Spring Program Issue, January 2023

CONTENTS

THE SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE

02  BLACK ELK’S LIFE SPEAKS: “THAT MUCH MORE” by Michael W. Taylor

06  AFTER UTOPIA: WHAT POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS SHALL WE EMBRACE? by Serge Danielson-Francois

10  MEMENTO MORI by Tayo Basquiat

14  SHUFFLING OFF THIS MORTAL COIL by Ann Crews Melton

20  MORE THAN OLD WIVES’ TALES: THE POWER OF WOMEN’S FABLES by Claire Barwise

24  NUCLEAR HISTORY: THE PRESENT SHAPES THE PAST by Raffi Andonian

28 ON BEING WЯONG by David Bjerklie

EDITOR’S NOTE: Recently, one of our keen-eyed readers pointed out two errors in the Fall 2022 “Gray Matters” issue of HumanitiesND Magazine. One, a typo (using “birth” when the word should have been “birch”), creates an unnecessarily confusing sentence in Dakota Goodhouse’s “The Beautiful Country: An Indigenous Geography”: “the Middle Dakhota tapped white birch for sap” (16). Though regrettable, and despite repeated proofreading with multiple sets of eyes, such typos do occasionally escape our notice.

The second error, somewhat more egregious, troubled us a bit more: in the excerpt from Charles Pace’s “The Principal and the President: Dining at the White House” (38), we mistakenly identified Joy Harjo, the renowned former Poet Laureate of the United States, whose highly acclaimed work has received multiple awards and is well known to us here at HumanitiesND, as Joy Harmon. While we’re not at all certain how this error escaped our notice, we deeply regret it. We strive for error-free perfection in every issue, but we also acknowledge our human fallibility. In this instance, we wanted to make our readers aware of our errors and to apologize for them.

36  POETRY TO SOOTHE THE SOUL by Kimberly L. Becker

38  IN PURSUIT OF WILLA CATHER AND “THE THING NOT NAMED” by Rebecca Chalmers

44  PUBLIC UNIVERSITY CATALOG

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE is published by Humanities North Dakota.

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THE BENEFITS OF LIFELONG LEARNING

BRENNA GERHARDT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Over half of all Americans make a New Year’s resolution, and the top contenders for most people include getting healthier, living fuller lives, or finding financial stability. Yet many people flounder in achieving their goals. As a member of Humanities North Dakota (HND), you don’t have to! Numerous studies show that lifelong learners reap benefits socially, emotionally, physically, and financially. We think of ourselves as a gym for your brain and our classes and events as group fitness for your mind. We hope you will take full advantage of your membership in North Dakota’s largest lifelong learning community in 2023. We offer up to 20 classes each semester taught by some of the nation’s best humanities faculty, multiple webinars featuring nationally recognized authors and thinkers, and we are beginning to bring back in-person programs, including our Marilyn Hudson Brave Conversations program. If you missed anything, check out our online Vault of recorded programs and past issues of our magazine.

Learning is more fun with a friend. Please share our programs with your friends and family! We welcome everyone to our classes and events.

In addition, your membership helps support our We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution program in high schools across North Dakota. This semester-long class teaches students their rights and responsibilities as citizens and helps create more thoughtful and informed future voters who are more actively engaged in civic life. Not only does your HND membership improve your life, but it also improves the lives of young people across our state.

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Much heart, Brenna Gerhardt

Executive Director & Fellow Lifelong Learner

p.s. You don’t have to be a member to join our classes and events, but we are so glad you donated to make lifelong learning accessible to everyone. As our volunteer spokesperson, Iris, says, “Keep learning. Keep growing. It’s making our world a better place!”

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST, TRYGVE OLSON

Trygve Olson has lived his entire life on either side of the Red River of the North. For more than 37 years he has been a freelance artist and editorial cartoonist (The Forum newspaper). Trygve lives in Moorhead, Minnesota, with his wife, Cheryl, and their two cats, Gunnar and Marte.

BLACK ELK’S LIFE SPEAKS: “THAT MUCH… MORE”

by Michael W. Taylor

Personal life journeys have a way of unintentionally finding a collective nexus, particularly when the journey has a sense of consistent clarity. One such unexpected congruence includes my own encounters with the life and times of mystic and healer Nicholas Black Elk, in particular as it was shared with me over the past few years with his great-great-great-grandson Maka Black Elk. It has been these chance encounters I continue to share in dialogue with learners of all ages, including those associated with the upcoming Public University course associated with Humanities North Dakota.

In retrospect, the ways three people’s lives (Black Elk, Michael W. Taylor, and Maka Black Elk) have crossed seem clearer due to stories of spiritual formation and plight. This is by no means to suggest that the three have experienced the same journey. Rather, when each journey is given the opportunity to speak for itself, in relation to other lives afforded the same emancipatory support, context and complexity can deepen, connect, and even distort a sense of intercultural affinity. This affinity, upon closer consideration, would appear to be more of a positive inclination to the other; and when such affinity is given space to flourish, this nexus becomes more evident.

For myself, a complex, even painful, autoethnographic journey to the self via a dissertation research endeavor provided the foundation for a positive juncture with unlikely others. Though some may wonder how a selfstudy could structure a doctoral dissertation, those who have knowledge about this process

vicariously via words written or directly by the author have seen that it is akin to peeling an onion to the core of one’s most authentic self. The onion of my layered life was left open for those reading the dissertation study and subsequent publications, beginning with a personal preface. In terms of personal preface, The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s (2018) bravery to stand in the face of publishing pressure and advocate for such a personal beginning is helpful company for those who believe that such an approach is

a story that cannot be written about in neutrality… So it makes sense at the onset to briefly lay out my own background and biases, the experiences and assumptions that I bring to telling of this very fascinating and very much unfinished story.

It has been similar through my own eye and the eyes of others like Michael Steltenkamp, who also experienced a personal nexus journey with Black Elk; he described his experience as illustrating “how the legacy of stereotypes… inherited obscures the flesh-and-blood individuals who are Native people.” And like his journey, his focus on the life of Black Elk revealed a man “who has been characterized in ways that have spawned numerous images of the Indian world that are not entirely accurate”—indeed, characterized in such a fashion not only inaccurate but also “expropriated and utilized on behalf of diverse forms of special pleading.” Ultimately, my hope is that by cultivating a learning dialogue centered around Black Elk’s life that speaks “that much more,” in a way his

descendants have stated can only be shared, then Black Elk’s life story “can shed light on the larger, more complex social system within which he lived.” And, in the process of this learning endeavor, “far more than just one man’s life will be better understood.”

Beyond one man’s life are still others who have encountered Black Elk at some stage in their lives. They also have stories to share. Central to my evolving understanding of Nicholas Black Elk is his lineal descendant Maka Black Elk, who, as Black Elk did, resides on the Pine Ridge Reservation, more specifically Manderson. But, unlike Black Elk, he learned of others informally through journeys throughout the Great Plains and abroad to Europe. Maka, following an education at Holy Rosary Mission’s Red Cloud School, was more formally educated on both ends of the United States at the University of San Francisco and then for graduate school at Columbia University. Similarly, both Maka and Black Elk were not exposed to the darker chapters of boarding schools in the United States.

Tragically, both were not spared the ill effects of colonization, which reduced an advanced culture of tens of millions of North American Native people to less than three hundred thousand by 1890. Many were forced to live in isolated areas that some viewed as befitting prisoners of war, as if it were possible that such an experience could be left in the past for only historians to sort out, and emotions could reside only on the pages these historians penned. Yet millions today, whose roots flow back to the ancestors and contemporaries of Lakota healer Black Elk, suffer under the historical trauma created by centuries of colonization. While many may aver that the most dramatic examples of such colonization are merely historical, many like Maka Black Elk, who nobly serve communities that continue to reel from the devastating effects of historical trauma, are

enlisting the echoes of leaders such as Black Elk as a way of rediscovering a cultural identity, in the face of past and present attempts to obfuscate such an identity.

For those with some of the strongest historical roots, who have a present-day impact on not only the restoration of cultural identity among Native people and seek an opportunity for cultural healing among all people, Black Elk’s story— which has been told to many, by many—may need another approach. What is suggested here for a continued learning dialogue is that Black Elk’s life should speak, as opposed to another speaking for his life. In other words, by creating more access points to Black Elk’s life, possibly his life can speak to more hearers, whatever their plight, in an attempt to help them recognize one another in spaces once unfamiliar, thanks in part to the modeling of a healer whose life navigated both social mores and faith perspectives of other cultures.

Black Elk’s story is remarkable and inspiring on a number of levels. Viewed retrospectively by a non-Native stepping into more and more cultural, affinity—like spaces from an upbringing once segregated during the “White flight” decades of the 60s and 70s, Black Elk’s start in life was not unlike others during his time or even today. Visiting his birthplace “…along the banks of the Little Powder River, [where] White Cross Sees [gave] birth to a baby boy named Kahnigapi (‘Choice’)”, I couldn’t help but ponder my own birth in Pontiac, Michigan, to Rod and Phyllis Taylor, who were quite advanced in age as they brought two families together during the tumult of the mid-1960s. And yet as Black Elk matured in his younger years, his baby boy Lakota name evolved, as so many did, into his father’s, Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk), a medicine man and cousin of the famed warrior and visionary, Crazy Horse. With these roots and family stories forming Black Elk was also a sense of belonging to the Oglala, one of seven bands of the Lakota, and “the name… now ran through four generations” (Oldmeadow).

Black Elk’s life story “can shed light on the larger, more complex social system within which he lived.”

While most of Black Elk’s Lakota people would have lived within a radius encompassing what presently is the Montana and Wyoming border area, his life became exceptional. The colonizing pressure exerted by a growing White American presence stretching from the east coast to the Great Plains troubled and displaced his family. While Black Elk did stay as rooted with his people as much as would be expected, he did venture to other lands a few short years following his adolescence, including to Europe. Stories abound regarding his exploits, for example:

When the queen [Victoria] departed, her subjects bowed in honor to her, but she bowed to the assembled Indians… Unable to speak English, they wandered around London until they were arrested by police as possible suspects in a crime that would later be associated with Jack the Ripper. An interpreter verified that they were not involved in the incident and suggested they connect with a smaller show that was comparable to Buffalo Bill’s (Steltenkamp).

Travels abroad are only a fraction of this seminal Native healer’s life, which included events such as the Battle of Little Big Horn and the horrors of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It is no surprise that many wonder at a life that began with participation in a thriving Native culture, experienced travels to Europe, and suffered seeing his people on the verge of total holocaust. DeMallie aptly drew attention to the salient question which this book hopefully can bring to surface: “How was it that a nineteenth-century Lakota mystic could live a full half of the twentieth century on the Pine Ridge Reservation in harmony with the encroaching white man’s world?”

The balance of my journey to understand Black Elk more fully with others is encapsulated by DeMallie’s query through the lens of stories, which are critical to understanding Native culture, Black Elk included. A critical component of the stories threading through exploration of Black Elk

is a contemporary view offered by a family member who has heard these stories passed down, namely Black Elk’s great-great-great-grandson Maka Black Elk, who shared these stories and accounts with me over two years of interviews and visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Consequently, the stories take shape in three primary areas in which a learning dialogue has been and will continue to be forged in an attempt to discern the impact of Black Elk’s life speaking “that much… more.”

First, the stories shared by Maka Black Elk with support of other Native people primarily, and other non-Native voices secondarily, are examined in the context of stories prior to and during European contact, focusing first on Black Elk and his people as exceptional people. These are followed by an exploration of the impact of European contact fueled by the Doctrine of Discovery. Second, the stories focus more sharply on representations of the Doctrine of Discovery specifically embodied in missionaries and the impact their anthropology had on Native people such as Black Elk. Finally, with understanding of stories both prior to and during European contact, there is an attempt to learn together the implications regarding how such stories speak today, and into the future, in the face of terms germane to Native people like survivance (active resistance) and decolonization, and collectively for Native and Non-Native people appreciating how such stories could find meaning and purpose in cultural healing among all people. l

MICHAEL W. TAYLOR is a professor of education at the University of Mary and is entering his 30th year of education ranging from K-12 to the university level. Taylor is the author of Perpetuating Joy in Affinity Spaces Through Intercultural Pedagogy (2022, Kendall Hunt Publishing), with another book slated for release (Kendall Hunt Publishing) in 2023—Black Elk’s Life Speaks: “That Much... More.”

