Dust Bowl memories, and why we need to understand the past to create a healthy future
'The story had really been around in some form or another inside me, for so long that it's just humbling to recollect,' Russell says. A research trip to Nebraska in 2012 yielded ideas and a few short stories, including one called 'Proving Up,' set in the 1870s when the
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But it wasn't until the pandemic that the novel came out. 'It's been a slow journey,' says Russell, 'but I had been thinking about this place and these people and this conceit for over a decade at that point.' Hunkered down in Portland, Ore., with a preschooler and a newborn while 'these terrible wildfires' raged outside, she adds, 'you could really feel the costs of climate emergency in your own lungs.'
Among the novel's characters is a Black woman working for the New Deal agency as a photographer (think Dorothea Lange) — another way to store painful memories, Russell points out. Contemporary photographers, writers, and others in Nebraska helped her see and understand the place from different perspectives, from Pawnee to the Polish American farmers who themselves had fled a place 'carved up by empire.'
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A large part of the book, Russell says, is about looking — and truly seeing one another: 'What if you are exchanging a gaze with someone whose land you're now living on? What if your portion of this American dream has been taken from families you live next to?'
Karen Russell will read at 6 p.m. Monday, March 24, at the
.
And now for some recommendations . . .
Maine author Ron Currie has won devoted fans for his quick-paced, darkly comic novels, and with '
'
In '
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Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section.
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