Maine Humanities Council

View of St. John River from Edmundston, New Brunswick toward Frenchville, ME (credit: Daniel Picard)

The St. John Valley in Aroostook County is an area rich in history and culture. When I visited it two years ago for the second time in my life, I saw rural lawns mowed in straight rows, houses painted perfectly, and window boxes full of flowers. Fields of grass, clover, potatoes, and broccoli were everywhere. The landscape spoke of an idyllic life with a shared pride in community, and the people I met reflected this, too.

The MHC has always had programming in the St. John Valley, from a children’s literature seminar last year in Fort Kent to many New Books, New Readers adult literacy groups to several grants awarded to, among other projects, the development of a cultural tour (“Voici the Valley”). And recently, we’ve had Let’s Talk About It library-based reading and discussion groups.

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Each year, the adult education programs that partner with New Books, New Readers eagerly await a new series, and just about every year, the program provides one. In 2010, New Books, New Readers developed a series on the immigrant experience in the United States. “Caught Between Cultures” explores such questions as: What do immigrants find alien about America? How does America start feeling like home? How can you maintain the culture that you were born into and still become American? What do immigrants value most about America?

New Books, New Readers is a reading and discussion program for adults who struggle to read. It uses children’s books with simple language but enormous ideas. The texts for “Caught Between Cultures,” like all other series, are capable of prompting powerful conversations:

Home at Last, Susan Middleton Elya

Grandfather Counts, Andrea Cheng

In English, of Course, Josephine Nobisso

Angel Child, Dragon Child, Michele Maria Surat

Molly Bannaky, Alice McGill

When Jessie Came Across the Sea, Amy Hest

A Day’s Work, Eve Bunting

Hannah Is My Name: A Young Immigrant’s Story, Belle Yang

Coolies, Yin

Posted on behalf of our friends at PaperTigers:

The Spirit of PaperTigers project is part of the PaperTigers program. Through its website and blog, PaperTigers promotes multicultural books for young readers from and about anywhere in the world. The purpose of the Spirit of PaperTigers project (SPT) is to select a set of books and to put them into the hands of children in different parts of the world, especially in schools and libraries in areas of need. The seven books in this year’s set have been chosen because their content and focus promote our goals, i.e. to promote reading and literacy, as well as greater understanding and empathy among young people from different backgrounds, countries, and ethnicities.

Three phrases sum up what we hope the book sets will represent for all who use them: “a cultural encounter in or through a book”, “a fun encounter”, “a path towards empathy”.

While book set recipients are free to use the books in whatever way they judge best suited to their situation, an “SPT User’s Guide” is included with each set and offers suggestions that teachers and librarians might find useful.

A crucial element of our SPT project is the sharing of the feedback we get from recipients. Recipients are asked to provide feedback on the responses of the young readers to the books in the form of reports, observations, drawings, photos etc. We will then be able to feature this feedback, and the school or library that uses the book set, on the PaperTigers site and blog. In this first year of the project, sets of books are heading towards destinations within the United States but also to countries as far away, and as diverse, as India, Kenya, the Philippines, and Uruguay. A limited number of sets are still available and we would be delighted, even though we cannot say yes to all, if schools and/or libraries in Maine were to let us know if they wish to take part in the project. The quickest way to contact us is through email, or by regular mail at: PaperTigers Managing Editor, 300 Third Street, Suite 822, San Francisco, CA 94107.

Jennifer Crane, photo credit: Diane Magras

Each summer, the MHC holds week-long History Camps for Maine high school students, akin to Music Camps, Writing Camps, Computer Camps, and so on: participants spend their days studying or practicing what they love best. In this case, it’s inspiring history to life. Students have behind-the-scenes experiences at museums, learn how exhibits are created, investigate primary sources, and hear experts speak. In 2010, the MHC will offer “The Cold War, McCarthyism, and Margaret Chase Smith’s ‘Declaration of Conscience‘” (June 28 through July 2 in Skowhegan) and “Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold and the Maine Frontier” (July 12 through 16 in Augusta). More information will upcoming on the MHC website.

“Quest for the Pole,” offered last summer in partnership with the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College, was very close to the heart of Jennifer Crane, one of the camp’s instructors.

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Diane Athill’s meditative memoir Somewhere Towards the End examines aging with honesty and wry humor. In an opinionated and unadorned voice, Athill, now 93 and a longtime editor for edgy publisher André Deutsch in London (some of her authors included Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Simone de Beauvoir, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer) touches lightly on subjects as varied as driving, gardening, the ebbing of her love life, family, the gradual breakdown of the body, and regrets (or lack thereof). In a chapter on her reading habits, she confesses that she reads mainly nonfiction because novels no longer thrill her: “I became bored with what they had to tell me: I knew it too well…old age has made me pernickety, like someone whose appetite has dwindled so that she can only be tempted by rare delicacies…I no longer feel the need to ponder human relationships – particularly not love affairs – but I do still want to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander…” Athill infuses her reminiscences with a sense of gratefulness, both for the life she has lived and for the quotidian joys that bring meaning and pleasure to each day.

Recommended by Anne Schlitt