On Libraries: Another Speech
and an article about the West Virginia University MFA program
Hello all!
I hope you’re having a nice holiday season. I’ve been working off and on on my Red Heads novel, about the traveling women’s basketball team in the 1930s, but today, I wanted to share two nonfiction pieces.
The first is in the November/December issue of AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle. I was asked to write about the proposed shuttering of the West Virginia University MFA program as well as West Virginia University Press. It was interesting to write, more reporting than I’m used to, but I enjoyed working on it, and I hope it spreads the word about the austerity going on there. If you have a subscription, you can find it here: https://writerschronicle.mydigitalpublication.com/. I also posted the first couple pages above, and if you email me, I’m happy to send you a copy.
The second, a speech, I posted below. I was asked to give it at the Friends/Foundation holiday fundraiser for the Oregon City Public Library, where I worked part-time from 2016-2019. I discussed how libraries have influenced me and read a few excerpts from my linked collection, Bratwurst Haven (a great present for anyone in your life who likes short stories!).
I usually detail compensation on this Substack, so: for the article, I was paid just shy of $800, and for the speech $200.
Soon, I hope to share some of my favorite small press books I read in 2023. Until then, be well.
Sincerely,
Rachel
Good afternoon. Thank you to Greg, Denise, and Karen for inviting me to speak, and thank you all for being here. I really appreciate your support of the Oregon City Public Library. When I worked here, I used to catch glimpses of you all meeting in the community room with Mo, but I never met you all directly. It’s very nice to meet you all now.
I want to start with describing my own experience with libraries, how they’ve always meant so much to me. I grew up near the Hillsdale branch of the Multnomah County Library system in Portland, Oregon, and I can remember standing at the front counter and signing my own library card as soon as I could write my name.
I also remember the tire swing in the park across the street from the library where my siblings and I pushed each other until we felt like vomiting; the kind and reserved children’s librarian who for some reason let me show my rabbits as an extension of the summer reading program; the day at age eight that I walked toward the children’s section on the back wall of the library, saw a book on the second-to-bottom shelf, and my life changed. The book was Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.
I don’t remember where I read it: maybe in a clearing between bushes at the back of the library park, maybe in the magnolia tree in my parents’ side yard, maybe on my bed on the top bunk, but probably in the blue recliner in the living room where I tuned out family noise to focus on reading.
I do remember I cried while reading the final paragraphs. As Cassie says, “I cried for things which had happened in the night and would not pass. I cried for T.J. For T.J. and the land.” It was the first book over which I cried, and I don’t cry over much. If a book could make me to see these characters and this place so clearly, then books were magic, I decided. And I’ve never stopped thinking that.
After childhood came the Knight Library at the University of Oregon, where I conjugated Russian verbs on a study room blackboard; the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where I checked out dozens of books at a time, which I read while trying for the first time as an adult to write seriously; the Montessori Free Library in Forks, Maryland, where I had a part-time job cataloguing books; the Wise Library at West Virginia University, where I had a part-time job shelving books until 2 in the morning; the Louisville Public Library in Colorado, where I used the free internet to talk to my friend on Skype once a week; my current local library, the Multnomah County Midland branch, where I browse regularly; and this library, the Oregon City Public Library—my mom’s childhood library—where I worked as an on-call library assistant.
When I worked at the reference desk here, when the computers were still upstairs, I used to run into patrons who didn’t have internet at home, who came to the library to use it. I even helped one guy in his fifties register for health insurance for his job online, a guy who said he had never been on the internet, that this was his first time. I am a bit of a Luddite myself—I got my first smartphone in 2019, and before that, for six years of my adulthood, to save money, I didn’t have internet in my apartments, so I personally understand some of these patrons, and I can’t understate how important public libraries have been to me personally as an adult, not only to find life-changing books, as I had as a kid, but also to do daily tasks, like writing emails, finding jobs, and connecting with friends. I even applied for the OCPL library assistant job at a public library—the Capitol Hill branch of the Multnomah County system, when I first moved back to Portland.
I thought of people like I had been when COVID started and public libraries were closed down completely. Honestly, if I hadn’t had access to internet at libraries in places across the country where I lived that I didn’t know anyone, I don’t know what I would have done. However, like many libraries in the early days of the pandemic, OCPL continued to provide Wifi access outside the building, and also pivoted to online programing. Although I quit my library assistant job right before COVID spread across the United States, I continued to receive OCPL emails and was impressed with all of the online programs the library offered to the community at that time, from yoga to arts and crafts to story time. During the pandemic, public libraries continued to take their role as a community space seriously—for a while, they just became more of a virtual space.
