Fall Program Issue, 2024 Humanities North Dakota Magazine

HUM NITIES

THE FALL PROGRAM ISSUE

02  WHEN HISTORY AND LEGEND COLLIDE by Christopher M. Bellitto

06  PERPETUAL COVENANT by Brooks Susman

10  DEMOCRACY LESSONS by Kevin Walker

18 LIFE, LITERATURE, AND POLITICS by Tayo Basquiat

22 SOUND AND FORM IN POEM CONSTRUCTION by Shadd Piehl

26  SPECULATIVE FICTION...LET’S GO ON A JOURNEY by Steven A. Guglich

32  STOP. WORK. AUTHORITY. by Mark Hernberg

38 ARTIST PROFILE: RICH SOLBERG

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Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities North Dakota.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE SOUL

BRENNA GERHARDT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

In 1874, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator.” In it, he asked, “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Nietzsche believed the answer to these questions would reveal “the fundamental law of your very self.” He offered guiding questions, not the pat answers and “life hacks” dominating social media today.

In 1934, T.S. Eliot presented a pageant play entitled “The Rock,” which lamented “an age which advances progressively backwards.” Troubled by secularization and society’s fixation on material progress at the cost of spiritual growth, he asked his audience:

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Nietzsche wanted to break open the human heart to plumb its depths. Eliot questioned the foundation of a society built upon fast-paced scientific and technological progress that subjugated the human spirit to antiquity.

The humanities ask us to dive deeply into finding the vocation of our souls so we may engage with wisdom in the world’s affairs. From interior spiritual landscape to external social geography, this is the terrain of the humanities.

Thinkers like Nietzsche and Eliot serve as guides toward deeper meaning and purpose. Their wisdom was opened to me through the help of patient and kind instructors willing to meet me where I was on my learning journey.

I’m still learning and in need of instruction. That’s why I’m passionate about Humanities North Dakota’s work, which is to connect you and me to teachers eager to help us learn from the great thinkers past and present.

Blessings on your journey. I’m right there with you.

Executive Director & Fellow Lifelong Learner

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST, RICH SOLBERG

Rich Solberg has been turning metal and wood into artwork for six decades, often using blacksmithing tools like the forge and anvil. Much of the work is created from re-purposed metal, from farm and oilfield scrap often donated by friends, or collected from the Minot flood of 2011. His works are found in private collections, churches, and businesses in many states, Canada, and Norway.

WHEN HISTORY AND LEGEND COLLIDE

by Christopher M. Bellitto

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So we hear in the 1962 movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Take the familiar legend of George Washington, the most honest lad around. He’s about six years old in the late 1730s. His father, Augustine, asks if he chopped down a cherry tree. “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”

It’s a great story, except nobody can prove it really happened. The initial edition of the first Washington biography by Mason Locke Weems (more commonly known as Parson Weems because he was a minister) came out in 1800, the year after Washington died. The story’s not in that one nor in the next three editions. Maybe a public hungry for more prompted Weems to discover the tale in his notes or from a muddled recollection of a very elderly neighbor or maybe he just made it up.

That doesn’t mean the legend is false. Follow me: Washington was known to be a person of uncommon integrity. The story illustrates that admirable attribute at a very young age. If the exchange with his father didn’t happen as Weems recounts, that doesn’t make the adult Washington any less honest. So the truth behind the story—Washington’s exemplary character—is accurate even though the cherry tree episode could well be nothing more than legend.

The best history never leaves the story out. We can add that every history has a legend and every legend has a history. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a good story. We hear their power in the wonderful title and subtitle of a

book by the child psychiatrist Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (HarperCollins, 1990). We grew up with stories. We pass them to our own children and grandchildren: Aesop’s fables, the boy who cried wolf, Icarus flying too close to the sun as an ancient Greek warning of not overstepping your bounds and being brought down by your own hubris.

What’s wrong in a legend can also teach. Some historians get angry when a film “gets it wrong.” I’m of the opinion that a film can get all sorts of details wrong but the big picture right. Take the film Gladiator (2000): no, a gladiator didn’t kill the emperor in the Colosseum in front of thousands of screaming Romans. But the film does portray well how violence was a daily part of Roman life and how even an aristocratic woman was essentially trapped by her gender. Let’s look at other examples.

There’s the legend of the Children’s Crusade: many thousands of Christian children, on their own initiative and without almost any adult supervision, left France and Germany to fight the Muslims in the Holy Land in the early thirteenth century. There are about 50 accounts from that century, but many repeat each other and agree on very little. Did they get to the Holy Land or even board ships? It’s not always clear. Most stories end with the children drowning, slaughtered, or enslaved. In many of these scenarios, they’re depicted as crusading martyrs or holy innocents like the boys under the age of two slaughtered by Herod the Great in an attempt to kill the baby Jesus. That, by the way, is yet another legend with absolutely no witness in first-century records, not even

The best history never leaves the story out. We can add that every history has a legend and every legend has a history.

the Roman Jewish historian Josephus who kept a precise account of Herod’s reign.

Remarkably, the legend of the Children’s Crusade comes down to one Latin word: pueri. It means boys literally and can mean children, yes, but it can also mean bachelor, young adult, son, servant, or slave. There are very few other accounts corroborating the stories and we have lots of records about voyages from the time period. The omission is striking.

So why does the story matter if it didn’t happen or at least didn’t happen on the scale recounted by sketchy sources? Again, a good book title helps: Gary Dickson’s The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Not only does he debunk the legend, but he also says why the legend’s existence and persistence matter. First, it represents the fact that Crusade fervor had started to slip in Europe after the Muslim leader Saladin took Jerusalem back from the Christian crusaders in 1187. The story could have been used to rally or shame another wave of soldiers to get going—if children were this committed, why can’t you be? Think of a medieval army recruitment poster asking: Daddy, what did you do during the Crusades? Second, this story became very popular in the Enlightenment centuries when religion increasingly came under greater scrutiny and even derision. A legend like the Children’s Crusade served the critics’ caricature of the Middle Ages as a wild superstitious age that their new, enlightened thinking rose above.

The same is true of the inquisition legends, another favorite target of anti-religious authors ready to depict all believers as mindless zealots. Here’s the history first. Yes, the inquisitions were enormously unfair: little due process, limited innocent-until-proven-guilty, and few protections against false witness. Starting on a small scale, local inquisitions sought to root out heretics, which often caught women in charges of witchcraft, as well.

Burning heretics in an auto-de-fé in the 12th-14th centuries was mostly a rare event, but penalties were still severe: long-term imprisonment or exile, complete economic and reputational ruin of you and your family.

What most people think of is the Spanish Inquisition—THE Inquisition—starting in the fifteenth century, which quickly ran amuck with nearly no accountability under the notorious Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada, who was inquisitor general from 1483 until his death in 1498. Under him, there was greater use of torture and the death penalty: about 2,000 questioned were killed in his term. This inquisition was exported to the Americas with Columbus and conquistadores who butchered nonChristian indigenous people. The system was on the books for centuries until it was finally abolished in 1834.

Was it that bad? Yes, but it was also exaggerated both by Enlightenment writers, as in the case of the Children’s Crusade, as well as by Anglicans and Dutch Calvinists who painted Spanish Catholics with what came to be called the Black Legend. Writers also ran with the Inquisition in all its forms: Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1881), in which the Grand Inquisitor arrests Jesus for interrogation. (Jesus is released.) So the legend went beyond the history, but the legend itself is history because it represents anti-Catholic and antireligious sentiment in the modern world. The Black Legend reflected the awful truth of the competition between European nations and religions for money and souls.

One last example: did England’s King Henry II really order a hit on Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170? They’d once been friends— something of a medieval bromance—but became frenemies. Becket had been chancellor of England, essentially second in command. When the archbishop of Canterbury died, Henry thought

he’d have greater control of the church if he put his friend in charge. Something happened within Becket, and he decided his ultimate loyalty was to protect the church even at the cost of his long friendship with the king. As the legend goes, Henry at Christmas dinner shouted out in a drunken rage: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The adjective is sometimes translated as ‘troublesome’ or ‘turbulent’. Four of his knights took this as a command to murder Becket and hacked him to death near the altar in Canterbury Cathedral several days later on December 29, 1170.

Trouble is: there’s no record of Henry saying that. Yes, he could well have wanted Becket out of the picture, and people do say things when they are drunk that they may not really believe (although, in vino veritas….). The earliest record comes about a decade later from someone named Edmund Grim, who not only was an eyewitness to the murder but had his arm severely slashed during the attack. His report from 1180, ten years later, is that Henry had cried out: “I’ve nourished and raised up in my kingdom such worthless and wretched men who hold no faith in their lord that they let me be shamefully scorned by a common cleric” (my translation).

Here’s the first problem: that’s hardly a direct order from Tony Soprano. Here’s the second problem: none of the Latin words Grim records has the sense of meddlesome or troublesome or turbulent even in the loosest translation. The words in question from Grim are a plebeo…clerico: the key word gives us plebian—common, ordinary, lowborn. The same is true in the few other accounts that appear in the decades after 1170: nothing close to meddlesome, troublesome, or turbulent. The earliest record of that famous phrasing is 1740—more than 500 years later. Here’s the third problem: we don’t know whether Henry cried out in Latin, which seems unlikely, or in French, or in the Anglo-Norman language mashup people used

after the Norman Conquest in 1066. But the last problem is the worst: Grim didn’t hear the king first-hand, regardless of what language he spoke. Henry was not in England for Christmas 1170, but across the English Channel in Normandy. Grim was in Canterbury and could not have heard for himself what Henry said. Does it matter? Yes and no: we want as much precision as we can get, but in that heated moment, Henry likely did believe his life would be easier without Becket than with him.

In the end, legend can be imprecise but still accurate history. We can learn from both. l

DR. CHRISTOPHER M. BELLITTO is a Professor of History at Kean University in New Jersey, where he teaches courses in ancient and medieval history and specializes in medieval and church history. He has twice won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary and a Fulbright Specialist in New Zealand and the Netherlands. Dr. Bellitto also serves as series Editor in Chief of Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition and Academic Editor at Large for Paulist Press. He offers public lectures frequently and is also a media commentator on church history and contemporary Catholicism. His latest book is Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue (Georgetown University Press, 2023).

Did you find this article interesting? Christopher Bellitto will be teaching History’s Heroines, Heroes, and Legends on Mondays, Sept. 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct. 7, 14 7-8:30 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classesevents

PERPETUAL COVENANT

by Brooks Susman

To classical commentators, clergy, and teachers, the Bible offers not merely laws, traditions, and values, but also lessons of human beings and their interactions with each other as individuals, societies, and nations. The characters serve as “symbolic exemplars” of honor or failure. We teach about them, learn from them, and use them as models for behavior.

