 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, we're an online show. The terminology is up for debate to some people. Call us whatever you want. We are Encompass Live and we're here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine. We do record the show every week and it will be posted to our website afterwards and I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show so you can go to see where today's recording is and all of our previous ones. In our recordings we include the video of the show and the presentations that are up there that are used during the show and any websites or links or anything interesting that are mentioned during the show. So you have all of that afterwards. The show and recordings are free and open to anyone to watch so if you do have any friends or colleagues that are might be interested in any of our topics please do share our information with them and have them come and watch some of our shows or watch our recordings. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, many training sessions, demos, website tours, basically anything library related and any kind of library anywhere we'll have on the show. We're pretty broad. This library is really our only criteria. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come in and do presentations, some Nebraska-centric things, and we do have guest speakers that come in. And this morning we have a mixture of that. Today we're going to be talking about the new 2016 One Book One Nebraska title, The Meaning of Names and we have some good discussions and information about what's going on around the state and I think I'll just hand over to you Mary Jo and you can do your introductions to yourself, to your health and everybody and take away. Thank you. I'm Mary Jo Ryan and I'm here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm the Communications Coordinator and we have a stellar group of people to talk about The Meaning of Names. I'm Molly Fisher. I was Deputy Director of the Humanities Council Humanities. What is it? Nebraska Humanities Council. And I am on the State Library Commission as well as the Center for the Book Board. And I'm Karen Shoemaker, the author of The Meaning of Names and I wear many hats. I'm just going to wear the hat of the author of The Meaning of Names today. I'm Ron Wagner, Director of the Nebraska Library Commission, but today I'm here as a reader and a reader of The Meaning of Names. Great. Well, I'll just go, maybe. Go ahead Triggan. There we go. I'll just go first and just say a little bit about One Book One Nebraska. Most of the people who are watching the show probably know about One Book One Nebraska, but our goal is to have Nebraskans all across the state reading the same book and talking about it. And we do this every year. This is our 12th year. Yeah, 12th year. And this year the book has really captured the attention of a lot of people across Nebraska. We have people reading and talking and book groups and Karen's been out making presentations. So it's been a real great book for the people of Nebraska to talk about. A committee of the Nebraska Center for the Book selected this book from a list of titles nominated by Nebraskans from across the state. And the program is sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, Humanities Nebraska and Nebraska Library Commission. Oh, this is the 12 books I was telling you about. You can see we started our first year with Willa Cathers, Maya Antonea, and this year, The Meaning of Names. And maybe that's what we'll do right now is just move right into the book, because I know that's what people are here to hear about. Karen, would you like to give us just a little idea of what the book's about and your journey perhaps as the writer of the book? Well, the book is about a German American farm family in Central Nebraska during 19 takes place during 1918, and it involves the anti German sentiment of World War One and the flu pandemic of 1918. It is based on the seed of this novel came from family stories and so that it starts with family stories and then branched out to history. I did a lot of research on history of World War One and the flu pandemic. So it encompasses that worldwide history, but comes back to the story of this family, the Vogel family in Stuart, Nebraska. And Molly had mentioned earlier about it also as a story of a doctor up there. So I have to say that it's actually a story of a community as much as it is about a family. So a little bit about what the book is about. The first time you thought about this story, was it because you had heard about something like this or someone told you about a real incident? The what the reason I started writing the book is the story and this is not a spoiler alert. There is a baby born at the end of the book. And that baby and the story of her birth is the story of my mom's birth. And so I grew up as listening to family stories about my mother's birth. My grandmother had the whole family had the flu. And the doctor, when he came to the house to deliver my mother, whisk the baby, the baby was born, they whisk her out of the house and took her into town to a widow to take care of her that what they tried to find a widow what they found was a woman with children. But the doctor labeled both my grandmother and my mother a miracle. And that story of how the community came together for this family always intrigued me. So I wanted to tell that story. But when I started to try to tell the story and try to show how the emotions behind that and how intense that experience was, I had to sort of branch out and learn more about what the pandemic was. And it's an effect first on each individual community and then on the world. And once you start looking at the flu pandemic of 1918, you go into World War One, because the virus actually followed troop lines. So it had a major effect on World War One. And from World War One, the anti German sentiment and what's happening in the world. So I just kept researching why it took me eight or nine years to write this book. Really? I would not stop researching. I