By Jane Dickerson
Josephine Johnson was just 24 years old when her first novel, Now in November, won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She was, and remains, the youngest person to win, and is the ninth among only twenty-one women who have won a Pulitzer for fiction since its inception in 1907. When considering novels from the 1930s, we usually can name the big guns like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, but have never heard of Johnson, even though she went on to win numerous O’Henry Awards for her short stories and was an accomplished poet. This compelling and lyrical novel, set in the Dust Bowl, was published five years before The Grapes of Wrath. The novel is set in the Haldmarne family’s eleventh year on the family farm, most likely in Missouri, Johnson’s home state. The Haldmarnes had been town dwellers when Arnold, the father, decides they’d have better luck going back to the old family farm. They would have a chance of subsisting, at least. Unbeknownst to his wife and three young daughters, Arnold has mortgaged the farm to pay for supplies. From then on, the family’s elusive hope is to pay it off. At first, it seems possible, but after many drought years and the Depression, breaking-even seems fanciful at best. A tragic conclusion looms, but the heartbreak lies in the family itself. Marget, the middle daughter, narrates the story’s events, which have occurred over a span of years. She’s closest in age and sensibility to her younger sister, Merle, with whom she shares a profound sensitivity toward nature. The older sister, Kerrin, inhabits her own dark world, often moody, by turns angry or elated, but always distant. No one can understand her, and the sisters fear both Kerrin’s violent unpredictability and their father’s anger with her. The mother, Willa, is the heart of the family. Johnson’s knowledge of trees, plants, flowers, birds, and other wildlife is almost palpable in descriptions such as the following: Spring came first to the air, and then to the life of things. The elm trees were like sulphur smoke, or dust from a dry old fungus-ball; the wild ginger hard-packed still on the roots, but green with a silver mold, and in the ravine, I found a moccasin snake coiled and hating, while the cold spring water flowed over his skin, over and over until I grew almost chilled with seeing it. It’s no surprise that later in life Johnson became an environmentalist. Kerrin is as strong as a man and could be of help to the beleaguered father. Instead, Arnold hires a local man, Grant, to help in the fields, while the girls manage the farm animals and the home garden with their mother. Arnold rules the household; the mother works around him through suggestion, not confrontation. In this way, Johnson presents the traditional family constellation with concern for the hidden cost to the Haldemarne family’s well-being. Compared to many White authors, before and since, Johnson doesn’t stereotype or slight the neighboring tenant farmers, a Black family also struggling through the long drought and the Depression. The Ramseys, like all the surrounding farmers, share what they can when they can. But the Black family can’t meet the rent and are evicted. None of the neighbors has money to help them. Marget describes their extreme straits as the muledrawn Ramsey wagon, headed who knows where, loaded with children and “boxes and things that might have been kindling or chairs,” passes by the Haldmarne gate. The hired man, Grant, is the object of both Kerrin’s and Marget’s affections. Merle is indifferent to him. Unfortunately, Merle is the object of his affection. By the time Marget tells the Halemarne story in November, the desiccated fields and orchard have been destroyed by fire. Willa, the center of the family, incurs terrible burns. Kerrin’s behavior becomes more and more erratic, and she loses her teaching job. When the tax man appears, the reader isn’t sure what will happen to the family. Josephine Johnson was born into a Quaker family in 1910 and died in 1990. None of her other novels caught the public’s attention like Now in November. Her last was rejected by Simon and Schuster for what was deemed sympathy to homegrown Communism in the 1950s. Her upbringing and convictions led her to oppose the VietNam war in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though Johnson was 24 when she composed Now in November in her mother’s attic, she writes like someone older and wiser. I first learned about Johnson from an online article about the talented but essentially forgotten women who have won the Pulitzer for fiction. It’s our good luck that the novel was resurrected by the Feminist Press in the 1990s and that a subsequent edition came out in England in 2016. This book, like Steinbeck’s, should be remembered as one of the great tragic novels set in the Dust Bowl years.
have written this memoir in a unique way. The story is in four voices—each sister, the sisters together, and (as the title suggests) the windmill on their farm. With chapters set in themes, these four storytellers reminisce about everything from their parents’ early soil conservation efforts to Toni home permanents to helping deliver lambs when Dad’s hands were too big.
