(HOST) Commentator Deborah Luskin enjoys sitting around the campfire at her local library – metaphorically speaking of course.
(LUSKIN) At a recent workshop where I was teaching educators how to facilitate a literature-based book discussion, my colleague tossed a copy of the book we’d been talking about into the middle of our circle. We all stared at it, a little perplexed, until she explained: "The book’s like a campfire, and we’re all sitting around it, drawn together by the same story." She’s absolutely right. Stories bring us together.
Stories have probably been bringing people together since before we discovered fire. At first, stories probably imparted important information, like where to find water and food, and how to avoid predators and hazards. We know that people also told stories to explain the unknown: how the earth began, how fire arrived, what happens to us after we die.
Stories still hold our attention. Rather than gather around a fire though, we tend to read them alone, then circle up to discuss them. Thanks to the Vermont Reads program, Vermonters have a chance to read the same book and then come together to talk about it. Vermont Reads is like a statewide campfire. This year, the Vermont Reads book has been Katherine Patterson’s, The Day of the Pelican, the story of an Albanian family forced to flee their home in Kosovo.
At a recent Vermont Reads event, one participant noted that political discussions usually fall on one side or other of a hard line, but that this story, with its human characters, shows us how those who experience the fallout of hard line politics live much more nuanced lives.
The family in the story flees their ancestral home after soldiers steal their car, their identification, money and jewelry and set their home on fire. Two of the five children in the family are adolescents. The thirteen-year old boy wants to join the insurgents; the eleven-year old girl longs for a return to normalcy.
After two years of arduous homelessness, the family relocates to Vermont, where their story becomes the familiar one of immigration – the story of adjustment to a new world that has been going on in New England at least since 1620, when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.
Like the Puritans, this Kosovar family came here to escape religious persecution. But the day after 9/11, the two adolescents become targets of anti-Muslim prejudice. After fleeing sectarian violence in Kosovo, the family is dismayed to experience religious intolerance In America. Paterson’s story, however, has a hopeful ending.
Just as Americans have a long history of sheltering refugees, there’s a parallel history of established Americans trying to shut the door on the next wave of immigrants hoping to live peacefully in a country famed for freedom and opportunity. The political discourse around the subject of immigration often seems like a shouting contest, but the literary discussion allowed us to consider ethical human behavior. Through reading and talking, we were able to identify and strengthen our community standards. We circled around the literary campfire, secure in its warmth and light.