Let's Write about the lovely Dolly Parton

An essay from my friend Dr. Dora Ann Mills an expert public health advocate.

Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP on her Facebook
The View from Maine
August 26. 2026
The Light of a Clear Blue Morning
The news arrived yesterday the way hard news often does now - a push alert between meetings. 

Dolly Parton died at age 80, (a much loved icon of music and public health), at Vanderbilt in Nashville, after a brief battle with cancer. 

Within hours, tributes poured in from country stars and rock stars, presidents and preachers, drag queens and deacons. In a nation that cannot seem to agree on anything, we have apparently agreed on one thing: we loved Dolly.
She would have deflected all this solemnity, of course. This was the woman who famously quipped, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap", who disarmed every critic and every dumb-blonde joke by getting there first, laughing hardest, and then quietly outsmarting everyone in the room.
I found myself reflecting on why we loved her so. 

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Dolly Parton's life was, among many other things, a masterclass in public health — even though she never used the term.
Consider where she began. She was the fourth of twelve children, born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. The country doctor who delivered her was paid with a bag of cornmeal. She grew up without electricity or running water, in a region where poverty, isolation, and lack of access to care shaped nearly every family's story. We in public health call these the social drivers of health. Dolly simply called them her childhood, and then spent sixty years doing something about them.
Think about what she actually built. In 1995, in honor of her father, who never learned to read, she started mailing a free book every month to young children in her home county. That program, the Imagination Library, now spans five countries and has put well over 250 million books into the hands of children from birth to age five. We know from decades of research that early literacy is one of the most powerful predictors of lifelong health: of school readiness, of health literacy, of economic opportunity, of longevity itself. Dolly understood, perhaps better than many health officials, that a book mailed to a cabin at the end of a dirt road is a health intervention.
When wildfires tore through Gatlinburg in 2016, she didn't just hold a telethon. She put $1,000 a month, for six months, directly into the hands of families who had lost their homes, trusting people to know their own needs. That is dignity-centered disaster relief, years before that phrase became fashionable.
And in the spring of 2020, in those frightening early weeks of the pandemic, she quietly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt's vaccine research program - money that helped support the early trials of the Moderna mRNA vaccine. A year later, at age 75, she rolled up her sleeve on camera, turned one of her most famous songs into a playful plea for her fans to get vaccinated (“Vaccine, vaccine” to the tune of “Jolene”) and teased those who were hesitating to stop being scared. It's hard to measure how many people got vaccinated because Dolly told them it was safe. But I would wager it was more than any official press briefing persuaded (including some of mine).
And here is what makes her hold on our hearts all the more remarkable: she did not earn it by staying silent. Dolly took public stands - repeatedly, cheerfully, unmistakably. She embraced her LGBTQ fans for decades and defended transgender people when doing so carried real risk with some of her audience, insisting they were simply human beings deserving of love. Asked about gay marriage, she answered with vintage Dolly: "Sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do." In the summer of 2020, when so many public figures hedged, she said plainly, "Of course Black lives matter," adding, with characteristic bluntness, that she didn't think "our little white asses are the only ones that matter." She renamed her own Dixie Stampede attraction because she understood what the word “Dixie” evoked with its association with the Confederacy.
Any one of those positions should have lost her fans. But they didn’t. Fans who disagreed with her on every one of those issues kept filling her concerts, kept mailing their children's names to the Imagination Library, kept loving her. Why? Because she never wielded her convictions as a weapon. She stated them with warmth, wrapped them in humor, and extended to those who differed the same grace she asked for her own people. She drew circles that pulled people in rather than lines that shut people out. In an era when we are constantly told that taking a stand means making enemies, Dolly proved that it is possible to be unambiguous and still be beloved, that conviction and contempt are not the same thing, and only one of them is required.
But here is what I keep returning to on this sad day: her superpower was not just her voice, her songwriting, or even her generosity. It was trust. Dolly was trusted, and across every line that currently divides us. Red states and blue states. Rural hollows and city high-rises. She earned that trust the old-fashioned way: by never pretending to be anything other than what she was, by loving people before asking anything of them, and by showing up, decade after decade, for the community that raised her. The trust came first, built over a lifetime, and it proved strong enough to carry every truth she later asked it to hold.
We are living through a time when that kind of trust has become our scarcest public health resource. Measles, declared eliminated in this country a quarter century ago, is back. Vaccine policy has been thrown into turmoil. Public health agencies and the dedicated people in them have endured deep cuts. Many of us feel unmoored and overwhelmed by division, worried about the future, unsure what to hold onto.
Dolly's life suggests an answer, and it is not a complicated one. Meet people where they are. Honor where they come from. Lead with generosity rather than judgment. Make the good thing - the book, the vaccine, the helping hand - easy to say yes to, and wrap it in joy rather than fear. She reached people that public health cannot reach, not because she had better data, but because she had better relationships.
She often spoke of one of her own favorite songs, written in a dark season of her life, about the light of a clear blue morning, about how, after the hardest nights, everything is going to be all right. On a day of chaos and uncertainty, in a summer full of both, I choose to hear that as her parting instruction to all of us: grieve, yes. Then get up, look after one another, and get back to work.
Tonight, the moon rises nearly full, the same moon climbing over the Smoky Mountains of her childhood and over the coast of Maine, over red counties and blue ones, over every hollow and high-rise where someone is playing her songs and grieving. It seems fitting. The moon makes no light of its own; it simply catches the sun and gives it back to the dark side of the earth, asking nothing in return. That was Dolly's kind of light.
And a nearly full moon holds its own quiet promise: not yet complete, still becoming, like the work she leaves to the rest of us.
“Vaccine” song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjbSWebA3Ko

Let's write about "How to read a book!"