finally had it put a note on my computer research is not writing. So cutting it back to the core story of the baby at the end. I was curious about your research and your sources. So it's kind of a combination of stories that your family members shared. In the acknowledgments, you mentioned many family members and you said your family is rich in storytelling and listening. So I'm assuming that a lot of those family stories were inspiration for parts of your book. And you mentioned your historical research in terms of war and the flu. Yes, I was curious about because this takes place over 100 years ago or about 100 years ago. But what some of those research sources? Well, the initial research source wasn't I didn't think of it as research is just what we did was told stories. And the character Katie in the book who's eight year old in the book actually grew up and became a nun. And she was my mom's oldest sister. And she spent a lot of time at our house holidays, our house would visit. And I love this woman intensely. She was a talker. But she's done a talk in the book. Not so much. But she was later in life. She probably was when she was younger, because that's something you do. But I didn't have that. But she was such a talker that I joke with my family that we had a tag team listen. And so that's where that kind of came from. But I was it fascinated with stories. I mean, it was a journalist before I became a fiction writer. And so I recorded stories. And I wrote down what she had to say. And the funny thing is when you become interested in a story of an era or any topic at all, people start giving you more stories. You become a kind of magnet. So I had those stories that just came to me before I knew I was going to write about them. And then when I started pulling them together then other people started giving me stories. So my aunts and uncles. I have journals that they wrote and papers they wrote for college to give me, you know, they started here, you can keep this because we're going to die soon. And we need somebody to have it. So my boxes of these things. And then that's true of strangers to they find out that somebody is interested in they have these documents, they want something to happen to them. They don't want to, they don't want to just throw away. They want something to happen. So people would give me information. So I had a lot of source materials that actually came from people writing of that time in that time, not just historical looking back, it's how it looked from that position. So I was really fortunate in that. Yes. And that's where a lot of it came from. Did your family experience anti German settlement? I don't have any family stories of anti German sentiment. I do know in the communities there was that anti German sentiment. I don't have it explained what I have is my grandfather. I knew him as Fred. So he changed his name from Fritz to Fred. So I know that there must have been something that caused him to make that change in his name. And he was drafted. And according to the records of draft, he should have been exempt. I mean, he was almost too old. He was a German. I mean, he was a farmer. He was the breadwinner. He had children. He had all the these checkmarks for exemptions from draft, but he was drafted. And the flu actually kept him home. So that was one of Katie's stories or sister mother assigned her. That was one of her stories. So she didn't talk about it as anti German sentiment. It was just what happened during that time. And it was only after I started researching what the attitude was at that time that I realized this was this was why these things happened. I found out what happened, but it was research that helped me understand why it happened. And did you do library researcher historical societies or anything like that as well? I did. I spent days and days and days long days. As a matter of fact, I got very many parking tickets because I was a historical society. So I read newspapers. They're all unlike the Nebraska newspapers are all unlike films. So I read the newspapers from 1918 1917 and 18. So I read Nebraska papers, but I also read in various sites, you know, the computer is a great thing that I went as much as I could go to sites to research. But there was still I depended a lot on things I can find on the internet about what happened elsewhere. And then I had read I read, you know, I read books on the flu, which I should have brought the list of books, but flew by Gina Kalada. And then there's a great pandemic of 1918 by a man who wrote a really good book, but his name won't come to me. It's available. Actually, I've seen it in libraries when I've traveled. So it's available. But I read a lot about the flu and read about World War One, just historical books because they interested me. So I did. And then there was on hands on kind of research, I went to museums and handle things. If you want to know what a character is feeling, you really need to know literally what they're feeling. So my grandmother would never have known what this bottle felt like. Yeah, because it's plastic shooting. It didn't exist. And so you go and find out what did exist and what they touched. So you sort of go and have it their lives as best you can. Isn't that an amazing thing? Yes, that's pretty cool. It is. Are some of the incidents in the book based upon actual like the young man getting thrown off the train, the priest who gets after the doctor for his beliefs, but also, you know, refuses to look at what might have been your mother. Right. And oh, I mean, there are just several incidents where, well, and I'm sure this actually happened where rumors got started that the Germans dropped something over here to cause the flu. Right. And I'm sure that's true. Right. Yeah. Yes, that's, that is true. Those were taken from newspaper accounts, the things that people were saying. And so, you know, I pulled the things that people talked about. And I took some of the rumors you you pull from those diaries that I said I had, but some were actually published. They were editorials in especially East Coast