2018 Summer Library Series: My First Library by Richard Paolinelli

We have reached the middle of September and nearly the end of summer, and though the doors to summer are closing, the library doors will remain propped open when the weather's right, and autumn leaves will hopefully follow you to the circulation desk and book return.

Please welcome this week's writer, Richard Paolinelli, and his beginning of many visits to the library shelves.

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My First Library
by
Richard Paolinelli

Richard Paolinelli as a child

My first library was located at the corner of Minaret Avenue and Cooper Avenue in Turlock, California. It was across the street from Crane Elementary School, which I attended in 1972. A lot has changed in my hometown. But the library is still there.

It was a magical place. A place of so many different worlds and universes, filled with people and things and creatures beyond imagination. A place I would go to if I needed to wait to be picked up well after school got out. I didn’t mind waiting there. I met many friends there: Wells, Blish, Poe, Verne, Doyle, Burroughs, Foster and so many, many others.

It was there, in the audio room, where I listened for the first time to the recording of Orson Welles’ infamous radio play of War of the Worlds that created a nationwide panic back in 1938.

I walked along the many shelves, looking at random for the next adventure I wanted to immerse myself into. Sometimes I would have a title or subject in mind even before I walked through the doors and would head to the cabinet where the index cards were. Flipping through them until I found the book I sought, getting the Dewey number and then hunting the shelf, hoping someone hadn’t checked it out already.

That library was a haven, a source of familiarity that I took with me as we moved from town to town (my father’s business kept us fairly mobile). No matter what new town we landed in, I sought the nearest library and felt right at home everywhere we went.

To this day, I credit that love of reading, those hours spent within the walls of that first library, with planting the seed to my becoming the writer I am today. Anytime we venture back to Turlock, I stop by and peek in.

It hasn’t changed all that much in 46 years. Oh, there are books in there that weren’t there in 1972 of course. And there is a small area for computers and a terminal to search for books instead of the old card cabinet. But if I stand in just the right spot, it is 1972 all over again, and a new adventure waits somewhere among those shelves.

Turlock Library
(image from Google Earth)

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About this library author:

Richard Paolinelli began his writing career as a freelance writer in 1984 and gained his first fiction credit serving as the lead writer for the first two issues of the Elite Comics sci-fi/fantasy series, Seadragon. His 20-year sports writing career was highlighted by the 2001 California Newspaper Publishers Association award for Best Sports Story.

In 2010, Richard retired as a sportswriter and returned to his fiction writing roots. Since then he has written six novels, including the recently released, When The Gods Fell, three Sherlock Holmes pastiches, two non-fiction sports books, three novelettes, and shorter works in several anthologies.

He plans on releasing The Timeless series, a middle-grade YA Steampunk series, this fall and another novel, Firstborn’s Curse, around Christmas. Learn more at his website: https://scifiscribe.com/

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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series: 
http://www.erinpringle.com/p/summer-library-series.html

2018 Summer Library Series: That Texas Library by Julia Drescher

Welcome to September and this week's edition of the 2018 Summer Library Series. Poet Julia Drescher shares reflections of her wry childhood in the library, and the thoughts one might have read from her mind had it been a book back then.

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That Texas Library

Julia Drescher

Julia Drescher, Father, Sister

Where one is is in a temple that sometimes makes us forget that we are in it. Where we are is in a sentence.    – Jack Spicer, “Textbook of Poetry” #13

As a kid, I absolutely hated Texas in a generalizing way – the way everyone seemed to have (and be proud of) a get-mean-or-die kind of attitude, the weather (the oppressive humidity combined with the relentless way the sun shines feels like a perpetual punishment most of the year), and the landscape of the suburban town we eventually settled down in (every living thing seemingly cut down for concrete, wretched-looking brush residing in what was left of the natural areas). Places of seeming-refuge were somewhat hard to find.


The small public library in that town has two floors. The first floor contains the card catalog (now on computers), adult fiction & non-fiction collections, and, between this and a newspaper/magazine wall, a weird construction best described as a series of movable particle board curtains with various (mostly pastoral or portrait) paintings in the traditional style hanging from them. Though I never saw anyone do this, theoretically you could check one out like a book and hang it on your wall for two weeks.

The second floor contains the children/juvenile fiction & non-fiction collections, a small room that often held children’s music recitals, a huge dollhouse display, and a librarian who sits at a desk in the most advantageous location for monitoring who is on the floor.

After moving to Bryan, Texas when I was ten, I would often be dropped off at the library and left to roam the stacks (mostly unseen) for hours. When my mom came to pick me up, I would have quite a heavy load of books, reading my way through what of the collection interested me. 

