The Neverending Library Blog Tour

Fair warning... Most of this blog entry is a repost from a couple of years ago, so if you're a regular reader you may have already seen this. But, my friends over at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh are sponsoring a blog tour. It's called the “My Library Story” blog carnival, which will run between Sunday, May 18th and Saturday May 31st. You can read more details about it on their blog post "The Neverending (Library) Story."

I realized that I had already written about this! But, it's an opportunity to share it again with the legions of new followers I have made since then.

*coughcough*

If you have a great library story to share, now is the time to do so.

From here on out this post is a reprint:

I've been thinking about libraries recently, and how grateful I am that they exist. Reading and books are such a major part of my life that I simply can't imagine a world where they weren't readily available.

I grew up in the country. The grade schools I went to in first through third grade (in Nineveh and Rogersville, PA respectively), were small community schools. In Nineveh there were only three classrooms and three teachers for six grades. First and second grade kids shared a room and a teacher, as did third and fourth, and fifth and sixth. Neither of these two schools were big enough for an actual library. One day a week the Bookmobile would show up. This was the traveling library for the entire school district and I assume it spent the rest of the week at other grade schools. It was essentially a large motor home lined with bookshelves and books.

The librarian was a wonderful woman by the name of Mary Berryman. She was small built, with gray hair, catseye glasses, and a sweater held on by clasps. I know how amazingly cliché this description sounds, but it is the truth. When I was six I thought she was old, but she continued as the district grade school librarian well past the time I graduated college, so my perceptions are a little skewed.

As I've said elsewhere on this blog, I learned to read, mostly from comic books, well before I began first grade. Mom is an avid reader and instilled her love of books in me very early. Library day was my favorite day of the week.

I'm not exactly sure of the chronology of this, but I also remember the Library came to our community during the summer months as well, for a summer reading program. It's possible I went to the Bookmobile before I actually started school. Mom tells me that once when she took me I chose the books I wanted and when I took them to check out Mrs. Berryman asked my Mom if they weren't a little too advanced for me. Mom said they were what I wanted, and if they were too advanced, well then, there was something for me to learn from them. She continues the story that when we returned the books I couldn't wait to tell Mrs. Berryman all about them.

Mrs. Berryman guided thousands of students through the hallowed shelves of her library over the years, but I think it's accurate to say I was one of her favorite kids. Mom instilled my love of books. Mrs. Berryman and the school library facilitated my access to them in a way my family could never have afforded. I was voracious (still am).

Oddly enough, the first three real books (chapter books instead of stuff written primarily for kids), did not come from the library. Mom bought me a copy of the Howard Pyle version of The Adventures of Robin Hood. I inherited copies of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from my older brother. I had read all of these by the time I finished third grade.

By the time I entered fourth grade the school district had built a brand new school building in Graysville, PA and consolidated several of the smaller grade schools in this new location. Mrs. Berryman finally had a permanent home for her library, and for the first time I had access to one every day. I couldn't begin to tell you the number of books I read there.

In addition to the library we were periodically given a catalog from Scholastic (or the 1970's equivalent) that we could order books from. I remember getting several in this fashion, including my first copy of All In Color For A Dime, a collection of essays about comics of the Golden Age. This was probably my first, conscious knowledge of comic book history, and definitely my first exposure to the concept of comics scholarship (just as an aside... I loaned my copy of this to the Chatham student I'm advising this semester because one of the essays ties in specifically with the topic she is writing about for her thesis.)

My original copy, with this cover, is long gone.
A revised edition came out a few years ago.

In seventh grade I went to the West Greene High School building (there was no separate middle school then; grades seven through twelve all wandered the same halls and used the same facilities). Of course I very quickly made myself at home in the library there and became a very familiar face to the new librarian, Mrs. Hildreth. The books housed there were aimed at an older audience of course.