papers have a lot of them. So that was those kind of things were true that two directions on that you ask about the man on the train and the doctor and their two separate answers to that. So the man on the train actually, the interesting story to me about the man on the train is that when I was doing this research, I knew about how violent anti German sentiment had become all over the country. But I didn't believe it had happened in Nebraska. Because as we talked earlier, it's there were so many Germans in Nebraska that we wouldn't turn on ourselves kind of thing. So when I was researching, I couldn't see it happening in Nebraska. But I saw it in Missouri, there was a man drug off a street car and drug through the streets wrapped in American flag and the people who did it didn't get charged with anything because the judge said he shouldn't have been speaking German in the first place. So I knew that there was really horrible things happening very close to Nebraska, but I didn't see it happening here. And so one day I was going back through the notes I had taken from the newspapers. And I found in my own handwriting the story of this man from the train that I had written it down but didn't let it enter my consciousness in some way. And that that intrigues me that we see what we expect to see. And no matter how close we are to it, we can't see what we don't expect to see. And it wasn't until I saw it a few weeks after writing it down that I thought, Oh my gosh, that's in the Nebraska newspaper. And I had to go back to the newspaper. And then I started seeing it. Then I could see what was happening in Nebraska. And it did happen in Nebraska. So, you know, I stayed true to the, not the facts of Nebraska, but the tenor of the truth in it. And so that man who was thrown off the train, that's a true story. But I don't don't have a grandmother who witnessed it. And it's a it's a dramatization of the kind of things that happened. And some of the quotes are directly to newspaper. So that's very true. So, so that's the answer on the guy on the train and it's several of the other things. But then there's other things that are full clock imagination and the doctor and the priest stem from that. One of the challenges of writing a book about a family that lives on a farm in 1918 in North Central Nebraska without a phone and without access to newspapers is that you have this very closed community. But there's all this stuff going around them that I want the reader to know. So I had to bring in characters who could then inform the readers and interact with these people. And I know there was the doctor. I know there was the priest, etc. But I created them to help dramatize this story. And they weren't really intended to be that big of a part of the story. But as I've said, I just got a crush on the doctor and I kept writing about him. And he just kept saying interesting things. So I kept writing them down. Yeah, they kind of took over, don't they? For the librarians in the group, he was committed to helping start a war library. Yes. And we also appreciated that you mentioned Charlotte Templeton and early head of this agency back at that time. That was our poor mother's is mentioned in the book, Charlotte Templeton. Yes, that was a fun piece of information to come across that war fund. And there was a lot of that. You know, what my characters say was part of the tenor. I don't have anybody who really said that. I don't know anybody who really said those. But that's what happened in different communities is some communities really wanted the war fund to get books to our soldiers. That didn't turn out so well. No, not so much. And part of it had to do with that that some people were concerned what they would learn. So learning is a bad thing. In some people's minds, I guess, I had another question. Let's see. What about the theme of death, I guess you would say, which starts the book but ends the book in life? And also how that relates to the whole family core. Because, of course, in the book, Gerda loses her older sister. And that nightmare stays with her. But the nightmare also translates to the doctor who dreams about snakes and so forth. So was that kind of a unifying? I'm not sure if this what I will say next has anything to do with what you just asked about me. I didn't really set up to write about death as a theme. But I knew about my grandmother. She died when I was in sixth grade, so I didn't get to know her as a person. But through Katie or Sister Moner, I did know, because she told me many times, my grandmother's greatest fear was losing a child. She had 11 of them and she died before any of them died. So she didn't have to bear that burden of losing a child, but I knew she was terrified of it. And so when I was creating this character, I was trying to imagine what that meant to be so afraid of losing a child and why she was afraid of it. And in my research, our genealogy research, my grandmother did lose a sister. And I don't know that she died in childbirth, but she died about nine and a half months after she got married. So in a time when there was no, you just start burying children as soon as you start a come of age. So I knew that that was a fear of hers. And so I wanted to do what was what was motivating her throughout the book. What how did she live her days? And so when she got pregnant, I knew that would be a time when she would be most afraid of it. But the book starts with the death of a woman in childbirth. That was not originally in one of the, it was a late working draft to put that at the beginning. And part of it had to do with when I had one of the readers that I sent it to, she was a young woman. And it wasn't, I had that scene in which Elizabeth dies in childbirth, probably two thirds of the way through the book. And when she came to that, she said, if I had known that before, I would have been terrified with Gerda instead of just when I get here, I was so shocked by it. Because she was a young woman and she didn't realize how dangerous childbirth was to women. And so it sort of set the stage for what was really