Clara B. Mounce Public Library

At around the same time as being forced to attend a small private Catholic school, I began to almost exclusively check out any books having to do with magic and witches (led here, of course, by what I would now say are the correspondences between prepubescence, the growing imposition of traditional femininity, and the learning about saints' lives). 

My mom probably held her tongue for awhile, but seeing so many spines with ‘witch’ on them finally disturbed her enough to say something like, Why are you reading so many books about witches? 

(and I probably answered moodily, “I don’t know”– if I answered at all) You better be careful – you might get into trouble. If the former clearly reflected to me an uneasiness with my interest, the latter seemed to reflect some sort of fear for me – a vague paranoia that the librarians would report such dark interests to some government authority (or something).

Pretty early on (because the library is actually very small), I grew bored with the offerings of the second floor. But it took me awhile to confidently peruse the first – I would arrive at the library, go up the stairs to the second floor, pretend to look at the juvenile books in the most obvious way that I could, then try to sneak back down the stairs without any adults seeing me do so. These were maneuvers based on an assumption that categories were untrespassable – that any adult could see that I didn’t belong on this floor. I knew generally, too, that I should be seen and not heard (from), so my biggest fear was drawing attention to myself, causing a scene.

At some point, I got over it. At some point, I went from the interest in witches to a vague interest in various outlaws that had some Texas connection and checked out as many books as the adult section had on Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde etc.

When I came out to the car with these stacks of books, my mom glanced over and, as we drove out of the parking lot, said under her breath with a sigh of relief, Thank God that witch phase is over.

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Julia Drescher,
photo used with permission

Today's library writer:

Julia Drescher lives in Colorado where she co-edits the press Further Other Book Works with the poet C.J. Martin. Her work has appeared most recently in ‘Pider, Entropy, Likestarlings,  Aspasiology, and Hotel. Her book of poems, Open Epic, is available from Delete Press. She works at a library.

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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/summer-library-series.html

2018 Summer Library Series: Neighborhood Libraries by Cetywa Powell

Welcome back to the 2018 edition of the Summer Library Series. Every Thursday this summer, a guest writer will be sharing childhood memories of reading, books, and the library. Should you panic while waiting for the next Thursday, please enjoy past contributions here: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/summer-library-series.html

Today's piece is an excellent reminder of both the importance of books and neighbors who read, and how a library can become a neighborhood, not just serve one. Please enjoy today's reflection by Cetywa Powell.

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Neighborhood Libraries

by

Cetywa Powell

Cetywa's membership card, used with permission

Libraries didn’t play a large role in my life until much later. My father’s work took him to Sweden, where he got his Ph.D., and later Africa, where he researched a disease called “Sleeping Sickness.” 

In Sweden, where I did half of my kindergarten, I didn’t speak the language and spent much of my class time in silence. The next half of kindergarten was spent in Hawaii, where my mother is from. I don’t recall ever frequenting the library there.

My father’s research then took him to Nairobi, Kenya. I read voraciously, but the books were from neighbors and friends, never from the library. In fact, in those days, Nairobi’s library had books that were so old and outdated, I felt they had been there from the colonial days (Nairobi was an English colony and got its independence in 1963). I visited that library once and had no desire to go back.

My reading came from the neighbors’ libraries. Our American neighbors introduced me to the Noddy series as a kid and later the Anne of Green Gables books. From down the street, I borrowed the Chronicles of Narnia series. And from someone else, I read George Orwell’s novels: Animal Farm and 1984.

Cetywa Powell, photo used with permission

When we returned to the U.S., we settled first in Denver and finally in New York, where my father was from. Denver was a difficult year so I spent a large part of my time reading. Although I don’t recall where my books came from, I do remember every book I read.

My love for libraries started in New York. There are two libraries that come to mind: the small New York library that I walked to from our apartment to borrow books and my college library at Columbia University. Although Columbia’s main library, Butler library, is one of the largest libraries in the United States, I was impressed only with its interior architecture, not its manuscripts. I spent many hours studying there, looking up between breaks to stare at the room(s) in awe. I’m ashamed to say I never actually thought to borrow any of their books.

Now, I’m a member of the Los Angeles public library, and my fondness for libraries extends beyond just books. I appreciate their free classes, their up-to-date movie collection, their free computers, and their monthly book sales where books cost just 25 cents. They’ve saved me when my computer crashed, when my printer ran out of ink, and I when couldn’t find a movie online. We even got free solar eclipse glasses from them for the solar eclipse in 2017.

