NEA's The Big Read Ahira Hall Memorial Library In Brocton

This past Wednesday, the Ahira Hall Memorial Library held an event for the Big Read discussion of Jack London's novel, The Call of the Wild, amongst the community of Brocton. The town is small enough to be described by locals as a single four-way intersection, and the library is very fitting in terms of size. Julie Putcher, director of AHML, paired up with our team to be sure we had a success experience, and helped us to create an appropriate atmosphere for our loosely based discussion. Out of the thirteen participants that had attended our Big Read event, three of them came from Brocton High School and despite our doubts, felt motivated to participate in the discussion with college students and older women. 

After much thought, we decided it was necessary to pick something universal that anyone could connect to and we felt using Buck as a focal point would be the best way to engage everyone in attendance. Of course, one of the first things brought up in our discussion was the human qualities of Buck and how much we as readers could identify with the humanity within the dog. Talk of empathy with animals led further to some of the biggest, and most controversial, topics of the novel, including animal abuse and environmentalist issues. Memories of connections with dogs in the past were shared, which carried into discussion of the kind of cruelty that can come from man’s power over animals. One of the big topics of discussion was the Iditarod and whether or not the treatment of the dogs involved was cruel, which lead to some interesting insights into the racing process. The talk of animal abuse got the younger members of the community to speak up and share their personal animal stories. That topic then segued into the environmental concerns of the novel, chiefly London’s emphasis on respect for nature, and the consequences of forgetting that respect. One of our ties to the modern world through this topic was the issue of hydrofracking, an issue one of the community members in attendance had vivid memories of dealing with on her property in the seventies. Tackling these topics helped everyone in attendance get to the core of what London was really writing about in Call of the Wild, and this provided an opening for insights into what the novel meant to all of the people involved.

Our thanks goes out to everyone who made the Big Read possible, to the participants from the Brocton and Fredonia communities, and to the Ahria Hall Memorial Library in Brocton for hosting this event!