 This Is the Solution to America’s Literacy Crisis, and It’s a Lot of Fun by Peter Schmidt.

If you’ve read the news lately — or, more likely, heard it, watched it or spied half a headline on your friend’s Instagram feed — you’ve been told that literacy is doomed. High school seniors are reading at the lowest levels in over 20 years, and college students don’t know how to read a book cover to cover. There is plenty to mourn in these developments, but as an English syllabus fixture of yore might have said, reports of literacy’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Having come of age amid Covid-19 lockdowns and the proliferation of social media, young people crave the forms of human connection that teach us to live in the world we actually inhabit, not the one we see onscreen — asking questions, thinking together and beholding the strangeness of the reality passed down to us. 

As it happens, books are uniquely powerful objects around which to organize these sorts of activities.

That’s why the act of engaging with written texts — the basis of our cultural, political and intellectual life for over 500 years — is not coming to an end. It’s changing to meet new needs by offering the kinds of experiences digital technologies can’t provide: synchronous, IRL encounters with other human beings.

In other words, the future of reading is a party.
Books are bringing people together. Gen Z reading groups are popping up across the United States and the Silent Book Club, a community that gathers for silent reading, now has over 2,000 chapters across 68 countries. 

Reading retreats and summer camps hosted by the Bad Bitch Book Club regularly convene between 15 and 90 enthusiasts for weekend-long getaways, giving new meaning to the term “escapist literature.” 

Sally Mercedes, the events coordinator at Magic City Books in Tulsa, Okla., sees bookstores playing an increasingly social function for their customers. “A lot of bookish people tend to be introverts,” she told me. “We need a space where we know that we’re on common ground with others.”
Other experiments are remixing the traditional book club format or breaking out of it entirely. The Consumption Book Club, a “literary and culinary event series” organized by the Gen Z artists Colette Estelle and Kyle Barnes, brings to life works such as Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” via meticulously themed dinner parties and facilitated conversations. 

A recent public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” organized by 20-somethings drew hundreds of people to Washington Square Park in New York City. 

The Strother School of Radical Attention, where I work, helps to gather groups over a dozen times a month in six states for Sidewalk Study, a practice of reading and enacting long-form texts while moving through public space.
These gatherings vary in location, duration and subject matter, but their unifying spirit is simple: that reading can be as much a mode of vibrant sociality as it is of secluded interiority.
Easy as it is to forget, sitting alone and reading in silence — the activity that professors tend to worry about — was once a novelty. 

In his “Confessions,” Saint Augustine of Hippo relates stumbling upon Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in a moment of perplexing absorption: “While reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” That Augustine bothered to describe this scene tells us something about the way reading commonly took place in the ancient world: as a public practice, recited before groups of lettered and unlettered listeners alike. Herodotus is thought to have read portions of his histories aloud, and performative “recitationes” of written texts were a favored form of entertainment and debate in Imperial Rome.
The practice of reading in and for groups endured in modern times in spaces of religious worship, workers’ study groups and avant-garde literary performances. 

But the spread of the printed word and the subsequent democratization of literacy cemented solitary, silent absorption as the dominant image of the reading person. This is the kind of reading we are taught to do in school. It is also the kind of reading that students are now failing to do in ever greater numbers.
Why? There’s no denying that young people are suffering from the harms of smartphone use and cognitive outsourcing to artificial intelligence. 

These are serious problems, but they are only half the story. Students understand as well as anyone else that long-form text is no longer the exclusive, or even the most effective, tool for distributing knowledge, connecting people across time and space and coordinating complex decisions. We’re in a moment of eclipse: The informational function of books is declining, and their experiential function is coming to the fore. This shift can bring new vitality not only to the lives of readers but also to long-form texts themselves.
Engaging with books as instruments for group experience is not the sort of reading that we encounter in classrooms, but it has plenty to teach us about the complexities of inhabiting the world together — and the ways that our literary inheritance can prepare us for the challenge. While educators may never abandon traditional instruction in solitary reading, right now they face an enormous opportunity to impart a new vision for the role of literacy in public life.

Last month, I helped to organize one of these gatherings in Dumbo, on the Brooklyn waterfront: an all-night group recitation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on the eve of the poet’s 207th birthday. We had 25 RSVPs, but, swelled by plus-ones and walk-ins, ended up with closer to 50 people in attendance. Two or three older Whitman enthusiasts joined us, but nearly all of the other people seemed to be in their 20s.
After four hours of recitation, singing, repetition, call and response and countless other experimental reading methods, we decamped to the shore of the East River, where around 2 a.m. we let out a full-throated collective yawp. 

