By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
After spending three months in Hays as part of an around-the-world trip to learn new ways to be a family, author Dan Kois is back to promote his book “How to be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together.”
Kois, accompanied by his daughter, Harper, will speak and sign books at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Hays Public Library.
Kois, an editor for Slate magazine, his wife, Alia Smith, and two daughters, Lyra and Harper, left their home in Arlington, Va., for the grand experiment on being a family.
They also spent three months each in New Zealand, The Nertherlands and Costa Rica before ending their journey with a stint in Hays, America.
“The book is about our epic 2017,” he said. “As the title suggests, we spent time in four different countries to try to shake ourselves out of our family rut, our parenting rut, to see what family living was in places other than where we lived before, which was Arlington, Va., a suburb of D.C.”
The Koises chose Hays in part because they wanted to learn a different way to be American parents. They are also friends with playwright and Hays resident Catherine Trieschmann, who Dan knew from college.
“We were looking for the real small-town experience,” he said. “Where we live, it is a suburb of a big city. It is very stereotypically fast-paced. Our kids are over-scheduled, and we are overworked. We thought a kind of closeness of community and a more deliberate pace of life might be great for us to experience.”
Kois said he did find that to be the case in Hays.
“We immediately made a lot of friends. We became very involved in our community in our three months here in service and in church and in neighborhood activities,” he said. “We really did find we were a lot more relaxed and chilled out here than we found ourselves to be in Arlington.
“Our kids found school a wonderful place with great friends, and we found the pace of everyday life just a lot more manageable than what we had been previously doing.”
The final quarter of the book is about Hays in which Kois talks about the glut of parades the family experienced in the fall and how it immediately gave them a sense of community and belonging.
He also describes the showing of the French documentary of “A Quiet America,” which was filmed in Hays in April 1976.
He writes about the Hays Symphony’s Halloween performance, where his daughters were drafted to act alongside the symphony with other children and adults.
Kois said he learned from his family’s international travel there is no one way to do things.
“You can go to New Zealand where kids have enormous amounts of independence and kids are encouraged to take huge risks with their bodies and their educations,” he said. “You can go someplace like The Netherlands where the entire society is built around cycling and cars aren’t used by most families and where children are prized for their independent thought, but just coincidentally all behave the same way like very traditional Dutch people.”
In some cases, the Koises found the communities in which they lived had things they can bring back and use in their family, and in other cases they found they didn’t fit in at all.
“In The Netherlands, our older daughter had a huge problem fitting in and never really felt completely at home,” he said. “Our younger daughter fit right in and immediately transformed herself into a tiny Dutch woman.”
As a parent, Kois said he brought home a lot of humility from the experience.
Some aspects of the trip turned out just as he imagined. Other aspects were so difficult he wondered why they ever attempted the trip.
“I also think both me and my wife have found a real new closeness with our kids and a sense that all four of us, all of us as team can really set out and accomplish things that we might never have thought we otherwise could do.
“One of the big problems we had that I hoped we could address on the trip was this sense that each one of us in our family lived our lives in sort of separate little pathways or lanes. We each had our things that we were worried about. We each had our school or work or home or whatever that was our concern, but we rarely all four of us got out in the world and challenged ourselves and challenged each other in ways we had to overcome all together. A year on the road definitely gives a chance to do that.”
Lyra and Harper both weigh in on the adventure in the book. Lyra at the end of the book is asked about how her dad portrayed her in the book. She answered she thought he was wrong.
Kois said the girls, who were fifth and seventh graders at the time, say in the book there were some very challenging times during the trip, but they grudgingly admit it was kind of cool.
“I’m going to take that as a huge win for me,” Kois said.
The family has moved back to Arlington, and they are trying to apply the lessons from the trip to their old life.
“In big ways and small, it is making our old life feel a little bit better and a little bit easier and a little bit new. Taking for example the lessons I learned about community here in Hays—the way that people in this smallish city make this the city they want to live in.”
He gave the example of Cathy Drabkin, who learned how to bake bread and now has her own bread business and Catherine Trieschmann, who wanted more theater in Hays, so she created pockets for that to happen.
“We’ve taken those lessons and tried to bring them back to our big community to make Arlington the place we want it to be instead of complaining about the things that it isn’t,” he said.
Kois’ book is available anywhere books are sold. They will be for sale at the signing. The Hays Public Library has copies for checkout pending availability.