 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing right now, and it is then posted to our website and archives for you to watch at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries in Nebraska. And that is for all libraries, so all types of libraries. So you will find topics on our show for all types of libraries. Public, K-12, academic, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything. We're there, only criteria is something to do with libraries. The cool things we think they're doing, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations for us sometimes, and we also bring in guest speakers sometimes. And today we have a mixture of that. Today we are talking about our 2022, 2022, sorry to say, one book, one Nebraska, The Bones of Paradise. And I'm actually going to hand over, I'm not sure who's starting up, Tessa, you maybe? I'm sorry to take away at, and we've got a group of people here with us this morning. And as we get to each section, I think we'll all can introduce yourself at that time when you're doing your bits. Hey everyone, I'm Tessa Therese from the Nebraska Library Commission. And here with us today, we have Nebraska Center for the Book. Becky Faber from the Nebraska Center for the Book. And the One Book, One Nebraska selection committee. We've got our author, John S. A. G. And then we've also got Erica Hamilton from Humanities Nebraska. So those are our speakers for today. I'm just going to hand things over to Christy about one book, one Nebraska in general. And the Center for the Book and what they do. Christy, are you still here? I lost your web, can't my notice just a minute ago? But she is still connected. I don't hear Becky either. I'm on. Oh. You just can't see me. So that's okay. She's just going to be on audio with us today. What's with Christy? Her camera dropped off, so maybe she's lost connection briefly. Can you just start up? I'll get started for Christy. So the Center for the Book is a reading and writing program and organization that just really brings together everyone and anything that has to do with books and Nebraska. We have publishers involved. We have humanities Nebraska organizations involved, museums, authors, booksellers and readers. So it's just a really nice group of people who love talking about Nebraska authors and Nebraska books. So what we've done with the One Book, One Nebraska, we've partnered with Nebraska Center of the Book, Nebraska Library Commission and Humanities Nebraska to choose one book that we can promote across the state for readers. And I'm going to hand that over to Becky for a little bit because she handles our One Book, One Nebraska program. Thank you, Tessa. The process for One Book, One Nebraska begins with the public because all of the nominations for One Book, One Nebraska come from members of the public who nominate a book and that form will come up a little bit later so that you can see what is asked for on the form and how to nominate. And for this year, for the 2022, we started with 35 books being nominated. So we had a very nice amount to start with. What we're looking for is to make sure that the nominated books fill criteria. The book should either be written by a Nebraska author, someone who has lived in Nebraska. They should have, they might also have a Nebraska setting or a Nebraska theme. And for 2022 with the Bones of Paradise, Bingo, we hit all three categories. Once we've been able to determine that nominated books meets a criteria, then those books move forward to a screening committee made up of members of the board for the Center for the Book. So this year we had a reading committee of seven and it's a very intense process. The cutoff date for nominations is the middle of June. And once we have those nominated books, we're checking for criteria and then the reading committee starts reading. And we're reading with the mindset of how the book would appeal to Nebraska readers. We go through several rounds of reading. Every book that moves forward is read by a number of readers. And when we have determined what our shortlist is, then the final vote is made by the full board for the Center for the Book. And the book that has been selected is announced when we have our celebration of Nebraska books in the fall. Are there any questions up to this point? This is our 18th One Book One Nebraska. And as you can see from the slide on the screen, we have had just some remarkable books that we have brought to the state and encouraged reading and discussion. So if we don't have any questions just yet, and you can ask questions at any time, Krysta will kind of moderate that and let us know if anything pops up. But I'm going to hand it over to Jonathan and let her just tell us about her book. Oh, good. Well, I'm just so pleased and honored and thrilled all of the adjectives to be part of this. And I've lived here for 21 years again. I grew up here in Nebraska. And I had never imagined this moment would come to me. And I'm just, I'm just beyond happy. I want to just tell you a moment a little bit about the book. And then I'm, I'm what began the book for me. And then I'll read a little passage from the book for the, you know, starting in 1990, I began to travel into the sand hills of Nebraska. And this is my third book set out in the sand hills. I had never been there before, even though I grew up in Nebraska, but my family had hunted out there. And I was just so struck by the beauty and the rawness of the place and the underlying currents of tension and the difficulties of living there, as well as how pristine the environment was. Three things began to move through me. And I didn't, well, two things really from the sand hills initially and I, and Rosebud reservation and Pine Ridge just, which sit in South Dakota, just above Nebraska there at the very top. And the first was I went to wounded me and it, it completely changed me, but I didn't know what to do with that material. I, it just sat there. And it made me think very deeply and, and feel. And then I was shown a ghost shirt in a little Catholic church and by a native woman and it was sitting in a drawer and she pulled it out and showed it to me. And it was just magical and powerful. And I, again, I didn't know what to do with this material. It just stayed with me for the next 14, 15 years. And I knew one day I would write something that brought these materials together, but I didn't know what it was going to be. And then I heard a story about my sister had told me about a