Yannick Murphy is the award-winning author of The Call. Her latest book, This is the Water (on sale 7/29) is a fast-paced story of murder, adultery, and parenthood involving a swim team of teenage girls, their morally flawed parents, and a killer who swims in their midst.
Today on LLF, Yannick talks about her extensive love and experience with libraries:
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I grew up in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and my local library was the historic Jefferson Market Library. Styled using gothic architecture, complete with a clock tower, and stained glass windows, it used to be an old courthouse, but in my mind it was as magical as a castle. It had wide stone stairs whose steps spiraled to the upper floors, that I spent many an afternoon running up and down and testing out my voice, and listening for an echo, that when it came back to me was, for some reason, so reassuring.
There was the reference room in the basement, which used to be a holding room for inmates. I can remember my sisters and I daring each other to go down to that dark section, and then scaring each other by running down the stairs to where the sister was who had accepted the dare and screaming at the top of our lungs.
Best of all, though, it had a great collection of children’s books, and I would imagine that beautiful library had a lot to do with my fondness for books and my eventual love of writing.
As I grew older, I volunteered in my school libraries. I would arrive early, before school started, just so I could help process new books and shelve books. In college, I also worked at the library. I remember going for the job, and the head librarian said that I first had to take a shelving test. He gave me thirty or so cards, and asked that I put them in correct Dewey Decimal order. He then said to come into his office and tell him when I was done.
He left, and closed his office door while I sat at a library table with the cards in front of me. I started wondering how once I finished all the cards that he would check all of the cards to see that I put them in the right order. I figured that if I were him, I would just write on the back of the cards the numbers 1-30, so that I could easily check if the test taker had ordered them correctly. I turned over the cards. Sure enough, on each of them, in the corner, written in faint pencil mark, was a number. I put them all in order in a matter of seconds, then I went and knocked on his office door.
“I’m done,” I said. “What? So fast?” he said. “That’s impossible,” he said.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell him that I had discovered his method for checking that the cards were in the correct order.
“In all of my fifteen years as a librarian I have been using these same cards to test students for this library job, and you are the first person who has ever thought to check the back of the cards.” “Good, so I’m hired,” I said. “Not just yet,” he said.
He gave me a set of new cards that had no numbers on the backs of them, that I had to put in the correct order. Doing that took me some time, but it also took him some time to correct them.
Eight years ago, when we moved to Vermont, I took a job teaching library in the local elementary school. This was a great job, as there is nothing more enjoyable that reading books to little kids. Some of my favorite books to read to them was “Are You My Mother?” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” because when reading the parts of the baby bird or the baby bear I would use this strange voice that sounded like a child with a New York accent who had just inhaled helium.
Where else can you emit such an awful sound and have a rapt audience at the same time? Teaching library was a blast, but then the school decided that it needed the library room as a classroom, and the book shelves were cleared out, and stuck into the hallway, and scattered through out the building, and Library is no longer taught at the school, and students no longer take out books. What a shame! What has the world come to? I thought, but of course there is no answer to that question.
Our small town libraries are precious to me. In my book “This is the Water” I mention how the town that the main character lives in is wonderful and safe, and I state how the librarian of the one room library keeps a barrel full of oyster crackers in the library, free for the taking, and how he’ll even deliver a book you’ve put on hold to your house if it’s on his way. This is a true part of my novel!
Some of the other local libraries we use even call us to remind us when our book is overdue and when our book on hold has arrived. The libraries are all small; they don’t even have a detector at the exit, whose alarm would sound if you walked out of the library without checking out a book. The nicest, sweetest, retired women work at the front desk, who are extremely slow at checking out books, and I swear, I have only ever once, being very late to pick up my kids, walked out of the library with a book that I didn’t check out. And yes, I did return the book a week later. But shh, please don’t tell. I will never, ever do it again. The guilt is too much!
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Thank you, Yannick. Be sure to download an egalley of This is the Water on Edelweiss.
– Annie