Please welcome today's avid reader, Julia Drescher.
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Both a Dress and Not a Dress
by Julia Drescher
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About Julia Drescher: Julia is a poet, writer, editor, and librarian living in Colorado. Learn about her projects here:
Showing posts with label reader. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reader. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Book Your Stocking 2023 with Julia Drescher
Sunday, May 16, 2021
Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (May 16, 2021)
Welcome to Sunday! Here's this week's installment of Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee, in which I read good poems by other people while we all wake up.
Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (5/16/21)
Poems read:
- XXI. by Wendell Berry (Sabbath Poem)
- Keyfood by Audre Lorde
- Water by Porsha Olayiwola (listen to full poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LPCoHERA3g)
- Duty by Natasha Trethewey
- The Decision by Jane Hirshfield
- Note by Maya Jewell Zeller
- Tree by Jane Hirshfield
- Like a Cat by Laura Cronk
- XXII. by Wendell Berry (Sabbath Poem)
Monday, December 17, 2018
Book Your Stocking with John Kenny
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| Book Your Stocking 2018 |
Book Your Stocking: December 17
For those celebrating the pagan, religious, or some mix of Christmas, we've now entered the last full week before that big day. So few days to write that book you want to give everyone, but enough time to order a book someone else wrote and hide it in your favorite person's stocking or under their pillow or wherever book-surprises happen where you live.Here to recommend such a book is John Kenny, all the way from Dublin.
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| Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector |
- Find Hour of the Star at your local bookstore.
- Discover Hour of the Star at your library.
- Learn more about the author here.
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About today's reader:
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| John Kenny |
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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors:
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Book Your Stocking with Michael Noll
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| Book Your Stocking 2018 |
Book Your Stocking: December 12
It's the twelfth day of Christmas, and one of my truest book-loving friends is here to share the book he'd be most pleased to pull from his stocking this winter.
Please welcome today's reader, Michael Noll.
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| Heavy: An American Memoir |
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon (2017)
I can't remember the last book that I've finished and immediately thought, "I need to read this again," but that's the case with Kiese Laymon's memoir Heavy.
He writes about weight, food, and his childhood growing up the brilliant black son of a brilliant black mother who was a university professor but often scraping by (and sometimes not).
The book intentionally cuts across the usual narratives of bootstrap self-improvement found in such stories and is written in one of the most captivating voices in current American prose (which is why the audiobook was named the best of the year by Audible).
- Find Heavy at your local bookstore.
- Locate Heavy at your library
- Learn more about Heavy at the publisher website (Simon and Schuster 2018)
- Discover the writer Kiese Laymon at his author website.
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| Michael Noll |
About today's reader:
Michael Noll is the author of The Writer's Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction and short stories that have appeared, most recently, in Crazyhorse. He edits the craft-of-writing blog Read to Write Stories and works as the Program Director for the Writers' League of Texas.
Thursday, December 6, 2018
Book Your Stocking with Regi Claire
Book Your Stocking: December 6
For as much of December as we can fill, writers and readers--nay, book lovers--are sharing the book they would love to find in their winter stocking this year. So far, contributors have shared a book scheduled for publication, a book that may not be a book, a book discovered on the radio, and now, today's book is a book that somehow fell between the spines of all the other books she's read so far.
I'm happy to welcome writer Regi Claire back to this year's edition of Book Your Stocking.
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| Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe |
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1994)
- Find Things Fall Apart at your local bookstore.
- Locate Things Fall Apart at your library.
- Learn more about Things Fall Apart at its publisher's website (Penguin Random House).
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About today's reader:
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| Regi Claire |
Regi Claire is a Swiss-born novelist and short story writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has had work included in Best British Short Stories and is a two-time finalist for a Saltire Book of the Year award. Learn more about Regi, her books, and upcoming events at www.regiclaire.com
Monday, September 10, 2018
2018 Summer Library Series: A Chinese Laborer, a Mural, Carlos Santana, and My Hometown Library by Donna Miscolta
Autumn may be reaching into these last weeks of Summer, but this year's Summer Library Series continues. Please enjoy this reflection by Donna Miscolta.
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A Chinese Laborer, a Mural, Carlos Santana, and My Hometown Library
by
Donna Miscolta |
| Library turned Arts Center, National City, CA |
Each Saturday after catechism class, our minds numb with doctrine, my siblings and I crossed the street to the public library. It seemed not a coincidence that our weekly visit to a place of books would follow something religious and utterly rote. True, there was something holy about the library, its orderly rows of books, the expectation of silence, the rules of checking out books like a liturgy, the fines for late returns like a penance. But liberation was what the library offered – from the memorized answers to questions about God and creation, which opened up space for stories and imagination and dreams.
