1. A Love Story
“So,” the agent said, “I like your stories. Are you working on a novel?”
I was sitting in the venerable Dey House, the 1857 Victorian home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, meeting with another agent – the fifth or sixth I’d met since I’d arrived in Iowa City. She sat in a chair, facing me, across a large wooden desk, the question lingering in her eyes.
I’d known the question was coming. Every other agent I’d met had come around to the same thing, eventually.
The answer – the truth – was that I was not. Writing a novel. Perhaps eventually I would. But at the time, I was writing stories, exclusively. Even worse, the stories had nothing to do with each other. They had no re-occurring characters; they were not linked, even thematically. I had a vague notion that one day, the stories would miraculously interweave into a collection that felt somehow organic. But try telling that to an agent, whose job it will be to actually sell your book. The starry light goes out of their eyes. They hand over the obligatory business card, ask you to keep in touch.
No, I thought, eyeing her across the desk, I do not have a novel.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
She leaned forward, intertwining her fingers on the blotter.
“What’s it about?”
Here, I paused. There was still time to save myself. It’s about nothing. I don’t even have an idea. I haven’t written a single word. I don’t know what came over me.
But I had come across something interesting the week before, while researching a short story.
“It’s about life saving stations. Funded by Congress in the 1800s?” I sat back, hoping to discern some flicker of interest in her expression. “They were a precursor to the Coast Guard. Red houses that dotted the Atlantic Coast, manned by young men – kids, really. They’d stand watch in a storm, waiting for shipwrecks.”
Her eyebrow went up. “Tell me more.”
“Well, when they spotted one, they’d head out in a small dinghy – a rescue crew. My novel’s about a saving station crewman on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. A terrible shipwreck in a violent storm.”
I swallowed hard. Clearly, she could see right through me. My career as a writer was over before it’d even started.
“It’s a love story,” I added.
“I love it!” she said.
And that was that. I’d been writing short stories seriously for half a dozen years. Revising, polishing. Sending them out. Tallying rejections. Revising some more. I’d published one story by that point, with a second forthcoming. And she was all but ready to represent me on the basis of a few-sentence novel synopsis I’d concocted right there on the spot. Practically from thin air.
2. A Testing Ground
In my Akron, Ohio, home office, I have a square certificate hung in a clear plastic frame:
Certificate of Award
This Certifies that
Josh Rolnick
Of
Lafayette Intermediate School
Has been awarded this certificate for
Creativity in Writing
Date November 10, 1980
I keep this on my wall to remind myself that I have identified as a writer, and loved creative writing, for a very long time.
I am not, however, one of those writers who has always wanted to be a writer. My mom will tell you: I wanted to be an entomologist. As a teenager, I joyfully fed crickets to Michelle, my pet tarantula. For years, my greatest wish – the one stroke of good fortune that seemed greedy even to hope for – was that my uncle, a professor at Rutgers, would somehow manage to score me a giant cockroach from one of the science labs on campus. While other budding writers were, I suppose, holing up in the local public library, I was dropping fat-bodied ants into spider webs and turning my fingers into landing pads for monarch butterflies.
My flirtation with insects ended finally after I enrolled at Rutgers College, signed up for “Bugs and Man,” and learned that practical entomology had more to do with pesticides and bug-resistant crops than the gory beauty of a wasp laying her eggs inside a paralyzed cicada.
I signed up to work for the Daily Targum newspaper, covering volleyball, writing sports columns, and eventually editorials. It was an outlet for my creativity, which led naturally to a career in journalism. I started off as news reporter at The News Tribune in Central Jersey, where I had the occasional opportunity to write off-beat features and even colorful reflections on major news events. Five years later, though, after taking a year to study and live in Israel, I found myself on the overnight shift at the Associated Press’s Trenton Bureau, rewriting radio copy for the morning drive. It was a great job for a budding reporter, with ample room for advancement. It wasn’t – in any sense that mattered to me – creative.