For millennia, the story of Jacob stealing the birthright and blessing from his older twin, Esau, has been a classic cautionary tale. The text interestingly proves that the popular assumption that there was a conscious theft by Jacob alone is questionable. As the text notes, Jacob is destined to be the inheritor. The foreshadowing that The Lord gives to Rebecca, “Two nations are in your womb…and the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23) foreshadows that it will be Jacob and not Esau who will receive the mantle of responsibility of being chosen by God. Jacob is aided and abetted by his mother, while his father Isaac eventually comes to realize which of his two sons is worthy. Any number of lessons emerge from this tale of sibling rivalry and parental responsibility, not the least of which is that it also serves as a lesson in redemption as the two brothers finally reconcile, with Esau accepting a truce with Jacob.

So, the simple story: Father Isaac favors Esau, the hunter who provides him with meat, while Rebecca loves Jacob, who is a “boy of the tents,” a “momma’s boy.” Being the older of the twins, Esau is the “bachur/the firstborn,” the typical recipient of the

birthright and the blessing. The blessing, however, is the inheritance, not of wealth and lands, but of the responsibility to continue serving one’s deity, who pledges faithfulness and protection for those who follow the laws and tenets of that god.

Upon returning from a failed hunt, Esau, famished, begs Isaac for a serving of red lentils. Jacob agrees, but only if Esau relinquishes his birthright. Thus begins the enmity that culminates in Esau marrying Hittite women, offspring of Canaan, the despised and exiled son of Noah. “They were a bitterness to both Isaac and Rebecca” (Gen. 26:34-35). Although the text does not specifically “say it,” it is obvious that both parents are rethinking who deserves to be the recipient of the blessing, which brother demonstrates the savviness and decision-making skills to lead a great nation.

But what is a “blessing?” Blessing, in the Bible, must include the gift of land and future generations. It is an acknowledgement that the deity, who will be known as “The God of Israel” (YHWH/Jehovah/ Yahweh/Adonai) will be protective of God’s chosen, offering a perpetual inheritance. The first to hear the word of God, and to receive the initial covenantal relationship is Abram, Isaac’s father and grandfather to the twins, Esau and Jacob. “And The Lord/Yahweh/ Adonai/Jehovah said to Abram, ‘Raise your eyes and look out from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if you can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring

too can be counted’” (Gen. 13:14-16). For it to be a true inheritance/blessing, it must include both land and progeny. The Lord is making a covenant: if you follow me as your God, then I will protect you and provide for you. Abram, who will become Abraham, has covenanted with his cultic deity, who will be known as Yahweh (from the Hebrew), translated as “The Lord.” So the ‘blessing’ is more than, “have a good life, be safe, call when you can.” It pledges a perpetual homeland and future generations. This is the responsibility of Abraham’s son, Isaac: to pass

on, to the appropriate son, the responsibility of the peoplehood.

Esau and Jacob’s father Isaac is aged, mostly blind, knowing that his days are numbered. He must pass on the inheritance/blessing, the covenantal pledge. Preparing for this rite, Issac asks Esau to cook the meal of game he so loves. While Esau leaves to hunt, Rebecca conspires with Jacob to wrap the younger brother’s arms and neck in skins to be hairy as Esau in order to “pull the wool over the old man’s eyes”—to lie, for a second time, to finally be given the birthright

blessing. It is at the insistence of Rebecca that the subterfuge takes place. But is it truly a masquerade? As the Bible prophesies, it is the younger Jacob who will “be served by the elder.”

Coming to his blind father with the desired meal, dressed in Esau’s clothes, Jacob, at the direction of his mother, responds as Esau to receive the “pilfered” blessing. It is Isaac, who in the classic response, says to his costumed second son, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). Finally recognizing that the word of God is now coming to fulfillment in that the elder son will serve the younger, Isaac confers an initial “good will” offering for a successful, productive life upon Jacob: “May God give you of the dew of Heaven and the fat of the earth, abundance of new grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow to you; be master over your brothers, and let your mother’s sons bow to you” (Gen. 27:28-29). It is not yet time for the conference of blessing. Esau still must be confronted in order to follow God’s word!

Jacob leaves his father’s bedside after this verbal “good will offering” is given. Esau then enters and requests the blessing of his birthright. One should not forget that he willingly gave it away for a bowl of pottage. When he declares who he is, “I’m Esau,” Isaac “shudders.” Had this been 2,500 years in the future, the cry might have been, “Oy Gevault.” Esau then pleads, “Bless me, too, father.” Whereupon Isaac offers:

“See, your abode shall enjoy the fat of the earth and the dew of heaven above. Yet by your sword shall you live, and you shall serve your brother; but when you grow restive, you shall break his yoke from your neck” (Gen. 27:39-40).

This again references The Lord’s words to Rebecca; Isaac knows it is truly Esau as he recognizes that the first subterfuge was in truth, Jacob. It is mindful of King Lear; only when he lost his sight in blindness did he become truly insightful. Recall that Esau has previously disappointed his parents by his choice of wives.

The inclusion of the promise of land and progeny becomes the pledge that will course throughout all the history of the Jewish people.

Esau pledges to kill his brother once Isaac (and Rebecca) are dead. (Gen. 35 permits the reunion of the brothers, for some measure of conclusion. While Jacob follows The Lord in accordance with the birthright, Esau will go on to become the father of another nation that follows another deity.)

After Esau storms out, Rebecca warns Jacob, who hides until he is certain his blood-lusting brother has departed. He then returns not just home, but to his father’s bedside, whereupon Isaac offers the true inheritance blessing:

“Isaac blessed Jacob. He instructed him, saying, ‘May Ayl Shaddai (God) bless you, make you fertile and numerous, so that you become an assembly of peoples. May God grant the blessing of Abraham to you and your offspring, that you possess the land that you are sojourning, which Yahweh/The Lord gave to Abraham’” (Gen. 28:1-4).

This then is the fulfillment and acceptance of what Yahweh said to Rebecca: “Two nations are in your womb…and the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23). It can be interpreted that Isaac must know that he is blessing Jacob, since he is using these words which are but a confirmation of Yahweh’s words.

The inclusion of the promise of land and progeny becomes the pledge that will course throughout all the history of the Jewish people. Isaac and Rebecca realize that Esau, mighty though he may be, is unworthy of the responsibility to continue the covenantal relationship between the created and the Creator, between the God of Israel and the children of Israel. In fact, it will be Jacob, who the night before he reconciles with his brother Esau, wrestles with a celestial being. As morning dawns, the wrestling antagonist changes Jacob’s name

from Yaakov/Jacob to Israel, which Rabbi Arthur Waskow translates the Hebrew, “Eesh ra Ayl”/Israel, as “the one who wrestles God,” or “God-wrestler.” So, “the fix was in”—The Lord from the beginning had chosen Jacob to further the peoplehood, to become Israel. Jacob is one of the actors in the drama, as is Esau, both playing their parts.

The Holy Scripture is teaching that meritocracy is far more important than aristocracy. Birth order does not confer privilege as far as the Bible’s lessons are concerned. In fact, not one of the “leaders” of “The Old Testament” is firstborn, not even David, who becomes the symbol of Messianism. This, and other salient events and personalities will be the focus of the

RABBI BROOKS R. SUSMAN is the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Am of Freehold, New Jersey, retiring in August 2015. In his rabbinate, Rabbi Susman has served congregations in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey as well as St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Ohio University with a dual major in philosophy and political science. Rabbi Susman was ordained from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1974 with a BHL and MAHL, where he also received his Doctor of Divinity in 1999. Dr. Susman is an adjunct professor at Brookdale Community College teaching classes on ethics, justice, history, and philosophy as well as Bible, Midrash, and Jewish thought.

Did you find this article interesting? Brooks Susman will be teaching The Bible as Literature on Tuesdays, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 - 6-7:30 pm Central time, using the Zoom

DEMOCRACY LESSONS

by Kevin Walker

In 1831, a French scholar named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States to search for the future. A careful reading of his book, Democracy in America, seems to prove that he found it.

Along with his colleague and fellow researcher, Gustav de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s American road trip (mostly by stagecoach) began in New England and upstate New York, then on to the frontier town of Milwaukee, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and then up through the deep south to Washington, DC before returning to France in February of 1832. The inquisitive Frenchman conversed with hundreds of Americans, attended many civic events and religious services, and gave vivid descriptions of all our activities. His book, first published in 1835, and in English in 1840, is a monumental study on every aspect of our national life.

Tocqueville visited at the moment that Americans first became Americans: whether it was our great political traditions, our love of liberty and equality, our religion and high culture, or our deepest customs and manners, this was the time that the nation took on its most recognizable form. Our history would have momentous events, and our ways of life would develop in surprising ways, but

Tocqueville visited at the moment that Americans first became Americans...

for the most part, Americans would become at that moment the people they would always be. European travel narratives from the United States were common at the time, and they offered a wide array of opinions on what America was. Some wrote with glowing optimism for the future, such as MichelGuillaume Crèvecoeur who became a US citizen and lived the rest of his life here. “We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed,” he wrote; “we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be” (Letters from an American Farmer, 1782). Others could only see America as a crass, vulgar, shoddy imitation of their Old World ancestors: according to British writer Franis Trollope, Americans “talk of their glory, while they drink mint julep and chew tobacco, swearing by the beard of Jupiter (or some other oath) that they are very graceful and agreeable, and, moreover, abusing everybody who does not cry out ‘Amen!’”

(Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832).

Tocqueville shared a mix of both of these views, but his message came with a twist: love it or hate it, democracy was the future. It was spreading, and it would soon transform every nation all over the world. Monarchy and aristocracy, with all of their lords, barons, and knights, would fade away as they became overwhelmed by the masses in a global tsunami of public opinion. He called this a “providential fact” moved by the hand of God: “it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress,” he wrote in his opening chapter. The United States was at the forefront of a global movement. The task, then, was not to feel optimism or disgust at what was happening in America, but to see just how well the Americans handled their democracy and how the rest of the world might manage it— because soon, that democracy would be everywhere.

