Poetry + Libraries = Transformation

by Kathy Welton, author of Poetry for Beginners (Steerforth, coming Jan. 2010)

In a recent New York Times article, Harold Bloom, professor of English at Yale advocates getting lost in books:

“More than ever in this time of economic troubles and societal change, entering upon an undergraduate education should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions.

There is general agreement on the indispensable canon: Homer, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton. From the 19th century until now, keeping only to English and American authors, a slightly more arbitrary selection might include Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Yeats and Joyce in England and Ireland. Among the Americans would certainly be Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne; and in the 20th century, Faulkner and the major poets: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane.”

One doesn’t necessarily need to be in school to get lost in books–or in poetry.
My fondest memories are of holding a book in my hands at a very early age. We were very lucky as a family to have both a prized library set of the Harvard Classics and an entire encyclopedia set in our house. Books that I could treasure, look at, and read while I was growing up.

Lucky indeed.

In addition, I was greatly influenced by my English teachers. I remember having to recite “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe in the fifth grade. And I am especially grateful to Diane Middlebrook, a poet and English teacher at Stanford University who showed her students how to transform and transcend destiny. I will always remember her poetry classes—and a special class when she read a favorite poem with Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” playing in the background.

So this was poetry!

These experiences with books and poetry greatly shaped my career, life, and who I am today.

I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to work with words and the world of books and be a part of the book publishing community for over 30 years. Working with authors, bookstores, and librarians has always been an essential way for me to get by and to get lost in books.

Working on a book in the For Beginners® series has been another enjoyable opportunity and experience for me. I liked the documentary, graphic, straightforward, and accessible (more…)

How Libraries Create Authors
Julie Kramer, author of Stalking Susan and this summer’s smash sequel, Missing Mark  (7.14.09)

My biggest author fantasy is seeing someone reading my book on an airplane. That hasn’t happened yet, but I have actually seen someone checking it out of the library. And that was pretty cool.

I’d always hoped to be a librarian. Instead, I became a journalist, while my sister works in a library—a fact she throws in my face constantly.

I grew up on a corn and cattle farm along a gravel road on the Minnesota–Iowa State Line. My fondest, best childhood memories were waiting for the Bookmobile to bring me a new Phyllis A. Whitney book.

Libraries kept me company through grade school, high school, college— even story hour with my own kids. And libraries were there for me when I decided to write my own novel. After all, when you’ve spent your life surrounded by books, the idea of writing one doesn’t seem that unusual.

Besides the obvious task of stocking books, libraries create authors by giving inspiration, a place for research, a platform to meet readers in person, and sometimes even a cozy corner to get out of the house and write.

An author friend of mine insists before you can write a publishable book, you probably have to write a million words. (more…)

Christine Porschet, SLMS of the high school library in the Marcus Whitman Central School District in Rushville, NY, writes of Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief:

Liesel is a girl obsessed with language and who isn’t scared of anything. Narrated by Death and beautifully written, The Book Thief is about Liesel, a scrappy girl in an increasingly troubled world. Set during the Holocaust, it shows the compassionate and the dark side of ordinary people in a war zone. The New York Times review called it “life changing,” and I agree. It gives you a new perspective on life, and this is a book that you can’t just read once.

 

And Jonathan Porschet, of the Geneva Middle School in Geneva, NY chose to write about another new classic for young people, Lawn Boy by Gary Paulson:

I don’t know when I have enjoyed a book more than Gary Paulsen’s Lawn Boy. With an eclectic assortment of offbeat characters in the background, the protagonist, known only as Lawn Boy, is clever, industrious, and incredibly lucky. The book is sweet, funny and exciting. I have read it aloud to small groups and recommended it to dozens of students. All who read it enjoy it. A great quick read, Lawn Boy is great for readers as young as third or fourth grade and still fun for middle school readers and beyond. A survival novel it is not, but Paulsen does not disappoint devotees of Hatchet and his other hugely popular survival novels. Read Lawn Boy!

