone can lead our own measures polish quote fashionable lemon drops was to her heroism is saudi then disappeared such a whirlwind nursery scene of herself again very often tilted cause for little bowels of his station wagon is shovels and behind the steering wheel and look at the dark art of the ghost a windshield the irish were eight of cracked it was a store that does not certain that his chauffeur paperbacks he punches as there are a lot of stores he loves the modernity of it for more that was rejected throwing papers and looking into the mirror shows you going back i am also an area is a portal into the way cuz said we demand for ago he says it was written from last fall he has rolled a smoke and

bonds and that was a funeral or bits of paper crow forum for the uk and shaman american into the show oh given to care for us to take a long ago the show's first as last week ok to volunteer haven't been there as medically proven ability i'm here landrieu it and it had a nice house for miles of oil rigs there's a one night and a year before horace going to know for russell foster and us air will bauer wanted just a uppers of public health care measure the farmers that permit on a lullaby oh oh oh i

don't know it's a way people are out there tore the owners of i remember it i asked him to come back and resinous it was no bubbles that has to work in places that suggests it was an hour or more i were <unk> and a fun place to bargain and both sides are very threatening barker your car with crushed a pop up for you know how do you balance that sense of a place you will you obviously have a real strong connection to kansas you come back here again and get maybe your life in dc in and i'll swear has given you a sense of perspective about kansas were other well whatever but replaces her going

away published in new letters phonetically re publish a magazine in a book form called the committee to save the world and it's about it's about their parents and it's about how i live in france for a while in montana state on the water cannons on outside of washington dc and in all these cultures have something interesting about them and some of what's interesting is not very nice i may you go there or a wacko people often a permanent still think that obama's illegitimate sham election the world is five thousand years old and dinosaurs were planted there by the bill the confusion and a member of the czar this but also very same people on lots of other ways or wherever bizarre it isn't in washington dc all oh i'm sure the ecumenical i'm audio it a lot of it seems on intimate and one would be on fire for several more dangerous no danger and decided there was no decision

you know you knock on a variety of course rooting for the earth awards in addition georgia mixture and i do think that i've been fortunate the father worked for travel ellen's mrp maturity for years and the fund for travel on social borrowing on we would take to be a point about a canvasser in trouble tale cancellations and off we would go to europe so i got to see the world and well it does and that prospective might be might not quite be why workers at best word i can think of was well it surely gives you a chance to have a lot of the regime of science if you will and so it's as close as we all right somebody told me that every piece i've ever published us the word anderson i don't think that's true with somebody told me somebody committed scholarship on my work

that's robert de author of not in kansas anymore which appears in the collection what kansas means to me our last two essays are from celeb bennington green best known as peggy of the flint hills she wrote for the topeka daily capital later the topeka capital journal from nineteen thirty three to nineteen eighty three fifty years of publishing six columns each week we'll hear her essay the cottonwood followed by the prairie the cottonwood is not a story or long live tree like the oak its wood is not valued like the walnuts does not even make good firewood but it has an eerie grace that pays its way the early settlers planted the cottonwood around their houses because it was quick growing it's for leading teachers must have warm the heart of the pioneer woman and it's soft russell whispered to her of courage and faith

through the heat of the summer it stand school and clean and shining believes shake off best as nervously as the fluttery housewife polishes the furniture never content to set a moment with quiet hands in the night it makes a rain sound on the roof becomes a sympathetic tree sensitive brooding like those yearning souls who love to bear burdens its size its distress the man's progress through this vale of tears should be so vexing but it never intrudes it expresses it's feeling unwell brenda murmurs it asks no questions but tenderly flutters down its leaves they fall as easily and copiously as a woman's tears which plotted and wiped away start falling again with each new sigh a cottonwood is

a tree to live with i'm sure is good luck to have a blessed the hearth with the baptism of leaves for the first fighter prairie's do not startle you with sudden vivid duty as a turn in a mountain road can do they do not to dazzle you or exhaust you with excitement there are no dramatic tricks they are quality rather than quantity they are as patient as torreon and as mysterious as the stars they are a woman who is neither beautiful nor brilliant clever nor accomplished

at first she scarcely noticed her as she moves silent and serene and unadorned afterwards in a quiet moment she walks into your mind there is the sound of her voice the movement of her hand the peace in her eyes and more than ease a strange rare essence of earthiness you can never forget ignore her she's calm and sufficient shut her out of your sight there she is again beyond the little town with awnings flapping in the breeze and the next town and the next with his many moods as the wind drawing you on shia not the gorgeous woman you dreamed should someday be yours but she is mystery and tenderness and strength and rapture and suddenly you know that this is what you wanted all your

life that knowledge comes as gently he says the surrender a wonderful writer pico presence she wasn't born in topeka but she eventually landed in topeka as and a colleague of mine at washburn your spirit mchenry is right in that

prof fischer and eating them memoir that she wrote about her life as she was a longtime daily columnist for the topeka capital journal with that with a name peggy of the flint hills and she was she was interested in in in kansas and in people and work with remarkably prolific and remarkably away for someone who who had invented daily a daily column she knew she was also a theatrical was in place she was also in the film mary why in the leadership of the sea he says yeah she was just a pretty was just a presence in topeka and the reason my colleague eric is is interested in her so much is that he grew up in the house next door to her husband a lot of time in in her house and she