AFTER UTOPIA: WHAT POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS SHALL WE EMBRACE?

by Serge Danielson-Francois

Chastened by the violent exuberance of partisan politics, the American electorate adopted a more moderate course in the recent midterms. Judith Shklar predicted as much in her seminal After Utopia over sixty years ago and in her “Conscience and Liberty” lecture nearly thirty years ago. Abolitionists, for example, entertained the righteousness of zeal up until the John Brown Raid at Harper’s Ferry and pivoted to institutional politics in light of the unseemliness of political violence. The early romantic convulsions of moral grandstanding inevitably cede the stage to the sober and dull business of social policy and governance. Radical Republicans, hellbent on reforming the postbellum South and exacting allegiance to a more emancipatory national Constitution, conceded after 1877 that military occupation cannot compel moral conversion. Compromise and concession produce sustainable progress. Utopian fantasies of unobstructed moral suasion for political aims always fall short of the mark.

So too, in our polarized age of grievance and recrimination, cruel irony and incisive trolling, we are relearning the more salubrious language of political obligation. If our differences can be used against us by demagogues and opportunists, then our national character may justly be called into question.

If we are not a serious people committed to the serious business of seeing the good work begun in us carried to fruition, then we have surely embraced the caricature of intemperate action that once defined us on the global stage. Citizenship entails responsibilities, not just rights. Liberty requires self-governance, not license.

Shklar borrowed this understanding of liberty from Isaiah Berlin; positive liberty “comprises the victory of the higher over the lower self, the feeling of being liberated from lower passions in favor of an inner sense of freedom” (Conscience and Liberty). What we appear to have avoided in our recovered sobriety is the corrosive “athletics of moral anti-politics” that unbridled righteousness engenders. “Politics,” as Shklar and Berlin both intuited, “is about choice… one has to get things right for that, as in politics no single harmonizing good is possible” (Conscience and Liberty). We are, in effect, conducting a coastto-coast referendum on pluralism, and as Shklar notes, pluralism is nothing to sneeze at. Pluralism “in and of itself is surely not enough to ensure toleration and liberty,” according to Berlin. Still, a better appreciation for the moral hazard of eschewing a more hospitable, a more civil, a more perfect “we the people”

Citizenship entails responsibilities, not just rights. Liberty requires self-governance, not license.

must constrain our more self-indulgent excesses. As Shklar, channeling Berlin, argues, “a plurality of values and our acknowledgment of them does not privilege freedom simply. We still have to choose.”

Judith Shklar’s words ring truer today than in the rarified 1990’s academic circles where she spoke them. This passage from “Conscience and Liberty” is affixed to the bulletin board in my high school AP Government classroom. Shklar distills the Socratic wisdom of Plato’s Republic for a contemporary audience:

For us liberty is to be realized against obstacles, not just the open door. It is a demand that governments act to protect the liberty of one group against another. It takes the form of positive action to assure liberty. Rights are not conditions of liberty; they have independent value. This is not liberation but a constant process that recognizes that we have a past of enslavement and an impulse to perpetuate it in various guises, against identified groups— initially, black slaves. It is a liberty expressed in rights, and whoever claims them knows that liberty exists in counterpoint to slavery. There is no question but that the choice between majority rule and minority rights is the choice, yet it is not just a choice between justice and freedom, but also between two freedoms, that of the master and that of the slave. It may also involve an inner struggle between two parts of ourselves.

Where some would blame liberalism (understood as liberality) for the effacement of this personal civic struggle behind the veil of courts, laws, and overreaching government action, Shklar reminds us that liberty within each one of us must be nurtured and governed by humility. The political implications of wanton abandon to self-interest should be dire enough to have us temper our pursuit of selfrealization and self-determination. Positive liberty is a political concept whose time has come. Shklar avoids the entangled thought of Rousseau on the general will. Citizens who opt for discretion exercise their political obligations as faithfully as those who make public avowal of their allegiance to the general will. Such citizens may be the architects of bolder

and more nimble political coalitions, less inclined and less susceptible to factionalism.

Judith Shklar’s political philosophy extends an ethic of reasonableness made famous by Thomas More in Utopia and best articulated by Philip Pettit. Our political obligation to republican liberty must involve a non-negotiable commitment to nondomination. More wisely observed in Utopia that “if a king should fall under such contempt or envy that he could not keep his subjects in their duty but by oppression and ill usage, and by rendering them poor and miserable, it were certainly better for him to quit his kingdom than to retain it by such methods as make him, while he keeps the name of authority, lose the majesty due to it.” With great power comes great political obligation. We are bound to each other beyond political convenience, machination, or intrigue.

Our social media-obsessed age has made more evident the influence of the audience in the political games we choose to play. As E.E. Schattsschneider observed in The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America, conflict is contagious, and the nationalization of politics has made conflicts legion. We have, with every electoral contest, been made subject to the simultaneous privatization and socialization of conflict. Every attempt to involve the wider public leads us into an impenetrable fog of war with coalitions of inferior interest (held together by a dominant interest). These fractious coalitions leverage coercive force by inviting outside intervention and by marshalling appeals to public authority for redress of private grievances. All circus tents beckon the clowns.

If we dare still to hope for liberation from improvident and undisciplined political behavior, only a less corrupting and less romantic understanding of the lived experience of a pluralist democracy can guide us forward. Obligation must be substituted for motivation and coalition for cabal. The inner struggle, as Shklar notes, is always between two parts of ourselves. l

SERGE DANIELSON-FRANCOIS is an educator at Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

MEMENTO MORI

by Tayo Basquiat

A few months before I turned fifty, that black-draped birthday signaling the downhill slide, should one be lucky enough to reach the slide and not somehow fall off the ladder during the climb, I moved into a dead man’s lake house. The dead man was my friend’s father. He spent several weeks dying in the living room, ironically, in a hospital bed positioned so he could look out the picture window at the lake he loved, hospice staff and his daughter doing what they could to keep him comfortable. My friend said it was a good death.

On the morning my friend flew back to California, her mother (and her father’s ex-wife) came by the house with a blue and orange rectangular box with the word “CREMAINS” printed on the side. No one spoke as the box was shoved onto the master bedroom’s closet shelf. Then, after hugs and goodbyes, my friend and her mother went back to their life and left me with the dead.

I made a beeline to his bedroom, opened the closet, stared at the box, and closed the door again. Already skittish about sleeping in a dead man’s bed, a feeling now compounded by his closeted cremains, I put my things in the spare bedroom, hoping this castoff room would be less familiar, less likely to attract his lingering spirit, an idea I profess not to believe yet don’t want to test. He didn’t die in his usual bed or even in his bedroom, of course, but I could see the depression in the old mattress and knew my body would find it. I moved through the house, studying the dead man’s things: framed photographs of him with his bush plane from Alaska days, with a large fish, with his daughter, in his military uniform; on the shelves several books about loons, books by and about Jimmy Carter, books about nearby

hikes. A monocular and flashlights wait for action on a table by the door. In the kitchen, leftovers: three-fourths’ stick of butter, a small jug of coffee creamer, half-finished ketchup and mustard and jam. The dead man took part of these things with him, in him. I will eat the rest. In the freezer are old tube sock-covered cold packs that I imagine comforted the man, touched his skin, absorbed his oils and sweat.

My imagination conjures last times: the last time he fixed that vent with duct tape and wire, the last sweat soaked into his hat’s band, the last time his hand held this wrench, the last time he put on his dancing boots now slumped by the door. Such mundane, common things. Did he notice each last when it happened? Perhaps, like me, he was just living, assuming continuance, until, that is, he ran up against the hard limit. Some lasts come slow like with cancer, some quick in a stroke or a fiery crash, but they always come. The last lasts are coming for us all.

I know this intellectually—of course I do—but living in that dead man’s house, well, death closed the intellectual distance, jumped into the bunker I’d dug. I’m not young or full of vigor; age spots, wrinkles, and creaky joints signal death like lights on an airport runway. Death seems very materially present and active. One day I vacuumed the lake house and went outside to empty the canister. I pulled the release, the bottom opened, and a clump of hair and dust fell, some to the grass, some on my shoes, some taken by the breeze. Part of that clump was the last skin cells and hair shed by the dead man, but part was mine. I’m sloughing off a little death every day. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Two months later, I am sitting in a church at my father’s funeral, staring at his box of cremains, this one wooden and etched with a buck deer. I didn’t go to see his body before it was cremated, something I do not yet regret but maybe I will, who knows? Despite all I’ve thought and felt about death since moving into the dead man’s lake house, I am no less stunned by how quickly a life is turned to ash.

Memento mori: “remember that you must die.” I teach philosophy at a community college, but maybe I’m one of those hacks people chide with “those who can’t do, teach.” Montaigne quotes Cicero who in turn was passing on advice he took from the Greeks: “that to philosophize is nothing else but to prepare for death.” I’ve been assiduously avoiding this task. Again, intellectually, I know that with birth comes the death sentence, first breath yields one day to last breath. All humans are mortal. Tayo is a human. Therefore, Tayo is mortal. But I don’t want to die. I want to live. I love being alive. Why should I ruin life by philosophizing about death?

Though millions of mortals worldwide hold religious views promising death is temporary or merely a passage to the immortal or eternal or reincarnate, death as brute fact has a greater hold on me than any beliefs about what may or may not come next. So far, to me, death has felt very much like a bad thing. Socrates, facing death, examined this question of whether death is a bad thing or not. He concludes that death cannot possibly be a bad

Did he notice each last when it happened? The last lasts are coming for us all.

thing because either 1) death would bring him into the realm of those philosophers and other greats who had gone before him and was thus a continuance of life; OR 2) death was like going to sleep and just never waking up again, and neither sounded bad to him. Socrates’s possibilities encapsulate most people’s beliefs about death, though the specifics vary widely: either there is some kind of “after” death OR there isn’t. I don’t know which is the more difficult philosophical task, to find the faith to believe there is some sort of continuance for the person I think myself to be or to embrace the finality of death, the end of Tayo the individual, conscious person who simply becomes proverbial food for worms. That I would be worm food, sustaining the continuance of life on the planet, should bring comfort of its own sort for a pro-earth person like me, and I suppose it does to a point, yet let it be said, I still very much want to be alive.

How does philosophizing prepare one for death? What is it that I’m supposed to be doing? One aspect of the philosophical task, I’ve heard, is distinguishing quality and quantity. According to Plato, Socrates accepted his own death sentence by arguing that some forms of living (like the kind the Athenians wanted him to live) are worse than death. Maybe I prefer living now simply because the quality of my life is so good. Put me in chronic or searing pain, a Siberian penal colony, total body paralysis, or abject, tortuous poverty, and maybe I’d start singing a different tune. Death can be a gift. One thing my dad said in one of our last visits (there’s one of those lasts again) sticks with me: “there is such a thing as living too long.”

Some philosophers on this subject suggest that living in fear of death diminishes life itself, so I’ve asked a lot of people about fear and death. Many people tell me that they do not fear being dead. Any fear they have is for others: they fear losing loved ones to death; they fear dying and leaving loved ones, especially children, to

a life without their protection, provision, and love. Some people fear the “how”: will dying be painful? Will they have to linger for years with a disease like Alzheimer’s or some other infirmity that makes them a financial and emotional burden to their family? Will they die alone? Some people’s fears stem from their belief in a dualistic afterlife, fearing an eternity in some version of unrelenting torment, pain, and misery. These folks admit they fear death will come before they have a chance to make things right and get their ticket punched to the good place. Another fear I’ve heard strikes closer to mine: the fear not of death but rather of not fully living the life you have—too afraid to try something, to love, to risk failure or rejection, to never leave what’s comfortable and safe. So, the thought is, presumably, memento mori is like a cattle prod: get busy living because the end is coming.

All these questions, all these things to think about. It’s what philosophers do (when they aren’t teaching or actively running from the questions themselves). Perhaps one of the good things to come from turning fifty, living in a dead man’s house, and losing my own father, all in just a few months, is the calling back to philosophy. I confess I’ve been letting too much of life slide by unexamined, taking it for granted, as if death could be slipped by averting my eyes. I re-read Thoreau’s Walden recently, and that oft-quoted line vibrated like a brand-new idea: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Memento mori, memento mori. l

TAYO BASQUIAT writes to pay attention and teaches to pay the bills. He and a passel of creatures dwell off-grid in the high desert of New Mexico.

by Ann Crews Melton

The author located the obituaries used in this article from a variety of sources, including online listings and funeral homes. She acknowledges that, aside from historical entries, she has no way to know whether they were written by staff or by family members.