We moved to National City the summer before I started fourth grade. Library visits soon became a ritual. It gave our parents an extra hour without us in the house. It made us feel grown up to be someplace unsupervised except by the shushing librarians. In all those years, while we read story after story, I never gave a thought to how that library came to be, how it had its own story.
The library was on 12th Street and sat on the northwest edge of Kimball Park, named after Frank Kimball, who, according to a local historian, purchased the Rancho de la Nación, a “barren” Mexican land grant. Nice to see that “barren” is in quotation marks, an acknowledgement that it was not actually empty or unproductive, just absent its indigenous inhabitants who had been driven inland onto reservations. Also, the name reflects the long history of Mexico’s claim to the land.
The library had its start in 1884 when Frank Kimball moved his personal book collection into his National City real estate office. His Chinese workman Ah Lem lent a hand. Kimball’s diary contains entries such as these:
“Ah Lem at work on library and on bookcases.”
“At work on 2nd bookcase for Public Library.”
“Ah Lem hauled 3 loads of books to the Library rooms in my real estate office.”
Um, it seems that Ah Lem was doing an awful lot of the work. I’d like to offer my personal gratitude to Ah Lem for his labor in creating the first National City public library.
In that children’s library, I read the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books by Betty MacDonald. Another title that I remember was a book called Three Wishes for Sarah, which I checked out multiple times. Recently, I searched for and found the Kirkus review, which summed up the book as “A somewhat saccharine flavor for a story with no particular significance.” It was a book about a girl who saves a small child from drowning. A girl hero, which I must’ve found to be of particular significance.
When I turned twelve, on the cusp of junior high school, I was allowed to borrow from the adult section of the library. I remember checking out Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, William Faulkner’s Light in August, and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. I checked them out multiple times. Because of the language. Because of the story. Because I don’t remember women writers or writers of color being terribly visible on those shelves.
As we got older and reached confirmation, we ceased going to catechism classes. And so ceased our regular trips to the public library, our devotion over.
In the 80s, several years after I had moved to the Pacific Northwest, the flat, bland design of the library was improved with the addition of a mural, one that I never saw, since in all my return visits to National City I never had reason to visit the library. I had not yet achieved the age of nostalgia.
Journalist Daniel Hernandez wrote about his memory of the mural:
“I remember a huge mural loomed from behind the library’s reception desk, depicting scenes of Mexican American life in the San Diego area in the late 1970s and early 1980s: a quinceañera celebration, students lifting up their diplomas, a backyard carne asada, a news reporter interviewing a vintage car enthusiast before the painted pillars of Chicano Park. The colors were rich, the images drawn with an appealing cleanliness, the lines easy to follow.”
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| The library mural by David Avalos |
The old public library I had grown up in was converted into an arts center. Its original ranch style is still recognizable even with a multistory addition that serves as its entrance. A couple of murals decorate the façade. One depicts a pair of birds dancing a jarabe. The other is of a young Carlos Santana, a psychedelic peace sign with hearts and doves emanating from it, and these Carlos Santana words: "The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace. Welcome is spelled out in metal-sculpted letters.The façade of the new, state-of-the-art library is graced in multiple languages with these words by Jorge Luis Borges: "I always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of Library."
The new library is where my books When the de la Cruz Family Danced and Hola and Goodbye, both set in a fictional town called Kimball Park, reside. It’s where Paradise and the imagination meet.
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This week's library author:
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| Donna Miscolta (photo by Meryl Schenker) |
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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series:
Monday, August 27, 2018
2018 Summer Library Series: The Missing Library by Rajia Hassib
Please welcome novelist Rajia Hassib to the 2018 Summer Library Series. In this week's reflection on childhood and the library, Rajia takes us to Egypt and the library she missed by several hundred centuries.
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The Missing Library
byRajia Hassib
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| Rajia Hassib as a child |
Like all avid readers, I, too, mourned the great library that I grew up believing Caesar had burned to ashes in 48 B.C., though I would later learn that the library suffered several devastating fires and that its destruction happened over several centuries: a slow, painful death rather than extinction in one glorious flame. Still, the end result was the same: my home city of Alexandria, Egypt, once housed the greatest library in the world, and now that library was gone.