cattle ranching family that had this tradition of taking the young, the oldest son and giving him to the grandfather to raise in a really harsh Spartan environment so that he, that child would be prepared to take over the running of this very large ranch. And that's the story of the Bennett families that I eventually settled on. And when I heard that story, I felt it click into place almost like a key in a lock or the right combination. And the three pieces came together and I realized I would tell this story. Said, you know, from 1890 to 1900, and that it would be the story of this Sandhills family and a wounded knee and the repercussions of the two families that occur and the way they come together and the violence that happens. And I see even now the two cultures, the white and the native cultures living side by side uneasily in that part of the country as they do in other parts. So that was the way the story began for me. And as soon as I put those three pieces together, I saw this opening scene and this usually when I began a novel, and this is my sixth novel, I usually throw out the opening, say 50 to 100 pages. So this is one of the few times I've kept the opening. And because it was always here, this was always the opening, the last day of JB Bennett's life. And I was really scared to write a story where the main character dies immediately because that's not very encouraging or inviting, but it's a mystery who's killed him and why and why is he found with a Native American, young Native American girl next to him. And what does this all mean? And so I'm just going to read you the beginning of chapter one. It was mid-morning in early May when JB Bennett crested the hill, stopped and surveyed the little Sandhills meadow where the windmill was slowly clinking in a wobbly circle. The metal rubbing on metal in an uneven cadence made him reach for the small tin of grease in his saddlebag, the one he already knew he'd pulled out yesterday and left sitting on the window ledge in the tool shed when he'd repacked his saddlebags for the trip to his father's ranch this morning. It was getting to be harder to keep track of every little detail. He wasn't that old, he reasoned, but then he had the boy in the 20,000 acres and the men in the cattle. He lifted his hand and let it drop back to the saddle horn. It was the other thing that drove his mind these days. He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out the photograph. He'd recovered from his son's dresser drawer a few hours ago. God only knew where Hayward had disappeared to. The picture showed his wife, Dulcenea, as she'd been in 1880 when she came to Nebraska, fresh faced and fiercely happy. Her long, all-burn hair barely contained by a ribbon, her hands shading her eyes as if she could see as far down the years as it would take to find him again and punish him for what he'd done. The wind was blowing so hard that day, he remembered praying that she wouldn't notice the fine grit from the sandhills that found its way into every crevice and seasoned your food. That night as they lay out in their bedroll, she teased him about the sand between his toes after they made love. It wasn't their first time that it happened when they agreed to marry at her parents' home in Chicago. By the time they bedded their first night on their new ranch in a new land, her initial shyness was replaced by a light teasing. He found delightful. He grimaced now. When had he ever used that word? But that was her effect on him. She brought a new language with her and made it his. He wondered if his son Hayward would miss the picture of his mother. This one had been lovingly preserved, wrapped in a pale blue silk scarf that must have been hers. Embedded carefully in a stack of his old baby clothes. Hand me downs from his older brother, Cullen. JB couldn't even think Cullen's name without wincing. While the staggering wine clank of the windmill seemed to grate harder on his ears. Today he was determined to find Cullen and bring him home. His father drum be damned. He gathered the reins in his fist and the young chestnut horse lifted its head and pawed impatient with the handkerchief. Cullen's mother, who paused too long. That's the way the novel and the story begins. By the end you'll find out everything you need to know about how he met his end and about the great love story. That is between the Dulcinea and JB and then between the families that are involved and their love of the land. Because that's something that keeps going on. I'm going to go around and talk to book groups, et cetera. At libraries I'm going to talk a lot more about the backgrounds of these stories and how it all came to be. Yeah. Josh, can you tell us a little bit about your background as far as what you do and how you became a writer? Yes. I grew up in Brownsburg. I grew up in Nebraska. I have a degree in English and creative writing. I'm a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Which is now Binghamton University. They lost the State University of New York. I always thought that was kind of cumbersome. I came back to Nebraska to teach at the University of Nebraska in 2000. Before that I had taught for 22 years up in Minnesota in St. Paul at a women's college there. I also taught three years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in their MFA program. Right now I teach in our undergraduate and graduate program. We offer graduate degrees, Ph.D. included in creative writing. Our students write books to get a better understanding of what is going on. It's been a lot of fun. I love it. I've gone around the country teaching workshops and researching. My books mainly, I decided very early on that I would write books about the Midwest, set in the Midwest that involved all three places I had lived growing up. That was Iowa, Missouri, and Iowa. I thought I would write three in Nebraska, two in Missouri, and only one poor, sad novel. I don't know that I will ever get back to Iowa. I thought I would write three books in each place and I was going to be free to do whatever I wanted. I don't know whether I will get all this done. That's my life goal. I write short stories. I write horses. My husband is a writer. He works at Creighton. We write screenplays together. We are trying to write a novel. We have been trying to write a mystery novel together for a long time. It's comic. Maybe that's the problem. We were really getting going and then the pandemic hit. It hasn't been really funny since then. It's been a little