Eric hated sad stories, beets, romantic comedies, a snow packed driveway and turning off the garage light. . . . We are not positive, but we think the cause of death was either leukemia or more likely being “dead sexy.”

~Eric A. Sauser, d. February 26, 2021, Omaha, Nebraska

How would you document your own life for posterity, in 500 words or less? In a few concise anecdotes and details, could you capture the essence of your personality and what gives you purpose?

Obituaries, traditionally written by newspaper staff, are now commonly penned by family members in the immediate wake of a loved one’s death. Whereas death notices—a public announcement someone has died, and brief details of funeral arrangements—might be drafted by funeral home staff, a more robust obituary requires intimate knowledge of a person’s life. The best obituaries, whether humorous or poignant, capture the personality and passions of the deceased. Beyond family, what did she love, or what brought a spark to his eye? What flaws or quirks will we remember, after our beloved, imperfect friend has passed?

When she was having fun, she was bowling with Dan and her mother-in-law Margaret, watching the Atlanta Braves (and cursing the “Damn Dodgers”), staying up late watching video-taped soap operas, and sharing her collection of Cary Grant movies. And always, she had an icecold Coke (with a little wedge of lemon) in her hand.

~Virginia “Ginnie” Chaussee, d. March 9, 2021, Bismarck

For historical context, I revisited one of my old haunts—the State Archives at the ND Heritage Center & State Museum. The Archives, which contain local newspapers as far back as the 1870s, are a popular stop for genealogy research. “We work with death every day here,” says Sarah Walker, ND State Archives Head of References Services. “Sometimes I wonder how often people think of their own mortality.” At the State Archives, citizens typically search papers from the 1950s and earlier—but whether they discover a full obituary or a death notice for their deceased ancestors is “hit or miss,” Walker says. Prominent community members were more likely to receive an obituary; however, in smaller towns, the death of any community member might be newsworthy.

Margaret McGilbray was born in Scotland on the Isle of Mull, in 1838. At the age of nineteen she married Isaae MacKinnon, and seven children were born to them. In 1874 they came to America, settling first in Ontario. In 1884 they came to North Dakota and three years later to Bottineau County. Since coming to this counry [sic] the husband and three sons and a daughter have died, leaving three sons and a daughter who survive their mother.

Mrs. MacKinnon was a woman of kindly disposition and was beloved by all who knew her.

~Margaret McGilbray MacKinnon, d. August 29, 1906, Omemee; Bottineau Courant, September 7, 1906

Walker observes that in earlier papers, obituaries frequently ran on the front page; they might contain flowery language about the person’s virtues and last days, while also including explicit detail about the cause of death.

Mr. Maloney’s death was due to injuries received from falling into a 40 ft bin in the PV elevator at Wales while assisting in getting it ready for operation. . . . he learned the grain business under Malcolm Morrison, whose tragic death in the railroad yards there was still fresh in the memory of Langdon, equally deplorable as that of Mr. Maloney.

~John Maloney, Wales; Hope Pioneer (Steele County), October 12, 1911

One significant hindrance for researchers is that often women’s obituaries omitted the first name—referring to her instead as “Mrs. [husband’s name],” or only Grandma or Mother. Prior to recent decades, there were few Indigenous obituaries recorded in local newspapers, since the papers were typically owned, edited, and reported by white settlers and their descendants. Writing one’s own obituary was rare, though it did happen, as

in the case of Charles Crain of Watertown, who received the headline “Autobiographical Obituary: The Record Remembered by Old-Timer Who Prepares Death Notice Himself Before Death” in the Emmons County Record in 1916. Crain, by his own account, was no hedonist.

He was an ardent church worker and a bitter foe of the liquor interests.

~Charles W. Crain, d. December 10, 1916, Watertown; Emmons County Record, December 21, 1916

Nowadays, newspapers charge a fee to publish submitted obituaries, which can vary by character, word count, or column inch. Predictably, publication is shifting to websites and/or self-publishing on social media. Regardless of publication method, a solid obituary serves multiple purposes: notify the public of a death and (optionally) its cause; document genealogical lineage (through parents, marriage, deceased relatives, and survivors); record places born and lived, schools attended, military service, religion practiced, community roles, and professional accomplishments; list funeral arrangements; and name preferred charities for memorials.

Dwight worked at various jobs and for awhile operated his own business ‘A Touch Above Custodial Care’ cleaning service. . . . A very particular person, Dwight enjoyed reading and writing. He was especially good at writing long, meaningful poems and short stories.

~Dwight Lee Kastrow, d. July 28, 2020, Center

My short list above omitted the most important part, and the reason I’m a dedicated obituary reader: to tell the story of a life, captured through the quirks, imperfections, adventures, and anecdotes of the deceased. We’re all familiar

with obituaries going viral, often for their humor and irreverence, but an obit does not have to be hilarious to give a strong sense of a person and their passions.

At the young age of 8 years old, Kesley began reading Harry Potter and would wait with great anticipation for each new volume to be released. His excitement for the books remained strong throughout his life—he reread the series multiple times and his choice of costume for Halloween last year was, in fact, Harry Potter.

~Kesley Dean Tveter, “Nahg-zidi-di-de-dish” (Running Buffalo Calf), d. Jan. 22, 2020, Bismarck

Unless you have a communications expert or particularly gifted wordsmith in the family, your own obituary may succumb to the dullness of a standard template (i.e., a “sad lib” in one unhelpful article I found), omitting important details, having been hastily composed by grieving or shocked relatives. What better way to jumpstart your own historic record than by drafting your obituary yourself?

To the astonishment of himself and others, Ted was an Eagle Scout, although he rarely looked like one, but rather resembled the proverbial unmade bed.

~Theodore White “Ted” Quanrud, d. July 3, 2019, Bismarck

Rather than focus on the morbid, try to make this a playful writing activity. (Gallows humor always welcome.) You can record and reflect on the most important moments of your life, and how

you’d like to be remembered—either by those you hold dear, or any curious souls conducting historical research down the road.

Nancy played guard for the Yellow Jackets’ basketball team wearing wartime hand-medown shoes and uniforms. The town pooled gas rationing coupons for their road games. Once, the bus broke down and the players had to push it from Karnak to Marshall. She loved the competition and for the rest of her life, she could say the name of rival Waskom High as an expletive.

~Nancy Ruth Rountree Mackey (my greataunt), d. April 27, 2021, Longview, Texas

Of course, you will have to rely on someone else to complete the cause of death, which is optional, but appreciated by readers (or at least by me). Contemporary obituaries tend to name a cause if the person died from cancer, but often one must read between the lines or be left wondering, especially if the deceased was younger in age. I find myself skimming the preferred charities for clues—does an obit point toward addiction/recovery resources, a suicide prevention nonprofit, or research funds for a particular degenerative disease? During the pandemic, obituaries sometimes explicitly stated the person died of COVID-19, or did not die of COVID-19—choices complicated by social stigma and political opinions.

He died in a room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with covid-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family. . . . He died in a world where many of his fellow Americans refuse to wear a piece of cloth on their face to protect one another.

~Marvin James Farr, d. Dec. 1, 2020, Scott City, Kansas

What better way to jumpstart your own historic record than by drafting your obituary yourself?

In these fractured times, the fact that we are mortal is the ultimate (and perhaps sole remaining) unifier: regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum, or our religious beliefs, or fashion sense, or accumulation/lack of wealth, or devotion to sport or country, we are the only species that must cope with consciousness of our impending demise. This, I suppose, is why obituaries invoke the essence of the humanities—what makes us human, and the stories we tell to define ourselves and others.

After the Berlin Wall came down, she was able to get a “black” flight [to Vietnam] with 130 other war brides and she found her family absolutely destitute. Russell [Anh’s husband] had sold two teams of horses and a neighbor lady sewed a hidden liner for her blouse. She had sixty $100 bills hidden on her person. After several close calls, she found her family . . . her mother buried the money in fruit jars in their garden.

~Be Ba (Anh) Gietzen, d. January 18, 2022, Glen Ullin

Any obituary writer will tell you it’s a challenge to write concisely, which is why it’s good to start early. Allow ample time (if you’re lucky, decades) for feedback and rewrites. You will be forced to reflect on the most meaningful experiences in your life—these might not be your happiest memories, but instead the challenges that yielded the most growth. You may also meditate on mistakes, lessons learned, and opportunities yet to seize.

His position as “king” and orator was challenged by the nuns at St. Wenceslaus

school in Spillville. He may have met his match. We’re not saying the nuns won, but they put up a good fight, we mean literally—he got into a fist-a-cuff with a nun. In fairness, she probably started it.

~Tim Schrandt, d. March 29, 2019, Spillville, Iowa

All good writing begins with reading—begin a practice of reading obituaries to honor the dead, and to discover the styles you like. Unlike the dearly departed, you’re not dead yet. What adventures are still waiting for you?

If you knew her at all, you also knew not to try phoning her during Wimbledon, the U.S. Tennis Open nor the French Open. Because she was a voracious reader, finishing three to four books weekly, Della would prefer, in lieu of flowers, a tax free donation to the Bismarck Library Foundation.

~Della Mae Elhard, d. Dec. 27, 2021, Bismarck l

ANN CREWS MELTON is executive director of Consensus Council, a Bismarck-based nonprofit, and previously served as an editor at the State Historical Society of ND and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in religion from Austin College and a master of arts degree in publishing and writing from Emerson College. She is an avid obituary reader and former reporter and community columnist for the Bismarck Tribune.

In these fractured times, the fact that we are mortal is the ultimate (and perhaps sole remaining) unifier…

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MORE THAN OLD WIVES’ TALES: THE POWER OF WOMEN’S FABLES

by Claire Barwise

A young woman refuses to remove the mysterious ribbon around her neck. When she finally gives in to her husband’s desire to untie it, her head rolls to the floor.

Maybe you’ve heard the urban legend of the girl with the green ribbon or encountered it in a children’s book. But have you ever really thought about what it might mean or why it has persisted in our collective imagination? Writer Carmen Maria Machado recently retold the tale in her collection Her Body and Other Parties; and when I teach her short story “The Husband Stitch” in my college classes, the reaction is as electric as if my students were hearing it for the first time around a campfire. Machado takes the story and humanizes it, introducing us to a young woman and following her through early courtship, marriage, motherhood, and midlife ennui. She could be so many of us. Always, though, the ribbon at her neck hints at something more, and always her husband itches to untie it. When our narrator finally lets him, the ending is shocking, but also all the more unsettling because many of us can see ourselves in her narrative. It is still a “scary story” but scary because it seems to tell us something about ourselves.

So what does it mean? Is the ribbon symbolic? Many of my students suggest it is about individuality, what sets us apart. We dig deeper. Could the ribbon be the part of ourselves we need to keep private and sacred, even from those we most love? Is that need universal or more specific

to women? Could the story be a commentary on what men ask from women and women’s desire to give, even at great cost to themselves?

Literature asks that we engage such questions, but it does not force an answer upon us. Perhaps this is why we return to certain stories again and again, but tell them differently. Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf is still at the door, but he looks different now, and we’re still not sure how we feel about him.

I’m particularly interested in women’s stories and retellings of stories. Because for so long women did not have a public venue for their stories, they found alternate means: songs, stories passed around, and yarns woven, both figuratively and literally. Few realize that the Grimms’ source material for their famous fairy tales were women—servants, friends of the family, and acquaintances. The French aristocrat Mme d’Aulnoy, who wrote stories for the French salon, gave us the very term fairy tales (from contes de fées) and her contemporary, Charlotte de la Force, authored the version of Rapunzel we know today. Despite dismissive terms such as “old wives’ tales,” the fact is that women’s fables serve as a rare example of a female intellectual tradition that persevered despite most women’s lack of access to education, or the means of sharing their voices and experiences directly with a larger public.

Disappointingly, the stories that we know best from this tradition are those that reinforce a status quo that still weighs upon women today: beauty and goodness go hand in hand, powerful women are evil, and the happiest endings involve marriage (preferably to a prince). Yet this actually has more to do with the history of selection and

editing (and editorializing) by male publishers than what could be found in the full range of women’s stories. In the Victorian era, stories were chosen with moral instruction in mind: children, and especially girls, were to be taught to be obedient and warned against straying off the path. They also offered marriage advice. If your husband seemed beastly (or froglike), just wait! Your love could reveal the prince underneath. Disney perpetuated these tropes in their films, which became so popular that much of their audience had no idea that other kinds of fairy tales existed. Yet as folklorist Jack Zipes explains, there were “thousands of stories that women told to each other, and that were never collected or written down, in which heroines were assertive, confident, and courageous—in short, nobody’s slave.”

