Library News & Views

Happy New Year from the Havre-Hill County Library staff.

The new year means our annual Winter Reading Series is about to kick off, and this year’s series is going to be wonderful and unique.

We have five Montana authors scheduled to come and discuss their books with us, and the first author to make the trek to Havre will be Philip Burgess, author of “Penny Postcards and Prairie Flowers.” Burgess will be at Havre-Hill County Library to discuss his book Thursday, Jan. 14, at 4 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.  

Through poems and storytelling Burgess describes the journey of his grandmother Anna Lee and great-aunt Dicka Lee from their family homestead in northern Minnesota out to eastern Montana, where they became homesteaders themselves and lived out their lives.

He includes a litany of disasters, humor, illnesses, adventure, hard work and social chatter excerpted from hundreds of postcards mailed to Anna and Dicka from their women’s community back in Minnesota.

This presentation provides some unique and intimate insights into the day-to-day social and working lives of early 20th-century, rural, Western women. It is a tribute to how women’s community, built with bonds of love, mutual support, and courage, can help build and hold together the greater community in extremely harsh circumstances — and to the contribution that one uneducated, impoverished, cantankerous, color-blind, terrible cook of an old woman made throughout her life to one such community.  

Burgess will be back at the library that same evening at 7 p.m., presenting his program “A Black Homesteader’s Struggle.”

Burgess uses his poetry and storytelling skills to describe a black family’s experience as early settlers in the Missouri River valley of eastern Montana.

Seeking refuge from the lynch-mob racism of the post-Civil War South, they found dignity and independence on a beautiful and isolated homestead. Although safe from the lynch-mob’s rope, they still had to deal with the less virulent but more complicated racial attitudes of Richland County, as well as the vagaries of Northern Plains weather and the wandering Missouri River.

Burgess, of Missoula, is a veteran, poet, storyteller, ex-therapist, ex-cabdriver, et cetera, who still nourishes and honors his eastern Montana roots. He is the author of the collection of poetry “Badlands Child,” which is now available on CD, and “Penny Postcards and Prairie Flowers.”

These events are part of the Humanities Montana program Hometown Humanities, providing a year’s worth of humanities-based programming to a Montana community. Havre is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Hometown Humanities grant, so keep an eye out for all the wonderful programming coming to Havre. The best way to keep up with what’s happening is to subscribe to the Hometown Humanities e-Newsletter, which can be accessed at their website humanitiesmontana.org.

If you have any questions, please give us a call at 265-2123, email us at [email protected], or just stop in at 402 3rd St.