To add spice to our week, I’ve asked my friend from the Vermont College MFA program, Ginger Johnson (whose blog you can read here), to share her love of libraries. I had a strong hunch that there was a long and varied romance here, and I was right! This time in the comments, maybe you’ll share little library memory from your childhood. Or you can always say, “I love libraries!” and I’ll donate a dollar for that. (For more details on this challenge, go here.) And now…
Love Song for a Library
the author and her sister
In the beginning was the Word. In her beginnings, there was a book. Her mother told her she could read before she started kindergarten, and she started kindergarten at age four. Each week, she would walk with her grandmother and older sister the nine or ten city blocks to their local branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, a low brick building down a side street.
There, she and her sister would settle in the children’s section, while their grandmother browsed through paperback mysteries and Regency romances. She remembers little of that library—windows, low shelves, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, and the front desk, where a stereotypically severe-looking librarian stamped their books with a heavy rubber stamp—ka-thunk!
By the time she was in fifth grade, her mother was in graduate school studying to become an elementary school librarian. Long Saturday afternoons were spent in Lockwood Library at the university: Mom at the copier with piles of coins, sister claiming the best of the blocky chairs available. The options were limited. Ride the elevator up and down, up and down. Run out to the vending machines, having first snatched a quarter from her mother’s towering pile. Quarter in, press F8, curly-cue swivels around, out pops frosted nut brownie. Or, of course, there were the stacks.
Mostly, she spent time in the stacks. One single row of children’s books, mostly books that sported shiny gold Newbery stickers. Somehow she got her hands on a bookmark that listed all the Newbery award winners, and she decided she would read them. Some of her favorite books were Newberies: A Wrinkle in Time, Tuck Everlasting, Bridge to Terabithia, The Westing Game, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They were quickly joined by Summer of the Swans, My Side of the Mountain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Great Gilly Hopkins, A Ring of Endless Light.
She remembers, though, mostly spending those afternoons with E.L. Konigsburg. Oh, they weren’t on a first-name basis, she and E.L., but nevertheless, she became great friends with Claudia and Jamie, wishing more than anything that she could stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that she could go to an automat (What was an automat, anyway?). She thrilled to the sound of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. She gobbled up About the B’nai Bagels, while developing A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. She even became Father’s Arcane Daughter for a while.
Those Saturday afternoons ceased, but she found other libraries to haunt. She could make a dot-to-dot design on a map of the United States of libraries she has frequented over her lifetime. It would undoubtedly look like an open book. Some of those libraries don’t exist anymore; some of them have expanded. All of them have been important to her. This one is the one she went to in college, studying with her roommates while wearing large hats (to channel the brain-waves, of course). This one she frequented when she was first married, borrowing books with unlikely plots and even more unlikely heroines. That is the one she walked to with her first baby, borrowing books on child development, as well as board books and movies for cheap date nights.
This library, here, was one of her favorites. She brought her toddler there for story time, but also to see the fish in the fish tank, and to work the puzzles on the table, and to borrow picture books to read to him, and CDs to listen to (a compilation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems set to music was her favorite). It was there that she returned to her love of children’s literature, often grabbing Anne of Green Gables off the shelf to read while her gingerbread boy played quietly. It was here that she realized she liked children’s literature better than literature for adults.
Now she frequents her current town library, an old schoolhouse built in the 1800s. It is a place where the librarians not only know her name, they know her library card number. She also volunteers in the elementary school library, where she returns dozens and dozens of books back to their places on the shelves. Sometimes, though, she sees a book that catches her eye, and she sits down right in the stacks, caught up in the pleasure of a book, just like she did when she was in fifth grade. Some things never change.
Ginger today. I don't think she's even seen this photo!
Best collection ever, and the books that snap shut on your nose? Fun to read about, and the fact that the librarian, Madam Pince, never wants anyone handling the books always makes me laugh. I think she should get a spin-off series.
This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, although I can’t quite remember why (another involves Holly Golightly sharing one of the few Italian phrases she knows, “I believe you are in league with the butcher!”) Is this the scene where there’s sneaking? J’adore sneaking. And j’adore the fact that Paul (George) Varjak finds a copy of his book at the NYPL. I need go to the Brooklyn Public Library one of these days and find Nice and Mean.
Oh, that scene in chapter one where responsible Sarah forgets her library book! And the librarian is so nice to them, endeared by them standing in a row at her desk and scratching their legs because Mama’s stockings make them so itchy. It’s just a great scene. Plus, the librarian becomes a very important person in their lives…read the book to find out.
As the playwright Wendy Wasserstein once wrote, “It’s disturbing having sympathy with everyone’s point of view.” She was talking from the point of view of one of her characters, but I imagine that it’s the playwright’s predicament, too. Whereas novelists are very much in the head of their protagonists, playwrights are more likely to be in touch with all of their characters (a good thing), not just get stuck making sure the main character’s experience is believable and interesting. I think of this quotation, from Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others, a lot when I’m writing–but perhaps not as much as I should.
As any good Jewish person or FOJP (friend of Jewish Person) will tell you, the title above is the first of the four questions asked at Passover. It was four questions that recently–and thankfully–changed the way I’ve been approaching my work in progress.
I stress again that none of this should have been a huge revelation. Just like Chazz Palminteri at the end of The Usual Suspects, I started hearing voices and seeing images of people saying the same–voices whose words I could remember with shocking clarity for conversations that happened quite a while ago. Grad School Advisor Margaret: “I’m not saying it’s not working. I’m saying it’s not working yet.” Agent Elizabeth: “I’m not saying to give up on it. But I am sounding an early warning.” Critique group member Jen, over her frothy chai (okay, I’m making that part up; I don’t remember her beverage of choice): “I’m still not buying it.” So–to throw in another question–why was my recent reader able to break through when these great responders–and they really are some of my favorites–couldn’t?
So anyway, why the great breakthrough with Dane? Part of it, I think, is time; I sent her the second draft, so I’ve had time to live with this story for a while and murder many darlings already. But more than that, I think there’s a power to asking questions rather than making statements. Goodness knows I can be a statement-y person–so eager to convince the writer that my idea is the right one, I might just rush in and declare my insight. However, this might not always be the right choice. Dane didn’t assume she knew what was best for my novel, and I shouldn’t do that for other peoples’.