scary. I just scrambling after that to stay afloat. Not coming up with many one-liners, I guess. Other questions? Anything else? No questions. A comment that when you are after reading the intro to the novel. Very powerful beginning. Oh, good. Really sucks you in. Oh, good. I think yes. Yeah, thank you. I just hated to kill him off. I'm sorry. I apologize when I kill off characters. You kind of hate to start with that kind of thing. The story goes where it wants to go. It really does. It does. I was just doing a book club the other night and I think people were surprised that I said, yeah, I turned my story over to the characters quite often to find out what else they have to tell me and what else they feel. So it's a very organic process. I don't have a big plan to begin with and I let it lead me to see where we're going to go. And the hardest characters in this novel, one of the hard ones was the child Cullen, who when we meet him, he's like 17, 18 years old. And he's a very dark character who's had a very, very hard life. And his grandfather, he's a man of his own, he's been a great character in the world. And I think in some way, how, how in the world they had their drum also a difficult character. But once I began to ask them what do you, you know, try to figure out what, who they were beneath all of that, because I think we're all so complex. The revelations were very I'm not, I'm just right there. No, I'm working around it. In this book there were people who hadn't finished it yet. So we had to not talk about the ending and not in pray that everyone just kept mouths shut enough. So they'd be able to finish it without having it ruined. Oh, I have a friend who reads the endings, the ending of every book to see if she'll find it worthwhile to read it. She reads that first. It's like, what kind of thinking is it? I mean, you don't like the surprise? The ending isn't the whole book, though. Yeah, that's true. She doesn't like the tension of waiting, I think. So she knows how it's going to end. She can read it. Everybody reads differently. Okay. I know. I know. I tease her about it. Well, we're going to move on a little bit to how you can be involved in the One Book, One Nebraska program and some of the resources that we offer for just our readers out there, but keep typing in your questions and comments and we'll get back to those as they pop up. So one of the things we offer is a website that readers can go to to get all kinds of information, both about the book, about Jonathan, about how they can be involved. I'm just going to pull that up really quick. And we've just got a lot of information on here. And on our Get Involved page, we have our social media connected. We also have it up at the top corner of every web page on here. So you can email us directly, find us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and see what other people are saying about the book. And we've just got some of our most recent posts up here that you can kind of flip through. We also have discussion questions listed, and those are actually ones that Janice wrote for us for the book specifically. So those are a great resource for whether you're in a book club group or just reading the book yourself. This is a great resource. Classrooms, however you're reading this book, we really encourage you to work through these questions. We also have the Facebook page where we encourage people to talk about the book, let us know what they think, tell us how they're reading it, who they're reading it with, and just be a little bit more involved in that conversation as well, talking about the book. We want this to be a conversation across the state, not just in your book club. So we would really love to hear your thoughts, and you can find that on Facebook One Book One Nebraska. And right now I'm going to hand things over to Erica a little bit so she can tell us about the Humanities Nebraska program that we have available to get Janice to your book club group. Yes, thank you Tessa. Janice has graciously agreed to be on the Humanities Nebraska Speakers Bureau, which means that Humanities Nebraska will help pay her stipend and mileage to attend meetings with your library or with your organization to talk about the book, to talk more about what she shared with us today. So Tessa, can we, there we are, there's our website, and the way to find this, you go to the Speakers Bureau, and then if you go to Speakers, just click on Speakers, and Janice is the second. It's alphabetical, so fortunately she has a name that ends with A, so she's easy to find on our website. You can go and there's a description, I think that's a bio of Janice, and then her program, Bones of Paradise, a novel examined, and her contact information is right there. And so the steps to book Janice G for or for your program is to contact her first. Just give her, send her an email to see if she is available, work at a date, work at a time with her, get that all confirmed and set first. And then after you get that confirmed with Janice, you can go back to our website and go to how to book a speaker. And if you forget the steps, we have the steps here. We also have the eligibility. And so to go through our Speakers Bureau, you need to be either a nonprofit organization or a library or a school or a university. So step one is to confirm it with Janice, and then we have an online application form. It's just a simple little one pager where you can give us the information about your event. And it's a $50 fee to Humane, Nebraska. But then as I said, we will pay Janice's, we'll pay her stipend and we'll also pay her mileage to get to your location. So it only costs the libraries or the universities just that $150 amount. That's right. Yep. Nice. Yeah. We do have a question. Can this be done remotely as well or in person or remote presentations? Well, that's a good question for Janice. What do you think? Oh, sure. Yeah. No, I'm fine with that. No problem at all. In fact, because of the current situation, I'm doing a lot remotely. Anyway, it just seems safer. And absolutely. And sometimes it's just easier for the book club. You know, they're meeting remotely. So it makes sense that yeah. And the other night when I was doing one, there were some people in the library and some people remotely. So we were doing a Zoom, a combined event and it worked well. It was fun. Yeah. And I'm used to this. It's not a problem for me. I enjoy it. I make people talk. Sorry. For online programs, you can still go through