In the tradition of Alice Hoffman, Adriana Trigiani and Sarah Addison Allen, Sarah Creech's debut novel, Season of the Dragonflies, is beguiling. A story of flowers, sisters, practical magic, old secrets and new love, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I recommend you check it out. And lucky for you, it goes on sale today! Sarah stopped by to say hello.
****
Becoming lost in the stacks at the library became my precursor for becoming lost in the pages of a novel. I visited the small public library on Memorial Avenue with my single mother. We went multiple times a week. While she searched the stacks for the ten or more books she’d check out that day ( by nightfall they’d be strewn about her bed and on the floor like jacks) I had no choice but to play in the nearby stacks, touching the rough spines of adult books I was not allowed to read. Someday, though, I would be able to, my mother promised me, and maybe even write novels once I grew up.
My habit of running my palms along the spines of books and stopping wherever I had the impulse to stop followed me through all of my adolescent years, as I haunted the middle school and high school libraries. I discovered A Raisin in the Sun with this tactic, along with Fitzgerald and Henry James. I continued to let my hands guide me in the stacks during my college years when I could drink a cappuccino—nobody seemed to care about those cafe noises inside the library—and walk through the stacks in a languorous manner, letting my fingertips touch the spines of the titles. I found Faulkner, Welty, the Brontes, Richard Yates, the screenplay for Pretty Woman (the original does not have a happy ending) and other oddities this way. It’s that sense of suspense and surprise that I desire when I read novels. Libraries taught me this feeling first, however, by allowing me to discover books curated by someone else. What world would I find on the top, middle, or bottom shelf? Each trip to the library with my mother felt like a vacation we couldn’t otherwise afford.
I’m all grown up now and with a daughter of my own who’s about to turn five. She loves libraries too, but she’s growing up in a much different environment than I did. She lives in a big city compared to my hometown. We have twenty public library locations in Charlotte, NC, compared to the two I grew up with in Lynchburg, VA. My daughter has access to Imaginon, a large library facility devoted to children’s and young adult’s books. They have children’s yoga on Saturdays, a large train to climb on, a theater for seeing plays, and rotating installations for imaginary play. Right now they have a fairy tales exhibit where children can make shoes like the elves and try on slippers like Cinderella. They can dine like kings and queens. And when they’re done with all that fun, they can race past shelves of books on their way to other rooms in the library where iPads are attached to desks with learning games available at their fingertips. The resources at this library astound me. It’s a requirement that we read books when we go to this library, but that activity competes with a tremendous amount of stimulus. My daughter doesn’t get lost in the library stacks. She’s in a playground amidst the books, but books are no longer the playground.
Just to make sure she receives the old-fashioned library experience, I take my daughter to the library at Queens University where I teach. Recently, they moved the entire collection of books to the basement, in an effort to decrease the stacks and move to more digitized information. This frees up much needed space in a small library. North Carolina State University uses the bookBot robotic book retrieval system so that no stacks are visible. Books are kept in a climate-controlled storage facility. A robot retrieves a book for the reader within minutes, and the entire system uses a fraction of the space as traditional shelves. I understand the appeal. I wish our library had more books, as it is my main resource for researching the novels I want to write. However, I have a very hard time imagining a library where I couldn’t search for the books the best way I know how: browsing in person. Sometimes I don’t look up titles. I disappear into the stacks and let my intuition guide me. I found a Coco Chanel biography this way, and that text became an important resource for my novel Season of the Dragonflies.
I plop my daughter down in front of the small collection of children’s books, and she browses too. She comes away with books about geometric solids and African-American spirituals. It is this freedom to roam the books that made me love books and the place that housed. I hope my daughter will carry into her future the strong sensory memories of being at Queens, with the smell of dusty books and the quiet of a basement. I hope she’ll remember our time there together as playful, even though the book selection was small and the toys nonexistent.
I’m told by my librarian friends that going digital (and stackless) is the future of library spaces. I hope the American spirit of innovation will find a way to recreate the anticipatory feeling of browsing. Perhaps a 3D image of the stacks, one in which a reader can scroll with her finger as if she’s touching the spines along the shelf? Whatever happens, I hope my daughter will remember this feeling of chance and possibility whenever she enters that ever sacred space known as the library.
****
Thank you so much, Sarah!
– Annie