This review of The Story of Forgetting comes from Marie Cloutier of the Gopen Family Library in Brookline, MA. She can also be read at bostonbibliophile.com. We’ve got a couple more coming. Send in yours to library@randomhouse.com if you’d like to see it here!

The Story of Forgetting is a show-stopper of a first novel. Based in part on his own family’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, author Stefan Merrill Block tells the story in two voices- that of Abel, an elderly recluse, and Seth, a lonely teenager. Abel lives by himself in High Plains, Texas, on a slowly diminishing homestead being encroached upon by McMansions and modernity. Seth lives in the Austin area, a somewhat nerdy boy and something of a loner as well. What binds them is a rare (and fictional) variant of Alzheimer’s, which has claimed Seth’s mother and several members of Abel’s family, including his brother Paul. They also share knowledge of a fairytale world called Isidora, where everyone forgets everything.

Seth and Abel are searching—for information, for survival, and, unbeknownst to them, for each other. The narrative unfolds gradually and alternates between the two. Their voices are engaging and distinctive. Abel speaks in a slow, almost literary cadence—a highly intelligent man with a crippling deformity, he spends much of his time with only his immediate family and his books. Seth’s casual, light tone is characteristic of the moody, flippant teenager struggling with his mother’s illness and his secretive, shame-laced family. Also very intelligent, Seth embarks on a solo project to find out all he can about the disease, and then his tone becomes sort of naively academic. He’s obviously out of his depth jumping into amateur neuroscience, but he’s sincere, and he doesn’t know what else to do.

Actually both have secrets and shames that both sadden and fuel them. It’s these secrets— tragedies, really—that give the book so much weight and feeling. The writing is beautiful—very literary in flavor, it’s a book to read slowly, and savor. The fairy tales of Isidora, interspersed throughout the narrative, are sweet and tragic, and symbolic of the pain binding Abel and Seth. Pain—the pain of watching loved ones deteriorate, and the pain of losing love to circumstance and convention—echoes through the book, and makes The Story of Forgetting, a beautiful, accomplished work, impossible to forget.

Gerald Kolpan’s first novel, Etta is due on bookshelves March 24th.

It’s a sprawling work of historical fiction portraying the imagined life of the mysterious Etta Place, legendary girlfriend of the Sundance Kid. Very little is actually known about the beautiful outlaw queen, although there are literally dozens of theories and clues, not to mention plenty of Etta’s fans that claim to know all the facts.

Gerald wanted the book to be as true to the known story as possible, but still tell the exciting tale that was unspooling in his head.

He decided he needed a methodology and worked one out for himself.

Seeing as how he’s an author, we’ll let him pick up the story.

____________________________________

There were a lot of historical figures to keep track of in Etta’s story. And keeping them all straight was something of a challenge.

I had to keep track of where everyone was at a given time and what they were doing there, as well as imagining what they might have been up to at any given time.

I had to know the differences in all the characters’ ages. I had to keep track of the seasons. I needed to make sure that all technology and inventions (especially the weapons) were correct for the period. Historical fiction readers hate anachronisms.

My solution was to make (to borrow a phrase from Gilbert and Sullivan), “a little list.”

First, I researched all that I could on the principal characters. Etta Place was the easiest, because most of the information on her was speculative. She had no affirmed birth date; no birthplace and she disappeared from history in 1909. I looked at the different stories: that Etta was really a woman named Eunice Grey; that she was actually Harry Longbaugh’s (The Sundance Kid’s) cousin; that they married and had a child or children; that she was a prostitute and lover of Sundance and Butch Cassidy and Lord knows who else. And then of course, there was the schoolteacher role portrayed in the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I decided to throw all of these out, instead portraying Etta as Philadelphia’s richest and most beautiful debutante. I thought it was more fun; and I figured that if the book was fun for me to write, then it would be fun to read.

Butch and Sundance themselves are well documented. Their births, parentage and lives are all a matter of record as are those of Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Eleanor Roosevelt, restaurateur Fred Harvey and others in the story.