Take, for example, an oral version of Little Red Riding Hood known as “The Story of Grandmother” recorded in 1885, in which there is no huntsman rescuer, only the young girl’s own ingenuity, as she tricks the wolf into letting her escape. Or the hundreds of variations of Cinderella (sometimes known as Catskin or Donkeyskin) in which the heroine asserts her own independence to run away from an abusive father and survive in a forest or other unfamiliar world. Such stories not only offer intelligent, resourceful women at their center but also reflect the very real threats women have faced throughout history: physical and sexual violence, unwanted marriages, restrictive domesticity, and other forms of patriarchal control.

Whatever steps we may have taken toward equality between the genders, and however many strong female heroines Disney now places

Despite dismissive terms such as “old wives’ tales,” the fact is that women’s fables serve as a rare example of a female intellectual tradition that persevered.

in its movie leads, women still face violence and oppression, as well as more subtle challenges: the complex feelings and expectations of motherhood; the mixed messages around sexual agency; the feeling of invisibility that can come with aging. Fables, or modern fairy tales, remain a fertile ground for exploring these topics and bringing to light unspoken fears, predicaments, and desires. A head rolls to the floor. A baby made of hair turns on the mother who summoned her into life. By bringing in elements of the fantastic or magical, authors such as Carmen Maria Machado and Lesley Nneka Arimah invite us to see old problems in new lights. We ask different questions. We pay attention.

Women all over the world have always told strange, radical, enchanting stories about their lives. We’re lucky now to live in an age when we can read them. Let’s explore some of these timeless stories together and examine the ways that they have been shaped by—and shape our understanding of—the so-called real world. l

CLAIRE BARWISE holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English Literature. Her work has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Feminist Modernist Cultures, and Modern Fiction Studies She currently resides in Philadelphia, PA, and teaches at Drexel University.

NUCLEAR HISTORY: THE PRESENT SHAPES THE PAST

by Raffi Andonian

“The ability to split atoms and extract energy from them was one of the more remarkable scientific achievements of the 20th century, widely seen as world-changing,” reported The Economist on 10 March 2012. “Intuitively,” the newspaper continued, “one might expect such a scientific wonder either to sweep all before it or be renounced, rather than end up in a modest niche, at best stable, at worst dwindling.” However, historic and social contexts have proven to shape the fate of the technology: “If nuclear power teaches one lesson, it is to doubt all stories of technological determinism. It is not the essential nature of a technology that matters but its capacity to fit into the social, political and economic conditions of the day.” With its extensive Special Report assessment of nuclear energy in 2012, The Economist revealed just how relevant, charged, and ambivalent nuclear history remains. “To the public at large,” the report gauged, “the history of nuclear power is mostly a history of accidents.” Even in the twenty-first century, the 2011 disaster at Fukushima in Japan seemed to demonstrate that cold reality. Thus, nuclear power continues as “a creature of politics not economics.”

Nearly seven decades after the first use of nuclear weapons in the world, the political implications of all things nuclear make it a difficult topic to discuss in a public forum. Thus, when U.S. President Barack Obama called for

“an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” he avoided mentioning nuclear energy, despite the fact that one-fifth of the electricity in the United States is supplied by its 104 nuclear reactors. Despite U.S. dependence on nuclear energy, almost two-thirds of Americans oppose building new nuclear reactors; hence, it remains a politically unpopular issue to highlight. Globally, nuclear power provided 13% of the world’s electricity in 2010—although that number was down from 18% in 1996. Even in Japan, site of the world’s first victims of nuclear weapons, 30% of electricity in 2010 derived from nuclear power plants, a source in use there since the 1960s—nevertheless, art referencing nuclear bombs remains taboo, even insulting and offensive.

With the triple meltdown at Fukushima in 2011, easily classified as “the world’s worst nuclear accident since the disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986,” as The Economist called it on 25 February 2012, and the first approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the construction of a new nuclear reactor in the United States since the landmark Three Mile Island accident in 1979—these three incidents denoting the most memorable of nuclear accidents—the question of the validity of nuclear technology has many reasons to stir up controversy anew. In the realm of foreign policy, the political power of nuclear arms becomes apparent well after the end of the Cold War, as “worries about the dark side of nuclear power are resurgent, thanks to what is happening in Iran.” The domestic front is even more controversial, as confirmed by President Obama’s comments and omission, particularly considering the mood created by fresh memories from Fukushima in Japan and by new projects in the United States allowed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As The Economist surmised in the spring of 2012, “America’s antinuclear movement has been as quiet as its nuclear

industry, but as one comes to life so will the other.”

Within such a climate, morally perplexing since the development of the first nuclear weapon in 1945, came the introduction of yet another motion that triggered a strong public reaction about the legacy of nuclear energy and its various applications. The Manhattan Project National Historical Park Act failed in the United States House of Representatives in September 2012, after months of effort in Congress to introduce and pass it, following several years of planning and study. The legislation would have created the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, a noncontiguous unit to be added to the National Park Service. The park would not acquire any property, but rather it would establish a National Park Service visitor center in each of three locations to interpret existing United States Department of Energy sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. All of these locations were critical to the historic Manhattan Project, which created the world’s first nuclear weapons as an effort aimed to bring an end to the Second World War, and then ultimately used against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These visitor centers would include information and interpretation (both formal and informal), offer exhibits and tours, and direct visitors to partners already present in the community, such as the Los Alamos Historical Museum or the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, site of the Manhattan Project’s chief laboratory facility. In Los Alamos, local efforts to amend and add to the existing National Historic Landmark district began in order to include more resources to the interpretation by the new park. A struggle over how to understand nuclear history had been triggered—where it fit in United States and world history, and how it should be remembered.

These debates about the past are rooted in the present. As the anthropologist Richard Flores explains in Remembering the Alamo: Memory,

Modernity, and the Master Symbol, “Stories of the past envelop us: they inscribe our present and shape our future; stories of the past are linked to the formation of selves and others in a complex tapestry of textured narratives.” Viewed from the present, the past pervades the current and contemporary—the now. “Remembering is a deeply embedded social practice that informs the present,” Flores acknowledges. J. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth, international scholars of heritage tourism, delineate further distinctions while maintaining an understanding of remembrance similar to that of Flores. As Tunbridge and Ashworth wrote in Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, “History is what a historian regards as worth recording and heritage is what contemporary society chooses

to inherit and to pass on.” That is, “the past” is “what has happened,” “history” is “selective attempts to describe this [past],” and “heritage” is “a contemporary product shaped from history.” The heritage of atrocity, according to Tunbridge and Ashworth, carries particular importance and intensity:

It is disproportionately significant to many heritage users. Its memory can so dominate the heritage of individuals or social and political groups, as to have profound effects upon their self-conscious identity to the extent that it may become almost a sine qua non of group cohesion in sects, tribes or states, powerfully motivating their self-image and aspirations, over many centuries… The dissonance created by the interpretation of atrocity is not only particularly intense and lasting but also particularly complex for victims, perpetrators and observers.

Interpreting the immediate outcomes of the Manhattan Project—victory versus defeat, lives saved versus lives lost, perceptions of good versus evil, the end of a world war versus the beginning of a new kind of war—reveals just how complex, multifaceted, sensitive, dissonant, and influential historical memory, understanding, and interpretation could become. l

RAFFI ANDONIAN is a frequent guest on ABC-NBCFOX-CBS TV stations nationwide and also produces and hosts his own streaming TV show that aims to challenge the present by inquiring about the past. He has authored 3 Amazon best-selling books, and he has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in history and another master’s degree in historic preservation. He began his career as a guide working at the Gettysburg battlefield, the Martin Luther King, Jr. childhood home, and Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was created.

“History is what a historian regards as worth recording and heritage is what contemporary society chooses to inherit and to pass on.”

ON BEING W ONG

by David Bjerklie

R

I’m going out on a limb here, but most of us have a less-than-healthy relationship with being wrong. Being right? That’s a piece of cake, of course, because we love being right. And, strangely enough, it doesn’t seem to matter what we are right about. We get a rush of exhilaration being right about the solution to today’s word puzzle, guessing the surprise ending of a movie, or predicting the winner of the Super Bowl. Whether the stakes are high or low, being right is deeply satisfying and just plain pleasurable. It reliably delivers that sweet, fist-pump emotion: “Oh yeah, called that one!”

But being wrong? Not so much. Because most of us really, really hate how it feels to be wrong. Even with the small stuff, it can be annoying or embarrassing, but depending on what we’re wrong about—and when, where, why, and in front of whom—it can make us feel chastened, shamed, shaken, humiliated, or full-on mortified. Being wrong trains a spotlight on our doubts, defects, deficits; it highlights our inexperience, ignorance, and failures. Being wrong can make us feel alone. Being wrong can feel like an identity crisis, an affront to who we think we are, a sneer at who we want to be.

Why is being wrong so fraught? Is it because right and wrong have emotional overlap with good and bad? I might be

projecting here, but didn’t we all hear, at some point in our childhood, something along the lines of: “You’re old enough to know right from wrong!” Maybe it was said by exasperated parents, angry neighbors, or teachers at their wits’ end. Whatever the exact circumstances in which we received that rhetorical cuff-on-the-ear, it was an admonishment that stung.

No wonder we go to great lengths to hide or deny our wrongness. But considering how many things we can be wrong about in life, running from wrongness is surely futile. We can be wrong about our opinions, our choices, our decisions; wrong about who to trust, when to help, how to get ahead; wrong about our facts, our goals, wrong at work and wrong at home; we can be wrong about cherished convictions and, oh yes, we can be wrong about love.

Most of us would be happy to avoid the subject entirely. And therein lies the rub. In her wonderfully insightful book Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz writes that “of all the things we are wrong about,” our approach to being wrong is what trips us up the most. “It is our meta-mistake,” says Schulz: “We are wrong about what it means to be wrong.” And it matters because being wrong about being wrong guarantees that we will miss out on the good stuff.

We are wrong about what it means to be wrong.

Let’s start by imagining our social circles, our friends, family, colleagues, people we know well. Who has the hardest time admitting the error of their ways? We probably all know someone for whom it is nearly impossible to say “I was wrong.” Maybe they just don’t see the use of it. Or maybe they genuinely don’t think of it in terms of being wrong and instead just claim they were misinformed, they couldn’t have known otherwise, so it basically wasn’t their fault.

Next, consider what we believe our friends and family are wrong about. Do you know someone who thinks Donald Trump was the best president ever? Or that Joe Biden is? Someone who thinks the latest U.S. Supreme Court ruling went too far? Or not far enough? In your view, who’s wrong and why can’t they see it? There are types of wrongness that we find baffling in other people—and sometimes even unforgivable. Are we wrong or right to feel this way?

And now let’s turn our attention to ourselves. What have we been wrong about this week? This year? Can we name three? Let’s really go-big-or-gohome and name the top five things we’ve been most wrong about in our lives. Chances are we’re going to have problems

coming up with those lists. And it’s not because we have perfect track records on being right. One obstacle we face in tracking our wrongs, explains Schulz, is that our minds don’t maintain a neat mental file drawer labeled “things I’ve been wrong about.”

Another obstacle is how seamlessly we replace the old “wrong” with the new “right.”

We can say “I was wrong” but the present-tense “I am wrong” doesn’t make sense, explains Schulz, because “realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time: something else instantly becomes the new right. In light of this new belief, the discarded one can quickly come to seem remote, indistinct, and irrelevant, as if we never took it all that seriously in the first place.” So we don’t feel wrong when we’re wrong. And when we realize we’re wrong, we’re right about seeing we were wrong. In a sense our minds transform the experience of wrongness into an experience of going from one “right” to another “right.” It can be a bit head spinning.

If the realization of being

wrong proceeds very slowly, on the other hand, our minds tend to frame the experience as an example of how views naturally develop and mature. And speaking of mature, here’s one last thought experiment: How does our sense of wrongness change as we grow older? Are we less wrong as we mature or just more aware of it? Can we compare our sense of being wrong at age 8 or 18 with our sense of being wrong at age 38 or 68? What, exactly, does “getting better at being wrong” look like? What does it feel like?

SO WHAT NOW?