In their early seventies, the youthful Jackie and Janine are bundles of energy. Both were queens in the 1960s—Jackie the North Dakota Rodeo Queen and Janine the state’s Short Horn Lassie Queen, finishing as a runner-up in the national competition. After careers as home economics teachers, Jackie is a professional volunteer and travel adventurer; Janine runs a mail-order bakery while helping husband Fred wind down their sheep breeding business. Her hands are still the smaller of the two. In June, The Sisters took North Dakota by storm with a cross-state book tour with eight stops in six days. This is even more amazing when you know that Jackie hails from Colville, Washington, and Janine from Atlantic, Iowa. I hope you pick up and enjoy their book. Did I mention it also includes recipes? As the Monty Python catchphrase says, “And now for something completely different!” Meanderings: Life, a Column at a Time is a selection of the collected writings of Hertha Shively Wehr of Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania. Hertha’s daughter Wendy, a former colleague, approached me about helping her and siblings gather their mom’s more than twenty years of columns written for their local paper. Hertha began her career in the late 1930s writing a column named “Call Me Farmer Brown,” I speculate because maybe people wouldn't read a column about the rural life written by a woman. After a few years and a few kids, Hertha put down her pen. Then nearly 50 years later, she embarked on another stint of writing, this time with no pseudonym, writing until around 2012. When Wendy and I started in February 2020, the plan was to have the book ready for an August 2020 major family reunion. At 97, Hertha was living in a care home in Mifflinburg, and knew nothing of the project until the reunion was cancelled and the kids couldn’t keep the secret anymore. While dependent on a wheelchair, Hertha’s mind was not dependent on anything. Wendy began showing her layouts of themed chapters—“When Everyone Owned a Cow” and “Travels Near and Far”—and Hertha began giving us edits. What a delight it was! Unfortunately, Hertha caught what was going around at the time and in October 2020, fell to COVID. The book took a break but was revived in time for us to print 500 copies for the family to give away in June at her memorial service and for Hertha’s church to sell. All the proceeds from the book are going to one of Hertha’s favorite Lutheran charities. I hope you’ll take a look at this droll and whip-smart woman’s writing. Some people ask me what it means to be a book consultant. First, it’s a great privilege to be asked to join writers in the expression of their dreams—to do whatever they need to turn their personal expression into an actual book that I can place in their hands. From the nuts and bolts perspective, for all my clients I edited either extensively or lightly (or both at different times), I designed the look of the book interior, and for one I also designed the cover. I built websites for some and created marketing plans. I consoled and only occasionally put my foot down. I found them the printer and did all the technical stuff that got the pages between the covers. What rewarding work it is! I feel my own novel writing calling to me, if I can stop working for everyone else long enough to answer the call. And when the time comes, I’ll be able to move ahead with confidence that I know a thing or two about publishing a book! P.S. You might also want to look at another book I edited and helped publish that lives on the 1666 Authors shelf: Dakota Attitude by Jim Puppe (but shelved by my last name and currently checked out). Released in late 2019, Jim’s first 2,000 copies sold out in five days, and we are now preparing for a seventh printing, with more than 13,000 books sold. These stories of 617 people living in North Dakota—one from every town on the state map—took Jim nearly 14 years and 113,000 miles to gather and hone. A big thank you to our librarians who long ago decided to extend the 1666 Authors shelves to include editors.
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruellest month.” In this sixteen-page poem, Eliot hits home this year when he writes,
Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road… If there were water we would stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock… There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain… If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water Although The Waste Land contains a few foreign phrases and some uncomfortable images and incomprehensible passages, words of meaning and truth pierce the stanzas and give us pause. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans, is not an easy read. But I urge you to pick it up and at least look at Walker Evans’s classic candid photos of Alabama sharecroppers who featured in his and Agee’s summer of 1936. If you decide to continue reading the book, skip the preface, and jump right into page seventeen. The book is shelved under “A” in U.S. History. Ulysses. Famed for its “stream of consciousness” style and for its impenetrability, as well as for being banned as “obscene,” James Joyce’s masterpiece is still celebrated annually at pubs on June 16, Bloomsday, when Molly’s monologue is read aloud. So if, as I, you have never read Ulysses, pick Molly Bloom’s monologue, the last fifty pages of the book, and raise a glass to her. And then there is Marcel Proust. If you have dipped a madeleine cake in your tea, you have tasted Proust. The madeleine and his mother’s love are referred to frequently in literature. But how often have we gone to the source? Which is an eight-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time), beginning with Swann’s Way. We find the madeleine and his need for love: “My sole consolation, when I went upstairs for the night, was that Mama would come kiss me once I was in bed. But this goodnight lasted so short a time…that the moment when I heard her coming up…was for me a painful moment” (p. 13). Now it is for you to seek out, on page 45 of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Swann’s Way, the story of the tea and the madeleine. No need to read the remaining seven volumes. Bonne chance! My greatest embarrassment is never to have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. Fragments of the story pop up so often that Tom, Eliza, little Eva, and Simon Legree are as familiar as any other fictional characters. Now I’m going to stick my neck out and tilt with windmills. Never did I expect to read The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. But after reading the first paragraph, I am intrigued. It is humorous! It is full of small details. And of the character himself, “So great was his curiosity…that he even sold many acres of tillable land in order to be able to buy and read the books that he loved, and he would carry home with him as many of them as he could obtain.” What’s not to love about this guy? Calypso, Circe, Cyclops, Charybdis and Scylla, the Sirens. All met by our hero, the resourceful Odysseus, as he wanders homeward to Ithaca and faithful Penelope at the end of the Trojan War. Richard Lattimore’s sterling translation of The Odyssey of Homer is available on the third floor of our Library under Poetry Collections. If you haven’t guessed, these classics and many more are on the shelves in our library, just waiting for you or me to pick them up and check them out.
Everyone in Willow Creek is there for a reason. They lead very ordinary small village existences. Social life revolves around two institutions, the Willow Creek Inn and the Willow Creek School (grades 1-12).
Sam Pickett, the high school’s English teacher/boys basketball coach, is a good teacher and knows basketball. Unfortunately, he has very little basketball talent to coach, and due to low high school enrollments, his teams rarely have six or seven players. They have not won a game in five years and are 0-93 during Pickett’s coaching tenure. Nevertheless, his players persist, despite broken dreams and personal sorrows. Pickett is about to resign as basketball coach when two new students appear. One is Peter Strong, a basketball guard from Saint Paul’s Central High School whose divorced parents have sent him to live with his eccentric grandmother. The other student is the gawky Olaf Gustafson, a 6’11” foreign exchange student who is staying with a nearby ranching family for the year. Olaf has never held a basketball. What unfolds is an uplifting tale of human decency, romance, and determination that plumbs hidden places in the human heart. All this unfolds with a cast of characters who learn to dream again, characters made so real that they will be with you long after you turn the last page. That’s Stanley Gordon West writing style. It’s a great summer’s read. You can find this book in the Coffman Library. |
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