Sitting alone at 5 a.m. with a S’mores Pop-Tart and a bitter cup of coffee, waiting for the newspaper guy to arrive with the dailies, I’d contemplate a different future. Could I push the reset button? Could I go back to the kind of creative writing that had first animated me?
Of course not, I reasoned. Because creative writers wrote novels. And how in the world does one up and write a novel?
I’d read novels before. Each one seemed more daunting an undertaking than the next. How did David Bradley write 432 pages of The Chaneysville Incident? How did Stephen King write 1,090 pages of It? How did Victor Hugo write 1,260 pages of Les Miserables? In French?
Yes, these were inspirational to read. But to write? Novels were unwieldy, unmanageable, inexplicable doorstops.
And then one day, my sister gave me a gift: The Best American Short Stories, 1997.
Stories? I’d read very few.
“The Short Story is a difficult literary form, demanding more attention to control and balance than the novel,” writes E. Annie Proulx in the introduction. “It is the choice of most beginning writers, attracted to its brevity, its apparent friendliness (a deception) to slender themes, or even its perceived function as a testing ground before attempting the five-hundred-page novel.”
Here was a new option. A possibility. It was easy to ignore her notes of caution: “difficult,” “apparent,” “perceived.” This bright orange book seemed to offer nothing less than the suggestion of a path. A way forward.
I quit my job, enrolled in Johns Hopkins’ part-time writing program in Dupont Circle, moved to Washington, DC. I found a new job and, at night, I began writing stories.
3. A Scheme of Ascendable Rungs
One of the first things I read when I got to Hopkins in the Fall of 1998 was an essay by Richard Ford in Harper’s Magazine, “First Things First: One more writer’s beginnings” (August, 1988).
In it, Ford describes how he started out writing and dutifully sending short stories to literary journals. The conventional wisdom (in 1970, but it’s no less true today) was that you wrote stories, sent them out to lit magazines, and gradually, as your writing improved, you moved up to the ladder. You became known. Eventually, if you persevered, you might land in the Atlantic or New Yorker. Ford describes sending off his stories, fretting about the “level” of each journal. (“Maybe the Cimarron Review is just too good for me at this point.”) He kept a careful log, “where this story was sent and when.” He was rejected again and again, at one point by a journal called Fur-Bearing Trout (whose editor chattily told him the stories “need not be about fish”). Finally, Ford had a story accepted by a journal in New Zealand. He briefly considered moving there.
But he was discouraged by the steady stream of no’s – stories that “aren’t right for us” or that “showed promise” or that “would surely find a home elsewhere.”
“I began to resent what seemed to me the unprovable premise that there existed any useful structure or scheme of ascendable rungs whose rule was that my stories weren’t good enough at first but might be better later on,” he wrote, “and that I should have patience and go on surrendering myself to its clankings. What I felt was that I wanted my stories to be great stories, as good as could be written. And now. And if they weren’t (and they weren’t) that was my own business, my problem, not the concern of some system for orderly advancement in the literary arts.”
“What was out there,” Ford concluded, “is not a structure for writers to surrender to, but fidgety, dodgy chaos. And our privileged task is to force it, calm to our wills.”
His decision: quit writing stories; start a novel. “A novel would take… years; I could go more slowly; there was more to work on, get better at. No demoralizing rejections would crash into my mailbox every morning.”
It’s a powerful essay. Here was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose work I greatly admired writing openly and honestly about his humbling start. His conclusion made sense. Only, I knew myself. I couldn’t sequester myself away for the years it would take to write a novel. I agreed with Ford’s assessment: Writers wrote not to “aggrandize themselves” or “just to be published,” but rather “to be read” – to reach people. And I didn’t want to wait five years for readers.
What this meant was that I would have to try to get better – to improve as a writer – in the public eye. Writing stories. For better or for worse, I surrendered myself to the system’s clankings.