During my teen years, in addition to the books I read from the library, I began to buy a lot of cheap paperbacks: Westerns, spy novels, and men's adventure stories with guns and girls. They were the kind of books that were probably inappropriate for my age and certainly not available at the school library. Eventually I discovered Science Fiction and Fantasy and was somewhat redeemed.

During my last year in high school there was a day when the seniors went to work as an assistant with one of the grade school teachers and help with their classes. I couldn't think of anyone back at Graysville I would rather spend the day with than Mrs. Berryman. She proudly introduced me to her classes as someone she was proud of and who had a bright future, because as she told them, I had always read books.

Mary Berryman did eventually retire and lived a long life. She's gone now but shines in my memory as the absolute Platonic ideal of a Librarian.

During college and grad school I had access to libraries of course. I used them primarily for research and class projects, but there was always the reading for pleasure aspect of it. I read a lot of Hesse, Henry Miller, Proust, and Kerouac while at Edinboro.

Somehow though, once I was out of school, I simply didn't go to a library very frequently. I still read, but I was buying most of my material by that time. I felt like I needed to own everything I read. One of my high school teachers, Will Hinerman (more on him in another post), had a large library of books in his home. There were always books around when I was growing up, but I don't think the idea of a personal library ever crossed my mind until I saw his. It became a goal. To supplement the books I bought at the big chain stores and local book stores I haunted used book stores and flea markets. I suppose I have a little bit of the hoarder in me.

So over time I accumulated a lot of books, a fact that was brought home to me a couple of years ago when, for the first time in many years, I needed to move them.

I started going back to the library regularly when I started working in Oakland. The main branch of the Carnegie Library is around the corner from my store. Over time I have realized I don't need to own everything I read (I would already be out of room in my house if that were the case). I'm there frequently and take advantage of many of their services. I have come to know many of the librarians there, and they are all exemplars of the Berryman credo.

There are two people in my life who I consider close, dear friends who are librarians, one at the Carnegie and one at a university library far away. One of them tells me that every day in the stacks she hears the books sing to her and feels it is a sacred duty to take care of them. The other one refers to the library as a “Temple for the Secular Soul.” I love that they both use the language of the sacred to refer to what they do.

For most of recorded history the ability to read was reserved to a special few. It was one of the things only the very privileged ever learned. The idea of archiving the collected knowledge of the world, its history and its stories, is one of the greatest ideas in our history. Today, when the skill of reading is taught to everyone, I fear it is all too often taken for granted. The ability to read was kept from the lower classes, slaves specifically, in an effort to keep people uninformed and more easily controlled. Ideas can be dangerous things, especially to the status quo. Today, when information is at our fingertips, when the wisdom of the ages is readily available, far too many people choose to remain willfully illiterate. Books are gateways to other worlds, to other ways of thinking, to knowledge and wisdom, to entertainment and enlightenment and empowerment.

In a recent conversation with one of my librarian friends she told me that someone had accused her of reading too much. My immediate response was to say that there's no such thing as reading too much. This was based on my own belief that there are far more books I want to read than I will ever be able to read in my lifetime. After giving it some more thought I do want to amend my initial kneejerk reaction. It is possible to read too much if you never actually go out and have a life as well. Your life is your story; you are writing your own book every day. It should be filled with something other than reading. But reading provides guideposts and maps for the kind of life you want to live.

In spite of the pages I devour, I don't think I live to read.

I read to live.

Writing Process Blog Tour

My friend Leigh Anne, over at her Be Less Amazing blog, participated in the Writing Process Blog Tour. She was invited to do this by local Pittsburgh Poet Angele Ellis (you can read her responses HERE). Leigh Anne made a more general call for anyone to participate. I'm doing the same. If you want to be a part of this, answer the questions below and link back to me. I'm curious to see what other people have to say.

What Am I Working On?

