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• Linking Generations

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• Upcoming Events

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• News from the MHC

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• Recent Grants

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• What We’re Reading: Teachers for a New Century

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• Quote of the Month

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”

— Time Regained
Marcel Proust

Recently, the Maine Humanities Council funded a reading and discussion program that brought together students from Lorrayne Carroll's service learning class at USM and residents of Ridgewood, a senior living facility in Gorham. Five residents joined three students for a reading and discussion series using books that the residents had chosen from a list provided by the Council. The texts included To Kill a Mockingbird, The Shipping News, Empire Falls, The Commitments, and Climbing the God Tree.

David Wentworth, one of the students, sent me a fascinating report on what he had experienced and observed about this program. He noted that the residents decided not to use one of the books after reading online that it contained adult language and sexual situations. These themes in several of the other books did cause some discomfort for the residents, but it also opened up a discussion.

“As an outreach program for the University, I think this was a tremendous success,” David wrote to me, “so much so that the seniors have agreed to host another group this fall. Both the students and the seniors got something valuable from the meetings. The students experienced first hand a generational difference in interpretation of readings, and an insight into the moral standards of the senior citizens which was quite different than that of the students. The seniors got socialization and friendship, and as was stated more than once, a reason to get out of the apartment for a few hours.”

David thought that the socialization was a critical element, but also the access to books. Many of the residents are unable to get out and obtain books, largely due to problems with their own mobility but also transportation. They often did not have enough money to buy all the books they might want to read, and their apartments had little room for storing libraries.

The Council would be delighted to explore future programs like this one, linking generations and providing valuable opportunities to both.

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Are we ambitious or simply insane? Sometimes our program officers, strapped down with project on top of project, ask themselves that very question. This June, two MHC programs will be offering a summer session at the same time and, yes indeed, at the same place (well, mostly). Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® will be offering a summer institute to train facilitators in this program. This will occur June 25 through June 28. Teachers for a New Century is holding another session of “Views of the East," its multipart program that helps Maine teachers expand their knowledge of Eastern culture and history, during precisely the same time. Both will be at Bowdoin, in different classrooms, though. These are very special programs and present some of the finest scholars that the MHC works with. If anyone on this list is interested in attending a session of either of these programs, please be in touch with me. These are not generally open to the public, but we’d be happy to share an insider’s view with a small group of friends.

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Grant-Funded Events

And as always, here is the list of current grant-funded events.

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Let’s Talk About It, the MHC’s free book discussion program, is featuring three new series for the late spring and summer. Titles for the series are American Traditions/American Innovations: American Poetry of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Across Cultures Continents: Literature of the Indian Experience and Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine.

American Traditions/American Innovations: American Poetry of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century will begin by focusing on three standout nineteenth century poets, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and show how their influence was essential to the development of a distinctly American style of writing. With these roots in mind, readers will discuss the works of poets Allen Ginsburg, Sylvia Plath, Howard Moss, Robert Bly, and others. This series was developed for the Maine Humanities Council by former Maine Poet Laureate, Baron Wormser, and will be held at the Belfast Free Library starting on May 30, led by poet Candice Stover. It will also take place at the Bridgton Public Library beginning July 15, led by Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl.

Across Cultures Continents: Literature of the Indian Experience is a new series developed for the Maine Humanities Council by Professor Deepaka Marya of the University of Southern Maine. This series explores how the colonial experience of South Asia has been represented in works of fiction over the years, with books from the colonial era of the 1920s in India to contemporary works focusing on the lives of South Asians living overseas in alien cultures. The titles for this series include A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Bricklane by Monica Ali, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee and Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. At the center of all the books is an exploration of what the South Asian/Indian experience has been, both living away from home in the UK and the USA, and under colonialism.

The final new series, Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine, provides an in-depth look at humans’ relationship to the natural environment in Maine. This collection of readings raises questions about what constitutes wilderness, conservation and ecology, and human beings’ relationships with the wilderness. The texts for this series include Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s personal account of her climb to the summit of Mt. Katahdin in 1849, and memoirs of family life in the Maine woods, and exploration of logging and eco-tourism industries in our state. Facilitated and created by historian Candice Kanes, this series will take place at the Livermore Public Library beginning May 18, and will start up in the fall at Norway Memorial Library.

If you are interested in having one of these series at your own library, please let your librarian know. If you’d like to learn more about this program, contact Elizabeth Sinclair, program officer of Let’s Talk About It.

Many thanks to the Maine State Library, with whom the MHC partners to present Let’s Talk About It statewide, and the Belvedere Fund of the Maine Community Foundation.

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May was a quiet month for the MHC grant-making team.

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Open it to any page and find strong, clear, and entertaining prose. That’s not the only reason that Teachers for a New Century used Robert Dallek’s Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President for its “Teaching American History” colloquia, but it certainly makes this fascinating history a very good read for anyone. Dallek follows Johnson through his early life in poverty in Texas, showing the steps that led to his political career, and sharing Johnson’s thoughts as reported by his family, aides, and colleagues. With an insightful eye, this book explores the struggles that Johnson had with foreign policy and the war in Vietnam. Many of the teachers who took this program had lived through Johnson’s presidency and could remember what it was like. This text brought forward new realizations for them, and for the younger teachers who were less familiar with Johnson himself, it opened new doors. Regardless of age or experience, it’s a good study of a painful and complicated period of American history.

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“I held the hand of a dying patient, a person I had known for 18 years. I told her that I loved her and held her hand as she died. I have usually been more detached, but gentle, and let others sit with the patient, so I could continue with my busy work. But I hesitated, sat at the bedside, and decided NOT to leave. To BE with her.”

— From a health care professional participating in
Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®

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