at stake and how closely, how close mortality was in this moment of life. And so I moved it there so that we could look at ways in which they're so closely tied. So that is okay. Good. I took a good stab at it. So any experience about in all of the many presentations and discussions you've had with people about the book, have there been any surprises in terms of people, of how people have reacted to this book? I imagine they've shared their own stories because they relate to, from family, relate to experiences they've had. I don't know if it's surprised. It's delight how many people do exactly what you just said, which is connected to their own stories and their own families. I know I did. Well, I was surprised because, you know, I kind of felt I was, when you're writing a book, you're in this little world and you think it's never going to really connect with people. And so when it does, it's so delightful. And early on, when I would go to bookstores, I would have people come and they would buy, one person would buy like five or six books because they had that many siblings. And the great thing about it wasn't just they bought a lot of books, but telling about how the book itself became an impetus for people to start talking to one another about things they'd never talked about before. And so I've, that's the surprise and delight is that people talk to one another about their own families, you know. And so that would be the best part about it to me. In talking about their families, do they talk about the relationship with fathers and daughters in relation to this? Or is it more about what happened at that time with their family? I think I can get some of both. A lot of people, Frank Dricki is the grand, is Garrett's father in the book. And he comes off as a bad guy in the book. I mean, he wanted to control, Garrett, he wants to be in control of everything. And he comes off quite negatively. And I've joked several times that when I cross over to the other side, I'm afraid my great grandfather is going to be standing there with his hands on his hips. You made me look really bad. And I don't know that he was bad. I do know it's true that he labeled my grandfather an armatoifle. And but that's interests people. How a negative family story comes down so it's not so much my specific story but they're interested in how these stories trickle down. So people do bring that up quite a bit and then talk about, it's one of the stepping off points for people to talk about their own family. So that's how that one works quite a bit. Though great grandpa Dricki might be mad at me for it. Oh, Ryder's got a lot to atone for. This guy and the other. Well, Malia was interested in the name of the book, the meaning of names. And I think you had some thoughts about that and maybe wanted to read a section that might help illuminate that. Yeah, I'll read a section. And I've not ever read this at a reading because it's kind of disjointed a little bit. So I'm going to try to wing it through reading it. It takes place in the middle of the book or close to the middle. And it's... Gerita has writing with her, writing letters to her sister. And as a result she builds a relationship with the mailman who brings the mail. And this is a scene in which it kind of helps explain where the theme of the title comes from. Early spring was her favorite time of year. A flock of finches littered the calf pen, scavenging for seeds or worms. The jangle of buckles on her boots scattered them as she approached and they disappeared into the trees lining the drive. They came back every year, robins, jays, finches, all the birds, all part of the cycle of seasons. Nothing to get excited about. But still the side of them made her happy, gave her hope. Sentimental nonsense is all it is, she chided herself. Still she felt uplifted by the side of the small birds and the whistle of the metal larks. She walked slowly, watching her feet when she got out onto the lane, taking care not to slip into the muck. And she was almost to the mailboxes before she realized the mail wagon was still there. She looked up and smiled at the man leaning against the backboard of his wagon. Good afternoon Mrs. Vogel. Charlie Burke said with a slow smile, you're a fine sign of spring. She blushed and looked away. You look like a great bird coming down toward me, coming toward me down the lane, Mrs. Vogel. He held a stack of mail out to her. Gerda told herself not to notice the way Charles Burke's smile spread slowly across his face. She told herself the dimple on his chin was no concern of hers. She kept her head tilted down as she looked at the stack of mail in in his hand. It's the way the wind caught your dress, I mean, he went on. It looked like wings. He spread his hands and arms out at his side in imitation of her. Or maybe it's an angel you remind me of. Gerda felt her cheeks warming and she pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. Bird, she said abruptly. That's what my name means. You know, in German, Vogel means bird. And I'll skip ahead a minute, a page. Gerda Shuker headed him in the same way she did when her children misbehaved. What does your name mean, Mr. Burke? Burke? I don't really know. It's just a name, an American name. Gerda's smile froze on her face. How quickly the tenor of a moment can change. Of course, Gerda thought, American names were enough in themselves. Only immigrants had names with two meanings. To be an American, your name was just your name and that was enough for America. Wow. So that's the title, original working title of the book was This Is Now because I'm a teacher as well and I was kind of pedantically pounding the theme in that it's not just history, it's something that continues. The things that are happening then, happen now, and these are people who have flirtations and who have the same concerns any one of us have in a lot of ways. But this is now, when I took the book to a pitch conference, how to pitch the book to publishers, they said, This Is Now is a stupid title, so get rid of it. So I got rid of it and went to the book. I followed