Even more painful than this knowledge was the absence of any other lending libraries that served a child reader. Alexandria in the 1980s, back when I was discovering the joy of reading, did not boast a single free-standing lending library that I knew of; and its many smaller libraries, located in various cultural centers, including the one where my mother worked, catered mainly to adults. I saw them as musty, foreboding places where ten-year-old me was not allowed. I distinctly remember one day when I accompanied my mother to work and, in the middle of her work day, walked the long corridor of the cultural center and all the way to the double doors opening up to the library. I remember standing at its doors, taking in its rows of shelves laden with books, then turning around and walking away. This was not a place I felt I was welcome.
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| Rajia as a teenager (age 16) |
My love of reading flourished thanks to my parents, who, despite falling solidly in Egypt’s middle class and rarely having money to spare, never once denied me the purchase of a book, and thanks to family friends who learned, early on, that the best gift they could give me was a trip to the bookstore. I had to buy almost every book I read as a child and teenager, and I was—and still am—keenly aware of how privileged I was, how lucky to be able to afford so many books.
Still, I never ceased to wonder what would have happened if that library never burned. The notion of a large, free-standing structure full of books fascinated me, and I longed for such a place with such force that, when Disney’s Beauty and the Beast first came out in 1991 and I watched the Beast open up the library doors and usher Belle in, I cried—a rare reaction coming from the surprisingly rational teenager that I was. Not until I moved to the U.S. in 1998 did I get to experience the pleasure of visiting a public library. The first ever card bearing my name in the U.S. was, in fact, my membership card to the Brooklyn Public Library.
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| Brooklyn Public Library |
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| Bibliotheca Alexandrina |
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| Inside the Bibliotheca Alexandria, photo by Rajia Hassib used with permission |
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| Rajia Hassib, photograph used with permission |
Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was twenty-three. She holds an MA in creative writing from Marshall University, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker online, The New York Times Book Review, Upstreet, Steam Ticket, and Border Crossing magazines. Her debut novel, In the Language of Miracles, was published by Viking (Penguin) in 2015, and her second novel, Hearts as Light as Feathers, is forthcoming from Viking (August 2019). She lives in West Virginia.
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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/summer-library-series.html
Monday, August 20, 2018
2018 Summer Library Series: The Bartholomew County Library by Melissa Stephenson
Welcome back to the 2018 Summer Library Series. All summer writers share childhood memories of the library. This week, writer Melissa Stephenson takes us into the Indiana library she and her brother grew up in, and found herself in again, in memory. Please enjoy this week's library reflection.
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The Bartholomew County Library
by
Melissa Stephenson
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| Melissa, Mother, and Brother |
When I think of my childhood library in Columbus, Indiana, I think about the building more than the books. Our county library was built in the late 60s, in a town known for its mid-century architecture, not long before my brother and I were born in the 70s.
Our young mother took my brother and me to the library at least once a week. I had a habit of knocking on the hollow metal sculpture in front of the library when we arrived. I’d listen to the sound reverberate through what I thought was a cast of a giant dinosaur bone. As an adult, I learned the twenty-foot piece was made of copper, created by Henry Moore (a well-known English artist), and installed in ’71—the year my brother was born.
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| The Bartholomew County Library |
I can’t imagine how many bricks they used making that library, but I did wonder. It was solid brick, from the walls to the driveway and sidewalks and stairs, which gave it a feeling of security and strength. In his teen years, my brother skateboarded up and down its many brick ramps, curbs, and ledges. Nothing bad would happen at the library. A tornado could not rustle the pages of a single book.
The inside had concrete ceilings, which, as I write this, sounds impossible. The concrete was poured in a grid, like a gray checkerboard suspended two stories high, with lights in the recessed spaces. I loved the feeling of weight and light above me. It’s a feeling that has marked my life—how we are all delicately suspended, flying, until we’re not.
The children’s section had a play area, and skylights over the short book stacks. Though I didn’t realize it then, when I returned as a mother with my own children, the toilets and sinks were child-sized as well—the same ones I’d used as a kid.
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| The Stephenson Family in the 1970s |
But what I want to tell you about is the Red Room. That’s where story time happened, an event we went to together—my mother, brother, and me—from the time I was an infant. The Red Room had solid brick walls, no windows, a low-hung version of that concrete ceiling, and deep red carpet rolling over the stairs where we sat as a librarian read to us. I crawled on those stairs. I sat on those stairs. That room calmed me. I did not look forward or backward but hung on the librarian’s words and rested in the still spots in between.
Years later, when I was twenty-five and my brother twenty-nine, I visited a funeral parlor near Athens, Georgia to say goodbye to his body, which sat, unprepared, on a stretcher at the far end of a large, windowless room. Unable to look up at first, I stared at the ground, trying to remember how to breathe. What caught my attention was the carpet: the same scarlet hue as the floor of the Red Room. It’s a detail that held the potential to be salt in a wound but to me, in that moment, felt like reprieve. Grace. Like the Universe reminding me of the sanctuary inside me where I could hunker down with a stack of books and wait out the storm.
