Dear Librarians, Like most lucky childhoods, mine was spent reading. Mostly this was because I enjoyed it but also, it was the only thing to do: my parents worked constantly, and as expatriate Americans doing business abroad, they believed that all meetings should take place in bistros. However, English language books were not as easy […]
Dear Librarians: You may not know the extent of your impact on someone when you make a reading recommendation or offer encouragement, but I am here to tell you that the librarians I’ve met throughout the years changed my life. An avid reader and writer since childhood, I spent many cherished hours at my local […]
Dear Librarians, My People, I owe you everything. I learned how to read in a library because I spent every Saturday morning there, usually by myself. Every Saturday morning, my father would announce that he needed to go to the barber’s. But since he was bald from the time I was born, I think what […]
I’m grateful to libraries, which have meant so much to me, in my development as a person and as a writer. I’m the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, and as a girl, I often felt torn between worlds. For me, books provided the explanations that my parents could not. I’d spend all afternoon at the […]
Like most writers, I’ve always been obsessed with libraries. My obsession extended to me earning a master’s degree in library science, publishing an article about zine collections in Public Libraries magazine, starting a zine archive at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and volunteering both at the library on Alcatraz(!) and my local […]
Dear Librarians, The day Toni Morrison died I was working an hour away from home, conducting meetings with a team of insurance professionals I’d managed for the best part of twenty years. I’d been balancing a double life, as a writer, the entire time I worked my full-time job. When my phone started buzzing, ringing, […]
Dear Reader, I’ve always loved heist stories: the high-octane car chases, the smooth-talking con artists, the crew that comes together against all odds. I’ve watched the Ocean’s movies more times than I can count. At the same time, they often feel like glimpses into another world, one that doesn’t always have space for people who […]
Oh hello lovely librarians, I was always told, quite clearly, that books were a child’s greatest treasure. I knew it because my grandfather had sold encyclopedias and we had been ceremoniously gifted volumes A-K before he became a paint can salesman instead. But the best part about books was that you could gain all the […]