Butler Library, Columbia University: more here

Los Angeles Public Library, photo from DryWired

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Today's Library Writer: Cetywa Powell is an editor, photographer, and filmmaker. She runs the small press, Underground Voices, which features new, hard-hitting work by award-winning writers in its magazine, e-book series, and book line. As a photographer, Powell's work has exhibited in galleries in France, New York, Los Angeles, Maryland, Virginia, Hungary, Florida, the Trieste airport in Italy, Vermont, and Texas. She is based in Los Angeles. Learn more about Powell and her visual work here: http://www.ten8photography.com/T8About.html.

2018 Summer Library Series: How Many Libraries by Azaria Podplesky

Summer Library Series 2018 

Child sketching, child reading (c. 1795, France)/photograph by Sharon Mollerus
used under CC license

The Summer Library Series has officially returned this year. Every Thursday, all summer, writers will share reflections of their childhood libraries. Should you panic while waiting for the next reflection, please enjoy past summers here: 2015, 2014, 2012.

I began The Summer Library Series after a deep longing to take part in a Summer Reading Program like those I participated in as a child every summer. I loved the suspense created by the librarians covering the new books with sheets. I loved even more the day of the great unveiling when the sheets were pulled back in front of a crowd of us kids, and there was always a crowd because every school teacher had dutifully marched her students from school to the downtown library so that the librarians could remind us to visit the library all summer. I loved the stickers on the inside, all blank on that first day, and slowly filled with the names of whoever read each book first. What an honor to write my own name in a book!

In addition to the reading, I remember the events. I remember hurrying from the front of the library to the back, where the daily or weekly events were happening. I remember sitting in the back of the library on the floor, watching The Red Balloon off a projector, and another time The Snowman, whose music haunted me into my adulthood and I finally found again and now watch every winter. I remember librarians sitting above us, reading stories.

When I was back home visiting my childhood library, I found several books still holding the names of children I'd grown up with. One name belonged to a girl in my grade who died a few years ago, but her careful cursive in the front of that book brought back her face from when we darted among the shelves searching for glossy new books to check out, read, and inscribe--always flipping open covers to discover whether someone beat us to the first read.

I may be an adult and I may have technically aged out of the bracket of readers who take part in Summer Reading Programs, but I have found that the Summer Library Series brings with it my love for libraries and the thrill of finding new writers and stories.

Without further ado, please enjoy this week's reflection by Azaria Podplesky.

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How Many Libraries Can One Childhood Hold?

by
Azaria Podplesky

Azaria Podplesky and sisters
(Azaria is in the front)

During my consistently inconsistent childhood, libraries were one of the few constants. As an Army Brat, growing up involved moving across the country every two to three years. In my 27 years, I’ve lived in four states and attended 10 schools. (But who’s counting?)

Being in a military family also meant having to navigate a new school and city and make new friends on a fairly regular basis, which was a challenge at times for my introverted younger self. Knowing there was a library at my new school or near our new home, however, always made moving easier.

There was the library at Greenwood Elementary School on Fort Lewis, now Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where I attended school for second, third and much of fourth grades. Helping the librarian, Mrs. Santuff, reshelve books during recess filled me with so much pride, though I admit the weekly reward of gummy bears also had something to do with my willingness to help.

And then there was the library at C.C. Pinckney Elementary School on Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, where I remember checking out Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to see what all the fuss was about, four years after it was released.

Better late than never, right?

I also remember using Accelerated Reader points, which were earned by taking a test after finishing a book, to buy trinkets from the school store. My proudest purchase came at the end of sixth grade, when, after saving up my A.R. points for months, I bought a disposable camera, which I used to take pictures of my friends and teachers on the last day of school.

My family still talks about the beautiful main branch of the Richland Library, also in Columbia, with its wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that let in an abundance of natural light. Also of note to a younger Azaria: the library’s huge children’s room, which research has told me is 20,000 square feet, that features a 40-foot mural of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Richland County Main Library

Inside of Richland County Library

Then there was the Lacey Timberland Library in Lacey, Washington, and, during our second stint on Fort Lewis, the Grandstaff Memorial Library, which was within walking distance of our house. I felt like Matilda, sans little red wagon, every time I walked home with an armful of new books to read.

I, clearly, could go on.

But no matter what state I lived in, the libraries I visited were comfortingly familiar.

Timberland Library

The Bailey School Kids books, by Marcia T. Jones and Debbie Dadey, were always going to be near Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series, which were never too far from My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater, or The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, three of my favorite books growing up.

Every time we moved, getting a library card was high on our list of priorities, and, if we moved during the summer, we always signed up for the summer reading program. It gave us kids something to do, for one, but the presence of books all over our new space always helped make the house feel more like home.

Now, as an adult, I still find myself letting out a contented sigh when I walk into the downtown branch of the Spokane Public Library, almost as if to say “Ahh, I’m home.”