Humans have chewed over philosophical, religious, and political definitions of right and wrong since the dawn of history. And there’s no reason to think that we will—or should—ever stop. But if there’s never a wrong time to think about these issues, in many ways now is a particularly right time to give them greater attention. We live in times of bitter divisiveness, self-righteous polarization, and rampant misinformation. The stakes are high and getting higher.

According to many experts,

In a sense our minds transform the experience of wrongness into an experience of going from one “right” to another “right.”

what these strident times call for is more intellectual humility, “the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong.” To be intellectually humble is to acknowledge one’s limitations, one’s fallibility. Ideally, this realization translates into being more open to other people’s views because a shared fallibility is also a shared opportunity. There are fine points and quibbles among philosophers and psychologists in the definitions of intellectual humility (as well as its opposite, intellectual arrogance) and these distinctions are important, but the basic concept is certainly commonsensical.

It is also powerful. Its champions see intellectual humility as the corrective we must embrace if we are to improve the health of our civil society. According to the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, intellectual humility is linked to a long list of potential benefits. For example, as Duke University psychologist Mark Leary points out, researchers have found that “intellectually humble people tend to be intellectually curious.” As a consequence, they persevere longer when faced with failures or challenges and dig deeper when faced with contrary views or false information.

Intellectual humility might also improve our relationships. Being intellectually humble, says Leary, “correlates with a range of beneficial interpersonal responses—including gratitude, forgiveness, altruism, and empathy—and with values that reflect concern for other people’s well-being.” People who are intellectually humble are not only more tolerant of views that differ from their own but also less likely to trash the moral character and intellect of those who don’t share their beliefs.

And the “likes” go both ways, explains Leary. “Given their open, agreeable, and less contentious nature, people high in IH [intellectual humility] are liked better than those low in IH.” One study found that “even after only 30 minutes of contact, people rate those who are high in IH more positively than those who are low. People also seem to forgive people whom they view as intellectually humble more easily.”

Humility can not only reduce the acrimony, but also “pave the way toward greater negotiation and compromise” (Leary).

In short, being intellectually humble can be a rising tide that lifts all boats. But is this wishful thinking? Asking someone if they recognize that “their beliefs might be wrong” is an extremely broad

question and not very useful if it remains a yes-or-no proposition.

The key is to pay heed to the phrase, “the degree to which” this is recognized. When researchers investigate a property, they strive to measure it. Trying to measure intellectual humility, however, is tricky because the measurement relies on self-reporting. “Do you strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, or strongly agree that you recognize that you might be wrong?” Or, “on a scale from 1 to 10 how do you rate your intellectual humility?”

Do genuinely humble folks rate themselves high or low on being genuinely humble? It’s pretty easy to imagine the t-shirt that proclaims “It’s my humility that makes me awesome!”

And yet, what is the alternative? Asking friends, family, or colleagues to assess a person’s intellectual humility is a possibility, but that’s still no guarantee of accuracy.

Combining self-reported data with informant data might be the most revealing approach, but it makes such research far more costly in terms of time and effort. So what researchers do instead is to try to devise questions that circle as closely around the truth as possible. One research group developed a 22-item questionnaire called

the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale (CIHS), which aims to measure four distinct factors of intellectual humility by asking whether respondents agree or disagree with certain statements. For example:

Independence of intellect and ego. “I feel small when others disagree with me on topics that are close to my heart.”

Openness to revising one’s viewpoints. “I am open to revising my important beliefs in the face of new information.”

Respect for others’ viewpoints. “Even when I disagree with others, I can recognize that they have sound points.”

Lack of intellectual overconfidence. “My ideas are usually better than other people’s ideas.”

Any such questionnaire will still have to contend with the cognitive bias known as the “better-than-average” effect. (A classic example of this bias: one survey that found that more than 95% of professors rated themselves above average as teachers.) And Leary himself has explored this bias, asking a sample of adults to estimate the percentage of disagreements they have with other people in which they are the one who is correct. “The vast majority—a whopping 82%—reported that,

when they disagreed with other people, they were usually the one who was right!”

There are also concerns over to what extent our ideas about intellectual humility blur with other concepts. Intellectual humility is not the same as intellectual diffidence or servility. Nor is it identical to either open-mindedness or tolerance. Intellectual humility doesn’t require a stance of neutrality nor does it necessarily fit handin-glove with uncertainty or doubt. In their book, Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science, authors Ian M. Church and Peter I. Samuelson point out that a precise description of the concept is still a moving target. Or as they phrase it, “the philosophy of intellectual humility is currently something like a wild frontier.”

Mark Leary raises another important point in an overview titled The Psychology of Intellectual Humility, written for the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research and public engagement on the subject: “Few psychological characteristics are beneficial in all instances, so we should consider both the possible benefits and liabilities of IH.” One possible downside, notes Leary, includes scenarios in which “people with

a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty may find that trying to keep an open mind increases their stress and anxiety.” Would the benefits of humility outweigh those of certainty? “Another possible liability of intellectual humility may be lower efficiency when processing information and making decisions.” Again, there can be trade-offs.

In trying to measure intellectual humility, researchers have found considerable variation, not only in relative levels of humility among people but also with respect to what people are—or are not— intellectually humble about. As Leary points out, “People may be intellectually humble with regard to some of their beliefs while being arrogant about others.” How humble we are also varies in different situations. “Sometimes we recognize (and may even acknowledge) that we might be wrong, and sometimes we vehemently defend our positions even when the evidence is a bit shaky.”

Consider this example, suggest Church and Samuelson: “Let’s say you are very openminded to different political arguments but very closeminded when it comes to religious convictions. Could you be characterized as an intellectually humble person?

Let’s say you had strong opinions about the right way to discipline children and. . . yet you were willing to listen to advice about cooking. Would you understand yourself as an intellectually arrogant person?” How and why intellectual humility varies is clearly important to defining and understanding the concept. “So what are we to conclude?” ask Church and Samuelson. “Is intellectual humility a stable and long-lasting trait or is it blown about by the winds of the situation. The answer is yes to both.”

Another big question is where intellectual humility originates. “First,” acknowledges Leary, “given that virtually every personal characteristic has at least a weak genetic basis, it would be surprising if intellectual humility was not partly heritable.” But that doesn’t mean that people who might be genetically predisposed to respond in certain ways have no choice in their reactions. Nor does it mean that the relative degree of intellectual humility can’t be changed. The takeaway, explains Leary, is that “although most psychological characteristics are influenced by the effects of genes on the

brain, they are also affected strongly by people’s experiences, including how they are raised, their interactions with other people, what they learn, and the other things that happen to them throughout life.”

Consider what is learned, emphasizes Leary, “as children observe how parents, teachers, and others express certainty and uncertainty about their beliefs, manage disagreements with other people, and change—or do not change—their minds when evidence warrants.” Are children encouraged to think critically, to base their views on evidence and to explain and justify why they believe what they believe? What we learn in school matters, of course, but the impact education has on intellectual humility may be mixed, explains Leary. “On the one hand, the more people learn, the more they see how much they do not know and come to realize that knowledge is exceptionally complicated, nuanced, and endless. On the other hand, the more people learn, the more justifiably confident they become in the areas in which they develop expertise.” It is quite possible that education both increases and

decreases intellectual humility.

There are social and cultural components to our learning as well, explains Leary. “Some cultures lead people to experience anxiety in situations that are ambiguous or unpredictable, and these cultures are structured in ways that make the world seem more stable and predictable through strict rules and laws, shared beliefs, and circumscribed ways of behaving.” Circumstances also impact intellectual humility. “Research shows that people become more entrenched in their views when they feel under existential threat,” says Leary. The nature of the threat can range from economic downturns to war and terrorism. Even pondering one’s own mortality can cause us to retreat from open-mindedness. When the going gets tough, it can make sense to hunker down in the stability of what we already believe to be tried and true.

But consider how the world might look different if our first impulse was to run toward uncertainty. “Although ignorance and failure are commonly thought of in a negative light, in science they are just the opposite: they are where all the interesting action is,” according to Stuart Firestein, a biologist at Columbia University in New York, and author of Ignorance:

Research shows that people become more entrenched in their views when they feel under existential threat.

How it Drives Science, and its sequel, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful. “Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.”

There is a spectrum of ignorance, of course, as well as a continuum of failure. Ignorance can range from willful stupidity to the simple absence of knowledge. And there are failures from which you learn neat and easy lessons and failures from which you struggle mightily to learn anything at all. But what interests Firestein are those “failures that lead to unexpected and otherwise unavailable discoveries: they often seem like serendipity, an accidental failure that opened a door you didn’t even know was there. There are failures that are informative: it doesn’t work this way; there must be some other way. There are failures that lead to other failures that eventually lead to some kind of success about learning why the other paths were failures.”

In this sense, scientists are probably the world’s experts on ignorance and failure—at least the really good ones are. Firestein relates an anecdote about a brilliant scientist and teacher who would walk through

his lab, asking his students how things were going. If they said “Fine,” he just moved on. It was only the ones who were stuck, the ones for whom something was going wrong, that got his attention. What interested him was why it was not working.

There is no shortage of anecdotes about being wrong: how we can’t see when or why we’re wrong; how people have and have not learned from being wrong; how being wrong can lead to enlightenment or catastrophe; how someone was vilified for being wrong and only later recognized as being right (the history of medicine is chock full of those stories). We can pick the anecdotes that support our view of wrongness and ignore the ones that undermine it. But one truth we should keep in mind is that meaningful openmindedness is usually hard, conscious work. There are times when it is far from obvious when to be humble and when to be resolute. There are times when tolerance of contrary views (extended sometimes with, sometimes without, respect) is more appropriate than openmindedness.

Intellectual humility is certainly not a call to be open-minded in the sense of being fully ready to revise or reconsider any or all views at any and all times. The

easy examples are, well, easy. We don’t have to be open-minded to arguments that promote alien abduction or genocide. But what about abortion, climate change, or gun control? We don’t have to buy the easy bumper-sticker maxim of “doubt everything” in order to be intellectually humble. But we also can’t expect to receive one-size-fits-all advice on when to suspend our suspension of judgment.

In an article titled, “What Open-Mindedness Requires,” in a 2009 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, William Hare offered his view on questions in this vein. “Is it wise to remain dubious about even apparently well-established scientific theories because science has been wrong before? Should we suspend judgment on all controversial matters until the issue in question is resolved? Should we pay attention to rumors and conspiracy theories just in case they might be true? Is it important to remind ourselves that cranks sometimes turn out to be unrecognized geniuses? How far should we think for ourselves about matters in which we lack expertise? Should we regard all views as embodying their own truth? Should we avoid concluding that anything is certain? Should we come to any definite conclusions at all?” Hare’s counsel: stay on your toes.

Wrestling with wrongness is a balancing act. We want to have justified confidence in our beliefs and yet avoid falling into the trap of intellectual arrogance where we are blind to the possibility of error, blind to the opportunities of seeing and understanding the world from new perspectives, and blind to our responsibilities to those who don’t share our views.

Both Schulz and Firestein (in his book Failure) begin their explorations with a quote by Benjamin Franklin. It’s a great quote, but I like Schulz’s paraphrase even better: “[W]rongness is a window into normal human nature— into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls.” Schulz also offers us the observation (or is it consolation?) “that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.” Good reason, she suggests, to see being wrong as a gift.

I like the ring of that. But do we think she’s right or wrong? I guess it all depends. l

DAVID BJERKLIE has been a science reporter, writer and editor at TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books, as well as a freelance contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T.; a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow; a two-time media grant recipient at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany; and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica.

We can pick the anecdotes that support our view of wrongness and ignore the ones that undermine it.

POETRY TO SOOTHE THE SOUL

by Kimberly L. Becker

Ihave “been acquainted with grief.” Who among us can’t relate, especially during these pandemic years of loss, whether individually or collectively?

As a former hospice, ICU, and trauma chaplain, I have been with people at the worst times of their lives. In some cases, I took on their grief, called secondary loss, common among healthcare workers. This secondary loss predated my own bout with the original variant of covid, my grief at job loss and loss of a prior level of health, compounded by divorce after 25 years, other medical issues, and the deaths of a both a parent and a beloved pet (the latter of which is a grief that often goes unacknowledged).

What has gotten me through these hard times? Aside from the love of friends and family, I would say poetry has been healing for me. I think of the lines, “Nothing I can sing will bring you back. Not the songs of a hundred horses running until they become wind” from Joy Harjo’s “Songs from the House of Death or How to Make it Through to the End of a Relationship.” And these lines, too, speak to me: “tonight I can write the saddest lines” from “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)” by Pablo Neruda. And I have written the line, “things should have been different.”

