Small Towns Matter
-By Karin Elton MARSHALL- A group of historians will discuss the unique problems and benefits of living in a small town next week. "A Place Called Home: A Conference on the Midwestern Small Town"
will start at 2:45 p.m. Thursday in Charter Hall 217 at Southwest Minnesota
State University. For nearly 30 years, Hasselstrom has worked on the family cattle ranch near the Black Hills of South Dakota, from freelance writing of books and essays, and by teaching writing workshops in poetry and nonfiction writing and publishing. In 1996 Hasselstrom began operating her ranch home--now called Windbreak House--as a writing retreat for women writers. Since she winters in Wyoming, commuting to the ranch to teach, she writes from a changed perspective, but here work is still rooted in the grasslands of southwestern South Dakota. Her latest publications include "Feels Like Far: A Rancher's Life
on the Great Plains" and "Between Grass and Sky: Where I Live
and Work." The conference, which is free and open to the public, will deal with the reality and image of the small town, past and present, and is being presented by the Center for Rural and Regional Studies at SMSU. In addition to Hasselstrom, writers Richard Davies, David Pichaske, and Joseph Amato, who recently collaborated on a book, "A Place Called Home: Writings on the Midwestern Small Town," will speak. "A Place Called Home" is a collection of writings from such
authors as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Dave Etter and Carol Bly, who wrote
on rural themes. And it's a timely subject. "The small town is associated with change, dramatic change," he said. Amato said the small town is undergoing the largest transformation since the United States' founding. If farms disappear, if towns disappear, become bedroom communities to larger town, a great resource for American culture, the American experience, is lost." Amato said fiction and nonfiction writers will explore that topic at
the conference. "I'm going to be talking about my book, 'Looking for History on Highway 14,' which is about 15 of the towns on Highway 14 in South Dakota between the Minnesota border and Wall, where Highway 14 merges with Interstate 90," Miller said. "The book tries to show how people can look at small towns from different angles and think of them in different perspectives, seeing both the light and the dark sides that characterize them." Miller said small towns matter. "For most of American history, we were, by definition, a colony and then a nation of small towns," he said. "Our values, our habits, and our political and social institutions all emerged out of communities that were, of necessity, small. "Now when most people live in large metropolitan areas, we need somehow to reconstruct the kinds of communal ties that drew people together in small towns, to resurrect the valuable things that made life pleasurable and discard the narrowness and provincialism that made it unpleasant." Miller is eager for the conference to start. "I am greatly looking forward to seeing old friends Joe Amato and Linda Hasselstrom and meeting the other speakers on the program," he said. Conference Schedule "A Place Called Home: A Conference on the Midwestern Small Town"
will start at 2:45 p.m. Thursday in Charter Hall 217 at Southwest Minnesota
State University. The conference will deal with the reality and image
of the small town, past and present, and is being presented by the Center
for Rural and Regional Studies at SMSU. Conference speakers on Thursday are: The conference schedule is: |