our speaker's bureau and we will still pay the stipend. So. Well, that's actually a very good deal to have that set up that way. Yeah. Nice. And we do some of this is thank you, Janice, for the discussion questions as well. Those have been very, it was always good to have those for the book discussion groups in this discussions that are happening. Yeah, Janice, can you talk a little bit about the program that you're offering through Humanity Nebraska? Well, I want to do several things. I'll give some background for the novel. As I mentioned, I'm going to elaborate more on the kinds of things that came into my work as my research, because a lot of research went into this book. When I'm writing historically or any of my novels, I do a lot of research. I like to do a lot of research in sight. And I'll also talk about writing how I became a writer a little more, you know, in greater detail. And I'll talk about the kind of themes and ideas that were at work here to bring these issues, the social issues, the issues of family and trauma, and the struggle for justice that is going on worldwide and that constantly goes on in our lives beginning with practically birth in a family. And then the various forces that are at work socially to kind of as we all vie for a place in the world and to have some sense of recognition and respect. And those are issues that I'm very interested in. And I also talk a little more about, as I mentioned, I'll talk a little more about the creative process, because that's something people are really curious about. And I also offer workshops that can accompany an appearance. I will do that with a book club if people want. I can, you know, we can do a whole day long event where we'll talk about the book. But I'll also offer a writing workshop if people are interested in that. And sometimes that's, that's, I have some approaches that really helped people who always thought they wanted to write, but didn't know whether they could write. They begin to introduce them to the process. And it's to kind of pull the curtain aside. And to help them understand, I have some, some prompts that work. I do a lot with very, I collect very old pictures that I get from junk stores and antique stores and, you know, those old photographs. And I use those to help stimulate stories and to discover characters. And people often discover something out of their own past or their own family history when we do this kind of exercise. So sometimes people begin to write memoirs or family histories. And sometimes they, they have stories that have been like, as, as occurs to in my life, stories that, that keep coming up that you, you know are your stories, but you don't know how to write them. And so sometimes I'll help them begin to write them and discover those stories. So yeah, it's a, it's, I kind of try to shape the experience to the group and what they have in mind and what they would like to have happen. Obviously if it's a school, it's a slightly different presentation, but probably more on the creative process too, because that's something that is really useful to all everyone in school and just to everyone. I teach a course in creativity impact, the capstone for our English major for the people who are involved in the arts. And so it's something I'm really engaged in. And I, I think it would, it'll work on a lot of different levels. So the, you know, I like that's, I'm glad they're going to contact me so that I can talk to them and find out exactly what they would like and what would suit their audience the best. And I actually have pictures. I got a power point. I'm just building it, but I have pictures now. I'm so excited because usually when I was going to book clubs, when the book first came out, I would drag along all these old photographs I have and pictures from Wounded Knee. There's a great book called Eyewitness at Wounded Knee and it's the University of Nebraska Press published it. And it was very, very useful. It continues to be useful because it gives a timeline about Wounded Knee, all of the printed historical reports, and then the photographs that were taken, which are pretty profound. I guess they're either profound or not. So pretty profound means is meaningless. I'm sorry. How about just profound? Profoundly moving. Okay. Yeah. Chris, do you have any questions? Yes. Well, I have one that just popped in here. Awesome. Want us to know, John, do you still teach at UNL? I know you were talking earlier about that. It wasn't sure. Yeah, I'm still at it. I don't know. They're going to have to drag me out of there and put me on a timey-dove horse and send me off. I'm still working. I only teach one course in the spring. And that's a PhD course in creative writing workshop. They're working on novels. So we'll be working on that this spring. In the fall, I'm going to teach my creativity course in the capstone. And I will also teach an undergraduate creative writing course in fiction. So yeah, I'm still teaching. It just seems to be what I wanted to do with my life. Well, I always wanted two things. I wanted to teach and I wanted to write. And I figured if I could arrange it so that they supported each other, it would really work out and it has. I feel very grateful. For years, I've been satisfied with work. And I know that, of course, knock on wood, that's a terrible thing to say that you're satisfied. But it's actually worked out. And I think that's important. It's helped. It's helped my writing. It's helped my family life, I think, that I'm not always struggling and thinking, oh, I need a different job. I need to change careers. The only thing I've done to change careers is to move to a different place to do it. But that's good. And I was very surprised by coming home to Nebraska. I didn't see that in the future, so that was good. And that really worked. Well, my sister and I had bought some land out in the sandhills after I discovered it, the sandhills for myself. And I thought, well, but we only bought a couple of hundred acres. And when you understand the breadth of the sandhills, you understand that's like having a lot in a suburb. That's virtually, it's useless. Unless you're going to build a house there. But it was just so beautiful. It was on the Navarera River. And it was, we had, you know, river. And it was just lovely. But we neither of us, she's in California, neither of us got out there enough to really hang on to it forever. So we sold it. And it went back to somebody who was our neighbor. And so he, he got