It had arrived in Europe with the French Revolution, which revealed just how bad raw democracy could be. Both the United States and France began with similar principles when it came to human equality and the “rights of man”—but while the Americans peacefully drafted their Constitution, ratified through

public debate and the consent of the people, and were blessed by founding statesmen like George Washington, France devolved into mob-rule through the National Assembly, the death of 30,000 people on the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, and the wars of Napoleon Bonaparte. France would recover from this blot on its history, and it would become a free and prosperous nation, but it took a long, painful, and bloody path to get there. Many subsequent revolutions would not end so well, and the French revolutionary model would become the basis for the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century.

Meditating on this comparison, Tocqueville asked some important questions: Will the coming of democracy be rational and decent, or will it be driven by furious passions? Will democratic majorities protect the rights of minority groups and individuals, or will majorities simply dominate everything? Will those same majorities protect individual rights, or will they call for total conformity? In short, will democracy be more like what it was in the United States, or more like what it was in France?

For those who preferred to make the best of democracy, Tocqueville’s book showed the way:

“The first of the duties that are at this time imposed upon

Tocqueville asked some important questions: Will the coming of democracy be rational and decent, or will it be driven by furious passions?

those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy, to reawaken, if possible, its religious beliefs; to purify its morals; to mold its actions; to substitute a knowledge of statecraft for its inexperience, and an awareness of its true interest for its blind instincts, to adapt its government to time and place, and to modify it according to men and to conditions.”

Using what he called “a new science of politics,” Tocqueville insisted that Americans could recognize and cultivate democracy’s best virtues and avoid its most destructive vices.

And while Tocqueville’s teachings at first fascinated French and European audiences anxious over their fading aristocracies, it has been Americans who have shown the most enduring interest

in Tocqueville’s work. As time has passed, each new generation of Americans has rallied around Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and let it teach us about ourselves.

WHEN DEMOCRACY IS A DANGER

So what is Tocqueville’s diagnosis of democracy, as seen in the America of 1830? Beneath both the charming and crude aspects of American equality, Tocqueville divined an alarming threat: the possibility of a new breed of tyranny.

The basic problem of democracy is as old as the West: it assumes the equality of all people, or the realization that no member of the community had any right to rule over anyone else; at the same time, it only functions by majority rule, and whenever the majority rules, the minority loses. The great task for statesmen and philosophers since ancient Greece has been to design a system that lets the majority rule, but makes it do so in a way that protects the minority.

According to Tocqueville, this had become an antiquated way of looking at the issue. Majority rule was no longer about voting: it was instead about the broad and everpresent force of public opinion. Even in an age before polling, the perception of what “everyone knows” or “everyone believes” was terribly strong, and quite

capable of overpowering any kind of due process or checks and balances—not by force, but by subtle persuasion. Majority rule had always been a bully, but now it was more like a seducer.

Tocqueville marveled at how pervasive majority rule was, and the variety of ways it asserted itself: government institutions yielded to it; public policy was always based on it; and elected officials were entirely beholden to it. Only the most respected politicians could use their own judgment about things, but the rest depended entirely on populist tropes. (Andrew Jackson, the quintessential populist president, held office when Tocqueville visited, and he was well-known for calling himself the only true “representative of the people.”) A vast, decentralized spirit of groupthink seemed to take on all the elements of a new faceless American sovereign, even more powerful than monarchies had ever been.

Politics aside, what was more alarming was the way that majority rule exercised moral authority: a thing was called “good” or “evil” for no other reason than because the majority believed it to be so. Tocqueville was amazed at how easily Americans were willing to abandon appeals to natural law or even individual conscience and submit their deepest convictions to popular opinion. “I know of

no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America”—not because of government persecution, but simply because the people defer to the masses of their fellow Americans on all things. “The majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.” This explained why we are so often the land of conspiracy theories: it is not so much the disinformation that deludes people, but the sense of moral obligation to believe things, no matter how crazy; it is “true” because it is what our group believes, and we accept it like a solemn creed. Here, all transcendence is swallowed up, and even the loftiest philosophic or religious ideas become less about Truth, and more the product of virtue signals and social belonging, leaving the public mind to close in on itself.

What was left of liberty in such a place? Tocqueville found it in retreat, seeking refuge in the tiny nook known as “individualism,” a term he is credited with coining. The history of the “self” as we think of it—each person’s rich inner life, the personal story and sense of meaning—had a long history, but it had reached its radical conclusion in democratic times. In aristocratic centuries,

each person’s identity was placed in the layered cake of social class, determined by family heritage, whether lords or peasants. But now, “[e]ach man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.” There, man is still free, but also miserable as his ties to family, religion and class all weaken, and leave him all alone. The more individual we become, Tocqueville warned, the more we become starved for belonging— and in that state, we become ready to believe and be part of anything. What is worse, once we become a massive assembly of individuals, we lose all basis for civil society. When these things happen, the only institution that can provide our sense of belonging and bind us together is the all-powerful State.

What this amounted to was in fact a new kind of tyranny—the “tyranny of the majority.” Old World tyranny was, of course, all about the tyrant—the Greek demagogue, the corrupt Roman Emperor, the mad king. But the tyranny in democratic times takes on a whole new form: it is administrative and faceless, and therefore able to take “each member of the community in its powerful grasp,” as it “extends its arm over the whole community.” Rather than violent thugs, it depends on nice, well-meaning bureaucrats; rather than cruelty,

terror, and a paranoid desire to stay in power, democratic tyranny acts for what it believes to be the good of the people. Tocqueville wrote some time before the major socialist movements appeared, but he captured their spirit quite well in his chilling description of what the future could hold:

“It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

The problem is not that this nagging, overregulating, paternalistic government seizes too much power; the problem is that the people tend to submit to it willingly, believing that it is the embodiment of majority rule, and therefore legitimate in its rules and regulations. We become

Tocqueville’s greatest discovery in the United States was the people’s ability to not only manage the problems of democracy, but also make the best of it.

those vices, and sometimes even turn them into virtues. He frequently described Americans as “combatting” their own ugliest tendencies. The dangers were no less real and serious. But the safeguards that protected liberty were quite robust, and could serve as an excellent model for the rest of the world.

easy-going, content with our private life and material wealth, and we find ourselves simply conforming and “going along,” submissive and sheeplike.

But then, Tocqueville meant to say that these are the problems of democracy in general—not necessarily the problems of democracy in America.

WHEN DEMOCRACY IS WELLTRAINED

But the story does not end on this fatalistic note: Tocqueville’s greatest discovery in the United States was the people’s ability to not only manage the problems of democracy, but also make the best of it; he saw how we were especially good at admitting our worst faults, and then constantly building up the customs and habits that contain

Tyranny of the majority ran its course, but, as Tocqueville observed, that course was carefully channeled by “townships, municipal bodies, and counties,” all of which were “looked upon as concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement.” What was concealed was the rest of the nation, which was shielded from the force of popular opinion as majority rule spent its energy only at the local level. If a national majority ever formed, made its way to the federal government, and tried to implement its goals through federal law, it was met by the system of checks and balances, which ensured that federal laws might fulfill the majority’s desires, but do it in a way that was as rational and just as possible.

Along with government and laws, a second major source was “free associations.” These were the countless clubs, societies, organizations, and interest groups that drove so much of American life; they were spontaneously formed, freely chosen, and

privately governed; they covered every possible topic of human interest, “religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive,” he wrote.

“The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.”

These free associations had a double effect: they offered a way for every person to combat the most dangerous aspects of individualism and the attendant isolation; and at the same time, these associations were highly effective at solving problems— poverty, substance abuse, or even ignorance and immorality— that would otherwise be left to government. The government was better able to focus on questions of true public necessity, and it could avoid becoming a bureaucratic monster.

One free association stood apart from all others: the religious one. The threat to religious belief was stronger in democratic times than it had ever been, given the

tendency of democratic public opinion to close itself off to all transcendence in favor of the practical and material. Kings and dictators could persecute religious belief, but this would not stop believers from believing, and would usually increase their faith; tyranny of the majority, however, really could extinguish it. And yet, Tocqueville observed with great fascination just how deeply religious Americans were, and how connected their faith was with freedom. “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other,” he wrote. More than any other free association, religion saved American democracy from disintegrating into a world of clashing individuals, incapable of looking for or recognizing a common good.

But the third and greatest source of freedom were the personal qualities of character that not only made us desire freedom, but also made us worthy of it. These, Tocqueville referred to as “mores,” or “habits of the heart.” Where did such qualities come from?

The source of these habits of the heart are even deeper than free associations. Tocqueville found it in the American family. The old aristocratic family was bound together by honor and

duty, the supremacy of the father, the privileges of the oldest son who would inherit the estate, and daughters usually treated as marriage pawns. But all of this was gone in America, and as a result, the true family emerged. Here, “a species of equality prevails around the domestic hearth.” It was a great loss for the noble heritage of Europe, but, Tocqueville wrote, “I am inclined to believe that man individually is a gainer by it.”

“I think that, in proportion as manners and laws become more democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of; confidence and tenderness are oftentimes increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer in proportion as the social bond is loosened.”

That “natural bond” was, of course, the bond of love, something far better than honor, and something supremely capable of teaching the habits of the heart that ensure freedom.

The supreme agent in this, according to Tocqueville, was the wife. European girls were traditionally married off by their fathers to form social alliances with other families; they were kept hidden away until they were abruptly thrown into marriage with

no preparation. But the American marriage was quite different: the man proposes, and the woman accepts (or refuses). American girls, though, were prepared far ahead of time for such a decision; their wisdom was fully developed long beforehand. “The great scene of the world is constantly open to her view; far from seeking concealment, it is every day disclosed to her more completely, and she is taught to survey it with a firm and calm gaze,” Tocqueville wrote; her elders “hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects.” For this reason, Tocqueville called the American girl “mistress of herself”—a supreme judge of the character of men, and uniquely able to turn the wildest hooligan into a gentleman worthy of marriage— and in the process, a good citizen worthy of self-government.

Indeed, if anyone were to ask “to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed”—how tyranny of the majority is avoided, how all the habits of the heart make democracy flourish; how liberty is best maintained—Tocqueville replies that it is “the superiority of their women.”

TOCQUEVILLE IN OUR TIME

Tocqueville gives all the vivid and entertaining observations that readers would expect of a

Tocqueville offers insights on our way of life that are well worth considering if we mean to preserve our country and its selfgovernment.

policy, supporting the right party, electing the right candidate. But Tocqueville reminds us to take a much slower and more careful approach, one that reflects the responsibility of every individual citizen to truly examine themselves. What better time in our national life to give a fresh reading of this classic text, and see what each of us might do to not only preserve the United States, but be worthy of it as well. l

travel book—the way Americans talk, the way they think, their peculiar manners and customs, and their patriotism, not to mention the extraordinary beauty of their natural surroundings. It can truly be said that there is something in Democracy in America for everyone.