the lead of my poet friends that they looked to the poem to help you see what the name title of the poem is and I went back to the book and opened it up and oddly it was to that page that, and I thought, well there you have it right there. So that's where the title and the theme of the title came from. And the bird imagery, especially in that scene, you see it in other places, that was not it never intentional. I never put that together intentionally. It's just that I live in Nebraska and those kinds of experience, the sounds of birds in the spring and the like are and the wind. So we all know wind in Nebraska is always present. I think that that passage that you just read also points out another thing about the book, which are the amazing descriptions of place. You know, that I think is kind of overlooked because the story is so powerful, but there's all these descriptions of the place that are so good. And part of it, maybe, I don't know, is it because it still looks like that or you grew up there? I mean I don't know, I guess I'm asking that question. How do you immerse yourself in that place to get those descriptions so true? Well part of it, the land is still very much like that, but you know I'm going to back away from that statement. It's not very much like that. If you go up into this area, you'll see that most of these pastures that I would have been familiar with have become cornfields and so we're much more plowed community, but that really didn't start. That kind of mass planting of Nebraska started more in the 80s when farms really took off, that family farms were disappearing and the fields got bigger, but I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I spent a lot of, both my grandparents had farms in Holt County and I spent time there and I'm an introvert and so I love just being by myself walking through the field. So I spent a lot of time just being in that landscape and I loved it. I mean I've traveled quite a bit, but I still think Nebraska is just really one of the most beautiful places. When it's beautiful, it's just, there's no manage for it. So I loved the place, so it makes it easy to describe it as something beautiful because that's how I see it, is something beautiful and so I have a lot of sense memory from my own youth about what those things were like and I think that it's true of any story or a lot of stories. Sometimes you could, any story, some stories can be any place and some stories only occur there and this may have happened a lot of places, but the land actually had an effect on these characters and so bringing that into the story so that you could feel, I wanted, you know, you would feel that isolation, you would feel that sense of reprieve that Gerta Felt and that scene where she comes out in spring in that sense of you can breathe again. I think that's a big part of what the characters' lives were like and what the story needed. That actually leads into a question that somebody from the audience just has asked just now. While you were talking, they wanted you to talk about the cover, the looming clouds, is that, well I don't know if that was something you had any decision-making in or is that clouds of war, the pandemic or Nebraska? Actually this is one of the things that I can say without any reserve that this is an absolutely gorgeous cover. I didn't have anything to do with it, so I can say that Mark Cull, the publisher and cover designer, did a great, great job. I love this because it feels to me what the book is about. He really got what the book was about, was that sense of ominous, we all know that storm coming at us, so it could be the, it could refer to the pandemic, the flu, or any number of things that are coming at you. When I talked to the publishers about the cover, I was told up front that authors have no voice in the cover. This is something that's decided, so when we send it to you, say yes or or too bad. So I was very happy when we sent this to me, but because I know them, I teach with one of the publishers at the University of Nebraska's MFA in writing program, so I teach with her, so I had a little bit of an in that I could at least interject what I thought would be on it, and I talked about the cover. One idea that I had for the cover was a kind of Dr. Chavago snowy planes kind of thing with the train moving across it, and so we did think about that sort of thing because it showed the, showed a lot of what the themes of the book, that isolation, the cold, that civilization via the train, so I had a lot of reasons why I thought that would be great, but we couldn't find a really good train picture, and I said well if I can't have a train, then I want it to be the sky. I think that it needs to be the sky to be a Nebraska story, and so they sent me a number of, they did let me have some input because they had no idea really what Nebraska would look like in 1918, and if you get a magnifying glass out, you can see that we, we don't have the right fence posts for 1918, and I think somewhere in the back you can see some veils on one of the scenes, or in one of them, you can see that, so I, but I was just that picky, so they had to actually, I had to make a case that you can't have around veils in the picture, because it wasn't right, and I was a little iffy about the road, because roads, even Highway 20, was just a dirt road, and I'm pretty sure it didn't have this much of a foundation, so, but I was that picky, and they said, oh just stop, and I agree, I think it's a great picture, so, and it does definitely, for those of us that are from or have driven across the state, it just screams Nebraska, I mean, I see that, oh yeah, of course, I think I've been there probably, and I like that the way the questioner, whoever it was, said, what are those clouds, because you do wonder, I mean, obviously there, it could be a winter storm, maybe fall, looking at the picture again, but you know, there's also, like you say, the forces coming in, the flu, the attitudes towards our community, what community means. I will tell you a funny story about Mark, who designed