By Louis Niebur
Twenty years ago I made my first trip to Reno from Los Angeles. I knew nearly nothing about the Biggest Little City other than what gay culture taught me (via the campy 1939 movie The Women): "Marry for love, marry for money. Where does it get you? On the train for Reno!"
By Joanne Mallari
As a student who grew up in a low-income household, public programming gave me valuable opportunities to engage with the arts. My earliest literacy sponsors included local librarians and mentors who worked with students in Las Vegas’ Clark County School District. When I started writing poems in sixth grade, my English teacher connected me with a summer program called the Southern Nevada Writing Project.
By Jane Fundis Tors
“Here’s to Lieutenant Gaetan Picon of the French Foreign Legion,” my father would say with his glass raised. The military rank may have been an embellishment, but history holds that Picon created the French liqueur while serving in Algeria. It would become the foundation of the Picon Punch drink, for many a symbol of the American-Basque and part of the northern Nevada experience.
By Christina Barr
Every year, as I drive across Nevada to head to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, I have four hours of deep-Nevada-landscape-road-trip time to think about the things that emerge when you stare at miles and miles of endless highway: life, love, work, poetry and of course, the passing of time.
By Angela M. Brommel
More than 20 years ago I met a retired Dean of Humanities through a course I was taking as a study of religion major. His name was Dee. Within moments of opening his door, he impatiently asked who I was and why I was qualified to be there. Before I had a chance to answer, he told me to sit as he started to tell me about his life’s work. As part of that story, Dee told me that each year he required students in his Introduction to Humanities course to memorize and recite Spring and Fall: to a young child by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wept as he recited it to me, and at that time I didn’t understand the poem or how it moved him.
By George Perreault
This poem was recently published in The American Journal of Poetry.
some folks who got shot today,
make it a whole bunch, a good score,
and sure some young ones are best,
give us headlines and ticker scroll,
the body count rising like a pledge drive,
maybe flashing lights and mouths, all that
By Katherine Fusco
In Ling Ma’s Severance, the undead are familiar. They are familiar not because, in the year 2020, we have all lived through the zombie trends in literature, film, and television. The fast zombie, the slow zombie, the funny zombie, the smart zombie—we’ve had them all. No, the undead in Severance are familiar because they are so much like you and I.
By Brad McMullen
Every year since 1985, thousands of people have made the trip out to Elko, Nevada in the dead of winter, gathering together in order to celebrate and commemorate the vitality of the artistic traditions of the American West at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Though the event has grown a bit from the 60 chairs set out by Western Folklife Center founding director Hal Cannon and poet Waddie Mitchell 36 years ago, the event still provides a place for people from all over to come together and have all kinds of conversations.
By Peter Michel and Aaron Mayes
Before gaming, before hotels, before the tourists came, the Las Vegas valley of the 1800s was home to Native American Indians, explorers, miners, ranchers, and settlers heading to California, who wandered, set down, picked up, and mostly moved on. When the San Pedro, Salt Lake, and Los Angeles Railroad decided to use the local springs on the old Stewart Ranch to water its locomotives, and, almost as an afterthought in 1905, laid out a small townsite around its depot and train yards, the latest Nevada boom town suddenly appeared. This eruption of a new town in the desert is vividly captured throughout the early family photo albums now housed at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, (UNLV) Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
By Amy Pason
Over the holidays, my family likes to play board games. This year, we played Seven Wonders where the objective is to build a civilization strategizing resource and building cards. Sometimes your strategy might be to build marketplaces so you profit from other players buying resources. Sometimes it is more advantageous to develop the arts. While other times, you might need to go on the offense to gain armies if your opponents decide to take a defense strategy (for the record, I was able to best my parents’ points gained in battle by focusing on points gained by my science and education buildings).
We wish you a joyous holiday season and look forward to sharing with you all the humanities have to offer from Reno to Las Vegas and every place in between.
Happy Holidays from Nevada Humanities!
Read MoreBy The Holland Project
The Holland Project and KWNK 97.7FM, along with Nevada Humanities, have collaborated to bring you a retrospective on the 2019 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, “Unabridged.” Bask in the afterglow, and plan ahead to another sunny September day for the 2020 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl.
By Kristen Simmons
I didn’t know I wanted to be an author until my senior year in high school. It was in my English class at McQueen High in Reno, Nevada, when Mr. Shields read my essay on A Tale of Two Cities aloud to the class. I was embarrassed—I mean, stoplight red, quaking in my seat, really hoping my crush in the back row wasn’t listening, embarrassed. Those minutes lasted a lifetime, and when Mr. Shields was finally finished, he placed the paper on my desk, and said, “You’ve really got something.”
By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Wishing you and yours a most Happy Thanksgiving Day! Celebrate, give thanks, and seek out the humanities in the world around you.
By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Have you ever stopped to think about the many ways in which the humanities touch your life? The humanities are all around you. The humanities are the basic elements that make us human, our capacity for reflection, our creativity, and our diverse cultures and identities.
By Christina Barr
Every year humanities council board members and staff from councils in each state around the nation gather together for the National Humanities Conference where we share program ideas, reinforce best practices, and connect with colleagues. This conference has become a critical forum for sharing our work and bringing new knowledge and programs to Nevada.
By Ellie Lakatos
This letter is one of the 2019 “Letters About Literature” competition winners for the state of Nevada.
Dear Maya Angelou,
I was never a ‘poem’ person. Analyzing or even reading poems seemed un-entertaining to me. On the other hand, I enjoyed and preferred to write prose. Poetry never stuck with me. To me, finding the deeper meanings in poems was a waste of time. That was true until one drama class in my first year of middle school, 6th grade. In beginning drama, I was nervous about what others would think of me. Was I cool in their eyes? Or was I lame?
By Deirdre Clemente
What can you do with $1,000?
I have an ex-boyfriend who spent $1,000 on a pair of rollerblades that he used two times before he gave them the Goodwill. My cousin paid $1,000 for a full-bred dog, who ate the toes out of all her socks. People spend $1,000 on bottles of champagne on the Vegas strip every single night. Others pay $1,000 for a psychic reading or baseball card or belt from Gucci. In the grand scheme of American life, it’s not a lot of money.
By Keith A. Brantley
Valley times like Death Valley Days.
We cannot count the ways
Our valley has changed.
We are estranged
from our less than humble beginnings.
Beginning with mob ties,
Our valley lies
Upon layers of mortar and bone.
Read MoreBy Joan Robinson
As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with ruins. Maybe it started with that picture of my father as a college boy standing shirtless in the Coliseum, thumb pointing downward with the ruthless arrogance of a petulant Caesar. Or maybe it started with our family’s monthly visits to Detroit, already crumbling to ruin in the 1970s. Whatever started it, the Mojave Desert has offered me a wealth of atmospheric, tumble-down facades to explore from Rhyolite to Goldfield, to Nelson’s Techatticup Mine, and then just over the border to the Liberty Bell Arc. There are ghost towns and abandoned mines aplenty to explore.
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