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| Melissa Stephenson |
Melissa Stephenson is currently on tour for her new book, Driven, a memoir of cars, childhood, and loss. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Blackbird, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and Fourth Genre. Stephenson grew up in Indiana and lives in Missoula, Montana with her two kids. Learn more at her website https://melissa-stephenson.squarespace.com
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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series:
Monday, August 13, 2018
2018 Summer Library Series: Library Time by Rachel King
Welcome back to the 2018 Summer Library Series in which writers remember their childhood libraries. This week's writer hails from Portland and shares the kind of magic that only you, dear reader, would know of. Please enjoy this week's reflection.
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| Hillsdale Branch Library, an earlier version of itself |
Library Time
byRachel King
I remember the tire swing in the park across the street from the library where my siblings and I pushed each other until we felt like vomiting; the kind and reserved children’s librarian who for some reason let us show our rabbits as an extension of the summer reading program; the day at age eight that I walked toward the children’s section on the back wall of the library, saw a book on the second-to-bottom shelf, and my life changed. The book was Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.
I don’t remember where I read it: maybe in a clearing between bushes at the back of the library park, maybe in the magnolia tree in my parents’ side yard, maybe on my bed on the top bunk, probably in the blue recliner in the living room where I tuned out family noise to focus on the written word.
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| Rachel King reading as a younger version of herself |
After childhood came the Knight Library at the University of Oregon, where I practiced conjugating Russian verbs on a study room blackboard; the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where I checked out dozens of books at a time, which I read in between working various jobs and trying, for the first time, to write seriously; the Wise Library at West Virginia University, where I found amazing poets while shelving books in an empty, elegant Robinson Reading Room at midnight or one a.m.; the Louisville Public Library, where I used the free internet once a week to talk to my friend on Skype; my current local library, the Midland branch, where I go to check out New York Review of Books Classics and browse Russian books and DVDs; the Oregon City Public Library—my mom’s childhood library—where now, as an on-call library assistant, I help patrons.
When I moved back to Portland, I went to the Hillsdale library. The old library building had been demolished, and replaced with a larger one on the same site. But inside was the same children’s librarian from my childhood, and to me, she looked no differently. And most importantly, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry was still on the shelf, for another generation to discover.
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| Hillsdale Branch Library as its newer self |
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| Rachel King, photo used with permission |
Rachel King is a writer and editor who lives in her hometown, Portland, Oregon. Her stories have most recently appeared in One Story and Flyway; her poetry chapbook Between Work and Light is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Learn more about her work at www.booksrachelking.com
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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/summer-library-series.html
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Fuse Spokane Book Club: Winter-Spring 2018 Book Selections and Dates
FUSE SPOKANE BOOK CLUB
2018
WINTER-SPRING
READINGS
February 21: Citizen by Claudia Rankine
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/160510384585994/
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/467548680313959/
April 11: Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/184855408927742/
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1551018144983849/
Where We Meet:
Spokane Downtown Library (906 W. Main)
Topmost floor, north end
Level-Up Classroom
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Join us
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About Fuse Spokane Book Club:
An arm of the Immigration and Inclusion Action Team of Fuse Spokane, we meet the second Wednesday of every month to discuss the stories, histories, and voices that have traditionally been ignored, repressed, ridiculed, or made invisible. We want to expand our knowledge of each other, deepen our understanding of ourselves, and thereby create a more inclusive and knowledgeable community to live in. You do not need to be a member of Fuse to participate in the book club.
About Fuse: Fuse is the largest progressive organization in Washington State. Learn more and other ways to be involved by visiting their website: https://fusewashington.org/.
The event is free, inclusive, welcoming, and open to the public. The group is facilitated by Fuse council member Erin Pringle/Toungate. You are most definitely invited. We have regular readers and new readers every meeting. Please come prepared to discuss the book.
Note! Book club members receive a discount at Auntie's Bookstore, so please call and reserve your copy of the book(s) today! Click on the individual titles above to find them at Auntie's, or visit their homepage here: http://www.auntiesbooks.com/
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Book Your Stocking with Barbara Simmons
Book Your Stocking: December 30
Last night, we went to the bookstore because we had received reading gift cards from family. We spent a good long while moving through the aisles, searching for titles and remembering titles we'd long wanted and shelved in maybe-later. Many other people seemed meandering for similar reasons, the bustle gone out of them, but the brightness of quiet and solitude suited them better. And, thankfully, we have one more day of December before the series' reprise, and one more day of book wishes and book gives. May you add these to your own list, mental or pencil, and take them with you into the aisles of your own reading places.
