Hometown Humanities - Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, former HK TALK discussion leader and Speakers Bureau presenter and former Poet Laureate of Kansas
For 32 years, I had the honor of presenting programming for Humanities Kansas throughout the state of Kansas. Through the TALK program, I led hundreds of book discussions and through the Speaker’s Bureau, I presented to dozens of communities, first on how extreme weather shapes who we are and how we live as Kansans and then on lessons from the Holocaust and Polish resistance.
Whether I presented to a dozen people or several hundred, I came away from all my presentations — which is why I did them for so many years — as a believer in the power of humanities to bring together people from diverse experiences and viewpoints to find their common ground together for true civic engagement. Here are some moments I will always remember:
In sharing the stories of two remarkable men — a Holocaust survivor and a Polish resistance fighter — who survived their communities, most of them family members, and their sense of the world destroyed in WWII, I frequently encountered people who wanted to know how they can make sure others know what happened so that we can all glean lessons from this terrible time in history. At one of my final talks in a small town, a 10-year-old, who came with her father, sat with me afterwards while we enjoyed refreshments and told me how she was going to present what she learned to her fifth grade class “because kids like me need to know what happened so that it doesn’t happen again.”
I also have led many book discussions over the years, and over and over I’ve witnessed this: two or more people in a small town who, upon hearing each other’s responses to what moved them or named their own lived experience for them in a book, said something like, “I didn’t know that about you and I’ve known you 30 years.” In many cases, people had animated conversations after the official talk, some later coming up to me and saying, “I never felt like I belonged in this community until tonight. Thank you.”
That’s some of the power of the humanities.