a bigger piece. So he doesn't feel like he's in a suburb. You never know where life will take you. Yeah. No, I know. But I thought, well, if I come back to Nebraska, I'll be closer to my land. And that, because one of my ideals, of course, I imagined I would move out there and live there because I love it so much. And, but like many of the things we love, it's better to visit. Yeah. I didn't know what I'd do out there. I couldn't commute to work. Unless you're going to be a rancher, cattle. Yeah. Yeah. Then you need thousands of acres. So you need 50 acres per cow calf pair, which that's why you could only have four cows on the land. This wasn't an enterprise that was going to go very far. I love that your program is so malleable that people can email you and you can really just customize your community's rest program to what they're looking for, whether that's some sort of writing workshop or, you know, just a straight book discussion about your work. Absolutely. I love that you're so flexible in that way. I wanted to talk a little bit about how we can get books into book club hands. So one thing we offer at the Nebraska Library Commission, our book club kit. And I'm going to just bring up our book club kit stage really quick. We have all the One Book One Nebraska titles available via our book club kit. And I'm just going to go ahead and search by last name. And here you can see all of Jonathan's books that we have available in our book club kit selection. So we don't just have Bones of Paradise, but we do have 50 copies available. We have the discussion questions here readily available for you guys. And it's a very easy process for you guys to check out books for a few weeks, a month at a time, depending on how long your book club likes to read something, and just be able to utilize the surface service from us. So I wanted to go over that a little bit. I believe we also, we said send sets of it to the regional library systems as well. Yes. So we're not the only one with book club kits. Our regional library systems also have book club kits. So you can check them out through them or through us. It really doesn't matter. However, we can get the book. When you want to, there's other places, there's other other options. Yeah. Right. So for the specific time you want to read it, if we're already two books up, check with your system. That's really good. We do have a question actually about having Jonas come to visit. So if I can jump into that. Alyssa wants to know if you're teaching in the fall, would it be more difficult to book you for a visit? Do you prefer summer or spring or any particular time? I rearranged my classes in the fall. So I will be more available. I teach in three hour blocks each week. So my two classes will meet once, they'll meet Monday and Tuesday nights. So I'm available Wednesday through Sunday basically. And yeah, just have to be back to teach on Monday and Tuesday nights. So pretty much any time of year is perfectly fine to, you know, whatever works in the library or the school it wants. Yeah. And this spring is the same thing. I teach in a three hour block on Tuesday afternoon. So I'm there. I'm available. Which is kind of nice. I've always taught in big blocks because particularly when you're teaching, working with somebody's fiction or poetry, you want that intense experience and you want them to be fully engaged. We often eat together. You know, we'll share some food and we just kind of, we just lock down and do it for three hours and it's good. We take a break. I give them a two minute break. Don't you think that's enough? All right, they get 10 minutes. Maybe 15 if I'm really not feeling it. So no, I'm available. I'm now, people have contacted me some and I've, you know, there's stuff happening in the summer, the spring. We haven't, yes, there's something in, you know, I've picked up a couple of dates in the fall too. So anytime just not those not Monday and Tuesday nights. Great. That was a great question. And I love that, yeah, you've been able to rearrange your schedule to be more flexible and be, yeah readily available for books. Yeah. No, I think it's a, yeah, this is very important. I, you know, all my life, I've, libraries really saved my life. There've been some public library in Omaha, where, which was my public library. I would walk there and, you know, just drag my whole armful of books as a little kid home. And that's when everyone walked. I don't know whether you remember that or not, but we did walk. And I'd be, I'd try to read a book while I was walking because it was so, I just loved the library and it just, I always think of libraries as saving my life. Even in high school, I would just hole up in the, on the floor in the corner of the central high in Omaha and the library and read poetry. That's what I discovered poetry. I became a poet first, by the way, and then turned to fiction. I just thought fiction took, it was too hard. It took too much time. I didn't have that. You know, I was a kid. I wanted to, I wanted something you could get your emotions right out there. So as my life got more emotionally complicated, and I discovered poetry and I just read and copied poems out of books for hours. And that for years, I carried around a book I made of poems that I had loved. And that was due to a library. And every place I've gone, I, everything I can do for libraries, I will do, you guys just save our lives all the time. And I know so many people who say that every, every writer says that or their idiots don't say that. Of course, they believe that because you guys are the people holding the books. This is great. We have to keep every, we have to keep libraries going. This is important. We have to keep people coming to libraries too. So the programming you do is so very, very important. And thank you for doing it. And we'll keep writing if you'll keep your doors open. That's a big thing. Absolutely. Yeah, good. Good. It's a deal. All right. Good. Good. One event that we do every year is the celebration of Nebraska books. And that's always in the fall. We haven't picked a date yet for this upcoming fall. So keep your eyes and ears open for that. But at the celebration, it's free and open to the public. And one thing is we always have that year's One Book One Nebraska author do a presentation. So, Janice will be there. She will be presenting for the One Book One Nebraska about her book. And then we'll also have Nebraska Book Awards and the Geshe and Bennett Awards that night. And then