Students, staff and faculty at Lane Community College in Eugene are participating in the Common Read. It's a project that aims to connect people on campus through reading one book together.
“The goal is to bring different parts of our community together," said LCC Librarian Claire Dannenbaum. "Oftentimes it's very difficult for faculty to meet with students outside of their classes or for students to know and meet with administrators on campus who are the people that actually help the campus function."
Dannenbaum said LCC students sometimes have a hard time building relationships with other students, in part because the school is a non-residential campus.
"They know people who are in their courses, but then oftentimes they leave campus immediately," she said. "So we're trying to keep students on campus and engaged and learning about each other and all of the communities that make up Lane Community College.”
Dannenbaum said the book was chosen from about 60 suggestions. They winnowed it down to 15, and then a committee of five people did a deeper dive.
“We really were looking for a title that had a positive connection between groups of people. Which is hard. It's hard to find that,” she said. “There's a lot of partisan material out there, information, a lot of it is self-help about what you should be doing better to make yourself better, optimize. This is really about trying to find something that was going to connect people around ideas that were hopeful and really help us think about the future.”
So what did the committee choose?
“The book is called ‘A Psalm for the Wild Built,' and it's part of a duo of very short novellas,” Dannenbaum said. “The books were written by Becky Chambers, who is an author who does a kind of science fiction. Some different terms have been ‘hope punk’ or ‘solar punk’. So, the idea is that there are visions of the future that are more about mutual aid. They're less dystopian. They're more about exploring ideas of resilience in the future, and her work is known for that. She's actually an award winning author and has helped develop this genre, this subset of science fiction.”
Dannenbaum said they've had a few campus events, including recent tea parties to discuss the book.
“It's been really interesting to try to do this project on campus," she said. "Right now there's a lot of competing forces for our attention, and so I feel that it's really important for people to choose activities that are actually going to feed them and not just drain them— doom scrolling and all the attention.
“It is really important to be able to take action and in order to be able to take action in the world you actually have to have the strength and the energy and the imagination to do it. So, I would not have guessed that we would be where we are politically today when we chose the book, but I actually think the book is kind of instructive on, you know, thinking about, how do you take care of yourself so that you can actually be part of the world.”
In early March, “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” author Becky Chambers will visit Lane Community College for two events with students in the campus community.
The Common Read is supported by the Lane Forward Fund at the LCC President's office.