But as a friend to our nation, Tocqueville offers insights on our way of life that are well worth considering if we mean to preserve our country and its self-government. He compels us to ask: Just how strong are the current safeguards against democratic vices today? How do we cultivate our own habits of the heart in our friendships, our marriages, and the way we raise our children? We often think of “saving America” in terms of adopting the right

KEVIN WALKER, PHD, is a Professor of Politics at the University of Mary in Bismarck, where he teaches classes on political philosophy and American politics. He received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University in 2010.

Did you find this article interesting? Kevin Walker will be teaching Democracy in America on Thursdays, Sept. 5, 12, 19, 26, Oct. 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, Nov. 7, 14 - 5-6 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events

LIFE, LITERATURE, AND POLITICS

by Tayo Basquiat

In 2018, I emceed an event featuring several younger writers reading their work. Each writer provided a brief biographical introduction to be read as I welcomed them to the podium. One writer self-described as queer, cis, white, neurodivergent, femme, spoonie, and a few other identity markers I no longer remember. That I read this as an author’s bio represents the trend then in literary circles whereby an author’s authority to write about certain subjects, get their work published, or be offered a spot on a panel or reading was tightly linked to their disclosure of or affiliation with certain identities. Perhaps inevitably, what began as the twentieth century’s earnest attempt to correct the lack of diversity in literature—too white, too male, too heterosexual, too Western and European, etc. for too long—fostered this form of identity politics where authors and their writing are first sorted by representation and identity claims and only then, secondarily, by literary merit. This current was so strong, writers who failed to make these positional claims, identity disclosures, or privilege acknowledgments regularly found themselves publicly censored on social media or assumed to be part of the problem and summarily dismissed.

The issue of identity politics first arose for me as a reader, not a writer, and not until I was nearly thirty (took me a long time in life to fall off the turnip truck). Someone I dated observed that the books on my shelf were monochromatic: Stegner, Abbey, Berry, Bowden (alongside a host of dead Western philosophers). Sure, I argued in self-defense, these are the books I own, but I’ve read Morrison, Murakami, Momaday (alongside a host of dead Eastern philosophers). The challenge continued. Had I read enough literature from women, Africans, Iranians? Pride for my bookshelf soured as now it clearly displayed my deficiencies and certain biases and -isms I didn’t know I had. And if this conversation happened today instead of twenty years ago, the challenge would certainly include the bloom of additional personal and political identities, like those related to mental health or disabilities or non-binary.

As readers, how do we navigate the demands of identity politics? What are the larger responsibilities we all share in the human enterprise related to the reading and writing of books? Does the author’s personal identity matter and if so, in what way? For example, should we read Sherman Alexie or Garrison Keillor’s books after discovering they’ve done something morally or legally objectionable in their personal lives? What if you really enjoyed reading American Dirt when Oprah recommended it only to discover the Latino/a community criticized the book as a caricature, culturally inaccurate, and full of racist assumptions?

How about as writers, should who or what a writer is, personally, dictate who or what they can write about? How does the personal relate to the political and what kind of choices do writers have about this in terms of form or genre or publication? What will readers make of those choices, and what’s the writer’s responsibility for this? Take the choice between writing autofiction or a memoir: with autofiction, details of an author’s life are fictionalized and the line between what really happened and what the author makes up is fuzzy, sometimes very fuzzy. Is it okay (we ask as if we are the cultural police) for that author to use their name and some other of their personal life details but then give themselves a hot and “of the moment” identity like making themselves Two Spirit if they are not, in fact, Two Spirited? If an author chooses to write a memoir, are readers owed the author’s full personal disclosure, just by virtue of the genre’s constraints? What about nonfiction: if a writer chooses a subject where they reveal personal details of that subject’s life, is the writer exploiting that subject? Are readers complicit if they read it?

Identity politics are inescapable and, in that sense, nothing all that new. Human beings are both individuals having a personal identity and social creatures belonging to a variety of political units, negotiating power relations, structures, and institutions, some chosen, some not. The only escape is the deserted island life (choose your five books wisely). Only about a hundred years has passed since the first white woman (Edith Wharton) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and only forty years since the first Black woman (Alice Walker) did. Wharton’s generation birthed what’s

Should who or what a writer is, personally, dictate who or what they can write about?

Should we be consuming the details of personal lives (especially if those lives are experiencing trauma, torture, suffering, etc.) for our reading pleasure?

known as first wave feminism, and though her book The Age of Innocence mourns the passing of the Gilded Age, its publication was contemporary with the passage of the 19th Amendment. It’s worth noting that while readers in America were saying yes to Wharton, the first five hundred copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses to reach American shores were declared obscene, seized, and burned. A little too much of the “personal” for the politics of the time, I guess. Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) comes after the Civil Rights movement and second wave feminism, the latter’s slogan being “the personal is political,” advocating the dismantling of the illusion that what happened in the home had nothing to do with politics and vice versa. This second iteration of feminism claimed that the power relations and structures at work throughout society were the very same operating in wage disparity, domestic violence, and reproductive rights. As Angela Davis wrote in her Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2015), “[O]ur interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives.” We can see by the issues second wave feminists raised the strategic importance of thrusting the personal more explicitly into the public realm, becoming terrain for political struggle.

Not all women then (or now) were on board with making the personal political. Some feared a slippery slope, that opening the door for government to enter one’s private home or putting one’s body in play politically would lead not to more but less privacy and freedom. They weren’t wrong. Yet, whether to make the personal political isn’t a choice, because, again, we humans are both at the same time. The choices are more about how and to what extent. Some writers choose not to write a memoir because they don’t want to make political hay of their personal lives. Fine—but fiction and poetry will still entail navigation of these issues, just in different ways. Alexander Chee’s first novel Edinburgh (2001) was autobiographical (he was sexually abused), but the book was still a novel, not a memoir. The questions he was asked about that choice, the demand for more personal disclosure, and navigating the relationship between the personal and the political prompted years later his essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018). I started writing about migrant mortality about ten years ago. A political issue, for sure, but not a personal issue in that I’m not a migrant. I’ve been accused of exploiting the trauma migrants experience for my own gain as a writer; I’ve been advised to “stay in my lane” and write about my own life instead of appropriating the lives of others. I remind myself that James Agee and Walker Evans faced similar criticism for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their beautiful work documenting the lives of poor Alabama tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) is about a private prison system which offers inmates the choice of remaining incarcerated in brutal conditions or fighting for their freedom in a gladiator-style reality show where they are forced to either win or die. The book is fiction but provides footnotes throughout about the actual U.S. prison system, America’s thirst for violence, and systemic racial and economic injustice. The veil between fiction and nonfiction there is thin indeed. Should we be

consuming the details of personal lives (especially if those lives are experiencing trauma, torture, suffering, etc.) for our reading pleasure?

As wearying and difficult as these questions can be, as often as I dismiss something as just another instance of identity politics blown up to silly proportions, and even if I wish it wasn’t so, I must admit the second wave feminists were right, the personal is political. As soon as someone or a group tries to take back the personal from the political, something happens to reveal that it’s impossible to do so. This relationship will never be static or fit into neat, tidy categories or discrete departments. Think about all the issues making recent headlines: the right to choose vs. the right to life; the right to live but not a right to die; parents’ rights over their children but not if the child is transgender; what counts as a disability for accommodation, what country you can live in, how to exercise personal religious beliefs that conflict with nondiscrimination laws, who you can marry or have sex with or who counts as “family.” We are always in the personal and political muck of it. And just when you might want to escape and get lost in a good book, wham! More of the same.

Here’s the good part though: books are safe spaces to reckon with these issues. Okay, maybe if you are the author, you’ll have to take what comes with putting your work out into the world, but as readers, we don’t have to fight that fight. Books effect change, stimulate ideas, show us what’s at stake, help us articulate our own thoughts and feelings, open doors, and demand response, even if that response is resistance or apathy. If you share the personal identity of a character or the author, you might feel like you’ve finally found your people, that you aren’t alone, that if others read this book, they’ll maybe understand you better. If you don’t share that identity, the book still holds a story which has the power to shape you, enlarge your world, and foster empathy and understanding. We can only really know what it is like to be the person we are (and some of us don’t even know that very well), but literature lets us glimpse what it is like to be other people, to have experiences we won’t have ourselves, to live a thousand lives we won’t live. We won’t get around to sampling them all, but we can push ourselves a little more and try that wacky new flavor.

I admit, I find current identity politics shrill and divisive and tiresome. The “I” is having a field day at the expense of the “we,” a kind of one-upmanship and silencing, creating walls instead of connection. Some “in the know” about such things assure me this form of identity politics is waning. I hope so. Meanwhile, I think we are at our best as a literary community when our guard is down, when we aren’t looking for a fight, and when we don’t have to worry about getting sucker punched. Pick up a book instead of boxing gloves, and let’s see if we can’t understand what it’s like to be us. l

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

Did you find this article interesting? Tayo Basquiat will be teaching Life, Literature, and Politics on Wednesdays, Sept. 11, Oct. 16, Nov. 6 - 7-9 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events

SOUND AND FORM IN POEM CONSTRUCTION

by Shadd Piehl

Quite a few years ago, while participating in a panel reading at the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, fellow North Dakota cowboy-poet Bill Lowman quipped in response to a question about a poem of mine that, “You know, free verse ain’t really free.”

It was a good line and garnered a laugh, but it was also a truth about poetry and verse: free verse really ain’t free. All poetry is built upon sound, and sound comes not only from the forming of consonants and vowels, but also from the rhythm, the meter, created when those sounds, or syllables, are strung together.

So, lines of free verse can’t really be “free” because all verse is constructed with measurable sound units (syllabic metrics) and sound elements such as assonance, consonance, alliteration, and (a cowboy poet’s favorite) rhyme of all kind—perfect, slant, eye, coupled, etc.

What then sets free verse “free” is not following a prescribed metrical pattern or form. Free verse still has meter, or rhythm, and form, but doesn’t follow a strict blueprint. To take this construction metaphor a bit further, oftentimes a blueprint, or better knowledge of component parts, can assist in the building of all things, including poems.

Analyzing sound and form patterns in a poem or a line of poetry is called scansion, and scanning not only deepens the understanding and appreciation of poetry, but also provides more insight into how well-written poems are built. In my own practice, I am attracted to, if not always a practitioner of, the concise. The Guinness Book of Records considers Aram Sayoran’s “M,” the world’s shortest poem:

Of course, even this visual poem, a four-footed “M,” is primarily a representation of sound…mmmm… monosyllabic consonance.

