This blog post comes from the Library's 21st Writer in Residence, Meg Files. In it, she reflects on her time spent supporting writers in our community.
I was a reader long before I was a writer. I had Pat the Bunny in my crib. My mother read Betty MacDonald’s Nancy and Plum to my sisters and me annually for at least six years, and we loved our parents all the more because every year we ran away from the orphanage and slept in barns. She took me to the Washington Square Library in Kalamazoo every Saturday, where I moved from the YA section to the adult shelves and progressed indiscriminately through the alphabet, and where I began in a secret pocket of brain cells to imagine my own stories. I loved the gray cardboard covers of library books, the crinkly protection, and the paste and thick paper smell. Years later, I checked The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out of the Kankakee Public Library and read it to my little boy who perhaps loved his parents more because he got to run away with Huck. I’ve been a card-carrying frequenter of libraries in six states, one territory, and three countries.
So when I found out I would serve as Pima County Public Library’s Writer in Residence, I knew I had come home.
In my weekly one-on-one consultations at Quincie Douglas and Wheeler Taft Abbett Sr. libraries, I met with writers of speculative fiction, memoirs, novels, a mental health workbook, poetry, life stories and personal essays, travel writing, a book about earthquakes and water in Arizona, and children’s stories. I met Michelle, a newcomer to Tucson, writing a very lively memoir. I met Matt, writing about his long-ago orphanage memories. I met Kazime, a neurologist writing Korean/Indigenous poetry. What were these writers seeking? Motivation, advice, encouragement, guidance, connection, craft help.... and mostly, I think, someone to say that what they were up to was worth the time putting pen to paper and fingers to keyboard.
When I was that young library girl, beginning to write, I told nobody. It was, after all, too grand a plan to be writer. (So I told those who asked that I wanted to be a concert pianist. Yeah, so much more achievable). And so I believe I could understand and appreciate the doubts, the desires, and enthusiasms of my consultants.
I hope I offered help in how to get started with writing, how to go forward, how to revise, how to find a publisher. Mostly, I found myself giving two pieces of advice that are likely to lead to the freshest, most original work:
- Write as if no one’s going to see it. (This is liberating. No one’s looking over your shoulder. It’s just you and the page.)
- Put it all in, whatever shows up in the drafting, al the details, all the free associations, all the tangents. No judging or editing here. (After all, you can always take it out later.) You’ll surprise yourself with new connections and understanding.
I loved my three writing workshops — “How to Be an Original Writer,” “Read it and Weep,” and “Says Who? Point of View Choices in Writing.” Thanks to the writers who gamely tried my writing exercises. Yes, there were some strange points of view, and yes, there was some weeping.
I read for the reason I write: I am mortal. Books give me thousands more than my one little life. Books and storytelling make me a shape-shifter, and I slip between centuries and slide into impossible skins. I know that my single suit of skin won’t see 2050. But the solid libraries, are, in my scheme, close to immortal, and I am comforted as I am by nothing less, that our human desire to create will endure. Deep thanks to all the librarians and writers I met during my residency for this inspiration.
Now I’m heading back to the library to pick up a new book that’s on hold for me, James by Percival Everett, and I’ll be off on another raft down the Mississippi with Huck and Jim.