was so supportive of kansas writers kansas artists she knew them all and roll he wrote about them work and she truly loved the state of kansas that the cottonwood in the prairie arm are both a celebration of common things and that's that runs all the way through these essays as well that that kansans are are sturdy because because they appreciate what no ordinary they appreciate what what's common and when she's writing about the prairie how it you know it doesn't doesn't overwhelm you with its beauty but the longer you live with that the more and all you are of that and the cottonwood tree non a long lasting train on a gorgeous tree time a noisy trees but it's their beds at st sentiment is reflected later on

and william stafford spawned mind no one home mine was a midwest home you can keep your world and that it ends with a line i think i'm quoting it right and i'm kicking cottonwood please we would run toward storms everywhere we look to land would hold us up but his notion of real simple things been supportive people like the cottonwood tree is in can pay to use them i knew peggy as best as it my wife when we knew well my parents and and she was a real figure in topeka when when she died we bought we bought her a coffee table still have that another one of those reminders as these objects their compass remember people and help us remember where we are and an aunt who we'll things to their nests as part of the arm that were to tell

you truth that's part of why i enjoyed putting together this book is like i had this affection for kansas i knew i didn't i've sort of fallen into it as is as a student and as a writer and to find out like why anyone would would have that thing believe me a lot attention to do that that since that they have the arkansans new warming and kansans i think that's important to a lot of people at self identification time you put this book was published back in nineteen ninety one years and here it is being selected as bad kansas reid's book in two thousand eleven does it seem strange in some ways to go back and revisit something he did twenty years ago or do you do you open this up and feel like it's an old familiar friend or do you just look at it and think oh i wish i would have done this different way or no it's it i haven't tried to

second guess and a lot of it on was negotiating with a couple of people right when this book was just about to go to press almost had two more essays that that the press was willing to put in but i couldn't i couldn't get the writers to dig dig it the finished pieces to me by the deadline and everyone saw i sort of wished that those people were in their one is an african american poet named kevin young and grew up in topeka now is published in the last twenty years probably eight or nine books of poetry in and is that is that is the poet at emory university in atlanta went to harvard yale and eddie writes about growing up in topeka and and cruising the streets in and being african american in topeka and i think i think that would have added to the book and in another piece was by smoking mckamey who's in the vice president's office and haskell indian nation gym membership wonderful piece

about growing up a pot water main theme for the reservation and what the kansas landscape still means to him and i would have liked it i'd like to have some more representation and the university of kansas and a man that i've done a pretty good job of trying to cross for elegy an unbalance and gender and things like that but i always like to hear what kansas means to me from a variety of people in the other thing and announce was eastern kansas western kansas flint hills kansas gypsum hills kansas prairie planes we have a lot of competing landscapes and sensibilities as these writers talk about why not and not just ones date so when i've been going and doing library programs the kinds of things that people talk about terms what can just means that is different than if you went once you get past wichita there are very many big towns i mean if

you were a land of small towns we forget that when we live in large topeka kansas city that's ricardo so what why kansas means do to small town kansas might be a little bit different from what it means to have someone living in order to peek at the freedom for example didn't just trust your neighbors not lock your door to borrow a car to you know the kind of neighborliness that is taken for granted in western kansas settle one finger waves that they'll do to each other is very genuine out there and and and there's they're struggling also with some economic survival issues that i've learned about so and so it's been really good for me dream days the book and also re engaged kansas in this way but i got to tell you it's like that it's like having an old friend at my side for these twenty years because as you know i'm done the commentaries about kansas almost from the same moment as i

edited this book and what can this means to me and i created william jennings bryan oleander who could have a particular take on the state and i find myself going back into this book over northern over again through to find material for him and just just last summer when the senate then governor parkinson was at the symphony of the flint hills and talked about that the kansas missouri border tensions and talked about the pure kansas night and and and talked about how no one knows even where we are from east coast to west coast in another that we have the best that god gave us his landscape and the best that humans can do with their arch in front of us and he said i want to be different i want i don't want to be boring when he wasn't boring but he wasn't different if you look at i did a commentary that says if you look at an arm curl back or even caught someone's but we

don't want to be as a bitch will insurers beer drinkers are even as these misery ends in that essay that distinction is very old and he's been the notion that we're overdue for a god given purity in the landscape the fact that were obscure we like it that way you know mine was and that was funny to keep europe is that is that think everything parkinson's and has a rhetorical tradition alive i could find example after example in this piece so frequently done that is whoops there is go back in and find it and an encoded in it and a commentary so i've lived with the book for ford for twenty years some of my colleagues have taught out of the book i've used it as a text to talk about some of the broad themes of the state so it's it's nice that has this journey now it's nice to be with the university press of kansas we just

kept it in print for all these twenty years and that's when the advantages of being with a university press that the cares about local culture as well as all are other lines i'd been visiting with time ever all editor of the book what kansas means to me and a man has made a whole career of exploring white kansas means to kansans tom thanks so much for coming in today thank you for having me i really appreciate what kansas means to me was selected by the center for the book at the state library of kansas as the kansas reads books for two thousand eleven find out more about kansas reads including discussion questions and program it is at their website but you did you did you that's cut waste our special thanks to fred crabs shannon draper that proposal anthony slow for their help with today's program i'm kate mcintyre keep your present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas keep your present is only

possible thanks to your support if you're not already a member and help keep this program on the air flights now actually pr back to you bat edu called eighty eight five seven seventh nineteen sixty eight at gp arcade game and you from all this the kansas public radio thanks for your support