What a pleasure to have U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo share with a Peter White Public Library audience last month, as part of the NEA Big Read. The National Endowment for the Arts recently released the 2022/2023 list of books that communities can select and write grant requests for, for next year’s Big Read. Here are a few from the list.

“Nothing to See Here” by Kevin Wilson tests the bond of family ties, with the pressure of keeping up appearances, all wrapped up in children who spontaneously combust when upset. The twins are coming to live with their father, who hopes to rise to Secretary of State in the coming months. That means they’ll need to be around, but only for photos, not to build relationships with their father, step-mother and half-brother. Enter Lillian, a 28 year-old grocery clerk who once went to school with the mother — Madison. She’s asked to care for the kids, to try and figure out how to help them control the outbreaks of them catching on fire. Lillian has a front row seat to the politics, pain and growth that can happen in families, and finds herself defining her own role in family. This laugh-out-loud book has the most satisfying end.

“The Bear” by Andrew Krivak. In an edenic future, a girl and her father are the last two humans on Earth. They live off the land in a log cabin on a mountain in New England. Each year of her live, the father teaches the girl a new survival skill, how to hunt, how salt meat, how to sew clothes, how to make a bow — to name a few. On a trip east to the ocean for salt to cure meat, her father has an accident, becomes ill and dies. The girl is now lost and alone in the wilderness. A bear appears and offers to guide the girl home. The journey will test her resolve and her newfound skills, as she grieves her loss and discovers her strength to go on.

“Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” (memoir) by Sarah Smarsh. Journalist Smarsh documents her family history in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s. Cyclical poverty, abusive relationships, unsafe job conditions, untreated medical conditions, all create tension for Smarsh’s family who long for a sliver of success that the American Dream offers. Smarsh shares memories of what the economic crisis of the ’80s meant for her Heartland Community. How her family dreamed of a better life, took a risk, but fell short, not once, but again, and again and again. It’s a testament to the grit of people who didn’t dream of riches, but of affording life’s basic supplies.

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” By Roz Chast is laugh-out-loud funny. Often. In this graphic-novel style memoir, Chast shares how she navigates her parents’ final years in their Brooklyn apartment, and then an assisted living home. And they don’t want to talk about death. Which leaves Chast to make the decisions, while respecting her parents’ dignity and independence. And her parents are fiercely independent. Time split between going into the city to attend to her parents’ needs, raising her own family downstate and working as a cartoonist, Chast lays it all out there. The good, the bad, the funny, the raw, the hurt, the hard. Those with aging parents and those who support caregivers will relate to and appreciate this book. It’s full of great conversation starters with your own aging parents.

“Sitting Pretty: The View from my Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body” by Rebekah Taussig. In her eye-opening memoir, Taussig suffers no fools as she writes her thoughts on present day disability. Through stories on when she lived with others and on her own, Taussig is blunt, honest, and hilarious. She challenges the complex issues around charity and acts of kindness, how disability is presented in the media, and how disability affects us all. This is a book everyone should read.

“Infinite Country” by Patricia Engel is a story of finding one’s identity, when one half of a family exists in one culture, and the other half exists in another. For 16 year-old Columbian Talia, reunification of her family (in Bogota and America) might help her make sense of her life. She’s lived with her father in Bogota since he was deported from the U.S. when she was a small child. Her mother, and older brother and sister stayed. It’s a story of two countries and one family that cannot be together because of immigration status. Both a story of love and loss, this book provides meaningful glimpses into a national conversation, and how policy impacts real lives.

By Jenifer Kilpela

Communications Coordinator