By Claire McCully
The cat meows in his carrier
For nearly all twenty minutes
Of our drive to the animal ER.
When he finally falls silent,
I worry that he’s already dead.

In the waiting room, my nine year old son
Points to a glossy magazine picture,
A cat like our own, but one that’s healthy
And playful. My boy plays Scheherazade
To my heart, tells a story
Of miracles, of a cat that survives
His faith in living things
Is full of boyish defiance,
Forevers-and-evers.
He hasn’t spilled a drop
Of his endless summer.

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By Jonathan Cummins
In 1938, the Federal Government adopted the Small Tract Act. As a Homestead Era policy, the Small Tract Act was intended to encourage settlement in the West. The one requirement to secure a 5-acre tract of free land was to live on it permanently. By the 1950s, hundreds of small tracts north of Reno, Nevada were settled temporarily before changing hands again. The Bureau of Land Management had allowed settlers to use trailers to establish residency. Speculators bought up small tracts and subdivided the place into lots with a simple formula: dig a well, a septic tank, install a trailer. And with that, Sun Valley was born.

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By Erica Vital-Lazare
Removed from our works
the iron core taken into our mouths
the sweet clay feeding the belly
through our wounds, we are stripped
and stripping conduits, conductors burned loose
where we travel, we are pushed through the ore—

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By Brad McMullen
One of the highlights of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is seeing the walls of the G Three Bar Theater fill up with colorful artwork from the students of Elko County, Nevada. Every year, Elko County art teachers submit art from hundreds of kids from around the county (including students from some of our one-room schoolhouses) to be exhibited as a part of the Gathering, showing off the talents of the next generation to the thousands of Gathering attendees.

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By Kathleen Kuo
When Nevada Humanities first conceived of Humanities Heart to Heart in late April, the state of Nevada had been shut down and in a state of emergency for a little over a month. All of us bore witness to bewildering nationwide toilet paper shortages, the rise of Zoom and working from home, new additions to our lexicon such as “social distancing” and “flatten the curve,” a surge of crafting homemade face masks, workers deemed essentials on the front line of the pandemic, and more.

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By Carly Sauvageau
In 1976 in Reno, Nevada, Phil Ragsdale decided to start something that had never been done before: a gay rodeo. The rodeo was like many others, involving bull and bronc riding, calf roping, and pig wrestling. However some events set it apart from a traditional rodeo, “goat-dressing” and cow milking events were participated in by teams of gay men, lesbians, and drag queens.

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By Mikayla Whitmore
Distance means so many things to me today. Growing up in Las Vegas, I’ve had several family members who worked in casinos throughout the Strip and Downtown. I remember walking inside a near-empty theme park at the MGM Grand on Employee Appreciation Day before they dismantled it - marking the end of the family fun era of the Las Vegas Strip in the early 2000s. The facades and landmarks of home used as an endless backdrop in Hollywood portrayals and real-life moments alike.

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By Staff of Nevada Humanities
A committee made up of writers, scholars, book sellers, and community members throughout the state met in late 2019 to select one fiction book and one non-fiction book as part of our statewide reading club, Nevada Reads. Two books were chosen, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, and Severance by Ling Ma. This pairing was chosen because of the corresponding theme of displacement and transience found in both books.

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By Lindsay Wilson
In the Great Basin the night’s a punch line,
a joke to our daylight selves
who thought the day’s expanse
can be seen within us, but the night’s curtain
descends, and you find your feet on the edge
of your life’s small black box stage.

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By Christina Barr
I've been following the news compulsively for months, but never more so than my round-the-clock news updates over the past few days. I am moved by the protesters who are enduring the very real risk of COVID-19 and police violence to combat the racial status quo in our country. I am stunned by the rampant instances of police brutality against protesters protesting police brutality, yet heartened by the stories of deep caring and humanity that are emerging in the chaos of our days and nights.

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By Erin Stiles
Humans are social creatures. We live in groups, we grow in groups, we raise our children in groups—we are utterly dependent on our social relationships. What happens to these relationships in a time when physical gatherings are limited or impossible due to “social distancing”?

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By Kathleen Kuo
The inability to fully connect with my parents on a linguistic and cultural level is painful.Through our conversations in mixed broken English and Mandarin, I wish to share my struggles, my hopes, my successes. I want to know their stories - their experiences growing up in Taiwan, moving to the States, and adjusting to their new home and environment. I am certain that there is always more that they wish they could impart upon me, and me to them, but the barrier of acculturative dissonance prevents us from doing so.

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By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Nevada Humanities announces Nevada Humanities CARES: Emergency Relief Grants for Nevada Cultural Organizations that will provide rapid-response, short-term operating support for Nevada nonprofit humanities and cultural organizations facing financial hardship and duress resulting from the COVID-19 health emergency.

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By Michael P. Branch
Tennessee Williams wrote that “…time is the longest distance between places.” That’s how it feels as we wrap up our second month of coronavirus quarantine and wonder what the future holds. Time seems to stretch out before us, becoming distorted and malleable as the days blend together imperceptibly. We look toward a horizon that recedes before us, refusing to remain in view.

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By June Sylvester Saraceno
Our breed was a brooding type,
menfolk in barns and garages, silent,
thick fingers turning tools.
Those hands could snap a shoulder
back in place, or drown a litter
of unwanted pups. They did
what had to be done, without a fuss.

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By Mark Salinas
Measuring the amount of space between objects has been occupying my mind, again. It seems everyone has dusted off the old home sewing machine and has committed bobbins and pinking shears to at-home Project Runway challenges, creating facemasks for friends, family, and even strangers.

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By Aliza Pantoja
Sometimes I forget my name and where I am because I have a dissociative disorder that alters my identity, my memory, and my connection to the world. It can be difficult to feel successful when I struggle with the simple upkeep of normal social and professional personas. I forget that although I have no choice but to adapt, my adaptability is a strength.

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By Heather Korbulic
The birds piss me off these days. Their incessant, merry chirping seems tone deaf to the darkness that fills day after blurry day in quarantine. Dear little finch – shut the hell up – I’m trying to be miserable here.

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By Autumn Harry, Tsanavi Spoonhunter, and Jarrette Werk
As Indigenous Peoples, our place-based narratives connect us with the ancestral world- geographically, spiritually, and physically. Due to the continued impacts of colonialism, Indigenous communities within North America are actively advocating for their rights to be recognized and respected within their ancestral homelands.

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By Susanna Newbury, Lauren Paljusaj, and Anne Savage
Photographs showcase history through the art of images. As objects, they represent shifting cultural styles and attitudes of times (and mediums) that no longer exist in the flickering novelty of the present. As Oliver Wendell Holmes warned in 1859, their invention trained us to hunt and collect images as glimmering appearances, in his words, like the skin and hide of trophy hunters. Photographs carry with them the possibility of leaving lives formerly lived to dissolve, mirage-like, in history’s distant viewfinder.

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