the cover, he's an engineer, and I love Mark, so if he hears this, I want to, this is sincerely, I like him a lot, but he's a nerd about some things, and what he did with this, he manipulated the clouds for a while to make them form, just subtly, the symbol for the virus, the flu virus, and they looked at it and said, no, that's too obvious, let people decide for themselves what those clouds mean, so actually the question was really good, because Mark did want it to be the flu, and I think that was him just messing with it, actually the actual clouds of Nebraska were enough without them. I think you did a good job with isolation, too, because I, you know, they were, she was only 150 miles from her family, but it was, she hadn't been to see them in a number of years, and a world away, world away, yeah, the other thing, their prosperity versus the struggle that she and her husband and family were, other thing I was going to say is that I think that this is such a timely book, because we live in world today where names make such a difference, and people are judged by their names, so often. Yeah, there were, there's a lot of different connections that you can see that we're struggling with as a community and as a country, as a world today, and that's why I said that the working title is This Is Now, because I wanted, that's one of the things I knew was happening. When I was doing research on the book, I came upon that sauerkraut became Liberty Cabbage, and hamburgers became ground beef patties. I found that in a Nebraska newspaper, so that's a story that really came from our history, and the summer I found that information was the summer we were all eating freedom fries. Right, and so, I mean, it's, the parallels are so close, and it's true that the names, so it's, yes, yes is the answer in so many words. There are so many connections, and I think that's also part of why it resonates with people. It's a safer way to look at it for one thing. It's easier to understand what's happening if we're a distance from it, and then apply it to what we're suffering now, and so I think that's one of the reasons why it, it feels timely, but removed enough to understand. And for this reason, I think it'd be such a great book for young adults to read. I don't know if you've heard, I know adults are reading this book, and I just didn't know if you'd heard whether younger people are, as well, you know, high school students. I have had a couple of teachers who have high school teachers. I've gone to visit high schools here in Lincoln, southwest high school, and she brought in teachers from other high schools, so I met a lot of high school teachers and librarians, and they're talking about it with students and using paragraphs from it to go try to explain the history as well as language writing coherently, I guess, and writing descriptions. So I know high school students are. One, I mentioned this earlier about a teacher, a high school teacher in Illinois had sent me a note saying that she read the entire book out loud to her senior class, and I love that idea that somebody sat down and read the book to kids. I don't know if the kids would have read it, but they had to sit and listen to it, so. Yeah, we thought it would be an awfully nice thing if someone would read out loud to us, which is why it's such a great thing. Your book is now on audible.com. The iTunes and Amazon, you can go and listen to me read. It should be great. So, but yeah, I think that as a high, it is a way of bringing history and just it has all the historical aspects so that the history they're learning in history classes can come alive. That's how I learn is through stories and many people learn through stories, so. Absolutely. And it's a pretty simple story. It's a small book and you know it is only as complex as you make it, and so I think that for high school students, if I had just made Katie a bigger character, then I could call it a YA book. Yeah, that's it. It's all in the way you do it. If there's anyone in our audience that has a question for Karen, I know that some of you have microphones and all you have to do is ask Krista to unmute your microphone. I can do that. Or you can just type the question right into the question box. We do have one other question. Also that first one came from, we have some of our staff here watching the show elsewhere. Someone else knows, this is your first book of fiction, or if you've got other ones, or if you have plans for others. I have made it through the years of writing this one. I have a short story collection that came out in 2002 called Night Sounds and Other Stories. I believe that's at a brosca. So you guys have been good to me for a long time. You've been good to me. It's a mutual admiration society. So I have that short story collection. I have a couple of novels that I've written. Some are just, they will probably stay in a desk for one. I'm hoping, I keep hoping I'm going to finish. I said I would have it at the end of last year, but I didn't. But I have a book that I'm sure I will finish in the next year called The Last Living Waitress of the Home Cafe. And it's historical only in that it takes place before the internet. And it's about a, again, it's a community story based on a young girl who grows up in a small town in Nebraska. Oddly enough, I can't get out of Nebraska. But she leaves home and ends up in a girly magazine. And it's the effects of that kind of thing on this community, interfamily, and the likes. So it's more than that, but that's as good a spiel as I have. That sounds like a very interesting story. I keep thinking the title, just I have to keep writing until I get a book to go with the title. It is a great title, yes. Well, Karen, is there anything else you'd like to share with us about, I know you've been going around doing presentations for club groups and presentations in libraries and museums. Have you learned anything new about Nebraska? I don't know. I don't know. I learned something all the time from people. I've learned that Nebraska is really, really a big state. Yes, it is. And some roads