4. Crowdsourced Feedback
I too dutifully kept a notebook, recording where I sent my stories, when, and what, if anything, they sent back. This notebook – I still have it, and, despite all the advances in technology since 1998, maintain my records in it – turned out to be a literary lifeline.
My notebook tells me that in January, 1999, I sent my first story, “Flip-Flops,” out to 12 journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and the New Yorker. (I viewed the top literary rung the same way my mom viewed the Lottery: Hey, you never know.) In time, I received 11 post card rejections (“PC” in my log). Thrillingly, however, someone at Glimmer Train had checked the box: “Thank you for letting us read your work. We will not be publishing this story, but we enjoyed it and would like to see more.” The same person had also underlined the words “Thank you.” A new notation was born in my log: the “PC+”.
I went back to work. Just about a year later, I sent out another story. Again, I sent it to the New Yorker. This time, someone wrote on the post card rejection: “Strong writing. Thanks.” Then, in November, I received a two-sentence letter from C. Michael Curtis at Atlantic Monthly: “‘A New Year’s Resolution’ starts out promisingly, but we think it veers into improbability (emotional) and something like melodrama. You’re awfully good, however, and I hope you’ll try us again.”
It’s no exaggeration to say it: This letter kept me going for years.
That I never would break into Glimmer Train, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker is almost beside the point. These responses – and many others over the years (Laurence Goldstein at Michigan Quarterly Review, Ben Fountain at Southwest Review, and Bret Lott at Southern Review have been particularly kind) – whether actual letters of encouragement from editors or unsigned “send again” scribblings, were oxygen for me.
Moreover, they were a useful tool. I was able to mark my progress (or lack thereof) from one draft to the next based on the number and tenor of these notes. Keep going, they said. Or, if a story came back with only “PC’s”: Something’s not working.
It was crowdsourced feedback, if you will, from a knowledgeable crowd – editors, assistant editors, and even interns – who truly cared about stories, and, in many cases, were making them their life’s work.
5. ‘Beyond Entertainment’
Short stories, meanwhile, had become a passion.
In The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, Robert Coles quotes one of his students, who, after reading a John Cheever story, feels as if he’s “been given the chance of a lifetime: to change trains, change my destination…”
“Novels and stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course,” Coles writes. “They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers – offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might make soundings.”
The more stories I read, the more I began to sense their unique potential to work in this way. It has something to do with the very brevity of the form.
“In the short story there lingers a faint sense of example, a trimmed, useful tautness implying a function for the reader beyond entertainment,” Proulx writes in her 1997 introduction. “The reader comes to the short story subliminally expecting enlightenment; that is, we accept the idea that there is some nugget of embedded truth in a short story…”
So it was that – when I read the second-to-last line of Alice Munro’s story, “Dimension”: “You don’t have to get to London?” – my eyes brimmed with tears. Not just for Doree, who has finally found the strength to stop visiting her husband – murderer of their three children – in a London, Ontario, prison. But also for myself: I, too, could reject the insanity in my life; the people who were sapping my strength.
I began clipping stories – every story I read – and filing them in manila folders under the author’s name, so that, in a moment, I could retrieve them, reread them, share them.
Today, I have hundreds of stories in my cabinet, filed alphabetically from Adichie to Wolff. Thumbing through, I find James Turner, Jr. and Mather; the disintegrating Ms. Swenson and the eight-year-old boy who finds the wig in the Dumpster and puts it on his head.
My kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers.
6. The Publication that Wasn’t
My first acceptance came in the form of a letter from a Washington, DC-area lit mag in March, 2000. I read the first few words, “We are pleased to inform you…” and I thought: I did it. No one can ever take this away from me.
I promptly called Harvey Grossinger, one of my writing teachers at Hopkins.
“Where did you say it’s getting published?” he asked.
I told him.
“Which story?”
I told him.
He paused. Congratulated me. Then he said he was going to give me some advice – advice I didn’t have to take; advice he was probably going to regret giving me. He knew the story I’d submitted, and he felt that if I kept working, kept revising, I could aim higher. The story could do more for my writing career.
