The 2021-22 Guide to Yellow Springs: A Kaleidoscopic View of the Village
- Published: October 29, 2021
When the staff of the News sat down together — finally together, in-person — to discuss plans for the Guide to Yellow Springs earlier this year, our talk very much reflected our collective states of mind. Our ideas were at turns cautious and audacious, both zeroed in on history and zooming forward to the future, with thematic considerations first rigid and then scattered to the breeze.
To reflect (pun intended) the theme of this year’s Guide to Yellow Springs — A Kaleidoscopic View of the Village — the iconic “Springs” ceramic sculpture, located in Bill Duncan Park at the juncture of Dayton Yellow Springs Road and Livermore Street, was photographed through a prism made from three mirrors taped together.
This experience will not sound unusual to any group of people meeting again after long months of remote communicating. Like you, we wanted to do everything. So we did — in a way. We cobbled together our fragmented ideas and began assembling some of our favorite past News articles. Almost inadvertently, we had created a mosaic — a kaleidoscope.
As such, may we present the theme of the 2021–22 Guide to Yellow Springs: A Kaleidoscopic View of Yellow Springs.
We’ve often said the job of the Yellow Springs News is to hold a mirror to the village — and we believe we’ve done just that for nearly 150 years. So, it may seem somewhat odd now to thematize our Guide through a more irregular lens. After all, a kaleidoscope distorts, warps and abstracts. Upon its rotation, a kaleidoscope fans out an ever-changing representation of what’s in view. Is what’s seen through the eyepiece really there?
By holding a kaleidoscope to Yellow Springs — its constituent culture, winding history and colorful inhabitants — this Guide offers a novel view of our beloved village.
In it, you’ll find tributes to some of the groups and organizations that lay the foundations of our community; historical accounts of people and events with lasting legacies; and visual odes to the rhythms and cycles of our village life.
And because we’re human and as self-indulgent as the next folks, you’ll find some things that don’t fit any of those descriptions — but we left them in anyway because we like them. (Please note the photo of Colonel Sanders visiting the Riding Centre on page 63 that Chuck begged the designers to include, and which they very kindly did.)
That stubborn humanness is as good a representation of our community as any. Turn Yellow Springs on its side on a given day and different pieces will drop into focus: we’re artists and we’re peacemakers and we’re scientists and we’re activists and we’re people.
Shake all those pieces up and the picture changes, but no matter the angle, it all looks good to us.
Reilly Dixon & Lauren “Chuck” Shows
• Pick up the print edition of the Guide to Yellow Springs in and around town, for free, or view the online version below (if you can’t see it, give it a moment to load).
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