Looking at the library card I keep safe in my wallet, I think my younger self would be happy to see that I’ve continued to keep libraries close to my heart. I can assure her that no matter where the future takes me, a visit to my local library will always be at the top of my to-do list, most likely before I’ve even finished unpacking.

From a site with every WA library card: here

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Azaria Podplesky,
photo used with permission

Today's Library Writer: Azaria Podplesky works as the entertainment writer at the Spokesman-Review. In the past, she has freelanced for the Inlander, Seattle Weekly and the Oregonian. She graduated from Eastern Washington University with degrees in journalism and communication studies in 2012 and currently calls Spokane home. Thanks to her Army brat upbringing, she finds the idea of growing up in just one city, or visiting just one library, nearly impossible to comprehend. Follow her on Twitter (@AzariaP) for writing updates and everything entertaining in Spokane.

2015 Summer Library Series: This Library Was Made for You and Me by Liz Rognes

It's a dizzying time of travels this summer here at What She Might Think, from Philadelphia to Washington to Switzerland, and this week, to the rural fields of Iowa.  Please enjoy this week's reflection of growing up in the library by singer, songwriter, and essayist, Liz Rognes.

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This Library Was Made for You and Me

Liz Rognes

 


Lake Mills Library

Summers in Lake Mills, Iowa meant long, hazy, humid days. My mom would drop my siblings and me off at the town pool for morning swimming lessons, two miles away from our farm, and then we would walk a few blocks to my grandma’s house, wrapped in our towels, our skin smelling of chlorine and salty sweat. My Grandma Bea was an Irish Catholic Democrat, the kind who fervently believed in social justice and local participation. She was on the Board of Directors for the public library, and she or my mom would take us every week for story hour or just to check out books. When we were old enough, we could walk by ourselves from Grandma’s house to the library across the street: a small, unassuming building on the outside, but on the inside filled to the brim with books and stories about the big, exciting, incomprehensible world outside of our little Iowa farm town.

I was a kid from a small, fairly conservative town in the middle of the country, but I learned about political history, dissent, revolution, magic, ghosts, outer space, and wild new ways of thinking from books. My favorite books were the ones that sparked controversy, the ones that my teachers sometimes talked about with a spectrum of thinly veiled to explicit disapproval. I remember lying on the musty, familiar carpet of the school library sometime in middle school, reading Go Ask Alice, when a teacher interrupted me to ask if my parents would approve of a “book like that.”
But I had already read lots of books “like that”: a quick perusal of the ALA’s list of most often challenged books in the 1990s reminds me of many of my favorite books as a preteen and teenager: The Handmaid’s Tale; Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret; Catcher in the Rye; Carrie; and so forth. I loved reading books with teen and female protagonists; I could relate to teenage girl angst, and, even though I was a quiet, “good” kid, I felt a tacit, political alignment with the outliers and rebels in the stories I read. My parents encouraged me to read and to read anything; the only censorship I remember from my parents came around the time I developed insomnia as a result of reading a collection of horror stories. The book mysteriously disappeared, a phenomenon I first attributed to a poltergeist, but then I realized that the thief had been my own mother, motivated by the desire to protect me from my own imagination.

As a younger kid, I loved browsing the shelves of the library, looking at the covers and titles and imagining the people and places that lived inside of each compact rectangle. I was a daydreamer and an eager traveler; it took very little for me to be launched into narrative transport: one moment I would be a kid in a sticky swimming suit and the next I would be Nancy Drew, bravely exploring haunted mansions, piecing together a puzzle of clues, and helping the families of the dead. I especially loved series of books; I loved the extended narratives and the way that I could grow up right along with the characters if I caught a series at the right time.


"Repose" by Various Brennemans, used under CC license

I would take library books with me everywhere I went. I read at the pool, Grandma’s house, car trips, gym class, and all corners of the farm where I lived. I would sit under a row of evergreen trees, curl up with the dog in the old chicken house-turned dusty storage shed, or I would sprawl out on top of a stack of hay bales in the stables and read while listening to the familiar huffs and stomps of the horses. I loved—and still love—the option to vacate my own life for a while, to disappear into someone else’s story.

My own sense of social justice and local activism has been informed by my love for reading, by developing empathy and understanding through narrative. Public libraries have played a big role in this development, and I am thankful that my parents and my grandma were such supporters of our local library and supporters of access to a variety of books.

Four years ago, I fell in love with a public librarian—not because of his librarianship, but because of his big heart, his patience, his creativity and sense of humor, his intellect: all things that make him a wonderful librarian, too. We have a one-year old son who already loves the library. Our son loves being around other kids and grown-ups, he loves picking out books and going to story time, and he loves visiting Dada at work. My Grandma Bea didn’t live to meet my partner or my son, but our little family carries on her love for libraries, knowledge, and local participation.

