Welcome to another expanded edition of Inside the Cover.

I am your host, Ted Ayres, and I want to thank you for watching PBS Kansas, and for watching our show.

I am pleased that you are joining us for what I think will be a very interesting program.

Tonight's guest is Dr. Gretchen Cassel Eick.

And I am excited to begin the conversation.

So join me as we go inside the cover.

Gretchen Eick worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. for over a decade as a foreign and military policy lobbyist before earning her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Kansas and becoming a noted professor of history.

She retired from Friends University as Professor Emerita.

Dr. Eick was one of the featured speakers at a sesquicentennial event in Wichita celebrating Kansas statehood and prior to the pandemic, Dr. Eick and her husband, Michael Poage, spent half the year in Bosnia and Herzegovina teaching English at a university there.

Currently and in her retirement, Eick teaches, writes books and manages a publishing company with her husband, Dr. Eick's 2001 book, Dissent in Wichita, was an award winning work, and it is truly important book about the heroics of a collection of young Wichitans who, through their courage, determination and good planning, integrated the lunch counters of the Dockum chain of drugstores in Wichita in 1958, well before the much more publicized activities in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In 2020, Dr. Eicks book They met at Wounded Knee, was published by the University of Nevada Press.

This book is a story of United States from the Civil War to World War Two.

Told through two people, Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman.

We reviewed this book on Inside the Cover during our season four.

In 2021, Eick and life coach and spiritual counselor Cora Poage who happens to be Doctor Eick's daughter, published a book called The Death Project: An Anthology for These Times.

It was an attempt to help people cope with the difficult and challenging times of the COVID pandemic.

Dr. Eicks most recent book is Dark Crossings, which is a part of a continuing series.

As you can see, Gretchen Eick is a talented, active and busy person, and i am grateful that she has taken time to be with us tonight.

Gretchen, welcome to this expanded edition of Inside the Cover.

Thanks Ted, I'm honored to be here.

We obviously have a lot to talk about.

And so if you're ready, let's get started.

First, I'm interested to know what brought you to Kansas and the PhD program at KU.

Well, I'd been working on Capitol Hill for 14 years, first as a lobbyist on foreign and military policy issues, and then as the director of National Impact, which was a coalition of of 23 national church organizations, religious organizations, not just church.

And when I met Michael Poage and decided to marry him and we had to make a choice of where we were, he was in Kansas, and we had to make a decision where we were going to go.

So I thought I would come to Kansas and came to Kansas kind of expecting, oh, you know, I'll have no trouble finding work.

But I had great trouble finding work, could not find anything.

I was living in Lawrence, too, that we were living in Lawrence at that point.

And so I was hired by somebody who had gone to Kalamazoo College, which was my alma mater, and in the psychology department to do data entry.

I mean, it was just a it was a it was a job that didn't really use my skills, but it was a job, you know, so and KU at that point allowed you to take classes for free if you were on the staff.

So I started back into a Ph.D. program.

I had dropped out of back in 1965.

So was teaching a long time goal.

Gretchen, or it just happened?

I had taught I taught at Federal City College, which is the University of D.C. back early, before I worked on Capitol Hill.

And I had taught in the school systems, you know, at the high school and junior high school level in New Haven, Connecticut, and then in Maryland.

So I'd had some experience with teaching, had always wanted to be a teacher.

And a lot of my work as a lobbyist was also interpreting issues, you know, teaching people about complex issues.

Well, we're all fortunate that you chose that career, as I mentioned in the introduction.

You and your husband manage a publishing company, I think Blue Cedar Press.

Why did you begin the company?

And when?

Mike started Blue Cedar Press in 2015 and his goal was to publish poetry and under my influence prose, I kept pushing for prose as well, because that's the primary.

I write some poetry, but mostly prose.

And so he we wanted to publish New Voices from the Prairie and the Planet and have published about 17 authors, 36 books.

I think, at this point.

Well, you anticipate because I was going to ask you how many books you had published.

Are they printed here in Wichita?

They're they're either they're print on demand through IngramSpark so that libraries and bookstores can get them that way.

Sometimes we print books, we have them printed locally, like through Menno Press or another publishing house.

So we have hard copies to distribute.

And you may have touched upon this, Gretchen, but does Blue Cedar Press now specialize in a certain genre?

No, actually, we have memoirs.

We have we're trying to be as inclusive in the stories that we tell.

So we have we have authors of all different ethnicities, and we're looking for more women.