“You’re suggesting I pull my first acceptance?”
Yes, he said. Reluctantly and with some trepidation.
But I trusted Harvey. And so I made one of the toughest calls in my life. I told the editors I wasn’t finished with the story. Apologized profusely. Pulled the story. Started reworking it. The following month I sent a revised version, with a new title, out to thirteen more publications. Mostly PC’s in response. But encouragement came from Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, and, again, from C. Michael Curtis.
Keep going.
In March 2001, I sent out another version – to seventeen journals. Fourteen PC’s. But Indiana Review, Texas Review, and Boulevard liked where I was headed.
Keep going.
Almost a year later, in February, 2002, I sent it out again – to five places. I got PC’s from all but one. My log records that, in June, more than two years after I’d pulled the story, I got a call from Arts & Letters. Robert Olen Butler had selected “Big Lake” for their annual fiction prize, beating out 12 finalists.
Arts & Letters flew me to Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, and put me up in the Antebellum Inn, where I met and had breakfast with Butler (who would quickly become a valued mentor and advocate), as well as the poetry winner and judge. I read the prize-winning story (my first reading) at Lockerly Hall, an 1852 antebellum mansion on a hill with six soaring Greek Revival columns that seemed to welcome me into some kind of formidable, rarefied fraternity.
I was lucky. And I was hooked.
7. Talk on Paper, Page After Page
“Pulp and Paper,” my debut collection of short stories thirteen years in the making, is coming out this fall. I’m thrilled, mainly, that these eight stories – six of which were published in literary journals over the years – will at last find a wider readership. I’m also relieved: that I can finally stop working on them. At long last, I am moving on to a novel.
As I make this transition, I find myself thinking of another extremely powerful essay I read years ago at Hopkins – a three-page brief by Betty S. Flowers, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, entitled “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process.”
In it, Flowers identifies four different personas who come into the writing process sequentially. Writing begins with the madman, who brings ideas and energy to the page, uninhibited. Next comes the architect, who looks unsentimentally at the madman’s “wild scribblings,” selects a fraction, and arranges those nuggets into paragraphs. Along comes the carpenter, who nails the ideas together at the sentence level. Finally, in comes the judge, who inspects the work, critically.
Writers get tripped up, Flowers suggests, when their judge gets in the way of their madman.
“So start by promising your judge that you’ll get around to asking his opinion, but not now,” Flowers writes. “And then let the madman energy flow. Find what interests you in the topic, the question or emotion that it raises in you, and respond as you might to a friend – or an enemy. Talk on paper, page after page, and don’t stop to judge…”
To this day, it remains one of the most liberating things I’ve read about writing. And it’s always been perfectly suited for stories. I have never written an outline. Never plotted my stories in advance. I don’t do research until my characters teach me what I need to discover. I start with the madman’s creative spark – an image, a voice, a bit of dialogue, an emotion – and I see, over twenty-five or thirty pages, where it takes me.
Stories, for me, have always started in this fidgety, dodgy chaos. My privileged task now is to see if, over the length of an entire novel, I can force that chaos, calm to my will.
Bonus Link: Ten Things I’ve Learned over 12 Years of Sending Out Stories
Image of the author via Margaret Rolnick
I don’t want to put words in Alan Jacobs’s mouth, but I think his suggestion is true inasmuch as my birth—both the circumstances of it and my genetics etc.—had much to do with my making those chance library discoveries that led me to my illustrious career as an MFA candidate and anonymous Harry Potter fanfiction writer.
One of the first things I remember about books is that the mechanics of reading came easily to me, when almost nothing else did; that, I think, more than the accessibility of books, brought me to literature at a young age. “I can read faster than you,” not better but faster, was one of my first weird attempts at positive self-identification as a beaten-up primary schooler.