The sounds of poetry, meant to be read aloud, have come back to me, and I see the frantic image of the drowning swimmer in Stevie Smith’s poem: “I was much further out than you thought/ And not waving but drowning” (“Not Waving but

Drowning”). How many of us have felt we were drowning during these last couple of years of the pandemic? In anxiety, in defeat, in depression, in hopelessness? Poetry seems to hear and echo what’s on our hearts: “And yet you will weep and know why./ Now no matter, child, the name:/ Sorrow’s springs are the same.” (from “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins). There is healing in the words that read like a prayer: We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us.

We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty. (from Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem”)

Joy Harjo, as you may know, was our first Indigenous Poet Laureate, whose work witnesses to the first songs sung on this stolen land.

The poetry of the Judeo-Christian psalms can also be of comfort: yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Poetry, the writing and reading of it, has helped me to survive and to heal. I hope you’ll consider joining me for a four-week class on the healing power of poetry, starting January 16. l

KIMBERLY L. BECKER is a Minot-based poet, whose latest collection, Bringing Back the Fire, was featured on One Book North Dakota

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself (Willa Cather, The Novel Démeublé).

IN PURSUIT OF WILLA CATHER AND “THE THING NOT NAMED”

by Rebecca Chalmers

When my sister and I talk about books or stories that have changed our lives, she recalls that our mother, a committed reader, in an effort to broaden her adolescent daughter’s mind and reading selections, recommended Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Unlike my sister, I didn’t read anything by Cather for a long while, not until I was an adult. I had mistakenly thought of her writing as nothing terribly substantial. It didn’t have the heft, I thought, to hold my interest. Contributing to my naïve assessment, Cather’s work may well have fallen out of fashion in the revolving door of a text-selection process that excluded her when I made my way through school. It was never assigned; thus I discounted it. Such omissions occur. Although our mother’s suggestion to me (Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) proved perhaps a more challenging endeavor for my

developing intellect, it is Willa Cather to whom a large portion of my adult interest and scholarly focus has been devoted.

Like my sister, I found my way into the Cather bibliography through My Ántonia, a fascinating book to the adult me because of its narrative perspective. Cather cleverly (in the best possible sense of that term) situates a male narrator, Jim Burden (and his “burden” is great at times), to tell the story of a Bohemian immigrant girl-to-woman experience that routinely begs the question, “What is it that Jim doesn’t get?” or “How is Jim misreading Ántonia?” or “Why is Jim such a romantic?”

Set against the backdrop of Cather’s adopted Nebraska, it is a boy-to-man romanticized version of a woman whose life is anything but romantic in a conventional or traditional sense.

I was mesmerized and often found myself

chuckling at Cather’s use of the male gaze, a device that allows her to masquerade as a man while at the same time commenting on, in extraordinarily wonderful ways, the misbegotten practice of judging women by and from the perspective of men. But the male masquerade was familiar to her, a practice that the young Willa Cather, identifying herself as William Cather M.D., tried on as a college student. These transgendered—if you will—narratives, can, and often do, challenge—albeit subtly— conventional readings of her work and raise any number of questions about what “the thing not named” might refer to in Cather’s work and life. Apart from her many accomplishments and publications, Cather lived in a way that few women of her era would have dared. While she would not have thought of herself as a feminist—it’s doubtful she would ever have considered such a term relevant—she operated as an independent entity; believed ardently in the value of privacy and destroyed many of her personal letters and artifacts; and maintained an almost forty-year relationship with Edith Lewis, with whom she lived until her death in 1947. Much has been written about her attraction to women, and this consideration—especially the long-enduring relationship with Lewis—provides an interesting

and powerful overlay to the discussion of her work.

But, at the same time, Cather demanded and commanded the respect of the writing and reading public. In terms of historical literary eras, she might well have been considered a “modernist” writer, joining the likes of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, though she rejected modernism per se and what it represented, almost as if she thought it a fad. She wanted to be taken seriously, as a writer of “classic” or traditional literature, not as a “woman” writer but as a writer who happened to be a woman, and she was determined to make her own path, to be as relevant as any male author had been.

Cather understood that, to make a significant contribution to literature, the male reading public must recognize and applaud her work as something other than the product of a “regionalist” writer, a category

to which women’s literary output was routinely relegated. Never mind that, say, William Faulkner, could create his own fictional Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha, populate it, and call it his “postage stamp on the world.” He would not be called a regionalist—a Southern writer, perhaps, but not with the disparaging, diminishing term used to describe writing by women—and a Nobel Prize for literature would guarantee that his seriousness of purpose was taken seriously.

After all, one’s perspective, if one happened to be a man, was considered substantially more important and translatable to a wider audience than if one were a woman… or so the thinking went. The work of most women, frequently overlooked or dismissed or generally considered fit for an audience comprising women only, didn’t pass the significance test. What could women know about how the world truly operated, and why would what they have to say be important enough to interest men or even for them to credit it? It was against this assumption that Cather struck out to define her writing.

It is fair to say that, among the romantic foundations of American literature, Cather’s prairie novels—especially My Ántonia and O Pioneers! have much contributed to the romanticization of American

She was determined to make her own path, to be as relevant as any male author had been.

expansion, at least as some early readers understood them. Still, at their core, these novels celebrate strong, independent women who, against all odds, make a mark on the landscape and on the lives of those around them. Cather is, by her own hand, transgressing the male romantic tradition and writing women into the serious discussion of national identity: who American women are and what they contribute to our cultural, financial, familial— and thus our national—identity. And she does so with such a deft hand that we hardly notice how forcefully she insinuates a particular point of view into our understanding of it all. Readers new to Cather are frequently surprised to find her style so compelling. She would have liked the moment of awareness her writing sparks in readers. As Hermione Lee, author of a definitive biography, first published in 1989 and then revised in 2017 with slight modifications (Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up and Willa Cather: Double Lives) notes, Her apparent simplicity, her authenticity and authority, her deep connection to places, her specific cultural histories, make her look straightforward and available. But she is no public monument, no laureate of rural America… Cather is unique, first of all, in being the only woman of her time to have appropriated a ‘great

tradition’ of male American writing… she is intervening in a masculine language of epic pastoral. The western frontier was a man’s world, subjected to masculine pioneering and male speech… the story of the frontier is essentially a male story, with the land as a woman (Lee, A Life Saved Up).

Confronting that tradition and making its revision her own, Cather defines her characters by what they can and do accomplish. They are not male stories that subjugate women to the will of men or victimize them. They are stories about people who refuse to be categorized by old norms, as Cather herself rejected such categorization in her own life. “She made her own version of the neverconcluded struggle in the American imagination between romance and realism, space and confinement, pioneering energy and elegiac memorializing” (Lee, A Life Saved Up). We are captivated both by her ability to make a sense of place come alive and by the power of her narratives to evoke the hard realism of the stories she captures.

Still, Cather’s contrarian approach was, at times, perplexing, and she could be fiercely opinionated. As the editor of an important and highly regarded literary magazine, McClure’s, she was

sometimes quite ruthless in her assessment of the writing of other women, as she was about Kate Chopin’s famous The Awakening. Accusing Chopin of being a member of the “forever clamoring” group (of women writers) “that demands more romance out of life than God put into it,” Cather admonishes Chopin and suggests a certain hopefulness that, with her next effort, “Miss Chopin will devote that flexible iridescent style of hers to a better cause.” Her response almost reeks of fear that Cather herself might be mistakenly considered among the same writing ranks as Chopin.

By contrast, we have Cather to thank for the beginning efforts to preserve the works of another woman, Sarah Orne Jewett. Cather visited with Jewett and took instruction from her, in the sense that it is Jewett we acknowledge for initially encouraging Cather to write more specifically out of the place and about the people she knew well: the plains, the prairie, and its inhabitants. We are in Jewett’s debt in that regard. A transplant to Nebraska when her family moved to Red Cloud when she was a girl of nine, Cather soaked up everything she could about her new home. Fascinated by the landscape, the dramatic vastness of the prairie, and its people, Cather took it all in and made it her own. Jewett understood that

this experience proved formative for both the writer’s life and her work.

Like Cather, I was born in Virginia but have lived in a number of states, though I never imagined making my life on the plains. Visiting them or reading Cather’s and other plains/prairie fiction was as close as I thought I’d ever get. As an East Coast girl, I was reluctant to get too far from the cultural venues and urban services that had much defined my life. Still, somewhat idyllically, I credit Cather with what ultimately landed me in North Dakota.

One day, casually perusing The Chronicle of Higher Education, I happened upon a small advertisement for a position at a North Dakota university, one that required an interest in “plains literature” and mentioned Cather by name. Intrigued, I applied for this appointment, was invited for an interview, and, quite simply, fell in love with the people and with a place far different from anywhere I had known. The welcoming unfamiliar beckoned me. Offered the position at the same time I had been offered a position at a major university in Philadelphia, I faced a decision on which my husband would leverage his considerable influence in favor of the East Coast school while noting, “Seriously, no one lives in North Dakota.” I assured him that they did; he wasn’t initially

convinced.

Still, the North Dakota folks were generous enough to allow me some time to finalize my decision, and he and I journeyed to the state nearly a month after the offer had come in to see if we could relocate to an area that was so very different from what we knew. We met with my potential colleagues, whom he liked right away, and played tourist in the area for a few days. Among the stops was a trip to Fort Abraham Lincoln in Mandan, and it was there that my decision was finalized. On that warm spring afternoon, the tall grass was bending and swaying to a particular kind of Missouri River breeze, and I turned and said, “That’s exactly what Cather describes, the grass as it moves.” His response, “We’re moving to the Northern Plains, aren’t we?” And I nodded. I couldn’t explain it, really, but it was, as Cather noted about “the thing not named,” a feeling, evoked by place, an unspoken awareness that I was supposed to be there.

Cather’s understanding of place and people is in many ways unparalleled. More importantly, her uncompromising approach to her subjects redefines traditional American literature while making a significant contribution to it. Like Sherwood Anderson, another American great, she counterbalances her characters’ secret lives against

the sometimes overwhelming American imperative to create romanticized national narratives of our collective experience and, in so doing, creates her own special brand of American fiction.

Her devotion to paring down narrative, as many modernist writers did, while, at the same time, creating an almost ethereal, intrinsic understanding of person and place, is what she defined as the power of “the thing not named.” The quest for how to communicate the otherwise incommunicable becomes her life’s mission, and it’s a fascinating cross-country journey… the exploration of her life and work, equally fascinating. l

REBECCA CHALMERS has spent her adult life on the study of literature. A Ph.D. in English (with concentrations in American literature, film studies, and critical theory) led her to a rich and rewarding academic career, the last thirteen years of which were spent with the English program at the University of Mary in Bismarck, and in regular work with the Humanities North Dakota. Currently, she resides on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she works as an independent scholar, with occasional university classes, and in freelance editing and writing, all while she continues to pen her own poetry and short stories. Rebecca is editor of Humanities North Dakota Magazine.

DEARLY DEPARTED: WRITE YOUR OWN OBITUARY

Ann Crews Melton

This is a 2-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: February 2 and 16 6-7:30 pm CST

A two-part writing workshop where you will be invited to reflect on a life well (and still to be) lived.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: In these fractured times, we all share one thing in common: we are mortal and must come to grips with our own inevitable demise. In this two-part writing workshop, you will be invited to reflect on a life well (and still to be) lived, how to best capture your personality, and what is important to you. The first session will discuss the role of obituaries, review examples, and present a basic template of the traditional form. In the second session we will workshop obituary drafts and offer feedback, and celebrate the lives of our classmates as we prepare to shuffle off this mortal coil.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Ann Crews Melton is executive director of Consensus Council, a Bismarck-based nonprofit, and previously served as an editor at the State Historical Society of ND and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in religion from Austin College and a master of arts degree in publishing and writing from Emerson College. She is an avid obituary reader and former reporter and community columnist for the Bismarck Tribune

DEATH AND THE GOOD LIFE

Tayo

Basquiat

This is a 4-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: January 19, 26, February 2, 9 7-8 pm CST

This class will be a general philosophical, not a specifically religious, exploration of the subject of death.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Seneca wrote, “Nothing can be of such great benefit to you . . . than to frequently contemplate the brevity of one’s life span, and its uncertainty. Whatever you undertake, cast your eyes on death.” Ugh! How

depressing, right? Not so. In fact, happiness and the good life will elude us if we fail to think about death. So, let’s give this a try, shall we? In this class, “Death and the Good Life,” we will read and discuss several classic philosophical writings on death and take up the questions they ask: what do we understand ourselves to be (our nature/kind of entity)? Do we have an immaterial part that survives death? Would immortality be a good thing? If death is the end, is death bad? Why is life defined by its limit? What is feared in death? How should the fact that I’m going to die affect the way I live? These are a few of the questions we’ll consider as we read and discuss selections from Plato, Seneca, Epicurus, Tolstoy, and others as a means of doing this personal philosophical work in our own lives. Side note: religions offer answers to these questions specific to their religious framework and theological underpinnings. This class will be a general philosophical, not a specifically religious, exploration of this subject. A syllabus will be provided a week in advance along with PDFs for all texts considered in the class.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Tayo Basquiat writes to pay attention and teaches to pay the bills. He and a passel of creatures dwell off-grid in the high desert of New Mexico.

