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July 17, 2026
from To Say One Million Times, WOW!
by Sarah Wells
“Our monument to our greatness was someone else’s sanctuary, desecrated.”
—Sarah Wells
One of the themes of Sarah Wells’ new memoir—To Say One Million Times, WOW!—is that the “story of human experience is always more complex” than the versions we tell ourselves. In her winning and often funny voices, she attempts to enlarge her understanding, and ours as well, in matters of family, faith, and country.
On a trip through the western states she finds that the “nostalgic, heroic story of taming the wild west comes at the expense of too many other competing narratives.” She writes: “There’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for a long time about America that isn’t the whole story but just one chapter from one character’s point of view. Maybe if we quiet down for a minute to listen, we’ll learn more of the story.”
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Quiet down. Listen. That is the task of these essays.
In our paragraph of the week she listens hard to the other story of Mount Rushmore which is much in the news these days. She points out—in “The Paragraph of the Week” and in her “Commentary”—that the national monument admired by so many is also a profanation.​​—THE
The Paragraph of the Week
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I used to feel differently about Mount Rushmore. Twenty-two years ago, I read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and marveled at the description of a sculptor in contrast to a painter. “If a painter blundered, what did he do? He patched and repaired and covered over with another layer of paint. The sculptor on the contrary had to see within the marble the form that it held. He could not glue back broken parts.” In the Black Hills, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore found four faces in the rock of ages and carved the image of men out of it. He saw within the stone the form that it held. How glorious! How godlike! What a wonder!
—Sarah Wells
Commentary
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But since then, I’ve learned more about Mount Rushmore’s story. The mountain face of faces was sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who called the granite formation Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or Six Grandfathers Mountain. The Lakota medicine man Nicolas Black Elk gave the mountain its name after a vision of the six sacred directions—west, east, north, south, above, and below. For the Lakota, the mountain stood for kindness, love, longevity, and wisdom. It was a place of prayer and devotion. They lived harmoniously with that marvelous slab of granite towering over the surrounding hills for centuries, until us Europeans came along with our chisels and firearms and trails of tears. Six Grandfathers became four Founding Fathers. Our monument to our greatness was someone else’s sanctuary, desecrated.
—Sarah Wells
This Visible Speaking
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Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