Actually, we have fewer women than we would like to have published.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's talk about some of the books that you have written or brought to life.

And I believe that you have eight books, both fiction and nonfiction and how and when did you make or was this part of your game plan to begin with, to combine both fiction and nonfiction in your writing career?

No, Dissent in Wichita was my Ph.D. dissertation, and because I was 50 when I started back for a Ph.D., I told my committee, I'm going to write this to be a book.

And they said, Oh, no, you should let it sit for four or five years before you actually turn it into a book.

And I said, I don't have time for that.

I'm starting this process too late.

So I wrote it.

I mean, I had to obviously I had to do some changes to make it into into a book from the dissertation.

And I did additional research.

So there were a few things that were changed in the book from the dissertation.

And then it was, there was a new edition put out in 2007, and then a new edition comes out in this year in the e-book from the University of Illinois Press.

How did you make that transition in your writing career from a very scholarly publication, your thesis work into nonfiction?

My mother was a novelist.

She has a book that was published by Viking, and she had several other manuscripts that didn't get published.

So I always thought that I wanted to write fiction as well, that I'd like to try it, but I never really had time teaching at Friends.

You teach four classes a semester and they're different classes, so there was a lot of preparation.

So when I retired in 2013 from full time work, I just decided this is the opportunity.

And Mike suggested, Why don't you.

Why don't you go to a novelist?

I had already started a novel and Mike said, Why don't you, you know, why don't we spend the money and you go and go to a writers retreat for novelists, which I did, which was a very good decision.

Yes, very good decision.

And that's how Maybe Crossings came to be.

Well, let's talk a little bit about Dissent in Wichita.

And I finished my copy on December four, 2011, and I still have the receipt from Amazon where I bought it and I loved it.

And as I understand it, Gretchen, this book was the first documented study of the Dockum sit in that occurred here in Wichita, but obviously that's only a part of your book.

And of course, the book is subtitled The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-1972.

And of course, you talked about your Ph.D. thesis, but what got you interested in, I'm going to be very broad here, in the civil rights movement?

I had always been interested in the civil rights movement.

I went to a university in West Africa when I was a junior.

I was the there were five of us.

We were the first white students to attend this African university in Sierra Leone.

And when that experience profoundly changed my life, for one thing, we arrive the day that James Meredith was being kicked out, were being disallowed, violently disallowed from the university to enter the University of Mississippi.

So we arrived and the the newspaper had the headline, you know, Meredith, four days of Violence and Protest Against Meredith.

And we thought, what are we getting into?

And of course, it was just the opposite.

We were welcomed.

We had this was a university that had students from all over Africa.

So it was not just an experience of Sierra Leonean students, but it was learning all about different in different parts of Africa.

It was incredible.

It changed my life profoundly.

It would have.

To.

Yeah.

So I came back and that and the rest of my life is basically shows the direction that that sent me because I, I taught in the first years of busing in New Haven and, and did bussing for integration in New Haven schools.

And then I just got very interested in black history and studying African American history.

How long did your research take for Dissent in Wichita?

Six years.

In 2020 your book, They Met at Wounded Knee was published by the University of Nevada Press.

And I want to remind our viewers that we reviewed this book during season four and it is available with all of our prior shows on the KPTS.org website.

This book is a story of the United States from the Civil War to World War Two.

As told through two people, Charles Eastman, a Dakota Sioux physician, and Elaine Goodale Eastman his Puritan Heritage wife.

What brought the Eastman's to your attention?

Well, the Eastman's when I was when we were living in Lawrence, when I was unable to find work, I went to Haskell Library and did some research there, and I read a book on Eastman, just a short book.

But I was intrigued with his life.

And later, my daughter, my oldest daughter, was living in Somerville, Massachusetts.

And so I would go out to visit her and I would go in and and then she she moved to Northampton.

I went to I found out that Elaine's papers were at the Smith College Special Collections.

So I started going into I could do double time, I could go visit Allison, and I could then go research-- Another opportunity.

Yeah, it was great.

So.

So I read all of Elaine's papers and this book I worked on for a long time.

That book is really trying to tell the history of Native American experience of U.S. policy as well as the story of the Eastmans.

So it's a double biography.

It's an ambitious book because it's trying to do a double biography and the history of the time.

So it's, you know, I always have a hard time narrowing it down and doing only one thing.

Well, that's the trouble Gretchen, when you're interested in so many things.

Exactly.