Or take Strickland Gillilan’s “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes” also known as “Fleas”:

Adam Had ‘em.

Two lines, one iambic foot (syllabic unit) in each, creating a true-rhymed couplet. Here’s another famous, even shorter, couplet, this time by The Greatest, Muhammad Ali:

Me. We.

Poetry is an art form that is meant to be heard in order to get the full effect. For example, read this poem by Emily Dickinson aloud, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –”:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –

Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind –

Dickinson’s sly wit often eludes the first time around and then hits the patient reader upside the head on a second or third reading with the truth, with a capital “T.” Truth, claims Dickinson, needs to approach side-ways, slantways, creep up gradual-like to really be received and perceived, otherwise the full-on force of it will “dazzle” and “blind.”

Undergirding that theme is the controlled sound of Dickinson’s lines, four stanzas of alternating eight and six syllables (tetra- and trimeter), with end-rhymed second and fourth lines in every stanza. “Too bright for our infirm Delight”! The meaning of the poem is demonstrated through the slow-reveal of

comprehension in the reading and hearing of its truthiness.

Walt Whitman is often considered the father of free verse poetry, and what he was trying to break free of were the constraints of traditional verse in English poetry. Scanning Whitman’s poetry often illuminates how he chooses to follow or not follow metrical patterns for sound effects. Take for instance the poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

Scanning this poem perhaps flies in the face of the point; there is a danger that over analysis can short circuit wonderment and enjoyment. But sometimes those “charts and diagrams” can also aid in the appreciation of the night sky or, in this case, Whitman’s poem about it.

This poem becomes free verse by breaking a metrical pattern and then returning to that pattern. The first line and the last line in this poem are in iambic pentameter, the most common metrical line in English verse (five feet of unstressed/stressed syllabics). Four of the other six lines that make up the poem are 14 syllables each, also very controlled metrically. Only the fourth line really breaks that rhythmic pattern with 23 syllables, the poem’s most long-winded line, perhaps much like the learned astronomer himself. All the lines are end-stopped with commas, and the seventh line at 13 syllables is close enough to 14 to complete the pattern, but not too strictly.

By employing iambic pentameter—the default da-DUM sound of spoken English, or the “rhythmic bongos” of verse (as the great poet Billy Collins phrases it)—in the first and last lines, Whitman chooses to enclose his freer lines metrically in the body of the poem. Repeating “when” and “when I” in the first four lines and then choosing the beautiful-sounding alliterative “mystical moist night” in the seventh line are some of the other sonic elements Whitman uses for effect.

Practicing a bit of scansion in the reading of poetry, I believe, can help in better understanding the role of sound and form in the writing of poems. As Bill Lowman might say, free verse ain’t free (but this upcoming six-week course is as close as it comes). Registrants will be asked to read, scan, critique, and construct poems with attention to sound and form. l

A fifth-generation North Dakotan, SHADD PIEHL’s poetry has appeared in the anthologies, Between Earth and Sky: Contemporary Cowboy Poets, Maverick Western Verse, Brushstrokes and Balladeers, and the magazines Aluminum Canoe, Pemmican, Red Weather, and Dry Crik Review, among others. A private investigator and adjunct English instructor at Bismarck State College, Shadd lives along Crown Butte Creek in the Heart River valley west of Mandan with his family.

Did you find this article interesting? Shadd Piehl will be teaching Sound and Form in Poem Construction on Thursdays, Sept. 19, 26, Oct 3, 10, 17, 24 - 6:30-8 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/ classes-events

SPECULATIVE FICTION...

LET’S GO ON A JOURNEY

by Steven A. Guglich

Dive into the world of fiction, and you’ll find yourself cruising along a vast highway, much like the iconic Route 66. It’s a journey through stories that may captivate but rarely challenge the boundaries of reality. However, there’s a thrilling exit ramp along this literary road— the Speculative Fiction Highway. While the Fiction Highway offers tales grounded in the familiar, Speculative Fiction invites you onto an exhilarating route where imagination takes the wheel, answering the age-old question, “What if...?” Consider the classics that have dared to tread this speculative path. Picture a child from distant stars, adopted by farmers on Earth, discovering his superhuman abilities (Superman by Jerry Spiegel). Or envision a hidden school where children from all corners of the globe master the arcane arts (Harry Potter by JK Rowling). How about a chilling tale where the seeds of extremism blossom into a dystopian nightmare? (The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood) And who could forget the spine-tingling saga of a demonic clown haunting the shadows of childhood? (It by Stephen King)

“...speculative fiction revolves around human concerns versus technological wonders.”

Wikipedia casts a wide net over this genre, defining Speculative Fiction as:

an umbrella genre of fiction that encompasses all the subgenres that depart from realism, or strictly imitating everyday reality, instead presenting fantastical, supernatural, futuristic, or other imaginative realms. This catch-all genre includes, but is not limited to, science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, magical realism, superhero fiction, alternate history, utopia and dystopia, fairy tales, steampunk, cyberpunk, weird fiction, and some apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. The term has been used for works of literature, film, television, drama, video games, radio, and their hybrids.

However, it was Robert Heinlein, the literary pioneer, who first coined the term in 1947 in an essay titled, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” Heinlein originally used the term to describe his style of writing, which was mainly science fiction. “Speculative fiction is fiction that focuses not on science and technology, but on human reactions to new situations caused by science and technology. In other words, speculative fiction revolves around human concerns versus technological wonders.” Over time, Heinlein’s definition broadened to encompass any fiction that delves into how people might respond to the extraordinary.

To delve deeper into the historical roots of speculative fiction is to unearth a rich tapestry of storytelling traditions that stretch back millennia. Long before Heinlein coined the term “speculative fiction,” ancient civilizations spun tales of gods and monsters, of heroes embarking on epic quests, and of worlds beyond mortal comprehension. Myths and legends from cultures around the world, such as the Greek myths, Norse sagas, and Arabian Nights, laid the foundation for the fantastical realms that would later populate speculative fiction. These stories served not only as entertainment but also as a means of exploring humanity’s deepest fears, desires, and aspirations, offering glimpses into the mysteries of the universe and the human psyche.

As literary traditions developed, so too did the themes and motifs of speculative fiction. The Enlightenment era saw the rise of utopian and dystopian literature, with authors like Thomas More envisioning ideal societies in works such as Utopia (1516), while later writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell explored the darker consequences of totalitarianism and technological control in Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1949). The Industrial Revolution brought about a surge of interest in science and technology, paving the way for the emergence of science fiction as a distinct genre with authors like Jules Verne and

Frankenstein remains a cornerstone of speculative fiction, inspiring countless adaptations, interpretations, and reflections on the moral and existential implications of scientific innovation.

H.G. Wells envisioning fantastical inventions and journeys to other worlds.

As speculative fiction continued to evolve, the 19th century witnessed the emergence of seminal works that would profoundly shape the genre. Among these luminaries stands Charles Dickens, whose novels transcended mere realism to incorporate elements of the fantastical and supernatural. In works like A Christmas Carol (1843), Dickens wove together themes of redemption, time travel, and spectral visitations, offering readers a glimpse into a world where the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical blur. Through the lens of speculative fiction, Dickens explored the complexities of human nature and the possibility of transformation, captivating audiences with his vivid imagination and keen insight into the human condition.

Another towering figure of 19th-century literature whose contributions to speculative fiction cannot be overstated is Mary Shelley. Considered to be the Grandmother of Science Fiction, her groundbreaking novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Shelley pioneered the genre of science fiction, crafting a tale that continues to resonate with readers over two centuries later. By exploring themes of scientific hubris, the ethics of creation, and the nature of humanity, Shelley challenged prevailing notions of progress and enlightenment, offering a cautionary tale that transcends its time and place. Frankenstein remains a cornerstone of speculative fiction, inspiring countless adaptations, interpretations, and reflections on the moral and existential implications of scientific innovation.

In the footsteps of Dickens and Shelley, a new

generation of writers would continue to push the boundaries of speculative fiction, expanding its scope and influence in the years to come. From the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928) to the dystopian visions of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), each contribution added new layers of complexity and depth to the genre, reflecting the ever-changing landscape of human imagination and ingenuity. Through their collective efforts, these visionary authors paved the way for future generations of writers to explore the limitless possibilities of speculative fiction, inviting readers to embark on journeys of wonder, discovery, and introspection.

For me, speculative fiction isn’t just a genre— it’s a playground of boundless possibilities. It’s the spark that ignites my imagination, fueling a cascade of “what ifs” that births entire worlds. Take, for instance, my series, The Veil Saga. It all began with a simple question: “What if magic existed, but it was hidden from us?” From there, a tapestry of mysteries unfurled—the allure of forgotten races, the clandestine impact of elves and goblins in the shadows of our modern world, and the enigma of why magic remains a secret in our mundane reality.

I write speculative fiction for the sheer thrill of creating vast worlds and civilizations and unleashing a host of characters into fantastic situations and seeing how they respond. I’m always asking myself, “What would they do if this happened?” But the thrill isn’t just from the creation of these new worlds, it’s just as Heinlein said…it’s the personal element of getting to know these characters and how they grow and develop under these situations. Author Ted

I write speculative fiction for the sheer thrill of creating vast worlds and civilizations and unleashing a host of characters into fantastic situations and seeing how they respond.

Dekker defined the term “story” as: “a narrative of consequential events involving worthy characters who change as a result of those events.”

This is why we go on journeys into fiction–whether it be straight down the Fiction Highway or whether we veer off on to the Speculative Fiction Highway—because we want to see what a character does under certain circumstances. We want to see him or her overcome adversity, grow, and become more than what they were at the beginning of the story. It’s why most of us root for the underdog and cheer for the misfit. It’s why some books are better received than others.

J.K. Rowling, in Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, hooks us right from the beginning, right from the title of Chapter 1, The Boy Who Lived It’s iconic. People all over the world, of various ages were captivated by the story of a seemingly ordinary orphan boy who goes on to become one of the most well-known wizards of all time.