 

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Liz Rognes,
Photo Used with Author's Permission

Liz Rognes is a writer and folk musician who lives in Spokane with her partner Jason and their son Nelson. She performs widely, from Washington to Minnesota, and teaches at Eastern Washington University.  Her newest album is Topographies. She's also a contributing blogger for the Emily Program. For more information about Liz, and to listen to samples of her music, please visit her website http://lizrognes.com/ 

2015 Summer Library Series: Scofflaw by Simone Zelitch

Welcome to the inaugural post of this summer's library series!  I'm pleased to showcase a third season of excellent writers and their reflections on growing up in the library.  The series originated in Summer 2012, when I was awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship that gave me the time to work on my fiction and other creative projects.

I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and looked forward to the annual public library summer reading program: the appearance of new colorful bookmarks on the circulation desk, the hanging of a banner of that summer's theme, and best of all, all the shiny new books that began to arrive and were set out in cardboard displays on the children's shelves but remained cloaked in sheets until the opening day.  It was a wonderful anticipation to experience. 

But because those programs are for children, and I've left that phase in most ways, I wanted to create something that provided that same excitement for grown-ups and returned us all to the library.  May you find the same excitement each Thursday when a new library reflection is released here at What She Might Think, from now through August.  And may you find yourself returning to the library nearest you and supporting this important aspect of our lives. 

Please enjoy this reflection by novelist Simone Zelitch, whose many early books came from the circulation desk at a branch library in Philadelphia.

Picture of Bustleton Branch Library

Scofflaw 
by Simone Zelitch 

The Bustleton branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia looks like a highway rest step: a single-story structure with long, narrow windows and a corrugated green roof.  It’s located next to Washington High school, which was an easy walk from our house in Northeast Philadelphia.  My mother claims that she took out fifteen books a week for me.  I never came along which made the process more efficient, but could be the reason why I have no early memories of libraries, no sentimental images of choosing my own read-out-loud book and watching a librarian stamp it with the due-date.  It also may explain why I couldn’t grasp that these library books were shared property.   I’d dog-ear pages, crack spines, and stain whatever I was reading with whatever I was eating at the time.   You might say that I left my mark. 

Simone hugging her "hippie sister"
who now works as a digital archivist.
Used with permission of author.

Things got worse when I began to check out books on my own. I didn’t return them. Cheap paperbacks like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman migrated from the library’s wire racks to my bookshelf and stayed there, along with dozens of case studies about teenagers who drifted through a hostile world until they finally found the person who understood them. I was that person. No one could love those books like me. Returning them to the library felt just plain wrong, as though I was condemning Lisa Bright and Dark or Dibs in Search of Self  to a life of abandonment and alienation. Besides, my older sister—a hippie and a role model— had so many library fines accrued that she was actually forbidden from ever taking out a book again,  and I had to do everything she did. In short—though I wouldn’t have used those words when I was twelve—returning library books felt like giving in to a conformist culture. 

What was the turning point?   In 1977, when I was fourteen, I actually wanted a book that was in demand, Alex Hailey’s Roots. Did the library have a record of all those unreturned paperbacks?  Maybe not, because they put me on a waiting list, and when my turn came, I took home a thick hardback with the same bold cover that had appeared at the end of the opening credits of the miniseries, and I propped it on my nightstand so it would be the first thing I’d see when I got up in the morning. Actually, the book wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it would be, but I did return it on time. After all, someone had done the same for me.  

Maybe that’s when I realized that libraries demanded a kind of social contract. Who read my nerdy paperbacks before I came along? I looked at the call slips and saw the long strip of stamped months and dates.  Eight readers had checked out I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. They were decent enough to return it so I could get my chance to read about a schizophrenic teenager and her German therapist. It’s romantic to imagine you’re the only one who loves something. It’s astounding to realize that you’re not alone. Who were the readers represented by the back-and-front eternity of stamps on Prince Caspian or Player Piano? Who took out Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid or just about anything by Orwell or the autobiography of Emma Goldman?  In the days before social media, it wasn’t easy to find these people, my people, my tribe, but the stamped cards were proof positive: That tribe existed.    

It took me a long time to understand that honoring the social contract of a library isn’t conformist. It’s countercultural. In a consumer society, libraries aren’t about what we own; they’re about what we share. Given this understanding, when I look through my own crammed bookshelves, what should I do when I come across a copy of Then Again, Maybe I Won’t that was due on March 12, 1973?  Should I return it?  Probably.  

Simone writing in her room, 1978
Used with permission of author

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Cover of Zelitch's novel,
Waveland.

