Adapting to a changing environment at the Dunkirk Free Library

        As we waited in anticipation at the Dunkirk Free Library, we prepared ourselves for our discussion on Jack London’s Call of the Wild.  We had geared our presentation towards adolescents in the middle to high school range, hoping that the local schools would have promoted the book and encouraged students to attend our discussion which was in a central location in the community.  We only had one student turn up, one of our peers, a college student, but our discussion was still as riveting as we anticipated.

        The Big Read aims to promote literacy in a world where many people are not as concerned anymore about books.  Their mission is an adamant one, and they succeed in getting people to think about books in a different and more in-depth way.  I think that all of the groups have witnessed that fact through this experience which we have been granted in our English Senior Seminar. We contributed to this year’s The Big Read on Call of the Wild by offering a deeper look at Buck’s character and his adaptation to his environment as well as how Jack London is identifiable through Buck’s character. We offered a source of identity between our reader and Buck as a character, hopefully causing a positive reader response between their own experiences and Bucks’ in the novel. 

        The venue of our event was wonderful. We were provided a room on the second floor of the library where we arranged the chairs in front of a Jack London display provided by SUNY Fredonia’s Reed Library to educate the public on the text and its context. Other library goers made their way in and out of the room to use the community computers as we analyzed several aspects of the novel.  Although our Big Read discussion at the Dunkirk Free Library had a turnout of only four readers, all were active and engaged in discussing the content of London’s Call of the Wild.  The group consisted of all upper level, pre-graduate students, with an academic background in English literature. Having one audience member did affect our presentation; however we were still able to discuss everything that we had planned.  Given our audience member’s academic background, and her previous reading of the novel, she was able to offer insightful information to our discussion. She used her psychological background to chime in about the different ways people strategize to fit in, the anxieties people generally have about going into new situations, and how people tend to abolish that feeling of uncertainty in different communicative ways. Her English background was an obvious help when it came to discussing the literary history of the novel, and she was intrigued to listen to the ways Jack London’s biographical information paralleled with Buck’s character in the novel. Although we had such a small audience, as a group we felt we were able to generate positive discussion, and truly cover everything we had planned, and maybe even a little more, given the psychological aspects our audience member contributed.

        The group, consisting of Alyssa Velk, Chelsey Ray, and Christina Boody, worked alongside Janice Dekoff, the director of the Dunkirk Free Library to put together a discussion thoroughly discussing Jack London as a man and as a novelist, as well as forming a deep discussion about environmental adaptation and how Buck’s journey through different environments expressed the theme. We hoped our chosen theme would generate thought within our audience, as we felt that the environmental adaptation was a topic that anyone could relate to in different ways. When choosing this particular theme, we wanted to make sure that it was adaptable to many different kinds of people because we had no idea what our anticipated demographic would be, and we felt that being able to connect a reader to the characters and plot of the novel was one of the best ways to generate positive reader response. We wanted our readers to have an emotional tie to the novel, and perhaps recollect on a time when they remembered themselves going through a similar journey to adapt to a new environment in their own lives, and learn the role of a new situation as Buck does with the Huskies. We analyzed the novel past the final page and evaluated the ability (or inability) to return to one’s former ways after natural instinct has taken over the mind.  With Chelsey’s knowledge on poetry, we analyzed the quoted poem at the start of the novel and related it back to Buck and his journey.  We discussed the force behind the meter, and how it was driven like the actions of the novel.  Speaking in meter becomes second nature for us, almost like an instinct, exactly the way we watched Buck adapt in Call of the Wild.

  

        The Big Read experience helped us to foster a deeper understanding of Jack London’s Call of the Wild using biographical information about Jack London, textual examples to support our chosen theme, and showing parallels between the author and the novel.  Our readers were engaged and offered lots of input, yet were still intrigued enough to ask questions and search for more answers. Our group had success with the Big Read.  We met all of our goals with this project, and hope that our presentation of the novel promoted a future for lifelong learning and reading.