The Book Club

On Thursday night, two days after the election, I walked through security at the newly built Utah State Penitentiary that sits on the exact spot where a large part of my novel Cast Away takes place, out in the middle of the Utah desert, at the edge of Great Salt Lake, and just a couple miles from the now dilapidated Saltair Resort. The whole evening seemed surreal, a chance to talk about the new book on the same barren land my characters lived on one hundred years ago and to talk about it with men who may be there for the rest of their lives. 

I drove out there in the dark. The lights of Salt Lake City dimmed behind me. It seemed fitting that we had enacted daylight savings two days before the election, and darkness came early that night. 

I am a claustrophobe. With age, my phobia heightens and has heightened horribly. With each shut of a gate behind me, eight or nine gates deep by the time we reached the building that housed our classroom, which too got locked down, my claustrophobia grew. Clank. Clank. Clank. Locked in. I felt like I may have gotten myself into something my anxiety couldn’t handle by agreeing to visit this book club that had read Cast Away. 

Once in the classroom, however, everything came back to normality. The students (inmates) rambled in from different blocks. They all held the book in their hand. They had read it. The edges were crumpled and dog-eared, haggard like favorite clothing. They recited passages that spoke to them. Three of them had immigrated from Mexico, and two of those grew up in Ogden, Utah, where I’m from. We shared a love of our hometown. 

What struck me first was their sense that I had given them a voice they had never seen in a book before—a dream for an author like me who struggles with his Mexican American and white identities. What struck me second was the entire group's love of reading these books and sharing an evening together. 

“How long of a break do we have between book clubs once this semester ends,” one young man asked the book club leader, Elliot Morris, who had started the group in 2019 and is changing lives through it. Elliot responded that after the December book club meeting, they would start again in early January. “Oh, good, that’s not that long. I need something to look forward to over the holidays. Thank you. That’s not that long at all.” 

This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my author life, and I was beyond flattered to chat about my book there, to really discuss it, to really answer questions with this unique book club, as any author should be. But this wasn’t what struck me most as the doors clanked behind me on my way out, each clank one step back out toward a world without fifty-foot fences and loud locks locking in behind me. 

As I drove home in the vast darkness of the plains west of Great Salt Lake and the lights of the city called me back and my anxiety from those clanging locks released, what struck me most about this evening was the hope that came with looking forward. “Oh good, that’s not that long. I need something to look forward to…” I came away from that night with more faith in humanity than heading in. 

We humans are resilient. We find home in art and literature and community. It’s there. If a young man in prison can rely on the anticipation of sitting around with others to talk about a book to get him through, we too can rely on the tools we have to get us through. Create. Share. Inspire. Give. It’s always been art and community that got us through. No election changes that. 

I have something to look forward to: all the things we will do and all the art we will create and all the community we will share. 

---

KASE JOHNSTUN is the author of Cast Away and Let the Wild Grasses Grow. He directs the Center for the Book at Utah Humanities and lives in Ogden, Utah.

GIVE TODAY