are better than maintained than others. But I've really enjoyed going around and to libraries. I spend a lot of time visiting libraries. I've been going to book clubs since the book was, I don't know if you said this earlier, it was the Omaha Reads selection in 2014. And at that point, a lot of, because of the public libraries, Omaha's public library promotion, I spent a lot of time in Omaha going to different book clubs and visiting book clubs in Lincoln and Omaha area. And what the biggest surprise is how many book clubs there are in this, in this town, in this state. Yeah. They're alive and well. People are reading, getting together and reading books and have been regularly. So I visited, I'm 60 to 70 book clubs since the book came out. So the big surprise, I learned that people love books and want to talk about them. And I'm really delighted about that because there's always this fear that the people are only watching movies or something. But I have found that people are reading books and talking about them and I do love that. In these book clubs have you had any of them, because they're small groups, have you had anybody say, well I didn't like this little thing that happened? Why did you make that happen to her? I'm mad at you about that. No, fortunately most people are really kind, especially when you're one on one. They might be saying that behind my back, but they're very kind to my face. I did have a few people ask me if I chickened out at the end and kept them alive because I couldn't bear to kill them off. And I said no, I kept them because they did live and so there was that kind of thing. There are, I want to know who else survived because I don't know if I, if you say in here, I've missed it, but like the male man and there's several, several people, everybody seems to have it for me. You're starting to care about those characters there, Molly. Well, the doctor avoids them. Yes, that's always an amazing thing that people, some people got it and some people didn't. But you know, I'm not sure if, because one of my books has to do with some of these characters, I'm reading a book or reading. I'm reading many books, but I'm also trying to write, too. And one is that Last Living Waitress at the Home Cafe and the other is sort of, it's not a follow-up, it's not a sequel, but there are people from it, from this book, move into the other. And so I know about what happens to some of them, because I've been working on it. Well, we better have that sequel here. I wish I wrote faster, because I want to know what happens to them, too. Well, this is a pretty good segue, I think, into, let's see if I can get this slide to advance. Oh, there we go. I just wanted to point out that all across Nebraska, we do have people engaging with this book all the way through 2016. We're halfway through right now. And our book club kits are actually booked through, and it says March 2016, but that is wrong. It's actually March 2017. We've got book club kits booked into next year, because people are really excited about this book. I just want to remind you that if you go to onebook.nebraska.gov and check out news and events, you can see where Karen's going to be in the next few months, where she'll be visiting libraries and book clubs, and you can also see any kind of press about things that are going on, how do you do with the book. And you can borrow, oh, excuse me, you can join the conversation on Facebook. We have, and Chris, if you will send me to my Facebook page, it's down. Oh, yeah, that'll work, too. Yeah, that's even better. You can see that we've got a lot going on. We are trying to keep track of Karen on Facebook and share a variety of different things. This is just a trailer, which starts automatically, sorry, about the show that we're watching right now, which I see 511 people reached with the trailer. Interestingly, only 107 of them looked at the trailer. So I don't know how it does those statistics. I don't either. I don't understand these statistics at all, but hey, it's all interesting. So do join us on Facebook, like us, please, and that way you'll get our posts. And also, just let us know what you're thinking and let us know what you're reading and what your book group is reading and what they think about. Look. And Chris, I'm sorry you'll have to send me. Oh, it's like that. There we go. Okay. And I would want to suggest that all of you consider scheduling a book cover or talk in the library. You know you can book a program with Karen through the Humanities Nebraska Speaker's Bureau, which is a terrific resource in our state. They are helping to sponsor one book on Nebraska, and they can make it very easy and inexpensive for you to have Karen come to your town soon. You do have to schedule it with Karen, so you make sure it works for her. I'd also like to suggest to librarians specifically that are watching this show that you offer to appear on your local radio and TV talk shows and talk about One Book One Nebraska and talk about the books that are resonating in your community. We also have a video that you'll be able to show of Karen speaking and we hope to make that available on YouTube, and that way you can screen that for your board, maybe, or another group that you have in your library. And then any other ideas you have for programming, we're open to hearing about them, and so please let us know what you're doing in your communities. And a reminder that Karen will be back with us here in Lincoln on October 29th. We'll have the Celebration of Nebraska books at the Nebraska History Museum, which is here in Lincoln on Centennial Mall North. It's a fabulous event. We have a great time. It starts at 2.30, ends around 6.30, so you don't have to give up your whole Saturday to it, but it's a lot of fun. We have a program from Karen on One Book One Nebraska. We'll be honoring our Nebraska Book Award winners for this year, and they usually provide about a, is that about a five minute, five to ten minute reading? So if you have favorite Nebraska authors, you just might get to hear them read as well. We will actually