Simone Zelitch has published four novels, most recently Waveland. Earlier work includes The Confession of Jack Straw, Moses in Sinai, and Louisa which was the recipient of the Goldberg Prize in Emerging Jewish Fiction. Her work has also appeared in The Lost Tribe Anthology and has been featured in the NPR broadcast and the published anthology Hanukah Lights.  Recent honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Fiction, and residences at the Edward Albee Barn and Yaddo.  She established a Creative Writing program at Community College of Philadelphia and currently coordinates their new Degree in English.  A new novel, Judenstaat, is forthcoming from Tor books in Summer 2016.  Visit her website here: simonezelitch.com.

 

 

 

Books by authors in the Summer Library Series will link directly to author-friendly sites, such as the press itself or to the international library search engine, Worldcat.org. Please support small publishers, independent bookstores, and our libraries.

Coming Soon: Summer Library Series 2015

Yes, it's that time of year.

Time to read.

Time to go to the library.

Time to pay the fine for the library books that you kept meaning to return.

 

Sarasota, FL 1958. Flickr, no known copyright restrictions.

 

And it's almost time for the Summer Library Series here at What She Might Think, where writers from around the world reflect on their childhood experiences in the library--from the non-experience to the befuddled experience to the awful experience.

 

I'm lining up the writers we'll begin hearing from in July.  But until then, like any good fan, please enjoy the summers' past writers as you prepare for the writers who are in the wings, typing.

 

Summer 2014

Summer 2012

2014 Summer Library Series: Some Kind of Reader by Tim Greenup

From Montana to Delaware, from Michigan to Indiana, this year's sometimes-annual edition of the Summer Library Series comes to a close "somewhere in Oakdale, Minnesota" with this reflection by writer, Tim Greenup.  Thanks to all the writers who took the time to write original work for the series, and for all the readers who have enjoyed the work (and hopefully a bit of summer reading via your own local library). Without further ado, Tim Greenup, everybody:  

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Some Kind of Reader
by Tim Greenup

I can only recall two things about my childhood library - itchy red-orange industrial carpeting and a wall of windows with sunlight coming through them - which both strike me as pretty commonplace sights for a suburban public library of the late 80’s. For certain I can say this of the library: it was somewhere in Oakdale, Minnesota and my family rarely went there.

Growing up, we weren’t exactly “book people.” We were TV people, and TV was king. We watched Cheers and Roseanne while eating hard shell, ground beef, tacos on flimsy foldable TV trays. We rode our bikes around the neighborhood and laughed about Balki from Perfect Strangers. We went to church and stopped for donuts afterward, never exchanging a word about the sermon, but about the Starship Enterprise instead. We enjoyed our simple cathode ray pleasures, and reading, we’d been taught by TV, was, well, boring. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.

That said, we did have a few books on a shelf in our living room, like a 12 book series on various peoples of the American West ("Plains Indians", "Mountain Men", "Homesteaders", etc.) and some book about the Civil War. I never saw either of my parents open these books, and I cannot recall anyone in my family ever voicing an interest in these topics. But the books remained on that shelf until the whole house got packed up and sold off a few years ago. The mint condition of the binding at the time of their packing suggested that no one had ever read them.

As a boy, I puzzled over the origin of these books. Perhaps they had belonged to a brave warrior and my family had been entrusted to keep watch over them while he fought valiantly in some far off place. Perhaps the only thing keeping him fighting was knowing that one day, when he got home, he could sit down and read at length about the Dust Bowl. It was our duty to keep that dream alive. More than likely, though, we'd been gifted the books one Christmas and didn’t know what else to do with them, so we put them out and went on with our lives. Nevertheless, I grew to like how the books looked lined on that shelf and what this small library suggested, albeit inaccurately, about the type of people that we were - smart.

Through grade school I began to build my own library of unread books. At school book fairs I bought as many as my pet sitting dollars would allow. When teachers handed out Scholastic and Golden Books catalogs for class book orders, I was always able to convince my mother to order me a few, for I would read them and reading them would lead to many future successes. Or that’s what I told her at least - something I’d picked up on 20/20. In reality, I thought that if my classmates saw me with enough crazy stacks of books, the smarter they would think I was, the more they would respect me and, in turn, the better I would feel about myself. I collected books with a desperate, misguided passion.

Whether my intellect ever crossed a single one of my classmate's minds, I will never know. I do know, though, that eventually the stacks of unread books in my bedroom got to be too much. They crowded my dressers and grew dusty. They stared at me, feeling neglected. I felt guilty, but turned away. I couldn’t read, it was just too boring, something teachers urged you to do and why should I listen to them? Urkel was on.