As we journey through the realms of speculative fiction, we find ourselves immersed in a landscape of boundless imagination, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the impossible feels within reach. From the ancient myths and legends that laid the foundation, to the visionary works of writers like Dickens, Shelley, Heinlein, and countless others who dared to challenge the boundaries of reality, speculative fiction has captivated audiences and inspired generations. It’s a genre that invites us to explore the depths of human experience, to ponder the “what ifs” and imagine worlds yet unseen. Whether we wander down the Fiction Highway or veer onto the Speculative Fiction Highway, one thing remains certain: we need the thrill of discovery, the wonder of possibility, and the enduring power of storytelling to ignite our imagination and illuminate the human condition. So, as we take the last turn on this road trip, let us remember that the journey into speculative fiction is not merely a departure from reality, but a trip into the infinite possibilities of the human mind. As we continue to venture down new roads and explore uncharted territories, may we always dare to ask, “What if...?” l

STEVEN A. GUGLICH is a chronicler of heroes and a guide to worlds not yet seen. On this world, he is a Christian, a husband, a dad, an author, a literacy advocate, and a public school principal. In 2020 he was awarded the prestigious North Dakota Principal of the Year Award.

Did you find this article interesting? Steven Guglich will be teaching A Practical Workshop to Writing Speculative Fiction on Tuesdays, Sept. 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 - 6-8 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events

STOP. WORK. AUTHORITY.

by Mark Hernberg

The jobsite was tucked into the quiet corner of a residential neighborhood, surrounded by towering evergreens. Men, trucks, equipment, two trailers, and a dull yellow excavator smudged the edges of the fenced-in area. Across the middle, a deep scar was gouged into the dirt—a trench, eight feet deep at the center, with a large black iron pipeline laid along the bottom like an exposed artery. Thin, white tarps were stretched and pinned, skin-like, along the slopes on either side.

Putting on my hardhat, I hopped out of the work truck and walked over to the jobsite. The foreman spotted me right away and gave a quick wave. He met me at the fence: simple gray t-shirt, jeans, wide belly, legs in an even wider stance. He was, without a doubt, the shortest foreman I’d ever met. We made our introductions through the chain-link. As an engineer, I spent just as much time in a button-down shirt in front of a computer screen as I did working out “in the field” at construction sites and industrial facilities. I had started pitching down my voice when I answered the phone and learning to talk about hunting elk with a bow. I donned this version of masculinity every time I put on my steel-toed boots and gloves and hardhat—another layer of safety gear that didn’t quite fit right.

“We gotta crane comin’ in first thing tomorrow morning. Drivin’ all the way from Montana.” The foreman pointed at the trench. “So all that has got to be backfilled and buttoned up. First thing tomorrow.” He looked back at me and paused for effect. “So how long is it gonna take for you to get all those wires installed?”

My job that day was simple: weld a hundred or so short copper cables along the top of the pipeline, from one end to the other. Two cables per pipeline joint. These welded cables

I donned this version of masculinity every time I put on my steel-toed boots and gloves and hardhat—another layer of safety gear that didn’t quite fit right.

would allow corrosion engineers like me to perform esoteric and marginally accurate tests to determine the rate of pipeline corrosion after it was all buried. I wasn’t lying when I told the foreman I’d done this countless times before. Grind the pipeline clean. Shoot the weld. Hammer off the slag. Slap a coating patch on top. Easy.

“Ahhh…Yeah. I should be able to get it done today.” I replied. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem at all.”

“Well, it’d better not be a fucking problem!” He roared with laughter, like we were both in on a private joke.

That was the first I’d heard of the crane or the deadline it imposed. I have no doubt that the foreman had known about the crane’s scheduled arrival for weeks. My mind had already started calculating how many wires needed to be installed, how many welds I could complete in an hour, how much time was left in the day. Anxiety buzzed in my chest. It was not a one-day job.

“I’ve done this a million times.” I said casually, eager to establish my own competence. I was 26 with a few years of experience under my belt. I knew enough to push back on his demands and tell him ‘I’m not promising anything!’ But instead, I meekly shouldered his responsibility and made his emergency my own.

I fucked up the very first weld.

Where some might feel insulted to be called a cog in a machine, I understood the opposite.

Molten copper spilled out of the graphite mold, rapidly cooling as it arced down the side of the pipe. A thin metallic tongue lolling towards the earth, sparkling in the morning sun. A droplet of metal plopped into the sand at the bottom of the trench with a loud hiss, just missing my boot.

“Is it supposed to do that?” The foreman asked. He barked a laugh, but no smile this time.

“Eh, sometimes the first one doesn’t stick.” I waved him off, hoping to appear nonchalant, unruffled. The pressure of him watching ratcheted down my mind’s focus with brutal efficiency. I craved this kind of distraction in every area of my life. Anything that I could throw myself into to avoid confronting my growing discomfort with the daily reality of my life.

The second weld stuck. Without saying a word, the foreman turned away, returning to his crew and their work. I let out a sigh. The morning’s gray cloud cover had started to disperse, and the sun warmed the back of my neck and arms. I settled myself into the work. Where some might feel insulted to be called a cog in a machine, I understood the opposite. As a cog, I experienced a certain kind of joy: to fit and

sit snug, perfect in my particular place; to be aware of my own hard, gear-bound boundaries; to know precisely where my reach terminated and my companions’ began; to move and to be moved by everyone else; to spin at a joyful hum. The day passed in that way, spinning, humming.

Industrial safety culture is sitting in a nondescript conference room on a Tuesday morning, watching a grainy video of a man die before you’ve finished your first cup of bad coffee. Every year, at mandatory safety trainings, I was shown accidental electrocutions, immolations, amputations, hands caught in the gears of a machine and ‘de-gloved’ of skin, men swallowed whole in a ball of hot plasma from an electrical arc-flash. We’re told that every accident is “preventable.” The unspoken question becomes “why didn’t you prevent this?” From the outside: there’s always time pressure, money pressure, or the “it’s always been done this way” pressure. From the inside: there’s desperation or weariness or cowardice. You’re tired, and you don’t want to be the one guy who complains; you just want the goddamn job done.

“Stop Work Authority” is a

common safety slogan in the industrial/construction world, shorthand for the idea that every worker has the right to speak up and bring any project to a complete halt, stopping work for everyone if they feel unsafe or see a hazardous work environment. In theory, it’s a powerful and necessary safety practice. It shouldn’t matter if you’re the foreman or the apprentice who’s on their first day at the job, no one should be forced to work in a situation they think is too dangerous. In my twelve years’ experience on construction jobsites of all kinds, I’ve never seen someone exercise “Stop Work Authority.” That doesn’t mean I haven’t seen my share of dangerous jobsites and reckless behavior; I’ve had a coworker crushed underneath the wheels of a truck when the driver didn’t see him and slowly backed up, then ran forward again over his body; another crippled by a 60-foot fall inside of a metal storage tank; another lose his toes, severed under a two ton piece of equipment that tumbled off the back of a loading dock. Others have been otherwise injured, maimed, concussed, or permanently disabled. I’ve been lucky. I’ve avoided anything more serious than the normal, minor dings and dents of a body at work.

Evening approached. At some

point, the foreman had grabbed a grinder from his truck and moved into the trench next to me, helping prepare the pipeline for my welds. He didn’t acknowledge the hopelessness of my task, just wordlessly reshouldered some of the burden. I had every right to be angry with him for putting me in this position, but as I watched his grinder bite into the pipeline, I felt only pitiful gratitude. I had made him the villain, so that I could play the victim. Furious orange sparks skittered off his grind wheel. I longed to be stripped bare like this, to find under the flimsy layer of my own cheerful conformity some hardened alloy of grit and confidence.

Night came. The foreman and his crew left, and I was entirely alone on the jobsite as the sun set. All I remember is the trench. Snap of flint, hiss of ignition; brilliant orange radiance.

A glowing cigarette of copper stuck to iron. I had tried to be oblivious to the passage of time all afternoon, pretending that I wasn’t counting down the remaining welds and comparing that stubborn number against the waning trajectory of the sun. That ability to understand a truth but push it aside to focus on the task at hand can be a useful skill; but over the next few years, I would hone it to a pathological compulsion.

I ran out of welding materials. Clutching the last, empty

cardboard box, I simply stared up into the night sky, too tired to be furious with myself. I drove two hours to an empty office and combed the dark warehouse for more thermite charges. Back at the jobsite, I pulled my truck inside the fence, angled it towards the trench, and left my high beams on. It wasn’t much, but it provided faint light at the bottom. Down again. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. My hands started to shake.

There was water in the bottom of the trench. Enough to come over the top of my boots if I wasn’t careful where I stepped. OSHA safety standards prohibit workers from even entering an excavation where water has accumulated. I knew that. I’d seen trenches collapsing on safety meeting videos. I knew how the sides of the excavation could suddenly slough off, slump inward, and settle down. It happened too fast to avoid or escape. On the videos, I heard men off to the side scream in horror as the earth collapsed and they surged forward in desperation. It can take hours or days to dig someone out. You might be entombed barely underneath the surface, and yet no one can save you in time.

I wasn’t afraid of failing the demands of the foreman, because I had already made them my own. I had performed that essential trick of masculinity

that allowed me to believe I wasn’t manipulated or controlled. I wasn’t a coward to my own authority. I told myself that I hefted the burden because I was determined and driven and because I could bear it.

I knew better than to continue.

I continued.

With two welds remaining, I accidently knocked my flint lighter off the pipe, and it tumbled into the water below. I was tired, hungry, and sloppy. I desperately fished it out, wiped it on my jeans, and blew into it until my face was splattered with grimy trench-water. There was a soggy thud when I pulled the trigger. I had started to allow myself to hope that the finish was within reach, that all this would be over soon. Yet even in that moment, ruined lighter in hand, I wouldn’t give up and climb out.

And I proved that to myself at nearly midnight, when I stood shindeep in the muddy, crotch of the earth with a cheap, plastic lighter from a nearby 24-hour gas station jury-rigged to my flint, and I shot the final weld, and I heard the bellow of immolation, felt that baptism of warm orange light, and I knew, knew without even looking, that the bond was perfect, hard, and ready for burial.

I whooped with angry joy the whole drive home. Victory roared in my ears, and I felt invincible. When I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, covered in grime and mud and thermite powder, I saw the man I had always longed to be. A man that was ferocious and capable. There was a part of me that wanted to get right back in my truck, drive back to that god-forsaken job site, kick down into the trench, and straddle that black iron pipe with a full-throated yeehaw. l

I wasn’t afraid of failing the demands of the foreman, because I had already made them my own.

MARK HERNBERG spent nearly 15 years working as a corrosion engineer at power plants, pipelines, and military bases across the world; he is now a writer and stay-at-home dad living in Seattle, WA. He recently completed his MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana, where he taught undergraduate composition courses and a creative writing workshop. Mark has served as a poetry reader and non-fiction editor for CutBank Literary Magazine and is currently an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.