Of course that doesn’t diminish the affecting personal anecdotes you’ve tied together here—the 13-year-old stranger is particularly sad to follow through into her alternate universes, especially the one where she becomes Harvard’s first professor of Steve Himmer studies. As for the first story, I can’t believe your local library is in the habit of giving four-year-olds the third degree—are we really so flush with would-be library users that we have to turn some away at the door?
Beautiful article. Heartbreaking stories. I want the mental images of your daughter trying so hard to write her name on the card and both the girls’ crestfallen faces when they were disallowed from reading as they wished (sure, your daughter got to read the books because you had a library card, but what about kids who walk to the library themselves – and, anyway, she wanted her own library card! How admirable of her! What kind of library turns that down. Any free speech-loving librarian would find a way around that inane policy!) I remember having moments that remind me of what happened with the 13-year-old girl when I was in elementary school – picking out and then being told that something by Judy Blume or Jack London was “too old for me” (London, I remember specifically, and I was not only furious about having a librarian determine my reading level but also because I was pretty sure it had something to do with my being a girl – I’m in, like, second or third grade here); my response was usually, “But I read [x not-kid’s classic] this summer,” which did not work.
I always thought the librarian was telling me the books were too difficult for someone in my grade to literally read and comprehend. It was only after I started working for American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which co-sponsors Banned Books Week and co-runs the Kids’ Right to Read Project that it more likely had to do with the books’ contents. I think this article will be my morning ABFFE tweet.
For your daughter and the other children in the area, I might suggest contacting the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and asking them if such a policy is legal or compatible with the Library Bill of Rights, to which I kind of think the library is beholden if it’s an ALA member, and most libraries (or librarians) are. That library is discouraging kids from reading, and if kids who don’t read aren’t getting much help with learning to write anything, even their own names. I guess kids whose parents don’t take them to the library have to wait until they’re 5 or 6 to start reading? Good luck with your standardized test scores, graduation rates, crime rates, and, oh yeah, unemployment rates, state.
I work for a public library and never have I heard of such a backwards policy as this. What is the point of such a rule? At our public library, we even give cards to babies from birth to 4years of age (one made specially for babies, with a cuter design), and at 4 they get a normal adult card just like anyone else. No hoops to jump through.
Great article! I was moved by both your stories about young readers. I also think you’re absolutely right about the fact that readers are made, and not necessarily born. The best is example is that so many people of my generation weren’t readers until they discovered the Harry Potter series, and then moved on to other books, seeking a similar pleasure and eventually learning to appreciate books for more than just the thrill of a good plot. It’s important that kids and teens have access to people and places that stimulate their reading habits and give them that first opportunity to read, which can then develop into a true love of books.
Cheers!
CAFS
Mr. Himmer, this is a really lovely article; very evocative. I have a few quibbles with the examples (although not with your underlying message): Are you saying that the women who called books “tricky” were rarifying them? I’m not so sure I would agree with that–books ARE tricky these days for girls around 13. I’m a passionate book person both personally and professionally, and an equally passionate supporter of free speech, but as a parent I still look at it as my job to limit my kids’ exposure to subject matter that isn’t age-appropriate, whether in a book or a movie or a video game. (When I say “age-appropriate” I don’t mean that in a generic sense; I mean appropriate given what I know about my own kids’ individual readiness to explore some adult topics.) In practice, I can’t remember a single book I’ve said “no” to, but I can appreciate the hesitation. I do think some books for young teens these days are a bit “tricky” for scads of reasons. It is precisely because I so believe in the power of books to influence our thinking as well as open our minds that I wouldn’t jump to judge those women. (Someone in that girl’s household appears to have “made” her into a reader already, right?)
Even the library policy doesn’t strike me as rarifying books; I see it another way. When your daughter does learn to fit her name on the card (or turns five), I bet that trip to the library will be one of the proudest, most memorable of her young life. The folks at that library seem to believe that the card signifies a certain level of maturity and responsibility, and that policy can be seen as a way to increase the value of both the card and the books for young children. Of course there’s a good argument to be made that perhaps it’s not the library’s job to parent, but in this case as well I’m not so sure the policy rarifies books as much as acknowledges their value.