At some point, my father saw all the books I had amassed and made the wild assumption that I was some kind of reader. He offered to take me to the local library, that strange place with orange carpeting and sun blasting in from all sides. On our way there, we decided we would check out a book that we could read together. I stared at the paperback covers on the revolving plastic book rack. They didn’t seem all that different from the books I had in my bedroom. Some looked scary and haunting, while others looked heroic and brave. Some suggested hijinks or mystery or romance. We opted for a book titled You Are a Monster, which was part of the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series of the time. Cramped on my twin bed, my father and I read and read. It didn’t make me feel smarter or more respected, but my brain seemed to stretch in ways it never had before. Had my father not been there, I may not have allowed it to stretch like it did. But he was there, and I felt safe. The room was quiet and warm. I thought about the story long into the night.

*

Tim Greenup is a writer and teacher in Spokane, Washington. His poems have appeared in Redivider, Leveler, interrupture, and elsewhere. 

In Review: The Summer Library Series

The first time I tried to check out a book from the library, that is, a book with no pictures, I was in first grade.  The book was A Vote for Love.  Evidently, I had been roaming on the other side of the children's section and found the metal racks where the teenage romance novels were kept.  When I took the book to the circulation desk, the librarian eyed the book then eyed me, and wanted to know if I realized the book had no pictures.  I was terribly insulted.  Yes, I knew it had no pictures.  Obviously, it has no pictures.  Maybe she even dared to ask me to get my mother's permission.

. . .

Forgive me.  I want to go on, but only because I need another library story to read.  It is Friday, after all.  And dedicated reader, you've been following What She Might Think, so you know what every Friday has meant all summer: a visiting poet or fiction writer has appeared to share a new, original essay on his or her childhood experience at the library. More than 1,000 readers know what Friday means here at What She Might Think, for that's how many readers came to read library essays this short summer.

But the wind is busy pushing summer backward in order to allow autumn to do what autumn has always done best: signal the end of warm, good things.  The Summer Library Series is over.

Editing the series has been, for me, one of those experiences that, while it's happening you both know you don't want it to end and that it absolutely will.  The essays themselves will not stay on What She Might Think forever.  It is, after all, each writer's work, and this website is no library archive.  Every writer wrote out of interest in the project and, I would say, a generous understanding of generosity.  Because of that, we must give them back their work.  Even the grasshopper knew that the ants' generosity had its limits.  So it is not just the end of summer, but nearly the end of our time to read the essays, too.

But now is now, and so reflections are here for only now, and they're artful, beautiful, strange, beating things:

Children reading in New York Public Library, circa 1920

Once upon a time, in a library, Owen Egerton smuggled horror novels into the children's section and "wished to God [he] could read!"  Matthew Brennan's mother was a painter, and her paintings hung in a library long gone.  Jack Kaulfus rode her bike almost every day one summer in Texas to air-conditioning, to a library, to a man who never questioned why she was choosing the books that she did, only her thoughts about them.  Dan Powell waited for a van of books to stop so that he could climb up the stairs to one of the most traveled vehicles that came through Colwich. Laura Ellen Scott's desk was empty at school because she was busy walking four miles to a library where there were enough books that she never encountered a nurse romance if she didn't want to.  The library discarded what came to be TJ Beitelman's favorite book, and he took care of it so that he could return it to the library, not knowing that they wouldn't take it back. John Kenny's library was a toyshop. Juliet E. McKenna just read and read read and read. Heather Anastasiu's town took place at her library. David Hadbawnik became David Hadbawnik over the course of reading in libraries while in Van Nuys, California, a little girl named Kathryn L. Pringle, fell in love with a statue outside her library and then decided to become an archaeologist.  Steinbeck killed Stacey Swann's pony in Sealy, Texas.  And then the library ended on a Saturday in Cincinnati for Stona Fitch.    

The series is over, but autumn is lovely, with the leaves how they change, and the air on your cheeks.  It is just the weather for a long walk that leads to a library. All our library authors are there, too, waiting for you in the shelves.

Warm Regards,

Erin Pringle-Toungate

THE SUMMER LIBRARY SERIES

LIBRARY AUTHORS

• In a Town With No Bookstores by Owen Egerton
• Buildings and the Love of Books by Matthew C. Brennan
• A Kind of Beacon by Jack Kaulfus
• The Library That Delivered by Dan Powell
• A Truant in the Stacks by Laura Ellen Scott
• The Mother of Libraries by TJ Beitelman
• My Regrettable Non-Relationship with Libraries by John Kenny
• All Sorts of Freedom by Juliet E. McKenna
• Library as Locus by Heather Anastasiu
• From Branch to Main and Back by David Hadbawnik
• On Raising an Ontological Architect by kathryn l. pringle
• Then Steinbeck Killed My Pony by Stacey Swann
• Library Days by Stona Fitch

Special thanks to the photographers who gave permission to What She Might Think expressly for this project. Many of the photographers were librarians themselves.

