Have I told you how much I love Anne Ursu?

My friend, the author Anne Ursu, (I just love writing that!) just posted another brilliant opinion on her blog. Anne is the author of Breadcrumbs, a middle grade novel that I finally got around to reading. And I'm wondering why I waited so long. Reading Anne is always a lesson to me. I keep repeating to myself, "Why didn't I say/think that?" or "I wish I could write like that!"

Anyway, check out her blog for her latest thoughts on the Secretary of Education.

Vampire Bats at the Library

 

A Jen (the Goth Librarian) and Emma (her ghost sidekick) Library Story

            Jen locked the library door and walked back through the dark building to her office. The rumbling of the elevator and grumbling of the furnace, no longer bothered her as she walked through the old building.

She didn’t even jump when Emma, the Ghost of Librarians Past, materialized beside her. “Do you have tomorrow’s story time planned, dear?”

Jen gritted her teeth. The ghostly librarian might use endearments when she spoke, but there was nothing sweet about the way she nagged and commented on everything Jen did. Only last week, she’d appeared after a very successful teen lock-in to sniff her nose and say, “we’d never have teens running around the library in the dark in my day.”

A teen would never have dared breath in the library in Emma’s day!

Jen sat down at her desk and picked up the book for tomorrow’s story time; Bats at the Library by Brian Lies. She loved the cute furry flying mice the pictures depicted. They wanted nothing but to fly in to the library and read stories all night. A clunk up in the attic brought her back to reality. Obviously, the real bats who lived in the attic weren’t cute story lovers.

The clunk was followed by a few more. Jen got up and walked out into the dark library. She stood listening to the thump, thump, thump coming from the attic. If that was bats, they’d grown feet and were walking around up there!

She made her way to the stairs. She placed her right foot on the first step and cursed the architects who’d put the light switch up in the attic, rather than at the bottom of the stairs. “Emma,” she whispered.

“Here, dear,” a disembodied voice said beside her.

Great! The ghost didn’t even want to materialize. Whatever was up there, even Emma didn’t want to see it.

The third stair tread creaked. She paused and then shook her head. It was a just a squirrel. A squirrel with big feet. She paused on the top step, her hand resting on the knob. From the other side of the door, she didn’t hear anything.  Either whatever had been there was gone. Or it was waiting right inside the door.

She threw the door open and lunged into the room. A tall man stood in the middle of the attic, moonlight cascading in the window and gleaming off his pale skin. He turned slowly to face her, the light sparkling off his fangs. Vampire bat in the attic!

Jen wiped her sweaty hands on her sweater. Along with garlic and a stake, she’d left the Librarian’s Guide to Fighting the Paranormal in her office.

The vampire smiled, looking past her. “Good evening,” he said in deep sonorous tones. He sounded like James Earl Jones.

Okay, not just a vampire, but a clichéd vampire inhabited her attic. She followed his gaze. He was smiling at Emma, who had not only materialized, but was smiling back at him.

Emma patted her hair. The old ghost was actually primping for a vampire. When she stepped toward him, she walked with her hands behind her back.

The vampire reached out his hand to her. “It’s been a long time, Emma.”

Emma, her skirts swishing behind her, reached out her right hand to the vampire. “It has been Dmitri.”

He bent to kiss her hand. As he straightened up, she leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “And I told you, to stay away from my town,” she said, as her left had flashed out. She drove her number 2 pencil into the vampire’s chest.

He stood perfectly still, his mouth a red round “o”, his eyes wide. And then he slowly turned to sand, dropping into a little pile on the floor. A breeze lifted through the window and blew the vampire out into the night.

Emma walked back to the door. “Close your mouth, dear,” she said, as she walked by Jen. As Jen hurried after her, the ghost added, “I keep telling you, all the iPads in the world will never replace a good no. 2 pencil.”

In My Next Life

                We all have our addictions. Mine is checking the want ads looking for what I’ll be in my next life. Currently in the running are doing an animal act at the circus, being an ornithologist, and becoming an archer. (The employment opportunities may be limited on the latter.) But some days, I’m intrigued by the more mundane. Like recently, I saw this ad to work in the Continuing Education office at a college.  The job consisted of recruiting and assisting adults who were returning to college.

                I said to Bruce, “I could do that. I’m the poster child for returning to school as an adult.”

                To which Bruce answered, “You’re the poster old lady for returning to school as an adult.”

                Husbands! You got to love them, because the alternative involves jail sentences.

                I actually, for a brief moment last week, looked at degree programs wondering if it was time to go back to school. But looking through course requirements I realized I’d finally reached the age where going back to college has lost its appeal. It’s not that the memory isn’t what it used to be – although that’s true. Or that adult ADHD has taken hold and I just can’t hold one thought in my brain for that long. It’s that I’ve reached the age where I am no longer willing to have someone tell me what to do.