ROMANTICISM IN SHORT FICTION: NATURALLY, WORTH A READ April van Buren

This is a 6-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: Feb. 16, 23, March 2, 9, 16, 23 6:30-8:30pm CST

Fascinating, strange and sometimes terrifying late 18th (and early 19th) century stories.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Learn about the late 18th (and early 19th) century literary movement through a study of short stories, including bizarre tales like Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark.” Despite common misconceptions, romanticism is not the same as romance. You are unlikely to find heaving bosoms here! Instead, we’ll find an assortment of fascinating, strange and sometimes terrifying stories which often include an emphasis on individualization and emotion, and an idealization of nature in opposition to science and industrialization.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: April van Buren is a digital media teacher in Madison, WI. She began her teaching career 20 years ago, teaching literature and journalism at a suburban high school in St. Louis county, Missouri. She was also an adjunct journalism professor at the University of New Mexico, a district librarian, hotel concierge, and the 2012 NM adviser of the year. Although she’s smart enough to hold teaching licenses in English, Journalism, Business Ed. and k-12 Library Sciences, she’s not smart enough to stay away from hobbies that involve getting hit on skates (roller derby and women’s ice hockey).

CONTESTED HISTORIES IN REMEMBERING AMERICANA Raffi Andonian

This is a 10-week virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays: February 8, 15, 22, March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, April 5, 12, 19, 26 12-1:30 pm CST

What makes historic sites, monuments, curriculums, publications, films, and symbols so controversial?

ABOUT THIS CLASS: We can better understand the world today by studying the provocative people and events of the past. What makes historic sites, monuments, curriculums, publications, films, and symbols so controversial? Conflicts over stories, spaces, and identities derive from their contested narratives, but how do we decide which perspectives are appropriate in each circumstance? We will examine an array of major topic areas, develop strategies for evaluating their histories, explore tools for helping us understand beyond our own opinions, and discuss as a group how we can all learn more and contribute constructively around us.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Raffi Andonian is a frequent guest on ABC-NBC-FOX-CBS TV stations nationwide and also produces and hosts his own streaming TV show that aims to challenge the present by inquiring the past. He has authored 3 Amazon best-selling books, and he has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in history and another master’s degree in historic preservation. He began his career as

Public University Classes

a guide working at the Gettysburg battlefield, the Martin Luther King Jr. childhood home, Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was created.

WILLA CATHER: THE

BEYOND Rebecca Chalmers

PRAIRIE AND

Thursdays: January 19, 26, February 2, 9, 16, 23, March 2, 9, 16, 23 2-4 pm CST

An in-depth look at American author Willa Cather.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: As a major American author, Willa Cather has long been connected to plains literature and identified by some as a “regionalist” writer, a designation against which she would no doubt have railed. She would have been right to do so. Her career as novelist, short story writer, and critic as well as her bibliography of published works speak for themselves, but in this course we will attempt to uncover even more about what Catherthe-writer and Cather-the-person often avoided addressing directly in her work. Through the exploration of several novels and a bit of biography, this course will examine the significant contribution that Cather made to the canon of American literature.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Rebecca Chalmers has spent her adult life on the study of literature. A Ph.D. in English (with concentrations in American literature, film studies, and critical theory) led her to a rich and rewarding academic career, the last thirteen years of which were spent with the English program at the University of Mary in Bismarck, and in regular work with the Humanities North Dakota. Currently, she resides on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she works as an independent scholar, with occasional university classes, and in freelance editing and writing, all while she continues to pen her own poetry and short stories.

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

Rebecca Chalmers

This is a 10-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Wednesdays: January 25, February 1, 8, 15, 22, March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 2-4 pm CST

What makes people do the right thing and under which circumstances?

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-Century British Prime Minister, called justice “truth in action.” The concept and practice of justice run deep in our American roots, to say nothing of our religious leanings. Justice, and how it manifests itself, is directly related to power, who has it, and how it is wielded. In this literature and film course, we will explore what makes people do the right thing and under which circumstances. Reading a widely disparate group of texts-ranging from Sophocles to John Grisham--and film adaptations of the pieces we read, we will examine our personal, cultural, and moral responses to this significant topic.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Rebecca Chalmers has spent her adult life on the study of literature. A Ph.D. in English (with concentrations in American literature, film studies, and critical theory) led her to a rich and rewarding academic career, the last thirteen years of which were spent with the English program at the University of Mary in Bismarck, and in regular work with the Humanities North Dakota. Currently, she resides on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she works as an independent scholar, with occasional university classes, and in freelance editing and writing, all while she continues to pen her own poetry and short stories.

THE WRITE STUFF

Rebecca Chalmers

This is a 2-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays: January 5 and 19 5-7 pm CST

Exploring writing for publication.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Using a kind of workshop format, this course encourages submissions

to HumanitiesND Magazine and alerts participants to the basic expectations for publishable work. It will cover the basic criteria for consideration, provide some “pro” tips for good writing practice, and offer feedback on potential projects. We will meet on two consecutive Thursday evenings in January 2023, in anticipation of submissions to the magazine for the coming year and beyond. Please join us!

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Rebecca Chalmers has spent her adult life on the study of literature. A Ph.D. in English (with concentrations in American literature, film studies, and critical theory) led her to a rich and rewarding academic career, the last thirteen years of which were spent with the English program at the University of Mary in Bismarck, and in regular work with the Humanities North Dakota. Currently, she resides on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she works as an independent scholar, with occasional university classes, and in freelance editing and writing, all while she continues to pen her own poetry and short stories.

THE HUMANITIES ARE CALLING!

Brian Palecek

This is a 4-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Sundays: February 5, 12, 19, 26 1:30-3:30 pm CST

A lively symposium in four sessions for friends of the humanities who want to be effective advocates.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Join humanities students, colleagues, scholars, friends, and passionate life-long learners to discuss, explore, and strategize ways to support and celebrate the humanities and to counter efforts to diminish this vital part of cultural life. This course is guided, but fully interactive. Come prepared to share ideas, insights, and issues leading to the decline of humanities programs.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: These four discussion sessions will be directed by humanities scholar Brian Palecek. Brian is a longtime participant in public humanities programs, since the inception of Humanities North Dakota and its

forerunners in the 1970s. He is also a college English, Literature, and Humanities teacher, serving at United Tribes Technical College for 31 years until his recent retirement. His documentary film “Conversations on the Bench” received support from Humanities ND. Brian recently taught two Humanities Zoom courses: “Viva Humanities! Embrace Your Inner Scholar” and “A Thousand Poems.”

OJIBWE GRAMMAR II

Alex DeCoteau

This is a 10-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Tuesdays: January 10, 24, 31, February 7, 21, March 7, 14, 28, April 11, 25 6-8 pm CST

Student driven, beginner/intermediate course focusing on Ojibwe language grammar.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: This is a student driven, beginner/intermediate course of the Ojibwe grammar continuing from Ojibwe Grammar l class, in an Indigenous pedagogy space.

Student driven means, students are encouraged to ask questions to drive the curriculum to accommodate the students’ learning interests.

Indigenous pedagogy means the learning is co-created by all. “Gikinoo’amaading”, the Ojibwe cultural concept of learning means “learning from one another.” Another Indigenous aspect of learning is that there are no “mistakes”. There are only teachings (learnings from so called ‘mistakes’). In an Indigenous pedagogy, students support one another mutually (wiidookodaading). There is no competition or hierarchy in the learning environment.

Each weekly class will consist of a preview of the last lesson’s concepts, introduction of new concepts, practice, and questions from students.

Miigwech Ojibwemo yan!

Thank you for speaking Ojibwe!

Gechitwaabandang (Dreams Holy) Alex DeCoteau

Mikinaak Wajiw Anishinaabe (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe)

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Alex DeCoteau is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. He teaches Native Language at the high school on his reservation. He has been teaching the Ojibwe language since 2004.

THE MESSINESS OF HUMAN NATURE

Serge Danielson-Francois

This is a 3-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Mondays: February 20, 27, and March 6 7-8:30 pm CST

Let’s write a contemporary interpretation of Federalist 51!

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Some of the classic texts that will inform our class conversations are The Republic by Plato, Utopia by Thomas More and After Utopia by Judith Shklar. The driving question is how do we create a shared reality rooted, but not mired, in the messiness of human nature? We will end the course by writing a contemporary interpretation of Federalist 51.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Serge Danielson-Francois is an educator at Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

THE HEALING POWER OF POETRY

Kimberly L. Becker

This is a 4-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Mondays: January 16, 23, 30, and February 6 6:30-8:30pm CST

Poetry can speak to and act as salve for those deep heartaches.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: We will explore poetry both as container and “medicine” for grief. Most of us have experienced grief at some point in our lives; poetry can speak to and act as salve for those deep heartaches. We will listen to poems, read poems, and even try our hand at writing poems. The pandemic has brought grief to the forefront: so many deaths, but also grief from loss of work, loss of health, loss of what felt “normal.” Collectively, we will be processing the trauma of the pandemic for some time. Poetry can help ease the pain of loss. No writing experience necessary. No required texts.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Minot-based poet Kimberly L. Becker has published five books with national presses. She has received numerous grants and residencies for her poetry. Kimberly has also served as a hospice, ICU, and level 1 trauma chaplain.

THE WRITTEN ME: LAYING THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR MEMOIR

Sue Skalicky

This is a 6-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: January 12, 19, February 2, 9, 16, 23 6-8 pm CST

Take a deep breath, shush the naysayers in your mind, and take this first step towards writing your story.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: During this course the daunting task of writing your memoir will be demystified and the process will be simplified. Plan to laugh, learn, and launch your story. Sign up today to embark on your journey to a memoir you will be proud to share!

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Sue Skalicky is a writer, speaker, and pursuer of abundant life. Over the past 30 years, she has worked as a medical photographer, photojournalist, leadership trainer, writer, and teacher. She has written for several publications including the Casper Journal, The Small Group Network, Christianity Today, and The New York Times. Sue has published two books, Change For a Penny and The Silent Sound of Darkness, and co-authored the anthology Deserts To Mountaintops: Our Collective Journey To (Re)Claiming Our Voice (as Sue Muraida). She is currently the program director for Humanities North Dakota.

THE THREE HATS: STAGES OF WRITING AND EDITING YOUR MEMOIR

Sue Skalicky

This is a 6-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: March 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, April 6 6-8 pm CST

Join this fun group of writers who are curious about what it would look like to publish a memoir. All levels of writers are welcome!

ABOUT THIS CLASS: A broad look at the technical process of writing a memoir through the instructor’s personal experiences and the experiential wisdom of memoir writers Robert Benson and Mary Karr. This class is broken down into three stages: writing, editing, and publishing, and offers a long list of resources, handouts, and inspiration for writers at all stages of writing a memoir.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Sue Skalicky is a writer, speaker, and pursuer of abundant life. Over the past 30 years, she has worked as a medical photographer, photojournalist, leadership trainer, writer, and teacher. She has written for several publications including the Casper Journal, The Small Group Network, Christianity Today, and The New York Times. Sue has published two books, Change For a Penny and The Silent Sound of Darkness, and co-authored the anthology Deserts To Mountaintops: Our Collective Journey To (Re) Claiming Our Voice (as Sue Muraida). She is currently the program director for Humanities North Dakota.

intellectual humility and what are the factors that encourage it? Are there downsides to being too humble? Surely we don’t have to be open-minded about all of our beliefs, do we? Join us as we explore how we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: David Bjerklie has been a science reporter, writer and editor at TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books, as well as a freelance contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T.; a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow; a two-time media grant recipient at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany; and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica.

INFORMATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Nigel Haarstad

THE BEAUTY OF BEING W ONG

David Bjerklie

R

This is a 6-week virtual class using the Zoom platform. Sundays: February 19, 26, March 5, 12, 19, 26 3-4:30 pm CST

Intellectual humility is linked to a long list of potential benefits, personal as well as social.

This is a 6-week virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays: January 18, 25, February 1, 8, 15, 22 7:30-9 pm CST

This class will explore the phenomenon of disinformation in order to equip us to be smarter consumers of information, especially in online spaces.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: How is today’s disinformation different from Yellow Journalism or propaganda? What makes people susceptible to “fake news,” and why some more than others? What can we do, personally, to avoid falling victim to it, and how might we help others? Drawing primarily on social science research, case studies, and current events, we will take an a-political approach to making sense of what some researchers have termed “information disorder” in the digital age.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Dr. Nigel Haarstad is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Studies, teaching remotely for the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He has spent the last decade studying the ways social media is changing our communication patterns, working as a Computational Disinformation Analyst

tracking coordinated campaigns, designing messaging for emergency alerts, and studying the impact of “new media” on our perceptions of risk. On the weekends, you’ll find Nigel out on the prairie taking photos of wildlife, biking, or anything else not involving a screen.

BLACK ELK’S LIFE SPEAKS: “THAT MUCH... MORE.”

Michael W. Taylor

This is a 6-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: Jan 12, 26; Feb. 9, 23; March 9, 23 6:30-8:30 pm CST

An exploration of the life and times of iconic Lakota healer Black Elk.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: Join the learning venture, as we explore the life and times of the iconic Lakota healer Black Elk. While much has been written about Black Elk, there is more to discern through the eyes of those related to him such as great, great (great) grandson Maka Black Elk. Whether your interest is Black Elk Lakota healer, Black Elk European traveler, Black Elk at historic events like Little Bighorn or Wounded Knee, or Black Elk Servant of God on the way to sainthood, join us in the dialogue as we learn together how Black Elk Speaks: “That Much... More.”

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Mike Taylor is entering his 30th year as an educator in a variety of learning setting from K-12 to the university setting; and has recently published his first book: Perpetuating Joy in Affinity Spaces Through Intercultural Pedagogy; and has another book slated for 2023: Black Elk's Life Speaks: “That Much... More.”. Mike shares his educational journey with his wife, who has also been in education for decades and teaches at the elementary level; and four adult children all of which have graduated from college and some of which are presently pursing graduate degrees. The Taylors also have two brother and sister beagles, and enjoy the outdoors, gardening, hiking, and kayaking.

RIDING THE BACK OF THE TIGER: AMERICA AND THE VIETNAM WAR, 1945-75

Rick Collin

This is a 5-week virtual class using the Zoom platform.

Thursdays: March 30, April 6, 13, 20, 27 7-9 pm CST

A close look at the Vietnam War and its impact on America and the world.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: This course will examine the Vietnam War, which had an enormous impact on American society and the role of the U.S. in world affairs. Until Afghanistan, it was our longest war. This course will cover from 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared an independent North Vietnam, to 1975 when South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam. The main focus will be on the years the U.S. was most involved, 1961-75. The course will meet five nights — the first night will be an introduction, then each night after that will be devoted to a particular phase of the war. The goal of this course is to examine the war’s chronology, while also providing ample time for discussion.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Rick Collin is a historian with a passion for history told through stories. Rick worked for the State Historical Society of North Dakota and taught America in the 1960s, The American Presidency, The History of World War II, The United States To 1877 and The United States Since 1877 at the University of Mary and Bismarck State College. Rick is an Army veteran whose brother-in-law was a medic with the Marines in Vietnam and whose next-doorneighbor in Maryland, an Army soldier, was killed in the Battle of Hamburger Hill in May 1969.

10 BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS BEFORE JANE AUSTEN

Sarah Faulkner

This is a 5-week virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays: March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 5-7 pm CST

A five-week course celebrating Women’s History Month

ABOUT THIS CLASS: While many of us are

familiar with the novels of Jane Austen, few of us have heard of the women writers who paved the way for her success. This five-week course celebrating Women’s History Month will focus on 10 fascinating women writers before Austen’s time. Spanning 150 years from 1650-1800, Dr. Sarah Faulkner will share the incredible stories from the lives of early novelists Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, social activists Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anna Letitia Barbauld, Romantic poets Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Gothic best-selling novelist Ann Radcliffe, and the realist novelists Austen was directly inspired by: Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth.

This class will be a mix of literary history and biography. Learn how these women were essential to shaping the Gothic novel, the National novel, and the Courtship novel, new forms of Romantic poetry, and philosophy on human rights. And these women did so much more than write! They served as political spies, celebrities, actresses, and royal mistresses, advocated for the abolition of slavery, introduced the smallpox inoculation to Britain, and wrote novels from horrifying London jails. We’ll read short selections from each writer’s work in class, and Dr. Faulkner will have an ample suggested reading list ready for you to peruse.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Dr. Sarah Faulkner is an award-winning scholar, teacher, and public humanist. Her research focuses on British women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; she has taught university courses on Jane Austen and Her World, Witches and Monsters in Fiction, The Romantic Age, Rise of the English Novel, and more. She currently teaches at the University of Washington, Seattle, and works as the Program Manager for Humanities Washington.

WOLVES WITHIN: WOMEN’S FICTION AND THE MODERN FABLE Claire Barwise

This is a 8-week virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays: January 17, 24, 31, February 7, 14, 21, 28, March 7 12-1:30 pm CST

Contemporary short stories from across the globe.

ABOUT THIS CLASS: In this course, we will read contemporary short stories from across the globe, all of which use elements of the magical and fantastic to convey psychological truths in women’s lives. As we will find, the modern fable shows itself to be far from simple in either form or content, as authors draw on multiple genres and stylistic techniques to engage complex questions of gender, sexuality, power, history, and the self.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Claire Barwise holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English Literature. Her work has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Feminist Modernist Cultures, and Modern Fiction Studies. She currently resides in Philadelphia, PA and teaches at Drexel University.

Humanities ND Magazine Writers’ Guidelines

Humanities ND Magazine is a quarterly publication that engages with ideas on all topics related to the Humanities and accepts submissions throughout the year from writers across the United States. In 2 (Spring and Fall) of our 4 issues, we offer specific programmatic content about the many events, courses, book/author discussions that Humanities ND offers. The other issues, “Sense of Place” (spring) and “Gray Matters” (fall), ask for specific kinds of content submissions. Please bear in mind that we seek a variety of voices and perspectives, and, to that end, we rarely publish submissions from the same writers in these 2 issues each year.

Program Issues (spring and fall): Instructors are encouraged to submit “teasers”—not a syllabus or specific course description, but rather something more reflective though related to their upcoming courses. They may submit in any category (essay/ article, fiction, poetry) and must imagine an audience that might be intrigued by their course offering. We occasionally offer other pieces in our program issues, but they primarily focus on courses and events.

The “Sense of Place” Issue (spring): For this issue alone, we focus most particularly on submissions from writers with a direct connection to North Dakota, and consider work from all categories. Writers might focus on how that connection has affected them, in terms of history, memory, education, landscape, ethnic identity, art, music, culture, family—a broad range of topics.

The “Gray Matters” Issue (fall): This issue, as its title suggests, focuses on more cerebral/ philosophical ideas. It often features “scholarly” articles (see below) but could include clearly written discussions on any relevant issues of concern to writers. It might also include contemplative poetry, memoir, or short fiction.

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES, GUIDELINES, AND CRITERIA

Humanities ND Magazine accepts several kinds of

year round. at any time for the “Sense of Place” or “Gray Matters” issues. Please note the specific guidelines that pertain to each category and see also Submission Criteria:

NONFICTION: Most of our submissions come from writers of articles—essays, creative nonfiction, memoir. These pieces should fit a range of a minimum of 1,000 to a maximum of 4,000 words. Although we do accept previously published work (for which we do not pay), we prefer original work.*

Within this category, we also accept “scholarly” essays, with the understanding that they must reflect consideration for a wide audience, not merely for colleagues in the writer’s field. Such pieces should demonstrate careful research, must make a clear, cohesive point within the 4,000-word limit, and must be well argued with supporting materials from personal or professional experience. They may focus on any humanities topic: culture, literature, film, history, ethnic studies, art, music—on any human/society endeavor or product.

FICTION: As with nonfiction submissions, we expect a 1,000—4,000-word range and expect, with certain occasional exceptions, that work will be original/unpublished.* Both short stories and chapters/excerpts from novels will be considered for publication.

POETRY: Poetry submissions must not exceed 60 lines. Given our limited ability to publish the poetry

that we receive, we accept no more than 2 pieces/ poems per submission. Submissions of greater than 2 pieces will not receive our consideration. As with all other submissions, we prize original work but may consider previously published pieces.*

ARTWORK: Please note: While we currently seek and encourage submissions of artwork to accompany articles/fiction/poetry, we are not accepting unsolicited submissions of artwork at this time. All submissions—original artwork, personal photographs, graphic art—must be of high, reproducible quality and are only published with appropriate permissions, for which the submitter is responsible.

*REPRINTED WORK: Selections of nonfiction, poetry, fiction, or artwork are allowable submissions. In this case, we generally look for recently published work, though, depending upon context, an older piece could also be considered. These submissions must be specifically identified as such and include both publication information and appropriate permissions—no exceptions in this regard.

PAYMENT FOR PUBLICATION: We pay $250 for articles, fiction pieces, and poetry, and $500 for scholarly essays and artwork selected for publication. Authors and artists maintain rights to their work and, if a piece is used on our website, can request that their piece be taken down at any time. As noted above, we do not pay authors for reprinted work.

SUBMISSION CRITERIA

NUTS AND BOLTS: All submissions must conform to some basic considerations, among them

1. Please carefully read all information regarding magazine issues, guidelines, and criteria prior to making submissions using the Google form (this link can be found in our magazine and on our website at humanitiesnd.org/news).

2. No piece of any kind should be submitted without the writer having performed a careful selfediting process to assure that it is as error-free as possible;

3. Pieces should clearly identify the writer and title, and provide the writer’s e-mail address/contact information;

4. Submissions must be double spaced, conform to standard expectations regarding usage, and be written in 12-point typeface with appropriate margins (generally 1 inch) all around;

5. All submissions will be initially reviewed to determine whether they meet both our criteria and our current need. Humanities ND Magazine reserves the right to refuse any publication that does not meet such expectations. Please note: submissions that are accepted are not guaranteed immediate publication. Our acceptance response will indicate when we anticipate publication;

6. Writers should anticipate that Humanities ND Magazine will edit for clarity—in terms of style, grammar, and mechanics. We will never tamper with content, but may ask questions related to it when necessary.

All questions should be submitted to Rebecca Chalmers, Editor, HumanitiesND Magazine at hndmagazine@humanitiesnd.org

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D. ENGELMAN

Harley Engelman is currently a contract consultant with the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation (CSAVR). Engelman and his wife, Rebecca, are the co-founders of The Engelman Group, an integrated marketing and management solutions company specializing in vocational rehabilitation business partnership strategies, disability-related messaging and imagery, and arts and education program development. During his 45-plus years of professional experience, he served as the Business Relations/Marketing Director for the North Dakota Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (NDDVR) and was an adjunct professor with the University of Mary, Bismarck, for over a decade.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS & STAFF

HND Board of Directors

CHAIR Dennis Cooley, Fargo

VICE CHAIR Linda Steve, Dickinson

Lyle Best, Watford City

Dina Butcher, Bismarck

Patty Corwin, Fargo

Harley Engelman, Bismarck

Angela S. Gorder, Bottineau

Eric L. Johnson, Grand Forks

Hamzat A. Koriko, Grand Forks

Jessica Rockeman, Richardton

Prairie Rose Seminole, Garrison

Barb Solberg, Minot

Amy Stromsodt, Larimore

Rebecca Thiem, Bismarck

Sarah Vogel, Bismarck

Staff

Brenna Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Nick Glass, Director of Fiscal Operations Sue Skalicky, Program Director Lacie Van Orman, Marketing Director Joleyn Laron, Podcast Producer Crista McCandless, Program Manager Rebecca Chalmers, Editor Humanities ND Magazine

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