Well, I love the book.

And again, was not aware of their story.

And I found it to be very relevant, vis-a-vis, this country's treatment of indigenous peoples.

I also was greatly fascinated by the Death Project: An Anthology of These Times, which was 2021.

How did that project come to be?

We were in Bosnia during COVID.

We were teaching virtually and quarantined in our apartment 24, seven for ten weeks.

And I needed a project I mean, I was teaching virtually, but that still wasn't enough because I was in the apartment, you know, all the time.

So I had the idea for trying to do this as an anthology and put out a call for submissions.

And we got lots of submissions from people.

So Cora and I went through the submissions and decided which ones we would publish and how to arrange it and and so forth.

And I was really happy with the book.

It's a book that I think maybe the title is unfortunate because the death project, you know, people are kind of loath to pick up something that talks about death.

There's a sort of fear of death or whatever in our in our culture.

But it's actually a really, really helpful read for people who are I mean, for for at any point in your life where you have to deal with.

You are reading my mind, Gretchen, because here's what I had written down as to for our conversation.

“In spite of the starkly grim title, I found the book to be surprisingly uplifting, hopeful, and a helpful guide to a topic that we all must address in one fashion or another.

” Where was Cora?

Here in the states.

Were you doing this international?

Cora was here, and then we came back in the middle of we came back in July 1st of 2020.

So and Cora was living in our house.

So at that point.

So we collaborated.

And again, there are a number of fascinating stories that you tell in that book.

And the 36, I'll say --submissions-- were from all over the world.

Mm hmm.

But I was really touched by something that Cora had put into the book, and she told a story about her grandfather and his struggle with Alzheimer's.

And she wrote, Yes.

Beautiful touching moment.

Yes.

And this brings us to Dark Crossings, which was published in 2022.

And I have not done a good job of showing our audience your books, but I want to read you one of the one bit of praise for this book, Of course, that writer happened to be Ted Ayres.

As I understand it, Gretchen Dark Crossing is a part of a larger family saga.

Tell us a little bit about that.

When I first started, I decided I wanted to try fiction.

Part of the reason I did that was I was so tired of reading novels that were all about drug addiction and the, you know, the dark, the ugliness of human interactions.

And I thought about my own life and thought how many positive, amazing interactions I've had with people.

And that, you know, that my family includes a lot of people.

In fact, my family is mostly people who are not kin, not blood kin.

My children are adopted or they were Mikes children and part of our family, you know, my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, they're all none of us are blood, blood kin.

And and then there were all those other people that are part of my family.

Mark McCormick, you know, Donald Betts.

And Kim, Kimberly Bryant, who.

Who consider themselves sons and daughters and part of the family.

And we consider part of the family.

So I wanted to write a story that was multiracial, so that showed positive relationships that you know, what was possible, but not in a way that denies the difficulties that people face in their lives.

And so Maybe Crossings started with the civil rights movement.

Sarah Bagby was-- The first in the series is Maybe Crossings.

When did that come out?

That came out in 2015.

And then a second it came out a second time with a study guide, back last year.

Okay.

And Maybe Crossings starts-- The first hundred pages are about the civil rights movement.

I mean, it's families, black and white families that are involved in that pulled into the civil rights.

So it's a way to tell the story of the civil rights movement, both the national story, but at local and various-- As it-- In various venues, as it affects those people.

And I did that because Sarah Bagby said when I wrote Dissent in Wichita, she said, You need to you should write it in a way that's a novel that people would get this history without thinking.

They're reading this, you know, without being.

Thinking, “I don't want to read History!

” So, the first 100 pages of that and then it fast forwards to look at what about the children of the civil rights movement?

What about that generation and how are they different and what kinds of struggles have But it's a story that ends in 2003.

So that was a very positive time in America's history.

They were you know, things were going pretty well in terms of race relations and in terms of the-- The racial violence was really at a low ebb.

But then Dark Crossings is set in 2019 and it's a and it's that same family.

But things have really changed.

And I wanted to be able to show the through the children of the children, grandchildren, the civil rights movement.

I wanted to show what they have lived through just in their childhood, just in this century, in the 21st century.

And so, like, I have a scene in there where the grandmother a keeps a book for her granddaughter.

Of all the events that are happening each year of her life and the numbers of deaths, of police violence, you know, all the all of the horrible things that are going on are also included.

She doesn't that's not all that she has, but she has she includes those things.

So the-- Say your name.

Say their name.