As an on-call library assistant, in addition to helping patrons find books and use the internet, I issued library cards, shelved books, reported a guy harassing library workers through phone calls, and listened to a guy who liked to rail against Clackamas County income taxes every time he checked out books at the counter. I helped run the summer reading program, signed up people for community classes, taught patrons the new checkout system, and a couple times witnessed a planned visitation of a baby daughter and the mother who had lost custody. At the time, the visitation was just another thing that happened during my workday, but in 2021, I ended up writing a visitation at a library into “At the Lake,” my final story I wrote for my second published book, Bratwurst Haven. I’m going to read to you all a few minutes of that story about a librarian and a patron. It might feel a little disjointed because I’m jumping around, reading only one thread of the story, but I think you’ll be able to follow it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Meryl was wearing a new red sweater the day a young woman, holding a detached car seat, asked for a key to a study room she’d reserved. An even younger and smaller woman—almost a girl—with bobbed brown hair who looked familiar stood behind her, arms crossed, one earbud in. The baby was squawking, and Meryl hoped these young women wouldn’t assume that the study rooms were soundproof. Sound resistant, yes, but Meryl had had to tell tutors and students to lower their volume. But she handed over the key without saying a word, and continued to browse her hard copy of Library Journal.
She looked up when she remembered where she’d seen the girl: at the lake a month or so ago, at the end of the fall colors. Or rather the marshy pond adjacent to the lake. The girl had been sitting on a wooden bench looking out. She’d been pregnant then, Meryl remembered—a belly that look enormous on such a slight figure—which was why Meryl looked up and through the glass walls of the study room to the baby who must be hers. It was a legal visitation, Meryl realized. People sometimes came to the library for them. The girl was still not holding the baby, just standing there, looking at the child. The other woman lifted the baby and placed it in the girl’s arms. The girl immediately sat, as though the baby was heavy, then touched her nose to the baby’s head. Meryl looked away, embarrassed, as the gesture seemed so intimate, and also contrasted the listlessness in the girl both at the pond and a few minutes ago in front of her.
…
Meryl looked into the study room again. The girl was holding the baby closer now, looking down at her, but her shoulders twitched, then hunched whenever the young woman said something. It reminded Meryl of the nervous energy of the squirrels at the lake, their twitching if you came close, their bolting if you came even closer. The girl wanted to bolt with her baby, Meryl could see that. What had this frightened girl done to end up here?
….
The girl continued her visitations at the library through the winter. Once a month, then every other week. She became more comfortable interacting with the baby, though she still seemed reserved, even hesitant outside the study room. The baby went through a louder period in January, and once Meryl had to ask them to quiet her down or leave. The girl immediately tried to hush the baby—probably because if Meryl had kicked them out, she wouldn’t see her child again for two weeks. By March, the girl was arriving before the baby, asking for the key from Meryl to let herself in. Meryl and the girl became familiar to each other but didn’t chat; the girl simply asked for the key while keeping one earbud in, then Meryl gave it to her.
…
In August, Meryl was standing in her canoe within the cattails on the north side of the lake, craning to see what she thought was a nest, when another canoe, paddled by three tween boys, smacked into her. Meryl stumbled and tripped over one bar in the canoe and crashed into the other. “Oh my god,” one boy said. She felt pain in her face, her chest, and her ankles, which she knew she’d reinjured. “Is she knocked out?” another boy said. She mouthed a no, then maneuvered into the middle of the canoe, where she sat on the bottom in a puddle of water. “You OK?” the third boy asked. She shook her head and asked them to pull her canoe to shore. At the dock, two teen boys who worked in the boat shed pulled her out. It was all she could do not to cry out at the pain. Sitting on the dock, without thinking, she called Rick, but hung up when he answered. What could he do for her from there? She called Susan, then another friend, but couldn’t reach either. Teens, families, and couples obliviously walked by her to board a canoe or paddleboat. Every time the dock bowed from their movement or weight, her whole hurt body quivered. And then the girl from the library was there, looking down at her.
“Are you OK? Do you need a ride?” she asked. Meryl nodded. Another, taller girl stepped out from behind her. They helped her hobble to an old green Honda. At the urgent care only a few minutes’ drive away, they brought out a wheelchair and pushed her in, but by the time she’d stood, braced herself against the check-in counter, and looked over to say thank you, the girls were gone.