Using information gathered from books, articles and on the Internet, I created a timeline that began with each character’s birth and ended with their deaths. This I typed in black and in a roman font (Palatino). A typical passage might read…

1867, Phoenixville, Pa
Sundance Kid born Harry Longbaugh
Parents: Josiah and Annie Place Longbaugh
Brothers: Elwood and Harvey

…all of which is true. These parts of the list contain where a character was at a particular time, what crimes they committed, if they appeared in the media or were written up by the Pinkerton detectives: anything historically accurate was included.

Once all the real stuff was completed, I began filling in the holes with fantasy, this time in red and in san serif type (Helvetica). So a fictional passage would look like this:

1880, Philadelphia, Pa
Lorinda Reese Jameson is born to G. David Jameson and Anna Pepper Reese on their estate, The Cedars, Chestnut Hill, Germantown Ave. and Etta Place, Philadelphia, Pa. Jameson is a banker, hunter, horseman and explorer. He is also a gambler and womanizer. Anna dies giving birth to Lorinda.

The above is the “list” item pertaining to Etta’s birthplace, “real” name and family. Absolutely all of it is made up: from the estate’s address to the circumstances of Lorinda’s birth. David Jameson is a fictional character, as is Anna. No one really knows for sure who Etta’s father and mother were.

The original outline goes on for thirteen pages, constantly alternating between the black (facts) and the red (fantasy). It actually ends with the death of Butch and Sundance although the book carries on for a considerable time after that.

This “red and black” list served me well. It functioned as my guiding outline and allowed me to use the facts as a way to create fiction while keeping all the characters, both real and invented, within my control. That is, until I actually began writing the book and they started living lives of their own.

After that, all I could do was follow them.

Gerald Kolpan is the author of Etta. For more information about the book (including an excerpt), visit www.geraldkolpan.com.

Jamie’s Top-10 Most Memorable Library Moments

Finally, a group of readers (Librarians!) that won’t snicker, chuckle, or otherwise laugh out loud at what I’m about to tell you. Ready? Here goes:

1) I met my wife at that hotbed of swinging singles activity known as…the public library. Hey, no laughing! Bat Girl was a librarian––and she was hot! (Cupid hangs out at the library by the way, look in the 300s). We met at a writers’ group hosted in the basement, right next to a room with recovering alcoholics and a program where people read to their pets. I think there’s a padded room down there somewhere but I can’t confirm it.

2) I was kicked out of my junior high school library, along with five of my geeky friends, for playing Dungeons & Dragons. A concerned parent accused us of worshipping Satan and had us booted. Because that’s where Satan likes to be worshipped, you know––the library, way in the back right next to the Encyclopedia Satanica.

3) In my past life I worked in advertising and was approached by my local public library to do a pro-bono campaign for a mill levy. Like all libraries, they were short on capital to make much-needed improvements. The levy passed with a whopping 77% of the vote. A literary landslide that left the library’s director shouting, “Damn, I should have asked for more money!”

4) As a kid in the 70s, I was into the rock band KISS. (I even dressed up as Peter Criss for Halloween). So years later, when I saw Kiss And Tell, the autobiography of lead-singer, Gene Simmons, I had to check it out. This is one of those rock-star, tell-all yarns about wild back-stage bacchanalia and life on the road. The best part was the bookplate. The book had been purchased with money donated to the library’s foundation, and read: “In loving memory of our reverent mother, Agnes.” Rock on, Agnes.

5) In high school I boosted a book from the library. I hesitate to use the word “stolen,” because I eventually paid the fine. The book, Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories, was on the verge of being banned at the time. My collective friends and I saw it as our duty to save Harlan’s book. Still, I felt bad. Until years later when I read one of the author’s famous quotes: “If you have a burning passion for books and can’t afford them, steal them. Pay society back later”. I guess I need to send Harlan a check.

6) When I went to NYC last year to meet the lovely folks at Random House, I went directly from the airport to the New York Public Library. I felt like a pilgrim visiting the Holy Land, only that land was actually the Rose Reading Room.