Remember, what's going on is kind of part of the message of the grandmother to the grandchild.

Don't forget that you're living through this time and that we've got to make sure this doesn't.

You know, one of the things that struck me about Dark Crossings was the this interweaving of family.

And, you know, I frankly had a little bit of trouble trying to place people in the family trees, I guess.

And it was as I finished the book, of course, it all came together.

But I was amazed and impressed by your ability to bring these various stories together in an inter-related way.

And, of course, again, we're dealing with another interracial couple in Dark Crossing.

And you have a sequel coming up.

Yes.

And what's it about?

Well, Dark Crossings also, you know, is part of the the salvation of the main character of Dark Crossings, who is widowed by murder.

By a murder is that she begins to search for her birth father, who she's never known anything about, who was a leader in the civil rights movement.

And that leads her into a whole other story of what's happening, but it also connects her with family.

So the third book, which is Coras Crossings and that's a working title, takes place in the future.

And I haven't I'm not sure what, how far into the future.

But Cora, the grandchild of the civil rights movement, is in her twenties and is studying at the Sorbonne and is studying artificial technology.

And she is connected with her-- The birth father that was searched for his family was discovered in Dark Crossings.

And so she's that family is still part of the story, a major part of the story.

And as they as she lives out her life in France and with her cousin and her cousin Aden, who's who comes to visit and with what's happening in France and the attempts to bring about a, you know, the attempts to bring about a fascist leadership and, you know.

And do you have an anticipated completion date?

No, I. I set that aside.

I was working on it pretty steadily last year, and I set it aside because several people said you need to work on a memoir before you get too old, that you can't even remember what's gone on in your life.

So I.

Don't think your memoryll ever be a problem.

I hope it won't be.

But so I've I've been doing some work on memoir.

And then I picked up I went to a writer's retreat two weeks ago and I picked I went back to Coras Crossings and started and wrote another chapter at the retreat.

And that was it felt that felt good.

I thought I got to get back to this the problem with editing two of us edit the books for Blue Cedar Press.

And the problem with that is that it takes a lot of time because you're reading manuscripts that are submitted.

So the time to be able to to work on your own writing is a problem.

Well, as I said in the introduction, you're obviously a talented person and a busy person.

And so I'm wondering how you keep it all in order and how you keep everything straight with the many projects you're working on.

How many books would you say that you and Michael are editing at any one time?

Well, we have a let's see.

Just to take right now, we have three manuscripts two that are in the re-editing, you know, that we've they're being revised from editing, and a third, that is by a previous author we published that we're I'm just beginning to read.

I got 50 pages into it so and he has maybe two poetry The Press is divided between poetry and prose and he handles poetry.

One of my closing questions, as we come to the end of our time together was What's next?

And so you've touched upon a couple of projects you've got going, but what is your process, Gretchen, for writing?

I mean, do you have, uh, early morning with a cup of coffee, late at night?

How do you create?

Well, I'm disciplined about it.

Which which with the press has really eaten into that discipline, unfortunately.

But when I'm disciplined about it, I do I write for like long periods of time.

I write for maybe 5 hours.

And that's been a problem because I need to get up and move around.

And I'm you know, so I've tried to change my habits and go for a walk in the morning rather than sit down at the computer.

But I but I work in long periods and I and I'm on a computer.

On a computer.

I write right at the computer.

And I'm very let's see how.

I'm just I get very much into it.

I can't I can't put it down.

You know, I just sort of mono-focused for a long period of time.

You would have to be, I would th And it gets complicated because as you said before, you know, you have different storylines that are feeding together and and trying to make sure that everything is, you know, connects properly and connects in a way that's clear To the reader.

Are you enjoying or are you learning things about yourself as you prepare your memoir?

The memoir is really at the beginning stages.

I've written memoir pieces in poetry and in short story form and and I've been thinking about maybe doing the memoir as a multi genre rather than just a, you know, straightforward narrative and just sort of flashing on different moments, because I've had some really amazing, wonderful experiences.

We've touched on some of those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I really do appreciate you spending time with us, Gretchen.

You have brought so much to the readers world and the teaching world, and you've had an amazing career.

And I applaud you for that.

And I want to thank you very, very much for being with us here on Inside the Cover.

Thank you very much, Ted.

I really appreciate being here.

It's been a real pleasure.

And that's our show.

We will be looking forward to bringing you another expanded edition of Inside the Cover real soon.

Thank you for being with us and good night.