COLUMBIA, S.C. — The One Book, One Community project has officially announced its book for this year’s reading project.
The project encourages Columbia residents to read the same book at the same time to strengthen the community in the Midlands.
On Sunday, people gathered at Bierkeller to learn about the book selected for this year’s project: Beaver Girl by Cassie Premo Steele, a Columbia-based author who centered her book around the Congaree National Park.
“It is a story about beavers as a keystone species. A keystone means the foundation of a building without which the whole thing would fall,” Premo Steele said of her 18th book. “They are climate change heroes right here in our midst. They can help us mitigate with droughts, floods and also wildfires.”
As Premo Steele explained, the story takes place in “the near future after a climate catastrophe.” The main character, 19-year-old Livia, goes to Congaree National Park to escape wildfires, where she meets a beaver family.
According to the book’s synopsis on Amazon, it “shows what beavers and humans could do together to restore faith and strength and a sense of family and community.”
For Jasper Project Executive Director Cindi Boiter, the book was “perfect” for this year’s project.
“It’s very well written. It’s lovely,” Boiter said. “The author did a wonderful job of representing the entire spectrum of individuals. There’s LGBTQ representation, there’s all kinds of racial representation, and it’s just, it’s a book about us.”
The Jasper Project is a multidisciplinary, all-volunteer arts organization that Boiter said works as “an incubator for projects” like One Book, One Community. The organization aims to “promote, validate and support artists from all different disciplines,” Boiter said.
When it comes to this reading project, Boiter said it was important to choose a local author.
“The first thing I did was to cry,” Premo Steele said about her reaction to finding out her work was selected for the project. “And then I texted my whole family so they could celebrate with me.”
Boiter said she learned about the One Book project in the early 2000s when research showed that the Seattle Public Library had created the concept.
“Their goal was to have as many people in their community as possible read the same book so that they would talk about it in the grocery line or at Pilates or, you know, at a coffee shop,” Boiter said. “We’re best when we come together as a community and one of the best ways to unite as a community is via the arts because our artists are the ones who interpret what happens to us. So, it allows us to come together as a community when we’re, you know, we’re at Bierkeller, or whenever we’re at Curiosity Coffee, or we’re at, you know, at Publix, we can see each other say, ‘I saw you at that meeting. How far along in the book are you and what did you think about this happening?”
“I think it’s really important,” Premo Steele added. “I think, after the last few years with the pandemic, the collective trauma that we’ve all been through, our fears about climate collapse, of insecurity in the future, I think coming together around one book allows us to come together as one community in a new way. We’ve all learned life lessons over the last few years that make us want to live with greater meaning and more connection. And I’m hoping that this project can help with that.”
Sunday’s announcement kicked off the year-long project, which Boiter said will feature a series of programs, including walks along the Congaree Swamp led by the author and author talks on Zoom.
The project is a partnership between the Jasper Project, One Columbia Arts and Culture and All Good Books.
Learn more at JasperProject.org.