Anyway, thanks for this great piece of writing. I’m inspired to address it at more length myself! I’d love your thoughts on my thoughts.
Beautiful column. Striking images. And a powerful moral.
loved the article – any booklover would be moved by it.
I definitely agree with your premise about reading being an encouraged act. Sure, there are always going to be sensitive souls, linguistic prodigies or just good old fashioned curious minds who become great readers in enviornments where there aren’t a lot books around (which I think would support Alan Jacobs’ argument). But- and this is a huge but- encouragement is all-important. After all, you could have parents whose shelves are filled with stuff and forbid the children to come hear them…
Great piece. “One of the first freedoms I had”- way to put that freedom to use!
Both of my daughters learned to write their names with one thing in mind: to get their library cards. They only needed to sign their first names, I will always cherish their cards (they will always too), on the back their sweet scrawl big round choppy letters, their names, their cards, their keys to the libraries treasures!
I dream of putting books in any/every child’s hand at that moment, that exact moment when their soul is ready for it –whether for a book in general, or in particular.
Oh, how the world can change with a book, with a library, with a word.
My word for you is THANKS. (I am going to use paper and print this article to keep.)
My sympathies to your daughter. When I was a child, my public library required us to be able to sign our name–in cursive–to get a library card. So I made my mother teach me, and got my library card when I was about 5. However, my elementary school teachers spent several years crossing out my name on papers and hand printing it above because I wasn’t supposed to know any cursive yet. Heaven help our children from power-tripping authority figures.
Bravo! And thank you for this article! Your central point is essential in this day and age.
Many of my experiences as a child reader mirror yours. The discoveries I made on my own, and knowing that my parents trusted me to make them, formed much of the foundation on which I built my sense of self.
I also appreciate that you don’t want to judge the guardians of the young teenage girl. It’s always tricky when you’re dealing with materials that may not be age-appropriate. Still, though – I just can’t get behind the idea that the best way to deal with these materials is really to our children’s exposure to it and shelter them from it. Mainly because the world doesn’t actually work that way – our kids see all kinds of things we don’t even know about. Kids are too curious by nature, and far too clever not to find their way to some of these tricky materials despite our best efforts to prevent it. If they’re going to get exposed it, then it seems to me that best thing we can do is to do is to try our very best to make them ready.
That’s what my parents did for me. They knew the risks of letting me explore on my own – and lord knows I got into plenty of stuff that wasn’t age-appropriate by today’s standards! -but they also believed that it was the greatest skill they could teach me regardless of those risks. And I always knew that I could go to them whenever I saw or read things that I didn’t understand or that disturbed me. Any question, any idea, any issue or strange feelings these things engendered in me – no matter what, my parents would help me to find my way through it, to answer my questions and deal with the issues without flinching. Nothing I could ask them was “bad” and I didn’t need to be embarrassed by any of it. And guess what? On those occasions when I wasn’t able to come to grips with something I’d read or seen, I would invariably choose of my own free will not to seek out that material anymore.
I can never thank my parents enough for doing things that way! This strategy did me more good and helped to make me a stronger, more adaptable person than any attempts they might have made to protect or shelter me. I can’t help but think that the impulse to shelter our children has more to do with our own adult squeamishness than with our children’s ability to learn and cope. I think our kids can be stronger than that, if we raise them the best we can.
Sorry, the sentence in the third paragraph is supposed to read, “I just can’t get behind the idea that the best way to deal with these materials is to LIMIT our children’s exposure to it and shelter them from it.”
I hit “Submit Comment” too soon!
Our local library does not have a minimum age. The child can sign their own name on the back or someone can sign for them, but regardless, they get a card!