…
“I won’t be here the next time you visit,” Meryl said on her last Wednesday at the library as she set the key across the counter. The girl was coming every week now. It was the third semiconversation Meryl had had with her. “My husband and I are moving to Arizona for our retirement.” The lie was slight but there.
“It’s warmer there,” the girl said.
“I wish you the best,” Meryl said. For some reason, she felt tears rising. It was strange. She pursed her lips, controlled her tear ducts and face.
The girl looked surprised at the attention Meryl was showing her. “Sometimes that’s all you can do. Wish someone the best.”
Meryl looked down at her catalogue, her mouth twitching, willing the conversation she’d unwisely initiated to be over.
The girl put a small, smooth hand on top of Meryl’s vein-ridden one. “I wish you the best too,” she said.
Meryl looked up, but the girl was walking away, her eyes on the glass-walled room where she’d soon meet her daughter.
Meryl was on a break when the girl left the library, and two weeks later, she was en route to Sun City. She never saw the girl again, but sometimes thought of her.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I thought this story portrays a professional yet intimate relationship a library worker can have with a regular patron. To coworkers, maybe Meryl called the young woman the “girl who comes for visitations” just as we had names for certain patrons when I worked here, like the “the guy who checks out a hundred DVDs right before closing on Wednesdays” or “the lady who always has a bunch of library fines.” It’s true that library workers are constantly helping patrons, but as this story shows, sometimes the patrons can help us, too.
I wanted to return briefly to the library book that changed my life: Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. I didn’t grow up around Black people, and southern culture and Black culture in general was something I learned through books before living in a predominately Black city of Baltimore as a young adult. I was also raised in a conservative Christian environment, and it was later reading another Black American writer, James Baldwin, from books I checked out from the library, who would help me question Christianity’s stance on gay people. Unfortunately, Mildred D. Taylor and James Baldwin are both authors that have had their books challenged historically, but even more than usual lately, in both schools and libraries, which makes me angry on both a personal and general level. Personally, it was reading Taylor and Baldwin, and also a huge variety of other books, often found in libraries, that gave me the freedom to imagine different and more open ways of living in and of viewing the world, and ultimately allowed me to differentiate myself from both peers and authority figures, to choose who I wanted to be and what I wanted to think, and I wish for every person in the United States to continue to have that kind of opportunity, to have access to all books so they can decide for themselves how they want to think and live—and I’m very grateful for the librarians at the Oregon City Public Library and across the nation who continually and fearlessly champion both intellectual freedom and privacy for all readers.
And so we see that the library is a safe space both on the physical and exterior level—for people who need to rest or to use the internet or to find community—but also on an intellectual and interior level, for people who want to read outside of what they have had access to at home or even in their schools. And library workers play a huge part on both levels: they often help one patron find a warm bed for the night and with the next patron, give them a book that changes their philosophy or even their life.
I often say that I think the public library is the most democratic place in our society because it’s the only space that anyone from any background can walk into without expecting to be asked to pay. And with the new initiatives that Greg spoke of—the outreach vehicle, the book locker, and students automatically receiving library cards—I feel like OCPL is taking that democracy out into the community, is telling people that they don’t need to always come to the library, but that the library will come to them. And I think there are some community members who need that, who wouldn’t or couldn’t be associated with the library without initiatives like these. So thank you for being here to support them.
Sometimes it was difficult for me as a library worker amid day-to-day annoyances to see the difference I might make in someone’s life. I remember we used to issue so many cards some days at the front desk that it became a chore more than the magical experience it was for me when I first received my library card. But I tried to remind myself that you never know who you are helping to sign up for a library card, to use social or community services, or to find books. A couple years ago, before my paternal grandma died, she told me proudly that she was the first person in her family to have a library card. She said she used to play alone in her front yard, up in Aberdeen, Washington, where her grandparents raised her, and an older neighbor girl would often come and talk to her, and, as she said “took an interest in her.” One day the older girl decided to walk my grandma down to the Aberdeen Public Library, to sign her up for a library card. My grandma would go on to be an avid lifetime reader, whose son, my dad, was the first in his family to graduate college, and his daughter, me, became a writer. And that is just one of many stories that libraries workers—and supporters and members of the Friends and the Foundation—are part of, but may never know.
So I want to thank you again for supporting the Oregon City Public Library, and all public libraries, and thank you again for having me here today. I hope you have a happy holidays.