You know that feeling you get when, late at night, you’re driving across a Kansas back road and you see a house in the distance with the porch light on. Or when you pull roll into your gravel drive at home to see the single bulb above the back steps lit in anticipation of your arrival.
Well, that’s the one I get when reading “Kansas Matters: 21st-century Writers on the Sunflower State.”
This is in no small part because of its editors, Thomas Fox Averill and Leslie VanHolten, who gathered voices of Kansas writers and their testimonies to belonging not only to a particular city, county and landscape, but also the state as a whole.
Tom Averill, who lives in Topeka, is professor Emeritus of English at Washburn University, where he taught Creative Writing and Kansas Studies. An O. Henry Award–winning short story writer, he is the author of ten books.
Averill stands for the entire state in much the same way Gene DeGruson stood for Southeast Kansas, not only as a teacher and historian but also a promoter of artists and writers, as could be seen in Gene’s ‘Little Balkan’s Review’, the literary and graphics quarterly he founded with Shelby Horn and Ted Watts, as well as his formation of special collections at PSU’s Axe Library.
In 2009 Averill donated to the Washburn University archives “an eclectic, inclusive set of materials dedicated to the study of Kansas literature through the state’s folklore, history, geography, flora, fauna, social fabric and culture. The holdings include novels, plays, collections of poetry and fiction, histories, biographies, memoirs, letters, scholarly articles, collected folklore, manuscripts and ephemera gathered over 40+ years.”
Leslie VonHolten, who lives in Lawrence, is a 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency fellow and a long-time commentator on High Plains Public Radio in Garden City. Until recent federal DOGE funding cuts, she worked at Humanities Kansas as grants director and managing editor of their poetry chapbook series, which features work by Kansas poets.
VonHolten, who lived in Franklin County until age 10, left when her father rejoined the army, returned to graduate college, then left again to live in Chicago, which is where she was when she wrote the following in the book’s epilogue:
“I remember the moment clearly: 1998, a cold slushy day on my lunch break wandering the shelves at Powell’s at fifty-Seventh and South Harper, just past the Metra tracks. There it was “What Kansas Means to Me,” edited by Thomas Fox Averill. I bought it. I was desperately homesick. And two years later I was a Kansan again.”
The book she came upon, “What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth Century Writers on the Sunflower State” was Averill’s first collection of Kansas writers. “Afflicted with Affection,” the title of book’s introduction, pretty much describes him and his call to promote what historian Carl Becker called “a ‘state of mind,’ a religion, and a philosophy in one.”
Averill and VonHolten are coming to town to lead a public reading and discussion of “Kansas Matters” hosted by Pittsburg Public Library at 2 p.m. this Sunday the 18th.
Two of my friends are coming down from K.C. as well. They will join me in sharing work included in the book. Mine will be a poem and story about my coal digger grandpa, Matt. Al Ortolani will read excerpts from his essay / poem combination about area strip pits. H.C. Palmer will read “Tide” — a poem about how his father’s belief that the gravitational pull of a full moon could move limestone — as well as other selections from his work.
Al’s also a poetry impresario who promotes poets and readings. He wrangled meself and two other local poets, Adam Jameson and Melissa Fite Johnson, into producing a collaboration of poems titled “Ghost Sign,” which won a Kansas notable book award and has been selected, along with H.C. Palmer’s “Feet of the Messenger”, to be included in the Kansas 250 Bookshelf, established by the Kansas state library to highlight the Kansas writers.
Although he grew up in Chanute and Atchison, H.C. Palmer is something of a native son himself, having been born at the old Mt. Carmel Hospital to Emma Benedetto of Pittsburg and H.C. “Speed” Palmer of Ringo.
Palmer served in Vietnam as a surgeon in the mid 1960s and worked 47 years as a physician before turning to poetry. At first, it was just for himself. Then, in 2014, he helped found the Veterans’ Writing Workshop of Kansas City to create a safe space for veterans and their families to regroup and process the harm done by their service through writing.
The reading will include a discussion and Q. & A. with the audience which promises to be as informative and entertaining as the shared poems and stories.
It’s all happening this Sunday at the library at two o’clock. Come join us. We’ll make sure to leave the light on for you.
J.T Knoll can be reached at 620-704-1309 or [email protected]
“I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas."
"That is because you have no brains," answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."
The Scarecrow sighed.
"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The poem goes on to tell how the father believed the gravitational pull of a full moon could move limestone and taught him to listen for echoes of the breaking surf. The son thought it all improbable until, one night as a full moon “rose so full of light we could have counted the calves in our pasture,” he felt the prairie lift and inch sideways as his father said, “There. That’s it.”
Getting back to Al Ortolani, I’m willing to bet he’s written at least one poem about all 35 of April’s official designations … except welding, maybe. But he’s got one about working summers on the City of Pittsburg asphalt crew that’s a good replacement.
Al’s also a poetry impresario who promotes poets and readings, as well as an editor for Little Balkan’s Press, which published the first full-length collections by locals Adam Jameson and Melissa Fite Johnson. Melissa’s book, “While the Kettle’s On,” won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book.
The reading is free and open to the public, so why not give yourself a break from the day’s “breaking news” about the latest malfeasance of Trump and his comrades, and Facebook’s latest algorithm scare, to celebrate Poetry Month and experience some finely tuned engines of words.
If you’re not sure the spoken word suits your fancy, here’s a couple of quotes to consider. The first is by Carol Ann Robb: “I didn't really appreciate poetry until I heard then poet laureate Ted Kooser read his work at PSU. I then read his poems on the page … but it wasn't quite the same. Poetry needs to be heard, not just read. I've recently come to the conclusion that if I think of poems as really short books I tend to understand them. But sometimes they don't need to mean something; it's just the beauty of the words.”
The second is by novelist and poet, James Dickey: “What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe.”
J.T. Knoll is a writer, speaker and eulogist. He also operates Knoll Training & Consulting in Pittsburg. He can be reached at 231-0499 or [email protected]