Please welcome today's reader, Barb Simmons.
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To Give
To Receive
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| Barbara Simmons, photograph used with permission |
About today's reader:
Barbara Simmons teaches English and is Director of Composition at Spokane Falls Community College. She lives in Spokane with her husband and two daughters.
Friday, December 29, 2017
Book Your Stocking with Laura Robey
Book Your Stocking: December 29
Welcome back to Book Your Stocking, the holiday reading series in which readers of all stripes recommend their favorite books and share what books they'd like to become their favorites, if someone would do the honors. The official gift-giving day has passed, but New Year's Eve moves ever closer, and seems a very good excuse to give words, and find words, that draw us back to ourselves and the ideas of others.
Here's a new list of wishes and gifts from today's reader, and my childhood friend, Laura Robey.
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My Wish List
I am going to continue working my way through all of the Newberry Award (and Honors) books. This year, I decided that I would like to own them all because that is the kind of treasure I want to keep. As a reading challenge and as a fun hobby, I began looking for the books at garage sales, used book stores, and library sales. Yeah, I could go online and find them, but the discovery and the actual reading of a well-loved edition simply makes me happy. 
Anyone who has spent anytime with me knows that I throughly enjoy quality children’s literature. I think it is the most overlooked genre. Although YA is certainly receiving plenty of attention now, adults who only look for a reading “challenge” are missing some of the most thought-provoking literature. Re-reading a book from your childhood is an intensely emotional experience that deserves time for contemplation and discussion.
Speaking of which, I have throughly enjoyed sharing my collection with my four daughters. I am able to read aloud to my 7-year old and share with my three teens. “Mom, do you have anything good to read?” I simply take them to my growing Newberry Collection!
After all that talk about simple books (from American authors no less), my other Wish List Item is a large leap. For the past few years, I have been drawn to the intimidating world of Russian Literature. Notice I said drawn to…I have yet to dive in. I attempted but quickly realized that I lack the language, historical knowledge, and cultural understanding was holding me back. I haven’t had the time to immerse myself in any of that but I am getting closer. So my goal this year is to spend time with Leo Tolstoy, specifically his short stories.
My Gift-Giving List
Hard-Cover Gift Book for Anyone (And my go-to Baby Shower Gift)
I read this book for the first time earlier this year and “haven’t put it down yet.” I purchased the audio version which is read by the author. It is my go-to to fall asleep, listen to in the car, and well, anytime I just need quality words.
For My Seven-Year Old
A shared audible library with me.
Sharing books this way has given me accountability in reading quality and classics. Playing alone in her room or laying in bed at night are her main listening times. For me, it is while driving or walking the track. Through audiobooks, we are spending time with the same “people” and in the same places, even when we are not together! Does she understand it all? Certainly not, but her vocabulary is increasing, and we have plenty to talk about. Our favorites: Little Women and Black Beauty. I just asked her which ones are her favorites and she is still listing, “Wizard of Oz…Little House…The Moffats…Mary Poppins…”
For My Teens
Yes, it is a religious self-help book so I am completely aware it isn’t for everyone. The book is meant to be read a chapter-a-day for 40 days. We read it together to begin our school day during the first quarter of the school year so it was it wasn’t exactly that. Rather it was a jumping off point for some serious discussion. The subtitle of the book is “What on Earth Am I Here For?” and I can’t think of a more important time in your life to seriously contemplate that question! It gave me such insight into the way their brains/hearts process life. In addition to encouraging service to others and truly knowing yourself, it was filled with affirmations: You are valuable. You have unique gifts and abilities. You are necessary.
For My Husband
I read this book for the first time this year as I was trying to finish up last year’s goal of reading all of Steinbeck. (((Sigh.))) I LOVED IT. I forced myself to read only a little each day so that this thin, little book would last me longer. Pretty much all I want right now is a camper…and to retire and travel. Since that isn’t going to happen for “a while” (see above mention of the 3 high schoolers and the 1st-grader!), he can read it and dream along with me until that time.
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Laura Robey is a homeschool mom of four who lives in central Illinois. Her two oldest daughters joined the family through international adoption as teenagers, whose native language is Russian. (Hence the interest in Russian Lit.) In her spare time she reads, works part-time, taxies her children, and sings to her cat. She casually and rarely blogs at WhereLoveStarts.blogspot.com
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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors:
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