Wow, as a librarian I find that your daughter could not get a card horrifying. We give cards to babies when they are born http://sclibs.net/Kids/borntoread.aspx. And books to take home and keep forever too.
This article brought back some memories for me of getting my first library card at age four and writing my first name and last name around the wrong way, but getting away with it. The weekly visit to the library became a wonderful time of discovery and freedom of choice.
I had hoped to keep the card, but an overzealous librarian cut it in half ten years later as they were updating their cards. I remember asking tearfully if I could keep the bits.. but no, ‘not our policy’ was the answer… It can’t of damaged me too much though, ‘cos now I’m a librarian! (not the make you cry type ;-)
It’s a very well written piece and agree with the sentiments expressed .. However I like the fine distinction that one commentator Jody Reins makes in her “quibble” as she calls it, that the two examples the author quotes as “acts of rareifying” are wonderful story hooks but not the best illustration of the point.
Not every library / book store is a ‘careful selection’ of books .. trashy material snuggles with ‘classy’ ones. The act of reading is one thing, .. but what happens in the formative years and mind of a child given to the pleasures of reading requires a little active guidance … NOT dictatorial but some mediation and negotiating .. through BOTH the trash and the classy and regular fare.
I truly subscribe to the fact that just as what you eat builds your body, what you read builds your mind, thoughts and person – books ARE POWERFUL .. and one needs to learn how to equip themselves with the tools of judging their value.
Except of course, that’s not *quite* what Alan Jacobs said, is it? In fact, that’s really not at all close to what he said at all. In trying to make your point even more powerful you’ve actually weakened your case quite considerably by incorrectly quoting, making me wonder what else you’ve made up.
Hmmm it’s great that this Dad is so focused on making books available to kids. But I was once a 4-year-old and had to practice long and hard to write my name on the library card. And the main thing I remember is the huge feeling of accomplishment and pride when I finally got that card, my scraggly writing beautifully entombed in official-looking plastic. I was so grown-up, I could write, I had my own card, I could take out BOOKS!
It was one of the many hurdles that come with learning, and I, like other kids, like kids are meant to do, took on the rest of the hurdles too: the toughness of learning to read, figuring out math, learning to share, etc.
During the time it took me to learn to write my name on the card (and during the agonizingly long two-week period I had to wait for the now-signed card to be properly printed up in plastic) my parents took out books for me on their cards. To be perfectly honest, for all practical concerns, I didn’t really need my own card. It was more a symbol of my increasing abilities and independence than anything else (and kids love such symbols!)
As to the girl who was refused a book because it might not be age-appropriate, I sympathize with the authors sentiments–it really annoys me when kids are quarantined into the (age 4-7) groups; I think it’s good to encourage kids to take on stuff that might be a bit above (or a lot above) their current level of understanding. It shows them that there’s lots of room left yet to explore, and they can come back a couple years or months later with a huge sense of pride because what once was barely comprehensible is now so easy.
At the same time, I was refused a lot of books by my parents because of sexual content/violence, etc, and it didn’t seem to hurt me. I generally found a way to smuggle them in under the covers eventually anyway, and it gave me a sense of both proprieties/rules/boundaries–and how to break them.
I do entirely agree that closing libraries is despicable though–just because books are going digital doesn’t mean we still don’t need librarians and places of learning to gather in. How are we going to reopen them/build new ones/make them better complements to the many new ways of accessing information? I think such issues would as worthwhile of discussion as how to protect our kids from the harsh, philistine librarians who think that children can actually learn to write their own names and should, perhaps, not have access to porn.
I’ve worked in and with many public libraries over the years and I’ve never heard of one where the child needs to be able to print their name before getting a card. Most of the time, the parent or guardian just has to fill out the application and sign it so they are responsible for the child’s materials. I hope this library considers changes their policy. Libraries are all about access and especially for children access should be as quick and painless as possible.