we announce at the end, the next year's One Book One Nebraska. So it's kind of a nice bookend to the program. And so that's one thing we like to put out there that that event will be coming this fall. And we really encourage you guys all to attend if you can if you're here in Lincoln, Nebraska. Okay, here's one thing we talked about a little bit at the beginning with Becky about nominating for One Book One Nebraska. So, like she said, the nominations closed June 15. But if you nominate on June 16, it just goes towards the next year's selection committee. And this can be found on the One Book One Nebraska website. It's very simple for you to submit Nebraska Center for the book or Center for the book dot Nebraska dot gov slash obon type and nominations dot ast. So we just want to know the book title, the author, your email just so we know who's nominating it and then why you think it's a great book for the One Book One Nebraska program. We can't select a book if it's never been nominated. So we really encourage you if you think there's a book out there that needs one of these criteria, nominate it so that it can get into our judges hands and they can have an opportunity to read it and consider it for the One Book One Nebraska program. So that is a question you have about somebody want to know about nominating. So it's good that we I knew we were going to get to this. I was waiting for this. So the only books that are ever put up to possibly be the One Book One Nebraska do come from nominations from citizens. No one on the committees or from Center for the Book or anything come up with the titles. You just wait for people to tell you what books they think might be good for it. Yes. It's really a people's not a people's choice, but it starts off as people's choice. Can we can we nominate more than one book using a different form for each book? Yes. Yeah. Because as you were saying that I thought I thought of two books I want to nominate. Well, should I get a friend to nominate one? Yeah. And it could be any genre could be poetry could be nonfiction fiction. Good. We had a book of poetry a few years ago actually. 2018. Yes. I'm sorry to interrupt Tessa, but yes, 2018 Nebraska presence, which was a collection of poetry was the One Book One Nebraska. And I would also like to interject two things while we're on this page if you don't mind. One is that these nominations should not be children's books or young adult books. That's these are for it sounds weird to say adult readers, but they are books that that would appeal to people at a reading level that would be defined as an adult level. And the other thing we talked about Nebraska author we talked about Nebraska theme Nebraska setting. But the third question here in print is really an important one, because over the years, we have had books nominated that were no longer in print. And if the book is not in print, it makes it almost impossible for the nominating committee to lay our hands on it to be able to read and consider it. And it also makes it that much more difficult for libraries to have access to it. So we would encourage people to be aware that this in print criterion is an important one for us to be able to bring the book to the state of Nebraska. Thank you, Becky. Yeah. Those are all great points. And I will mention, since you did mention about this being for adults that we at the library commission do actually have a separate program of one book for Nebraska kids and teens. If you are looking for something that is for the younger type readers, we do have that program. And we do the new book is chosen every year. And you can find that on our website. We didn't encompass that earlier as well this year. Thank you. That's all the program through the center for the book. And it's not a Nebraska, I mean, it's books that have been chosen by library staff here at the commission for we have a children's and a young adult novel chosen, but they don't necessarily have a Nebraska theme or setting in them there. We're just taking books that we think would be great reads for children that year. And we always have book tips available for those books as well. Yes, like Becky said, the one book one Nebraska program is specifically an adult book club brain program. That doesn't mean high school students or middle school students can read the book. But that's the last slide I have. And then here's my information. If you guys have questions about the one book one Nebraska program, please just let me know and we'll answer those for you. This is great. Let's see. Questions. Yeah, if anybody does have any questions, go ahead and any other questions type into the questions section, you go to webinar interface and answer them. I didn't know if we did briefly lose Christie there at the beginning. I didn't know if you wanted to say anything as well about the program and one book. Oh, I suspect you all covered it beautifully. Just that the Center for the Book loves this program. It is an honor to be a part of it. And we so appreciate the active authors that participate in all of the support from Humanities Nebraska to make it all possible and the Nebraska Library Commission, of course, because without all those partnerships, none of this would happen and it certainly would never have the reach that it does. So I guess I would just say thank you and please nominate those books, encourage your friends to nominate the books that they think are fabulous. And I know there are lots of people across the state that are looking forward to having John has come to their libraries to talk about this book or her other books and do writing workshops. So be another great year of One Book, One Nebraska. One last thing while we're waiting to make some questions to pop in. If you booked John for an event, shoot me an email, let us know so that we can post it on the One Book, One Nebraska event page. That way people in your surrounding communities might be able to come attend. If she's having an online event, we post that if she's doing a book signing or a bookstore event across the state, we want to know about it so that we can try to let everybody know about it that we can. So that's one thing I ask you guys to do is just submit those events so that we can get them on our page. Absolutely. I will add to that that when you book through the Speaker's Bureau, the Humane's Nebraska, we will also publicize your program through our weekly blasts and on our website to help people know about it too. That's really good. That's