Month: March 2015

Our Long Brown Land by David Stone

Growing concern over this season’s low-levels of snowpack in the Sierras has brought numerous comparisons to California’s lowest recorded snowpack in 1977. This summer we may be once more “under the sky that deafened from listening for rain” as Gary Soto wrote in his 1977 poem “The Drought.” Californians need to place drought literature at the top of their reading lists because it provides us knowledge of our past and visions for our future.

The Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton wrote, “man uses his old disasters as a mirror.” Natural disasters such as drought allow humans to see more clearly their relationship to Earth and its natural forces.

The classic American novel of drought is John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” which describes farm families fleeing the Great Plains’ Dustbowl in the 1930s with false hopes of an Eden in California. Steinbeck’s novel helps readers to see the environmental, economic, and human costs of drought and the great migrations that major droughts can cause.

The term “dustbowl” is increasingly being used to refer to California’s Central Valley. Former Inlandia Literary Laureate Gayle Brandeis recommends Alan Heathcock’s “Scenes from the New American Dustbowl” with photographs by Matt Black, published in the online magazine, Matter. Reminiscent of Steinbeck’s travel literature, the fiction writer Heathcock turns to nonfiction to tell the story of farmers along California’s Highway 99.

Drought drives home the value of water. Joan Didion’s essay “Holy Water” from her 1979 collection “The White Album” reminds us to reconsider the complex and distant sources of California’s water. Didion says, “the apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.” The megadroughts of prehistorical California, like the 240-year-long one that began in 850, make Didion’s words sound prophetic.

For the definitive history of water resources in the American West, read Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert,” commonly described as an illuminating look into the political economy of limited resources. For a more in-depth look at the history of the Colorado River, which Reisner called the “American Nile,” read “Contested Waters” by water historian April Summitt of La Sierra University.

The Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Water Knife,” now available for pre-order, presents a near future dystopia where Nevada, Arizona and California fight over the water of the Colorado River. Early reviews describe it as a science fiction thriller with a realistic portrayal of an all too probable future.

“Water Knife” may also be classified as climate fiction, cli-fi for short. Climate change concern drives this emerging genre’s increasing popularity in literature and film. Often described as a cousin of science fiction, climate fiction typically focuses on the results of climate change in the present and near future. J. G. Ballard began the cli-fi genre with a trilogy of novels in the 1960s , including “The Burning World,” which tells the story of a global drought caused by industrial waste. The novel was later renamed “The Drought.”

Should we as humans see ourselves essentially in conflict with nature? Do Southern Californians misconstrue natural disasters “by a way of thinking that simultaneously imposes false expectations on the environment and then explains the inevitable disappointments as proof [of] a malign and hostile nature,” as Mike Davis argues in “Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster?”

The academic field of ecocriticism, which examines how nature is portrayed in culture, prompts careful rethinking about the relationship of humans to the environment. “Readers should ask how could individuals and societies inhabit their world more sustainably. Literature can help us articulate the dangers and imagine the solutions,” says Lora Geriguis, associate professor of English at La Sierra University and host of the Natures conference, which annually draws ecocritical scholars from around the world.

Children can also use literature to cope with drought. Larry Gerber’s “Adapting to Drought” gives readers in grades four to eight a basic understanding of the science behind droughts as well as suggestions of how to take action. They might also enjoy Karen Hesse’s Newberry Award winning free-verse novel “Out of the Dust” that tells the story of Billie-Jo trying to survive during the dustbowl years of the Depression.

Teens looking for something beyond the myriad of dystopian novels should check out “We Are the Weather Makers: The History of Climate Change.”

If drought worries you, crack open Ruth Nolan’s “No Place for a Puritan” to the excerpt from Mary Austin’s “The Land of Little Rain.” “If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections.”

School Libraries: A Place at the Table by Victoria Waddle

The table is twenty-eight feet long, and made of solid oak. Its top is a single slab of wood. As I fill it with hundreds of books that our high school students will browse today, I try to imagine the giant tree, felled eight decades ago, from which it was fashioned. I’m both intent on my task and bothered by something I saw in the morning news. The author of an article was lamenting that kids today don’t have empathy toward others. The piece was an argument for providing an empathy curriculum in schools.

Of course the teens at my school should be empathetic toward others. Yet I can’t imagine wasting time and dollars to implement an empathy curriculum. Diversity and equity are key to current educational goals, and as a high school librarian, the longtime teacher in me has decades of anecdotal evidence about what makes a teen care about others, thus welcoming diversity. At the top of that list is reading. So I am adding to the table the sort of books that a decade ago would have been difficult or impossible to come by: an autobiography of a Hispanic American Supreme Court justice (My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor); a book of interviews with transgender teens (Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin); a novel about a girl sent to conversion-therapy camp (The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth); a searing yet strangely poetic novel of PTSD and the Iraq War (Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers); YA fiction about a Muslim girl who wears a hijab (Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah); nonfiction that shows shy kids how really important their personal qualities are (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain).

The reading levels among these books are as diverse as the topics. From professional review resources, I cull low-level, high-interest titles for students who are learning English. I find the most popular graphic novels that will be a springboard into other reading. At the upper end, I include nonfiction that offers depth such as Deep Down Dark by Hector Tobar. I learn who the thoughtful, literary readers are and hand-sell tougher works of fiction such as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. In between, I talk up countless titles of teen fiction, works that appeal to fans of realism, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance.

I spend so much time engaging teens with fiction because, as Barbara Kingsolver has stated, “fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous.”

Time was when we bookworms were accused of not having any evidence for such a theory. But that changed when researchers Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that fiction readers are better at seeing the world from others’ perspective.

Happily, access to literature provides teens with the opportunity to develop not just empathy, but rather the perfect trifecta of life skills: compassion; imaginative thinking; and the ability to analyze and evaluate, to engage in higher-order thinking.

The necessity of whole-brain thinking is often promoted in adult nonfiction such as Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded or Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. As Pink says, in a ‘conceptual age’ that demands its workers be creators and empathizers, people will need to fashion the big picture, forge relationships, and tackle novel challenges. So nurturing students with fiction isn’t, as some critics suggest, training them to be English teachers; it’s helping them blend their left-brain analysis of writing with their right-brain imaginative story capabilities. For students who have an innate desire to question and imagine, the library is one of the best places on campus where they can do so.

My book display table is immobile. It is so long and so heavy that it had to be built inside the library. Several someones would have to take a chainsaw to it before it would fit through a door. It has always been an emblem of the permanence of community and communion. Over the years, the community it has served has enlarged; the communion is becoming all-embracing. But like a vast banquet table where nothing is served without the behind-the-scenes work of the chef, a book collection that feeds the souls of students requires the skills of a teacher librarian, one whose goal is to lift individual students to the nearest rung of the literacy ladder and then help them climb.