Did you find this article interesting? Mark Hernberg will be teaching A Labor of Love: A Life Spent Writing and Working on Tuesdays, Sept. 3, 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1, 8 - 7-9 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events

ARTIST PROFILE: RICH SOLBERG

Rich Solberg calls himself “a lucky kid!”

His dad not only owned a farm implement business but also had learned gas welding as a student at Wahpeton. He took his twelveyear-old son, Rich, to the implement shop to teach him how to weld. After a few short lessons, Rich was allowed to take the shop keys after supper, walk the few blocks to the shop, and weld away! One of his first pieces depicted a story he had overheard about a fellow who had had too much to drink and his head fell on the table at the bar. Rich welded nuts and bolts together to create the scene which became his first art piece. His family’s banker neighbor loved the piece and commissioned thirteen-year-old Richard to make one for him. His first commission! Solberg has been recycling and welding metal together to create art ever since.

Some of Solberg’s metal creations are small, some large; some are serious, some are whimsical. Perhaps his most serious art piece is the recent creation of a 12-foot cross containing 199 smaller crosses, recalling the 199 North Dakota military personnel who gave their lives in Vietnam. “It’s personal for me, a Vietnam veteran,

because I lost friends in that war. I want their lives and their service to be honored.” The cross of crosses currently stands at the end of Solberg’s driveway waiting for permanent placement in a veterans’ park to be created in Minot.

Solberg’s whimsical art grows from his love of language, particularly words, phrases, and colloquialisms that strike a chord with him. Phrases like “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” “ride until the wheels fall off,” “mansplain”. Art pieces, Solberg believes, will usually tell a story.

“The artist should let the viewer either find the story or decide what his/her own story is in the art piece.”

“Creating artworks is like giving birth,” Solberg says. “It’s like your own child that you thought about, nurtured, and shaped into something. I can’t sell some pieces just like I wouldn’t sell my child.” One of those pieces is called COFFEE. It took many hours to create, and several people have requested to buy it. “Not for sale,” he tells them. Just like the bench he made from old skis he and his family used when the kids were growing up. “Not for sale.”

Solberg’s friends and relatives often provide him with raw materials for his work. Some of that “junk” will lie around his studio for years until one day he may pass by and realize it has a place in a current creation. He will often recycle that shared junk into a new piece that he gives back to its owner. A bit of nostalgia!

Solberg has created over 1,000 pieces that can be found around the world in family homes, at lake resorts, on farms, or in offices. Several of his art pieces have won Best of Show at the North Dakota State Fair.

Using mostly recycled metal, car and motorcycle parts, railroad spikes and other odd pieces gives Solberg enjoyment. “I like creating something new out of something old.” Another type of art he likes to create is family name signs that have a 3D object that indicates something about the family; “It’s the 3D part of the creation that I enjoy.” His own Solberg family sign has a skier on it. Some family signs might have an oil rig, an old car, a hockey player—something significant to the family’s life. A local family commissioned Solberg to create signs for seven family members and those signs now hang in fancy lodges in Big Sky, Montana.

“I like everything about creating the art pieces,” he says, “but the best part is when someone else appreciates the piece and lets me know.” Some parts of creating the piece can be difficult and challenging, and that’s when Solberg wakes at 4 am and his mind churns until he comes up with a way to complete the work. Sleepless nights call for some short afternoon naps!

The Taube Art Museum in Minot will be featuring current Solberg sculptures from September 9 - October 10 in his fourth Taube show entitled Old Gold: Steel & Wood. The artist reception will be held on September 13, 2024. Solbergs work can be viewed on Facebook at RL Solberg.

Solberg, who now lives in Minot, grew up in Stanley and graduated with both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of North Dakota. After returning from Vietnam, he purchased his father’s farm implement business where he had access to his own shop! Eventually he sold the business and began a career as a school counselor and school administrator. Upon retirement in 2011, he has given himself to creating art, restoring old vehicles, and enjoying traveling with his wife and spending time with their two children and five grandchildren. l

“I can’t sell some pieces just like I wouldn’t sell my child.”

Public University classes are FREE to members, simply enter the following coupon code at checkout: learn Thanks to the support of the members of Humanities North Dakota Registration is currently open Class sizes are limited

Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes

NATIVE AMERICAN BEST PRACTICES 1

Ricky White

This is a 12-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Mondays, Sept. 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct. 7, 14, 21, 28, Nov. 4, 11, 18, 25 - 5-7 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

Participants will begin a journey of learning Native American cultural competence by connecting with cultural teachings and applying them to their own work or perspectives. Once participants connect with the culture, they are much more equipped to tackle the content and plans of this robust course, which will ultimately make them much more confident to use what they have learned in a respectful and meaningful way.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Ricky White is an Ojibwe educator who is fluent in the Ojibwe language and deeply knowledgeable in the Ojibwe culture, customs, and ways of life. He is also a member of the renowned singing group, the Whitefish Bay Singers, and he is deeply honored to share the teachings that he has retained from his mentors, experiences, and study. Ricky is a sought-after Native American consultant, and he is dedicating his life to helping school districts and organizations to better understand Native people.

NATIVE AMERICAN BEST PRACTICES 2

Ricky White

This is a 12-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, Sept. 4, 11, 18, 25, Oct. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Nov. 6, 13, 20, 27 - 5-7 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This course is open to folks who participated in Native American Best Practices 1. Many people have taken my course through NDSU and you are also welcome to this one as well. This course will dive deeper into what we were exposed to in the previous course with opportunities to advance and enhance into how folks will use the content in their work or lives. This will inspire deeper layers of Native competence and understanding to move things to another level of knowing and sharing this content.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Ricky White is an Ojibwe educator who is fluent in the Ojibwe language and deeply knowledgeable in the Ojibwe culture, customs, and ways of life.

He is also a member of the renowned singing group, the Whitefish Bay Singers, and he is deeply honored to share the teachings that he has retained from his mentors, experiences, and study. Ricky is a sought-after Native American consultant, and he is dedicating his life to helping school districts and organizations to better understand Native people.

OJIBWE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 1

Ricky White

This is a 12-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Sept. 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Nov. 5, 12, 19, 26 - 5-7 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This is an introductory course to Ojibwe Language and Culture. There will be language embedded into each evening along with cultural teachings. Native cultures stress that the language is the culture and the culture is the language and we cannot have one without the other. This unique course will build a proficient base and will add to the overall knowledge of the Ojibwe.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Ricky White is an Ojibwe educator who is fluent in the Ojibwe language and deeply knowledgeable in the Ojibwe culture, customs, and ways of life. He is also a member of the renowned singing group, the Whitefish Bay Singers, and he is deeply honored to share the teachings that he has retained from his mentors, experiences, and study. Ricky is a sought-after Native American consultant, and he is dedicating his life to helping school districts and organizations to better understand Native people.

WRITE WHERE YOU ARE

William J. Macauley

This is a 4-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22 - 5:30-7:30 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This workshop series will focus on writing from the richness of where participants are. Quality writing calls attention to exactly these details. We all have so much available to us right here,

right now, and too often this richness can be missed. This is the essence of both meaningful writing and mindfulness practice—paying attention and being aware.

This workshop series will help participants build from what may seem mundane. Participants will be invited to try on practices and tools to not only notice but articulate details from everyday life, toward whatever writing they are interested in pursuing. These workshops provide opportunities to develop mindful practices that will both use and inform writing. Participants will leave this workshop series with a keen appreciation for lived detail, an engagement with meaning-making out of the familiar, and tools and practices for writing as both a tool of mindfulness and mindfulness as a way to enrich writing.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Dr. William Macauley has been teaching college-level English since 1987, as well as directing writing programs and writing centers in a variety of settings. Over the past few years, his teaching has turned toward writing and mindfulness classes/workshops to help writers be present with their writing and break out of production/publication as singular measures of success.

UNDERSTANDING SCIENCE FICTION

Eric Link

This is a 1-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursday, Sept. 5 - 6-8 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

Arguably, no single genre—in literature, in film, in the visual arts—has come to dominate the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century more than science fiction. Over the last 100 years, science fiction—or SF—has evolved, branched out into all manner of representation, become the object of massive and diverse fandoms, and become a focus of intense academic investigation and scrutiny. SF has become a kind of lens through which individuals engage their worlds and envision their collective futures.

In this illustrated lecture, “Understanding

Science Fiction,” I introduce audiences to the field of science fiction film and literature. During this talk, I answer the question: what is science fiction? and talk about the language of science fiction, including such concepts as alloplastic and autoplastic societies, alterity, the novum, distance markers, and cybernetics. I discuss the impact of contemporary techno-philosophical ideas such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the technological singularity hypothesis on modern science fiction, and I give a tour through many of the most common science fiction plot structures, from the alien contact story to the alternative history to the dying-earth scenario.

This lecture requires no specialized knowledge of literary theory: it is intended for broad academic audiences.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Eric Carl Link is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of North Dakota. He is the author and/or editor of ten books and over fifty scholarly articles that span the fields of 19th-century American literature and Science Fiction. His work in the field of science fiction includes Understanding Philip K. Dick (2010), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), and The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015).

UNDERSTANDING ISRAEL AND GAZA

Jason Steinhauer

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Nov. 5 - 7-8 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

A broad historical overview of the Middle East, particularly on Israel and Gaza. This course aims to offer contemporary information so that news consumers have a more solid historical framework when analyzing the current war between Israel and Hamas.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Jason Steinhauer is a bestselling author, public historian, podcast host, founder of the History Communication Institute, creator of History Club, Global Fellow at The Wilson Center, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy

Research Institute, and an expert speaker on disinformation and media literacy for the US Department of State.

EMPOWERMENT THROUGH VISUALIZATION AND GOAL SETTING FOR OLDER ADULTS

Jeremy Holloway

This is a 12-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Sept. 3, 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Nov 5, 12, 19 - 7:15-8:45 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

Unlock your potential and embark on a transformative journey tailored to older adults. In this interactive workshop, you will discover the art of setting and achieving Life Enrichment Goals, profoundly impacting your well-being and equipping you with tangible skills that redefine your personal growth and life enrichment.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Dr. Jeremy Holloway is an Assistant Professor and Director of Geriatric Education at the University of North Dakota. He was inspired to take action after hearing from a chaplain at an assisted living facility about the alarming rates of older adults succumbing to social isolation and loneliness. Dr. Holloway’s research primarily revolves around the social determinants of health, with a specific focus on the self-efficacy, connectedness, and resiliency of older adults.