7) It’s ironic how small schools will ban books like The Catcher in the Rye, but leave that fount of all things four-lettered—the dictionary. I recall being in grade school pouring over a ginormous tome with pages dog-eared from countless generations of gangly boys trying to discern the facts of life. Even today I can remember that a certain word was preceded by the word fuchsin––a purplish-red aniline dye. Some day that bit of trivia will be my savior on Jeopardy.

8 ) Two years ago I returned to the library of my childhood to find it closed. Despite millions of dollars in expansion and renovation, a nasty political fight resulted in the doors being shut, permanently. There were signs all over the front entrance that read, “Maybe if they’d stop spending so much on war, we could have a library.” I shoved a five-dollar bill beneath the door and sadly walked away.

9) I edited most of my novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, at the public library. It was summer and my kids were constantly confusing my home office with a McDonald’s Playland, so I packed up my manuscript and laptop and got it done at the library. Shhhhhhhhhh.

10) My first book event, as a real bonafide author, was at the public library. Unfortunately my reading coincided with a record-shattering blizzard and a remodel of the library entrance, which made attendance rather light. Only readings at leper colonies get fewer patrons. The janitor thought I was pretty good, though. Once I woke him up.

What are your memorable moments?

–Jamie Ford

Jamie Ford’s first novel  Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet went on sale in January 2009.  Visit his author website to read an excerpt, download a reading group guide, view images of the true events that inspired Hotel, and follow his blog.

BEHIND THE SCENES:
Watch as Jamie Ford narrates a tour of the Seattle neighborhood where Japanese lives were disrupted at the start of World War II, the subject of his moving new novel.

 Confessions of a Library Boy

I was a library boy.

Some of us are just born that way. We start on the soft stuff in the children’s section. Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Cat in the Hat, Go Dog Go, then we move up to juniors, The Great Brain, How to Eat Fried Worms, The Mad Scientists’ Club, then it’s on to young adult, Have Space Suit Will Travel, The Prince in Waiting, The Outsiders, then we’re hitting the grownup matter, The Lord of the Rings, The Glass Key, The Sun Also Rises. The ones who can’t handle it, they end up wandering in the non fiction aisles. But I don’t want to talk about that. Non fiction, that’s a one way downhill slide to periodicals and newspapers on rattan poles. Find yourself there and next you’re hooked on microfiche. Or that was the case back then. I figure you can’t even score any microfiche these days. It’s all digital now. Clicky clicky click. Man, what I wouldn’t give for the loud whir and clunk of a microfiche reader scrolling through back issues of The New York Times circa 1934.

Whoa, almost got the shakes there for a second.

Libraries will do that to you, get in the blood, an addiction that you forget after you have the coin to spend regularly in the shops, but ready to dig its claws back in whenever you let your mind drift back to those years when you were the kid sitting in the middle of a row of Dewey Decimaled spines wrapped in stiff cellophane, your Keds kicked out so the adults have to step over your legs as they walk by looking at the stuff on the top shelves. Kneeling at the spinney rack where they keep a few dozen beaten paperbacks with covers that mostly feature dragons, bullets, ray guns and maidens. Or pulling the long drawers from a card catalog and flipping up and down, scribbling titles, numbers, letters on scrap paper with an eraserless stub of yellow pencil.

You know who you are.

You’re the one who looked forward to a trip to the library more than a trip to the toy store. You’re the one, the day you got your own library card and didn’t have to borrow on you mom or your dad’s card anymore, that was better than the day years later when you got your driver’s license.

You know who you are.

You’re the one, the librarians knew your name. You found a book out of order on a shelf, you put it where it belonged.

You, the only time you were ever shushed was when you got excited about a book and started trying to tell someone about how good it was.

You wanted a repeal on the five-books-at-once-time limit.

You lobbied for expanded operating hours.

You, when you left the house and your folks asked where you were going and you said you were going to hang out, they knew you didn’t mean you were going to the bowling alley or the video arcade.