Way too many things, probably. I'm currently working on a paid professional comics project involving the Holocaust in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Holocaust Center and the Pittsburgh Toonseum (this is my first public announcement of this). I serve on the steering committee as a comics historian as well. The overall project involves what will be a traveling educational art/history museum installation called “Chutz-Pow!: Real Life Superheroes of the Holocaust.” The idea is to focus on real people who participated in genuinely heroic acts in the midst of this tragedy. We're using the metaphor of the superhero to do this. Many of the earliest comics creators were Jewish and had connections with European Jews during this period. Many served in the military in World War II.

My primary responsibility is writing a 24 page comic book that will be given away as part of the project. I'm telling the stories of five Pittsburgh residents who fit the description of a “real life hero of the Holocaust.” This has involved a tremendous amount of research. The biggest challenge of this for me is trying to fit these tremendous stories into four to eight page vignettes. I'm lucky to be working with four local professional comics artists. This is shaping up to possibly be the biggest, most important writing project of my life so far.

The installation will premiere at the 2014 Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival. I will be making more specific announcements about this project as the details develop.

In addition to this project I occasionally blog at two different sites, this one and another one over at Word Press. That ones, called Masks, is the home of my very specific ramblings and thoughts on comic book history and serves as a first draft space for what may someday be a book on the topic. This one is home to a wide variety of topics. I write the occasional book review for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Then there are my novels. I have four complete novels available, and I'm currently about 50,000 words into the next one (though it seems to be taking awhile).

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

In the course of submitting my novels to agents and publishers I was told many times that while they loved my writing style (one agent called it “lyrical”), the problem was that they didn't know how to market it because it didn't fit comfortably in a specific genre. Three of my novels (I leave Bedivere out because it is pretty specifically Arthurian fiction), straddle the line between Horror and Urban Fantasy. The tropes of each of these are certainly present, but it's difficult to pinpoint either. When I was submitting I would craft my pitch either way depending on what the publisher was looking for. I've had others refer to my work as Dark Fantasy, Slipstream, Magical Realism, and Speculative Fiction. Okay...

So what makes my work different? While I deal with elements of Horror my work isn't as dark as a lot of that genre. Even in my darkest moments I am still inspired by heroic fiction, so I guess that's where the Fantasy comes in. There is a message of hope in my work that that is absent from a lot of Horror, without ever slipping into “the hero who will save the world” cliches. I'm not very interested in the classic monsters of Horror (at least in writng about them). It might be more commercial but the world has enough vampire and werewolf and zombie fiction right now, and don't get me started on the overdone Lovecraftian, tentacled horror from beyond. There's way too much of that to dig through. There are so many other mythologies and folk lore to mine for ideas.

Why do I write what I do?

I've always been drawn to the fantastic. I learned to read from comic books, so the idea of heroes living in a world of monsters and aliens and super powers is my default worldview. I like the metaphor that these genres provide. When we write about monsters we're writing about the monstrous in ourselves. When we write about heroes we're appealing to our own better self. Genre fiction allows us to exaggerate these things and explore the ideas in sometimes deeper ways.

And, simply because I enjoy these genres myself, I find them more fun to write.

How does your writing process work?

When things are going well on a novel I sit down at the keyboard and write. I try for at least 1000 words before I will let myself walk away. There's no magic to it other than showing up for work. I usually have spent a lot of time thinking about the project and what comes next, and I will have a few notes, but in general I'm not a big outliner or planner. Within certain parameters I want to be open to let the story take me where it will. Characters frequently say and do things I never planned until the moment I wrote the lines. When that happens it is usually a sign that the story has become a living thing and I need to listen to what it's trying to tell me.

The process works better for me when I have some kind of writing routine in place. Recently I have not been showing up to work as often as I would like, at least not on my novels. As I stated above I have been spending a lot of my creative time on the Holocaust project. I'm also teaching a class this semester and a lot of my energy has gone toward that. These are not meant as excuses, simply the reality of time management at the moment. I made a conscious decision to put a hold on the novel I'm working on because I knew these other commitments would eat into my time and energy. The fear is always that once I get off the novel-writing horse it can be difficult to get back on.

But I write because I write. It's a big part of what defines me.