really helpful to get that kind of support. I hope people will do that. I will also send you both of you when I get some, when people contact me and I'm not sure who they're going through. People are just contacting me so I never know. They've always done that anyways. But I will start sending those too so that you'll know. Good. I don't see any questions, new questions yet. Anybody have any last minute desperate questions you want to ask of anyone about the program, about one book, one Nebraska Center for the Book or anything you want to ask Janice about her book, about the story. We can talk about that too. Well, I would like to make a comment. I've known Janice for a long time and have read several of her novels. And I've read The Bones of Paradise more than once. And when Janice was reading the first chapter about JB and the end of his life, what really struck me was that this is a book that, for me, when I finish reading it, the next thing I do is I go back and reread the first chapter because she's built this beautiful cycle. And so I would not be at all surprised to hear other readers over the year as they discuss this book talk about the fact that once they finish, what they most want to do is to go back and reread the beginning. And I think that's just a method in which readers are really going to be captivated by the story that she's telling. Well, that's wonderful news. Thank you. I like hearing that better than, yeah, I threw it away. I hated this book. I never wanted to hear another word of a book discussion that can make for an animated interesting discussion amongst the members, however. But that's true. And, yeah, as I was reading it, I was actually thinking, yeah, I did kind of get all of the, I got the beginnings of the themes that the tensions, the dramas that are going to be explored and played out in the novel are all in that opening. And I didn't know it when I was writing it. It was very intuitive. It came out of my unconscious, I'm sure. And my job then was to see if I could play those out throughout the novel, if I could explore each thing that suggested there. So thank you for finding that. And I'm impressed that you read the novel more than once, too. Absolutely, Janice. And as I said, I've read several of your books. Thank you. I'm very pleased. I'm your biggest fan. We do have a question. You mentioned the book club kits to borrow those. Is it available in other formats, like an e-book or audio book as well? It is. I know, well, I know it's an audio book. I imagine it's an e-book. I think it is. Yeah, is it an overdrive? I know when they did the audio book, the publisher said, okay, now here, we're going to send you three examples or samples of readers. And the one they first sent me was this guy with a kind of Western drawl, kind of like, you know, gun smoke or something. Because they thought, oh, it's a Western. I said, no, nobody from Nebraska ever sounded like that. And no, we're not doing that. And, you know, kind of a tough guy. Someone didn't say actually it is available in our Nebraska overdrive group. Yes. So if you remember, yes, so it is available. It's both an audio book and an e-book in Nebraska overdrive. Good. Good. I got there. And I'm so glad you made that choice, John, because make a great book for an audio book. It was so, it was coming. Well, you know, when you deal with New York, God love them. You don't know what a pole barn is or, you know, there are a whole bunch of language that isn't theirs or experiences. Yeah, one day I'll tell people about, and I do talk about this, the time I brought my agent. Oh, no, it was my editor. I brought her out to the Sandhills in January and late December, early January. And that was an experience. If any of you have ever been out there, there's nothing. It's completely, beautifully quiet and pristine. And she was, I just pulled the car over and stopped at a, you know, where there was nothing. And she was kind of scared because she grew up in Manhattan. This was really terrifying to her. And I enjoyed it. She used to yell at me about having my characters drive around in pickup trucks too much. She said, they need to go, why are they driving so much? And so then she finally understood. She didn't know how to drive a car, but she had never learned how to drive a car because if you're in New York City, you don't drive. And so for her, the characters driving around in pickups seemed bizarre. Like I had some strange obsession. I understand that, yes, I'm actually originally from New York. Oh, are you? There you go. Upstate New York, Saratoga Springs. Oh, yeah. When I moved here 20 years ago, while I visited here first and in Lincoln in the city, it was fine. As soon as I left, it was a little agoraphobic. The open spaces were just, you read about it, you see pictures. It's not the same as sitting there and saying, how far away is that farmhouse? No. But now, you grow to love it. Yes, the open, the expanse and everything. It's, everything is different. You know, in New York, we have mountains and forests, but we have the open spaces and it's all, they're both good. Yeah. I loved upstate New York. Loved it. And Saratoga Springs is just incredibly beautiful. It really is. All right. And we do have a comment from someone. I was wondering about this too. Our regional library systems do have grants sometimes. And specifically, this one, she's in the Three Rivers Library System, but the others may well, grants for humanities Nebraska speakers. So if your library or school can't afford or doesn't have that $50 to bring someone in, look to your regional library systems to see if they have grants that they would be able to give you for that. And here, right now, our grants have been awarded already, but through the library commission, we would do that as well. If someone submitted a grant application just for either, well, for the youth ones, for some of the team books or our library improvement grants or something, programming type stuff, could be something you could apply for as well. Next year. Yeah. Good. For future reference. But yeah, look to your regional systems now and see if they can help you with any of the costs that might be involved. All right. We just hit 11 o'clock, but if anybody has any, we don't get cut off right now. If anyone has any other questions, any other comments they want to make, go right ahead. We did just a few other comments saying, thank you, everyone. Can't wait to read it. People haven't gotten to reading it yet. They're very excited. Good. I think people every year are always waiting to see what is going to be the one book and want to know what it's doing, going to be and making plans. Yeah, I was so excited about Becky texting me as soon as it was announced. I was helping with the band competition and I wanted to know what was going to be one book one Nebraska. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was saying I was utterly surprised. I had no idea this was happening. So it was a perfect, a lovely, uplifting moment to what has been just not a very good year 2021. Thank goodness we're done with that. And I'm hoping 2022 will begin to move into the positive soon. Soon, soon. Yes. Yeah. No, good. But at least we have books. We can, we can just hold up and read fiction. I've done so much. Sometimes I read a book every two days now. You know, sometimes every day, my father always read a book a day. So it was, he was insane. He was a very fast reader, but he could remember it all too. See, that's my problem if I read very fast. Yeah, I can get through it. Do I remember it? Parts a little, I don't know. So I'm really looking forward to meeting everybody. I love driving around. That's driving around any places my favorite activity. And I've been locked down with the pandemic, which has been kind of scary because, you know, you're just sitting there looking at the dogs and they're looking at you. And you're deciding which is going to eat you first. But aside from that, yeah, so I can hardly wait for things to loosen up and we can get out on the road again. I can go from there excited to have you come to either good or remotely, which either way. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Are there any other questions coming in any other last words from everybody? Sounds so dramatic, but encouraging final thoughts. I think we can wrap it up for today's show. Thank you everybody for joining us today. Thank you, Becky and Christie and Erica, all for being here with us for our annual intro to the One Book One Nebraska. Reach out, schedule your sessions, get your books in hand and start reading. I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen. There it is. Okay. There we go. All right. And wrap things up. So that wrapped up for today's show. This is our session page for here and Tessa was showing lots of the websites and we have them all linked from our session page here. So One Book Nebraska, Community Nebraska Center for the Book, Celebration of Nebraska Books. So all of those are on there for you to be able to jump to all of them from the page here. This is our main Encompass Live page for their upcoming shows. But I said I would show you here is where our archives are listed underneath the upcoming shows. Those recent ones at the top of the page. So today will be here. Should be done and available tomorrow sometime as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everyone attended today's show and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when the recording is ready. We will have a link to the recording on our YouTube channel, a link to Tessa's slides. So if you haven't wanted to look at those and then of course all the links that are built in there. As you can see here, we do have a search feature. If you do want to look for any of our previous shows, you can search through here and we do have our, we had mentioned the one book from Nebraska Kids and Teens. We did a show, did a show last August about the 2021 and the 2022 titles. So if you're interested in those, you can watch that and access the information about the Kids and Teens program that we have through here through the library commission. But while we're here on this search, you can search our show full show archives or just the most recent 12 months you want something just recent. That is because this is our full show archives and I'm not going to scroll all the way down because there's too many. Going back to the very beginning when Encompass Live premiered in January 2009. So we're going on like 12 years of archives here. So just pay attention to do watch any recordings to the original broadcast date to the all of a date there. Many of the shows will stand the test of time and still be good useful information, but some things will become outdated. Services or programs may have changed drastically. They may no longer exist anymore. Links may be broken. Such pages have moved. So just pay attention when you're watching any of our previous shows. We also do have a Facebook page for the show. If you do like to use Facebook, you can give us a like over there. We give reminders to your reminder to log in to today's show, highlighting our speakers. We'll let you know when recordings of previous shows are available. So if you do like to use Facebook, you can use that. Also, we use the hashtag Encompass Live, wherever we post on social media. Twitter, Instagram. I think that's all we're doing now so far, right? Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Yeah. All the places that we reach out. So you can follow us there as well. So, yeah, get over here. So, I'm going to get back to the page. There we go. All right. So that wraps up today's show. Look for my email with information about today's recording. Just one last little information I want to share is our Big Talk from Small Libraries is our online conference for small libraries. It's going to be held February 25th. This year, it's always the last Friday in February, but the call for speakers is open through this Friday. So if you have something you would like to share and you're a small library with an FTE of 10,000 or less, that's who we generally try and keep to on the show. This is speakers from actually small libraries, all types, public, academic, school, anything. Get your proposal into me by this Friday and you might be able to be on our Big Talk from Small Libraries annual conference. This is the 11th annual conference of this. So just want to remind people to send in your proposals. And then that wraps it up for today's show. Hopefully you see I've got some open dates here. This is our schedule at the moment. I'm working on filling in some dates and stuff. So keep your eye on here for other shows coming on and what the topics are going to be. Other than that, thank you so much for being here with us this morning. Go out and read Bones of Paradise and talk about it with all your friends and family and everyone. Yeah. Good. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.