Summer Library Series: Library Days by Stona Fitch

Every Friday this summer authors have been sharing their childhood experiences at the library, and we've now arrived at the final Friday of the Summer Library Series here at What She Might Think--not to mention the final Friday of summer. 

This week's author is novelist Stona Fitch who went to the Cincinnati Public Library until one day in fifth grade. In fiction, it's sometimes said that a way to start a story is to bring a a stranger into town, as that's a way to introduce conflict, tension, and suspense in a piece.  And it is.  But when the stranger appears in real life . . .  that's the day that ends more than a library. 

*

LIBRARY DAYS
by Stona Fitch

Working my way down the aisles, 

I picked out novels like a crow, 

attracted by shiny covers and big type. 

Cincinnati Public Library, photograph by OZinOH ,
used under CC license

The self-study math program my fifth-grade teacher gave me fit in a carton that I hauled around like ant with an enormous crumb. The laminated lessons included a test every ten cards. But tucked in the back were the answer cards, so honest students could grade their own tests. I soon discovered that skipping ahead to the answer cards and pretending to take the tests saved a lot of time. In short order, I moved on to 10th-grade level, so far ahead that I could spend class time daydreaming.

Hauling around the math carton gave me the illusion of intellect—the middle-school equivalent of carrying around the two-volume set of Musil’s Man Without Qualities. That carton said I was smart, not just a scrawny dreamer in white corduroys, a web belt, and a blue button-down shirt.

On winter weekends, the carton earned me rides downtown to the main library, clearly the only edifice in southern Ohio large and scholarly enough to let me pursue my interest in mathematics. Every Saturday, my father would drop me off at the library while he went to work at the paper plant down by the river, an arrangement designed to keep me out of trouble.

The Cincinnati Public Library squatted on a full block of Vine Street, a brick heap of the International Style that looked like a joint project of I.M. Pei and the Aztecs. The airy, cement-walled reading room allowed it to stay extra cold during the energy crisis, now in full bloom. Students and eccentrics clustered on long expanses of tables and desks—everyone bundled in sweaters and down jackets, giving the library a gulag-ish vibe. We should have been carrying picks and shovels instead of books.

At the library, I ditched my math box and prowled through the fiction stacks, sampling books the same way my sister abused a box of chocolates, jamming her little finger into each soft middle to see what was inside then putting them back in the box, hole side down.

Working my way down the aisles, I picked out novels like a crow, attracted by shiny covers and big type. Hours flew by. A hunt for Nazis (The Odessa File) segued to depressed guy in Pennsylvania (Rabbit Redux) then on to an interplanetary catastrophe (Cataclysm!). These choices weren’t intentional—these titles just happened to be at eye-level.

One Saturday in early December, I had to leave the fiction section to go to the men’s room downstairs, a smoky haven for creeps. I peed and washed my hands and found myself alone in the dingy bathroom except for someone grunting and rustling around in one of the stalls. The stall door flew open and a tall man rushed across the bathroom. He wore a blue pin-stripped suit and a white shirt and looked exactly like a bank manager, except his fly was open and he was stroking himself with intense devotion. His watery face was a rictus of ecstatic pain or its reverse.

I turned to run but he grabbed my gray sweater and pulled me down toward him. My clunky black orthopedic shoes slipped on the tiled floor as I tried to get away. He had a firm hold of me but I managed to wriggle away, freeing my spindly arms from the sweater, which slipped past my face in a blur of gray wool. I slid into the wall next to the hand-dryer, stunned, my concave chest heaving.

Our brief fight left the banker with nothing but my wooly husk, which would suffice, apparently. He balled it up and mashed it into his cock over and over.

Photograph by Joe Thorn, used under a CC license

I struggled to put the scene before me in words to convince myself it was actually happening. A banker was fucking my sweater in the men’s room of the Cincinnati Public Library!

After a moment he gave a gruff yelp. Then he held my used sweater toward me like a gift.

No thanks. I shook my head and ran, slowing only to grab my math box on the way out.

My library days were over.



*



Stona Fitch



Stona Fitch lives and writes in Concord, Massachusetts and is the author of five novels, including Give + Take (2010), Printer's Devil (2009), and Senseless (2001).  "Library Days" is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Funny As Hell. He is also the founder of generosity-based publisher Concord Free Press, which gives away its books, asking only that readers donate money to a charity or someone in need. Readers are encourgaed to pass the book on to another reader after they're finished.