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River of Stories

Notes from a winter diary. Awaiting rosy fingers on the eastern horizon, I make a prayer of thanks for the morning dark, the starry quiet, and the companionship of this interlude. Not a creature is stirring, not even Angie the History Dog. So what is this pre-dawn "companionship" of which I speak?

There is fire. The two fireplaces warm my two centers of gravity: the Study, with its Bison Chair for reading and its cherry work tables for writing; and the north room, with the Grandpa Chair and hickory floors that glow in the firelight.

And there is print. Wherever I preach these days (classroom, library, radio, cafe, elevator), I talk print culture--the importance of print, on paper, in the definition of people and the enrichment of life. I'm standing on solid ground here; we know from Benedict Anderson's landmark work, Imagined Communities, that it is print culture which makes nations. I know from personal experience (as well as catechism class) that a relationship with print--say, a reading of the Gospel of Mark on a winter morning--also defines an individual.

Here is a profound blessing to an old guy: to awaken in a house warmed by fire and populated by books. This morning I have flown in a cropdusting airplane with David Vail (via his excellent new work, Chemical Lands) and met the Marquis de Mores with Bertha Palmer (via her classic love letter to the land, Beauty Spots in North Dakota). I wish I could pour each of them a cup of coffee. I think a great conversation would ensue. Or maybe it already has.

Or maybe the conversation is ongoing, at least so I hope. Going confessional, I admit to a bias, honestly acquired, for print culture. To say otherwise would not be Lutheran. Think about the date of Luther’s 95 Theses--1517. It was Gutenberg, near a century earlier, who made it possible for Luther’s scrawl to go viral.

Drawing on another line of personal print culture, I will say, Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this culture, or any culture, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Print culture is so embedded in the faith and in the republic I find it hard to conceive of either without it. It heartens me that books, books made with ink on paper, are enjoying a remarkable resurgence in the twenty-first century.

Also that print culture--it’s a thing, “print culture,” both as an expression and as an object of study--print culture has become a flourishing field of inquiry at the intersection of History, Literature, and Communication. I know it behooves me, as a scholar of the prairies, to speak to this emerging consciousness.

A key finding in the scholarship of print culture is that no new mode of communication eradicates a previous mode. Neither print nor electronic communications eradicated orality--I say, speaking to you by radio.

Nor should it have been surprising that print has sustained and resurged in the digital era. We are buying more books than ever--and buying many of them online. Today I fear more for oral culture than for print culture. Young people are stilted storytellers.

And the Great Plains, our country, is not so much as sea of grass--although print culture generated that metaphor--as it is a river of stories.

~Tom Isern

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