AMERICA AND THE MODERN PRESIDENCY: FROM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT TO RONALD

REAGAN, 1933-1989 Rick Collin

This is a 10-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, Sept. 11, 18, 25, Oct. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Nov. 6, 13 - 7-9 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This course will examine the policies and personalities of the nine men who occupied the White House from the depths of the Great Depression and World War II through the Space Race, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the end of the Cold War—Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy

Carter, and Ronald Reagan. The course meets ten nights—the first night will be an introduction, then each night after that will be devoted to a particular President. The goal of this course is to profile each of these Presidents and the times in which they served, while also providing ample time for discussion among class members.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Instructor Rick Collin is a historian passionate about history told through stories. Rick worked for the State Historical Society of North Dakota for 16 years. Previous Public University courses he has taught include America and the 1960s: From Camelot to Woodstock, Riding the Back of the Tiger: America and the Vietnam War, 194575, and The Modern Presidency: FDR to Reagan, 1933-89.

EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND WORDS

Claire Barwise

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Mondays, Oct. 14, 21, 28, Nov. 4, 11, 186:30-8 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

“[O]ne black-haired tree slips / up like a drowned woman into the hot sky…” So begins Anne Sexton’s electrifying poem “The Starry Night.” No matter how many times you’ve seen Van Gogh’s masterwork, Sexton’s poem will make you see it with new eyes. Ekphrastic literature, derived from the Greek words “ek” (out) and “phrazein” (“to point out or explain”), refers to the vivid description of visual art through words. It captures the essence, emotions, and intricacies of artwork, breathing life into static images.

Through a curated selection of texts and artworks spanning different periods, cultures, and genres, we will explore the dynamic interplay between visual imagery and written narratives. From masters such as WH Auden to contemporary voices such as Ocean Vuong, from classical paintings to avant-garde installations, each session will offer a rich and thought-provoking exploration of both visual art and written expression. Join us in seeing how words illuminate art and art breathes life into words, forging connections across time, space, and imagination. No prior knowledge of art

or literature is required—only a curiosity for discovery and a passion for creativity.

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 lives and teaches in Philadelphia, PA.

THE COST OF FREE LAND BOOKCLUB

Rebecca Clarren

This is a 5-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Sundays, Sept. 15, 22, 29, Oct. 6, 13 - 3:30-5 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

Join Rebecca Clarren, author of the acclaimed The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and An American Inheritance for an intimate book club. Each week, participants will discuss two chapters of this award-winning blend of history, memoir, and investigative journalism, learning from Clarren the stories behind the making of this book. Clarren will also share tips for how to conduct ancestral research, interrogate family lore, and find oneself in the history of Native American land dispossession.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty years. Her work, which work has won a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and regular support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She lives in Portland, OR with her husband and two kids.

SOUND AND FORM IN POEM CONSTRUCTION

Shadd Piehl

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursdays, Sept. 19, 26, Oct. 3, 10, 17, 24 - 6:30-8 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This class will focus on refining sound and line in the writing of poems by examining structure and meter and through the reading, discussing, and writing of different forms of poetry.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

A fifth-generation North Dakotan, Shadd Piehl’s poetry has appeared in the anthologies, Between Earth and Sky: Contemporary Cowboy Poets, Maverick Western Verse, Brushstrokes and Balladeers, and the magazines Aluminum Canoe, Pemmican, Red Weather, and Dry Crik Review, among others. A private investigator and adjunct English instructor at Bismarck State College, Shadd lives along Crown Butte Creek in the Heart River valley west of Mandan with his family.

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

Kevin Walker

This is an 11-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursdays, Sept. 5, 12, 19, 26, Oct. 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, Nov. 7, 14 - 5-6 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

The author of one of the most important books on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that the world was moving toward democracy as if guided by the hand of God. This could be good news or bad news: would nations end up with stable constitutions like the United States, or would they fall into violence and instability like he witnessed in France? How might Americans continue to make the best use of democracy, and avoid its dangers? To answer that question, Tocqueville came to the United States to study our political institutions and ways of life, and he published his findings in his book, Democracy in America, in 1835. This course is a study of Tocqueville’s major observations, warnings, and hopes for our country, and it considers what guidance he offers for maintaining our national life.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Kevin Walker is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Mary. He received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University in California and has taught politics and history for 22 years at different colleges.

HISTORY’S HEROINES, HEROES, AND LEGENDS

Christopher Bellitto

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Mondays, Sept. 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct. 7, 147-8:30 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So we hear in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Indeed, we can add that every history has a legend and every legend has a history. Join us as we try to untangle one from the other as we learn from both. We will spend our time in the classical and medieval world. We begin with the trial of Socrates and then move to the great tale of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. From ancient Greece and Rome, we travel to the early Middle Ages and the myth of Pope Joan—a fabrication that tells great truths. Next, we visit Canterbury and the martyrdom of Thomas Becket—was it a hit ordered by his frenemy King Henry II? Join us in medieval Spain to uncover the truth behind the Inquisition. Finally, we walk with Joan of Arc from a peasant village to royal courts.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Dr. Christopher M. Bellitto is a Professor of History at Kean University in New Jersey, where he teaches courses in ancient and medieval history. A specialist in medieval and church history, his latest book is Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue (Georgetown University Press, 2023). He has twice won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary and a Fulbright Specialist in New Zealand and the Netherlands. Dr. Bellitto also serves as series Editor in Chief of Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition and Academic Editor at Large for Paulist Press. He offers public lectures frequently and is also a media commentator on church history and contemporary Catholicism.

THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

Brooks Susman

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 - 6-7:30 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

Was the biblical text revealed by God or written as a “who done it” by someone like Dashiell Hammett or Agatha Christie? The Bible’s stories and lessons are more than religious or theological; they delve into the human spirit, mind, and actions. This course will look at the unembellished story through the text, offering insights through the original Hebrew to allow the English reader to discover the real stories behind the “sermonic lessons”.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Rabbi Brooks R. Susman is the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Am of Freehold, New Jersey, retiring in August 2015. In his rabbinate, Rabbi Susman has served congregations in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey as well as St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Ohio University with a dual major in philosophy and political science. Rabbi Susman was ordained from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1974 with a BHL and MAHL, where he also received his Doctor of Divinity in 1999. Dr. Susman is an adjunct professor at Brookdale Community College teaching classes on ethics, justice, history, and philosophy as well as Bible, Midrash, and Jewish Thought.

A PRACTICAL WORKSHOP TO WRITING SPECULATIVE FICTION

Steven A. Guglich

This is an 8-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Sept. 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 - 6-8 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This course will cover the basics of speculative fiction writing, including plotting, character development, tropes, world-building, and critique partners/groups. Participants will submit samples of their work to be critiqued by the members of the group. From this group, we will also form critique groups.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Steven A. Guglich is a chronicler of heroes and a guide to worlds not yet seen. In this world, he is a Christian, husband, dad, and Nationally Distinguished Principal.

A LABOR OF LOVE: A LIFE SPENT WRITING AND WORKING

Mark Hernberg

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Sept. 3, 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1, 8 - 7-9 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This 6-week course is designed as a hybrid format of literary discussion/lecture and creative writing workshop. It’s aimed at students who love reading about fascinating jobs, who want to learn how to write about their own work, and who want to approach their own creative writing practice with more intention, craft, and enthusiasm.

Students will be introduced to a variety of books, poems, and articles that delve into various fascinating jobs and aspects of work in our modern world, from memoirs like Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” to poems like Phillip Levine’s “What Work Is”. We’ll use these pieces to discuss the craft of ‘work writing’: how do successful writers investigate their own ‘work’ and make it so evocative? How can their approaches be applied to our own writing?

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Mark Hernberg spent nearly 15 years working as a corrosion engineer at power plants, pipelines, and military bases across the world; he is now a writer and stay-at-home dad living in Seattle, WA. He recently completed his MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana, where he taught undergraduate composition courses and a creative writing workshop. Mark has served as a poetry reader and non-fiction editor for CutBank Literary Magazine and is currently an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.

SHORT FORM WRITING WORKSHOP

Tayo Basquiat

This is a 4-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, Sept. 18, 25, Oct. 2, 9 - 7-8:30 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

In this writing workshop, we’ll explore the art of short-form writing (fiction and nonfiction) through the study of selected short stories and by workshopping participants’ original work. Everyone will submit one short story of no more than 1,000 words, for discussion at one of the workshops. Class limit: 8

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

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

LIFE, LITERATURE, AND POLITICS

Tayo Basquiat

This is a 3-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, Sept. 11, Oct. 16, Nov. 6 - 7-9 pm Central time.

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

This is a class exploring how we create ourselves in life and in art, where the tidy separation between the private and the political breaks down and we must figure out how to respond, how to create, and how to resist or change. We’ll read and discuss three books: Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel; James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and Nana Kwame

Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All-Stars

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

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

THEORY OF ENCHANTMENT

PROFESSIONAL COURSE

Chloé Valdary

Asynchronous

ABOUT THIS CLASS:

By enrolling in the Theory of Enchantment Professional course, you’ll learn self-mastery, how to manage your emotional health, and practice the three principles of the Theory of Enchantment to build holistic, transformational relationships with others—even with those you find disagreeable.

The course is a completely self-paced online course—you decide when you start and the course ends exactly two months from the purchase date.

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

After spending a year as a Bartley fellow at the Wall Street Journal, Chloé Valdary developed The Theory of Enchantment, an innovative framework for social emotional learning (SEL), character development, and interpersonal growth that uses pop culture as an educational tool in the classroom and beyond.

Chloé has trained around the world, including in South Africa, The Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. Her clients have included high school and college students, government agencies, business teams, and many more. She has also lectured at universities across America, including Harvard and Georgetown. Her work has been covered in Psychology Today Magazine and her writings have appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

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April 10, 2024 through June 21, 2024

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS & STAFF

HND Board of Directors

CHAIR

Barb Solberg, Minot

VICE CHAIR

Dina Butcher, Bismarck

Lyle Best, Watford City

Julie Blehm, Fargo

Dennis Cooley, Fargo

Angela S. Gorder, Bottineau

Trygve Hammer, Minot

Mark Holman, Williston

Hamzat A. Koriko, Grand Forks

Dorothy Lick, Bismarck

Marianna Malm, Fargo

Prairie Rose Seminole, Garrison

Staff

Brenna Gerhardt, Executive Director

Nick Glass, Fiscal Operations Director

Sue Muraida, Program Director

Ashley Thornberg, Program Manager

Lacie Van Orman, Marketing Director

Amber Dirk, Office Administrator

Dayna Del Val, Podcast Host

Scott Wild, Podcast Editor