College involves requirements. And I no longer believe that what other people require is a necessity for me. At my age, when someone tells me what to do, I no longer jump to it with a smile. I’m practicing my baleful look, with a drippingly sarcastic, “You think so?” thrown in. Which is, I’m told, infinitely better than throwing things at people.

                But really – at some point in life it’s time to do what you want to do. Learn what you want to learn; the way you want to learn it; at the speed you want to learn. It’s called jumping through your own hoops.  

That’s where the library comes in. Libraries, since the beginning of time, have been about life-long learning. Life-long learning is fun. You get to control everything. Want to start a new business, learn to make cheese, write your memoir? You can find the information at the library. If one book is boring, try another one. Read it when you want to, where you want to (but remember no sand or water on the books!). Learn at your own pace, your own way.  At Burger King you can “have it your way.” At the library you can “learn it your way.”

I’ll let you in on a secret – when you are a life-long learner, if you aren’t totally enthralled with a book by the second chapter, the second page, or the second paragraph, you don’t have to finish it. At a certain age, you deserve to read what you want. And at the library, we’ll help you find it! So go ahead, take up dragon training. At the library you get to make your own curriculum.  

               

This Essay May not Save your Life, but a Poem Can

There are days when words fail me. Usually they occur when I hear someone say something that feels so amazingly wrong to me, I can’t believe anyone could ever think that. Some part of me knows there are all sorts of logical, thoughtful, calm things that could be said.  But, I’m so busy fighting the desire to use violent force, I can’t think. I can’t find a cohesive argument, because the only thing going through my head is “Don’t hit them, don’t hit them!”

I had one of these conversations with Bruce the other day. I was talking about a poet I know who does a “Poet in the Schools” program. She spends a week at schools throughout Central NY doing poetry workshops.

“What if the kids don’t want to do poetry?” Bruce said to me.

I resisted hitting him, despite the fact that he would never dream of saying “what if they don’t want to learn biology?” He still clings to the vestiges of early Quakerism that held fiction and poetry were “unreal” and therefore to be avoided.

That evening I was reading Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why be Happy when You can be Normal?, and found that some people can manage articulate, intelligent, and most important, peaceful answers to such comments. Why be Happy is Winterson’s memoir of her rather grim childhood. Adopted by a Pentecostal family, she grew up in poverty dealing with abuse from her adoptive mother. She left home at sixteen, kicked out by her mother because Winterson was gay.

Poetry and literature helped Winterson survive. Discovering T.S. Eliot set her on her own journey as a writer. She writes:

               

"I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

                So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

                It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place."

 

“A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is.” Reading that, I realized that when people say that poetry is unnecessary or unreal, they are thinking of poetry as flowery and sweet; missing the toughness of it. Poetry comes with sharp edges, cutting truths that crack us open. If you think it’s soft and flowery, maybe you aren’t reading the tough stuff. Or maybe like Winterson says, you haven’t had a tough life.

But what about all the kids that do? Have tough lives that is. If we reduce education to facts and figures, to whether a kid knows how to look up how thunderstorms occur and present a powerpoint presentation on it, or write a five paragraph essay on the life cycle of a snail, have we failed to acknowledge that living requires more than information? Have we failed children with tough lives, who need the raw language of poetry, a cutting metaphor for life, in order to crack things open and find themselves? Have we failed to provide a “language powerful enough to say how it is?”

“A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is.” It needs to be emblazoned on our schools and in our minds. If it weren’t so long and I wasn’t such a wimp, I’d have it tattooed on my arm. Like a good poem, it pulls me up sharp.

I haven’t always thought of poetry as a tough language. I think of swearing and yelling as tough. But the truth is – that truth is found in the subtle, sharp metaphor that arrows into my heart and soul and resonates with something deep in my core. Facts and figures don’t do that. Poetry, literature, a pointed metaphor, a character like me and yet not – those things help me find myself. And isn’t that, at least, part of what education is?

Yeah, we need facts and information – but we need to know who we are, what motivates us, and how to live in the world we are in, with the facts and figures we’ve learned.

I promise to keep working at not hitting the people who say poetry, fiction, and fantasy aren’t necessary or important. But I expect all those people to start listening to the “tough language” of poetry. Their lives depend on it.

 

 

 

My Untidy Mind

My office has been described as “cheerfully untidy.” I’m not sure what qualifies a mess as “cheerful.” Untidy is rather obvious.

It’s an odd state for someone who goes crazy over messy shelves and misplaced books. The fact of the matter is I’m afraid to put anything away. If I file something it will be lost forever.  I will be madly searching for the craft idea under ‘c’ for craft, or ‘p’ for program, only to discover two months later I’d put it under ‘k’ for kid’s or ‘s’ for summer reading. I need a cross-indexed catalog for my filing system that lists all the things I might have filed something under.