In the breathless quiet that followed, a recent college graduate standing beside me admitted that she had never even read Whitman before. Several nodding heads assured her she wasn’t the only one. Then, emboldened by the company, she proposed: “Let’s do it again📙📘📗❓”

P.S. From Maine Writer:  I recently reviewed on Amazon a very short story read on my Kindle, written by Heather Graham, titled "Mercy Knows No Color".  For those with an Amazon Prime account, this read is probably free if you have an iCloud or e-reader. It is only 13 pages long.

Those who follow Heather Graham will be a little surprised by her creation of a short history lesson couched in the roots of the Civil War.  I recommended this short essay/story for community read aloud programs, even before reading this essay in The New York Times❗ Also, I put the short review on my Facebook page link here.

Let's write about teaching profane literature! OMG next comes book burning

Echo report published in The New York Times by David Ovalle

Florida Professor Fired for Assigning a Profane Story, Lawsuit Says

South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing.

Vinita Prabhakar, who taught English at South Florida State College, said in an interview that she assigned the story to challenge her students.

An English professor is suing the president of a Florida college that she says fired her for assigning a story that he called “political,” according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The story, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself,” is an award-winning story narrated by a fictional teacher who drinks to excess, uses cocaine and discusses sex with her students.
The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident. But in February, according to her lawsuit, the president of South Florida State College, Fred Hawkins, objected to the assignment after a student expressed “mild discomfort.” The president told Ms. Prabhakar that he would not want his college-age daughter to read the story, the lawsuit says.

In a move that is highly unusual for a college president, Hawkins immediately ordered that Ms. Prabhakar be suspended and her contract not renewed, the suit says. The suit asks that she be restored to her teaching position.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that advocates free speech, is representing Ms. Prabhakar.
Some courts have ruled that universities can restrict certain speech of university professors in classrooms. 

But, they have also ruled that the First Amendment offers greater protection if the speech is part of professors’ official duties, which can include teaching approved material, and is not disruptive.

Ms. Prabhakar’s attorneys also assert she is protected by a Florida law governing campus free speech. 

Public officials such as Hawkins “may not suppress speech because they dislike the ideas it conveys or fear a reaction to it,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over the boundaries of protected free speech in schools in Florida, where Republicans have for years sought to restrict teachings they believe are inappropriate or too left-leaning.

Hawkins and school officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has championed efforts to quash what he has deemed liberal indoctrination in education. For instance, he pushed a parental freedom law that limited instruction on gender and sexuality in elementary and middle schools, prompting some districts to remove books featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters.

In 2022, DeSantis also signed into law the Stop WOKE Act, which restricts concepts related to sexism and racism that can be taught in K-12 schools. The law sought to do the same in higher education, allowing the state to limit the teaching of ideas related to race, sexism and unconscious bias by tying it to teacher salaries.

A federal appeals court, however, struck down that portion of the law this month. The majority wrote that the provision was a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in classrooms where students are “trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard.”

Ms. Prabhakar, who has worked full time at South Florida State College since 2023, said the point of assigning “Bettering Myself” was to challenge students in her introductory reading and writing course. As part of the assignment, students had to read first-person stories told by other unlikable narrators — like “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver — to contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style, according to the lawsuit.

In colleges, such materials “take students out of their comfort zone, expose them to new ideas and provide opportunities for growth and intellectual maturation,” the suit said.

Ms. Prabhakar said in the interview that she had taught the assignment in previous years at South Florida State College with approval of supervisors.

The student who had emailed to say the story “made me a bit uncomfortable” ultimately completed the assignment and participated in class discussions without any incident, the suit said.
It is unclear who complained about the assignment to the school administration, according to the lawsuit. It accuses Hawkins of terminating Ms. Prabhakar without a formal complaint or attempt at lesser discipline.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over the boundaries of protected free speech in schools in Florida, where Republicans have for years sought to restrict teachings they believe are inappropriate or too left-leaning.

Hawkins, a former state representative and a DeSantis ally, was named president of the public community college in 2023. The school’s main campus is in Avon Park, Fla., southeast of Tampa.

The selection process drew scrutiny because Hawkins held no advanced college degrees and became eligible only after the board of trustees lowered the position’s educational requirements. 

At the time, one trustee acknowledged to The Tampa Bay Times that the board was expected to appoint a Republican and that he had concerns about a potential left-leaning president’s adherence to “woke” ideology.

In the suit, Ms. Prabhakar said she had apologized to the president and agreed to teach only material that appeared in a textbook. But Mr. Hawkins told her he had “been in contact with Tallahassee” and the board of trustees. The suit also names the board of trustees.

Ms. Prabhakar, 51, said that she hoped her lawsuit would help protect fellow professors. “I’m also doing this for my students,” Ms. Prabhakar said. “They were robbed — they were excited to come to class.”