One Book One Nebraska author speaks on campus
CHADRON – Karen Gettert Shoemaker, author of “The Meaning of Names,” spoke to a capacity crowd in the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center Chicoine Atrium Thursday. She is the second speaker in the Distinguished Visiting Writer Series sponsored by the Chadron State College English and Humanities department, Humanities Nebraska and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Shoemaker’s book, chosen for the 2016 One Book One Nebraska, tells the story of a 28-year-old mother of four who emigrates from Germany to Nebraska in 1918. During her presentation, Shoemaker shared a book trailer produced by a graduate assistant.
“We were not a cryptic German family. We talked a lot. This story was easy to tell. I knew the rhythm and the important parts,” Shoemaker said. “I started collecting stories from family interviews, as a child.”
She revealed that her mother is the baby born at the end of the book.
“It was a miracle that my grandmother lived through it,” she said, pointing out she gave birth during 1918-19 global influenza outbreak.
The section of the book she read to the audience depicted the death of a German man, who was beaten and thrown from the train carrying the young family. The anti-German sentiment she discovered in her research was shocking, Shoemaker said.
“I wanted to get at the truth of the experience. When German immigrants were attacked, it was wrong then and, oddly enough, it’s wrong now,” she said. “It’s not a family memoir because it doesn’t have the necessary allegiance to truth. I play fast and loose with that, so it is a novel. I assured all the audience members at a reading in Atkinson that all the bad people were made up and all the good people in the book were their ancestors.”
Category: Campus Events, Campus News, English, Sandoz Society