It’s easier to just leave it all on my desk. Somewhere in one of those piles is the piece of paper I saved just for this occasion. I just need to look through all the piles.

I’d like to say the problem is stress. Too much to do, too much to remember. But, I’m beginning to be afraid that the old mind is just not what it used to be. There’s just too much stuff in there. Adding something means, deleting something else. 

I used to refuse to have a day planner, saying if I had so much to do I couldn’t remember it all, than I was doing way too much. But now, I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do today, no less next week. People tell me I need an iphone or smartphone. I could do everything with it, call people, take pictures, keep my schedule. But really, I’m already forgetting things. Do I want my life organized on a device I might set down somewhere and not be able to find? And then there’s learning how to use it. I might need another degree just to access my calendar!

Despite that fact, I keep trying to cram more information into my head. I check out ten books a week, sure I need to read every one of them. And then I bring back nine (or sometimes, sadly more) unread, not having found the time to do more than read the inside flap or the back cover. My shelves are full of books I’ve been meaning to read for years and alas only half of them have actually been read.

A lot of people get rid of books after they read them. But not me. I hold on to them, sure I’ll need to refer to them again. But I don’t underline in books, or turn down the page corner. (Don’t even think about doing that to a library book!) So instead I write out quotes I want to remember in my journal. But years later, when I want that quote, I can’t find which of the journals filling my book case actually contain it. I started putting post-it notes in books, with my comments on the text. But unfortunately, when I go back I have no idea what the cryptic note means, or why I cared about that paragraph anyway!

Now, I’ve started using those little sticky arrow things that usually say “sign here.” Only they’re meant to point me to the best parts of a book, the things I want to remember. Last night Bruce, noticing one of those arrowy things on every single page of a book I was reading said, “Really, Priscilla, why bother?”

He’s right, of course and not just because I want to remember everything! A couple of years ago I read Marion Woodman’s “Dancing in the Flames.” I talked about if for months, reciting her ideas over and over. Last month, I thought I really needed to find those quotes again. I checked my journal sure I’d copied them down and couldn’t find them. So, I decided to re-read the book. Except there was nothing in it that vaguely sounded like what I remembered reading before.

“Are you sure it’s the right book,” Bruce asked.

“Of course, I am. It’s the only Marion Woodman book I’ve ever read.” He gave me the look, the one that says I may be losing it. But I’ve decided Marion just isn’t as smart this year as she was two years ago. I’m sure that has to be the problem.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste – but losing it’s pretty darn hard, too. But I’m sure mine’s not lost. It’s just cheerfully untidy!

 

Your Fictional Family

I was flipping through an old copy of Martha Stewart’s Real Simple magazine at the doctor’s the other day and saw a neat column. It was for the magazine’s book club and invited readers to write in an answer to the question, “what fictional family would you like to be part of?”

One of the responders said she wanted to be in Wendy’s family from Peter Pan that way she’d get to live in London, have a real cool dog and go to Neverland whenever she was bored. I’ve been thinking about what fictional family I’d want to be part of and just can’t decide.

First, I thought the Bennett family in Pride and Prejudice. I’d love to be Jane and Elizabeth’s sister, or friend. But I’m pretty sure the rest of that family would drive me crazy. And in fact I hate going to parties and talking to people I don’t know. So, how would I ever manage to spend my days going to balls and dancing and talking to people I don’t know?  I’d also be jealous of both of Elizabeth when she and Darcy finally get it together. But, I’d want the happy ending without all the heart ache in the middle.

Then there’s Theosdosia Throckmorton’s family in Robin LaFever’s Theodosia series.  Hanging out at an Egyptian museum all the time with absentminded archeologists for parents sounds like fun. After all the purpose of parents in a children’s book is to be gone as much as possible! Otherwise the fun can’t happen. And of course living in a museum is like living in the library. We can imagine all kinds of magical things happening at night when no one is around.

There’s the Weasleys in Harry Potter, too. That’s a fun and loving family who all get into enough trouble to make life entertaining. And catching garden gnomes always sounds like a great new pastime. But really, I want to be Harry, or Hermione, or Ron.

And then there’s Pippi Longstocking, whose father is lost at sea. Pippi basically doesn’t have a family, which means she can do what every she wants! So, again, it’s not so much Pippi’s family I want to be in, as I want to be Pippi.

Maybe the question should be what character do you want to be? Or even better, for us fantasy freaks, what magical talent do you want? I just read the Libriomancer by Jim Hines. The libriomancer is a librarian that can pull objects out of books and use them. He, of course, is a fantasy and science fiction fan so the objects he pulls out don’t really exist in the real world. So forget what fictional family I want to belong to or fictional character I want to be. What I really want is to be, a Libriomancer!