Yeah, you know who you are.

It hums in the blood, like the sound of the a/c on a summer day when that’s all you can hear other than the flipping of pages, the riffling of catalog cards, the squeak of the reshelving cart’s wheels, and the soft murmur of story time in the kiddie room where a volunteer is reading Harold and the Purple Crayon.

It’s the good stuff. It stays with you.

I have six books I’ve written on the shelves of the library where I cultivated my addiction. I can’t think of a damn thing else that I’ve done professionally that feels half as much like success as that does.

And, hey, whoever it is who’s had The Shotgun Rule out past-due since 11/15/08 better get on the stick, return that sucker, and pay their late fees.

Charlie Huston
Echo Park
November, 2008

Charlie Huston’s new book, The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death, will be published on January 13th, 2009.

Some children are raised by villages, some are raised by wolves, and a few, like me, are raised by libraries. My bibliomania has led me to the rare book collection at the Library of Congress, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and to the painted ceiling of the Rose Reading room at the New York Public Library.

I’ve hidden books within libraries so as not to endure the humiliation of having to check them out. (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Virginia Public Library, Williamsburg, circa 1982)

I’ve snuck into libraries late at night when I just had to have the next book in John D. Mcdonald’s Travis McGee series. (Rawlins Municipal Library, Pierre, South Dakota, circa 1986)

I’ve snuck out of libraries after accidentally being locked inside after closing time—don’t blame me, it was Jim Harrison’s fault. (Sundog, Alderman Library, Charlottesville, Virginia, circa 1990)

I was almost strangled because of a library. While flying to my mother-in-law’s funeral, I decided during a layover to pay a quick visit to the library at the University of Alaska to read some rare diaries of 19th century fur trappers. Who hasn’t done that? One thing led to another and I lost track of time. As I left the library for the airport I forgot to retrieve my driver’s license from the library sign-in desk. Imagine how much fun it was telling my wife I might miss her mother’s funeral because I’d stopped at a library! (Alaska Room, Consortium Library, Anchorage, circa 1998)

About the only thing I haven’t done in libraries is that which certain books have been banned for featuring. (Tropic of Cancer)

Irishmen have what they call their “local,” the pub where they congregate at the end of the day to have a pint and share a good story—a home away from home. In San Francisco my “local” is the muscularly named Mechanics’ Library, which is run by a sparkling-eyed woman named Inez Cohen who oversees her domain with a benign grace only sparkling-eyed librarians possess.

Her motto should be: Ordo, Pax, et Ingenium Bonum!

Order, Quiet, and Good Humor!

I hate to publicly reveal this for fear of jinxing it, but never once have I looked up a book in the card catalog of the Mechanics’ Library and found it missing from the shelves.

Far more than a gathering spot for people who “love” books, the Mechanics Library is a place for “serious readers.” A place for people who need books. The sort of person who would walk through hail to get a new, excellent biography of Antoine de Saint Exupéry (i.e. Stacy Schiff), or discover a forgotten classic they’ve always meant to read (i.e. Sister Carrie).

In other words, YOU!

And me too. My name is Rodes Fishburne, and I wrote a good part of my new novel Going to See the Elephant at the Mechanics’ Library. In fact my main character, Slater Brown, has dreams of becoming a writer good enough to be shelved one day “below Balzac and above Chekhov” at a reputable library.

The world is full of Slater Brown-style ambition—young men and women so charged-up by their literary aspirations that nothing can stop them. They fill up notebooks with observations about the world while hunched over, writing at cafés, park benches, and . . . libraries.

In fact, I’ll bet if you look up right now and scan your own library—big or small—you’ll see one of these Romantic souls intently scribbling away, turning imagination into words.

It is this connection—between books that have already been written and writing that has yet to be turned into books—that sustains me, and I suspect too that it sustains many of your patrons.

It is also why my vision of the afterlife has always been dominated by a long table, a large quiet room, and infinite rows of books.

Please visit the Bantam Dell site to read an excerpt of Going to See the Elephant.