I read something age-inappropriate when I was a kid. This was before the Internet of course, and I was curious about what naked people looked like. Well, the only place I could find them was in my dad’s medical library, and they were pretty hideous pictures. Not normal naked people. But you know what? It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I knew what I was looking at.
My great joy as a child was taking the bus to the next town over where they had a library and spending hours there. Long live the book!
On the article and on the first comment displayed: it’s very hard to grow up a book lover without books around. It reminded me of me and my elder sister: both my parents were eager readers, and my dad used to read Jules Verne to us (instead of “Sesame Street” or “Fluffy Teddy Bear Takes the Bus”) every night. I began reading and writing short stories (about ponies and the like) when I was five, and I loved getting dirty in those used Buenos Aires bookstores I searched with my mother (we were rather poor) looking for something new to read.
My sister, though, wasn’t at first very fond of reading as a kid. The strategy my parents found? They kept an open mind and invited her to explore different kinds of books so that she would find something she considered interesting. They kept the bookshelves open and kept inviting her to the family visits to the used books store, inviting her to pick any book she liked while they got something for themselves. During her early teens, she did find something she liked: first, the quite unsophisticated romantic short novels by Corín Tellado, later good vampire stories… Eventually she developped a literary taste and she keeps reading a lot. If my parents hadn’t done that back then, if they had thought she wasn’t born with it, or that she was meant to read more “appropriate” things, my sister would most likely have given up on books long ago.
Wow! I was really tired when I posted that comment. So many incomplete thoughts and sentences! Sorry for subjecting everyone to that!
Excellent article. You made some good points about reading and readers that I think we need to listen to. I personally would do anything to not disappoint or obstruct that first contact with a potential life-long reader.
It’s lovely how you took the time and effort to help your daughter get a card, and sad she couldn’t get her own. This brings back so many memories of myself as a young reader – being told I wasn’t old enough for To Kill A Mockingbird (and ironic, when you think of Scout being punished by her teacher for knowing how to read, essentially), the one and only time I forged my mum’s signature because I needed it to borrow a book (how weird is that rule?), and the sense of accomplishment when I reads my first book without any pictures at all. (wry smile) Also, staying up late under the covers with a flashlight to read.
I think reading should absolutely be encouraged – readers are made, not born. It helps to have books casually lying around the house, littering counter tops and tables, but a good library really helps. And yes, the younger the better.
So says Steve Himmer but he fails to consider the millions of children born into poverty who cannot become readers because their parents don’t read; because books are not found in their home; because the library is not where you go to get a book, but where you go to use the internet for the assignment that can only be done online and yet you don’t have an internet connection at home. Yes, it’s lovely that Steve’s 4 year old wants to read. But had Steve been born to a poor family and had no access to Tintin would he have been a reader? A writer? Let us not forget that for the 1 in 4 children in the US who live in poverty, an “accident of birth” has a profound effect on not only a love of reading but basic literacy. Statistics show that children who start school already behind in literacy never catch up.
I don’t mean to detract from Steve’s main point here, that all children should be encouraged to read, but it simply is not as easy as that.
I remember as a little girl wanting to borrow something from the adult (as opposed to children’s) section of the library. My mother had to write a note agreeing to let me borrow a book by Charles DIckins. Fortunately, libraries have changed, hardly a shush to be heard these days!
Alan,
Please do not think that all libraries are like that. At my library also, anyone of any age can have his/her own card. We too issue them to babies.
Please tell your daughter that we cherish her (and you!)
Sincerely,
Kathleen F. Lamantia
Canton, Ohio
oh
this is lovely, steve–
thank you–
gary
When my oldest daughter was about eight, and had already been reading a while, I decided to try and subtly influence her taste in authors and classics. As Tom Sawyer and white washing fences, I made a point of her seeing me happily read ‘Of Mice and Men (I thought it was of a level where she could grasp most of the message). It worked and she devoured it. To this day, and she is 29 and a successful architect, we share books and reviews on a regular basis. It is one of the most enduring and rewarding aspects of our relationship.