Like a great epic filmmaker, Susan Banyas moves fluidly between the personal and the historical, the particular and the archetypal, the internal and external. Memory has profound resonance in our time of relative truth, greed and indifference to history. This powerful book is more relevant than ever.
—Meredith Monk, composer and theatre artist
Weaving her way back and forth, from the early days of the Republic until the present, Banyas has created a history that comes alive with real people whose lives were central to the racial change and backlash, the passions and struggles that engulf this country today.
—Lewis Steel, civil right attorney and author
The Hillsboro Story/a kaleidoscope history
Spuyten Duyvil New York, New York
North American Distribution: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-947980-90-7
US Release July 2019
Fifty years after she witnessed her first protest, Susan Grace Banyas returned to her hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, to find the mothers who marched outside her 3rd grade classroom and the county engineer who sparked the action with a single tool, a match.
One person sends her to the next and following the memory threads, she uncovers a big American tale, set against the backdrop of the Cold War. The voices of the mothers, children, the county engineer, federal judges, town folk, national Civil Rights leaders are woven into a narrative that spirals from a conversation at the Prime Cut on Main Street to the coup in the Congo.
Inspired by her Quaker Ancestors, who operated a “safe house” on the Underground Railroad a few miles from Hillsboro, Banyas focuses the Light on what hides in the shadows of the cultural storytelling, then and now, and the deep nature of memory as a tool for empowerment, creative collaboration, and healing.
This stirring book deserves to be widely read as our American Citizenry continues to reckon with our country’s long legacy of racial injustice. --Jock Reynolds, former Yale University Art Gallery president and arts activist.
From the loyal cohort of women who picketed and homeschooled their children, to the visionary civil engineer, to the great Civil Rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley, to her own feisty mother and neighbors, Banyas, a dancer and movement teacher, delivers a passionate lyrical painful history. --Elin Diamond, Professor of English, Rutgers University, author of Performance and Cultural Studies
In the spirit of the best of Studs Terkel, “The Hillsboro Story” is an inspiring model for finding and revealing the lost voices of ordinary and extraordinary people who made our American history. --Pat Ferrero, Filmmaker, Professor Emeritus, InterArts & Cinema, San Francisco State University
Proust on the wings of the beat poets …a powerful and masterful work of creative depth… reflects a responsiveness to history and politics in a daring and poetic way… teaches us to feel, to imagine, and to think. --Wendy Haynes, psychotherapist and musician
Susan Grace Banyas is a choreographer and writer who grew up in Southern Ohio and lives on the West Coast. This is her first book.