announce the winners of the Mildred Bennett and the Jane Geske Award and what book we're going to be talking about next year on One Book One Nebraska. So we have a little reception and book signings. It's really a lot of fun, so join us if you can here in Lincoln on October 29th. Oh, and I was supposed to show you this slide when I was talking about all that. And for more information, you can always contact me. You can contact tessa.tary at Nebraska.gov as well. You can call me. You can go to our One Book One Nebraska website or our Facebook page. Other thoughts or things you'd like to share for the good of the group? Any last questions from the audience? Maybe have any last-minute questions while you've got us all here. Type in your questions, ask what you want to. Has anybody already had events at their libraries that they want to talk about? I don't know if anybody's already done things. Well, there have been quite a few events, but I don't know if any of the people in our audience have been involved in any of the events. Karen's been even busy. It's been a busy six months. It has been. And then some. I will say one of the things about the presentation, if you've been to one presentation, they're not always the same thing because I I put it over to the audience. So whatever presentation I make it's your group. Their interest is what we talk about. So it's always a little bit different each presentation. So that's it's important to to know that you don't have to listen to me say the same thing, though I will tell a lot of the same stories because I am my Aunt Katie's daughter. Talk, talk, talk to you listening. I love it. Yeah, we're actually looking forward to the October 29th event because we haven't been back to the History Museum, the Nebraska History Museum for several years. We've been doing that event here in the Library Commission. So we're going back to the Nebraska History Museum and they've just been remodeled and we have kind of a new exciting space to work in and so Karen will be there and it'll be very nice. It'll be a good event. And it's always fun to hear who won the Nebraska Book Awards. Yes, and I'm always happy when they talk about it. Yeah, to talk about it exactly. I love that. It doesn't look like anybody has any desperately urgent questions. Okay, well they can always they can always check in with us like there's an email address up there. They can always check in and they have additional questions and contact Karen if you're interested in working with the Humanities Grant to bring her to your town. Thank you very much. All right. All right, then I guess that will wrap it up for this week's show. This week's Encompass Live. And Mary-Joseph, do you have the keyboard if you could help me? Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Just type in Encompass Live. So thank you very much everyone for attending everyone our audience and thank you very much Karen for being here with us today. It was great to be able to talk to you everything. What? It didn't work. Sorry. You want the other slideshow down there on that PowerPoint? I know you want to talk about what's coming up and I can't get you there. Put a space in. Ah, there you go. It matters the space. Okay. Anyways, talk about Ted too. Technology. So thank you very much Karen and Mary-Jo and Molly and Rod and everyone for being here with us this morning. This is great. The show has been recorded and it will be available on our website and as you can see when you do figure out how to search for it, luckily so far in the world nothing has been called Encompass Live but us. So if you just google it, you don't have to put Nebraska in here, our website's the first result. So the recording for today we posted here on our website. These are upcoming shows and this is where recording will be over here. Here's last week's. We had our Esports and Vermont libraries. Recording will be here on the YouTube page. This PowerPoint presentation I'll put up and I've already been collecting some of the links that we were talking about, the one book page, Center for the Book, all those are on there. So when that is ready I will let everyone know and I'll be posted up there. This afternoon most likely, okay, usually I get it up by the afternoon, you'll all be getting an email letting you know. So I hope you'll join us for our next week's show which is Innovating Accessed Information in Libraries Without Borders Idea Box. Libraries Without Borders is a non-profit organization that is doing a lot of work in foreign countries but also in the United States, low-income areas, places that need this kind of need more help with getting books and computers and things and they have this thing called the Idea Box. Places that don't have library service like Southern County and they have this Project the Idea Box. It describes a portable library and multimedia center toolkit. You just unpack this thing and it has computers and books and movies and it's just kind of like a mini-traveling library and they've been doing it in foreign countries and here in the United States and we're going to have someone from the group is going to be on with us. There it is, Paloma Pradry. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce her name, I'll find out before next week. From Libraries Above Borders we'll be with us on the show next week so definitely do sign up for that show and any of other future ones here. We've got our July dates, August dates are starting to get filled, the calendar will be filled out as I confirm more things so definitely sign up for anything. Also, Encompass Live is also on Facebook as well so you can please give us a like over there. We post reminders of when our shows are coming up. Your reminder that I automatically sent up this morning to log in on the fly to our shows. When our recordings are available we put them up here so give us a like over on Facebook if you are a big Facebook user. Other than that, that wraps up for this morning's show. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you Chris. See you next week on Encompass Live. Bye bye.