Libraries and Embracing Failure

For this week's episode, we return to two blog posts: one about libraries and the other about successes that grow from failures.

Transcript

Hi. This is Ginger Johnson and you’re listening to Past Perfect: A Podcast.

For today’s episode, we’re going back to two blog posts. The first is from March of 2011. I had been asked to be a guest blogger on Jessica Leader’s blog during the Library-lovin’ Blog Challenge week. For each comment on the blog, Jess donated a dollar to her local library. I think that’s an idea that should be resurrected, and though I love my local library fiercely, I can’t help but think about the libraries in Ukraine and feel the need is greater in a different arena right now. 

So, for each review and share of this podcast, I’ll donate $10 to the International Red Cross for Ukrainian humanitarian aid.  Though I’ve donated already, I’ve seen friends in Vienna beginning to welcome in refugees, and I know there’s more that can be done. 

In the beginning was the Word. In her beginnings, there was a book. Her mother told her she could read before she started kindergarten, and she started kindergarten at age four. Each week, she would walk with her grandmother and older sister the nine or ten city blocks to their local branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, a low brick building down a side street.

There, she and her sister would settle in the children’s section, while their grandmother browsed through paperback mysteries and Regency romances. She remembers little of that library—windows, low shelves, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, and the front desk, where a stereotypically severe-looking librarian stamped their books with a heavy rubber stamp—ka-thunk!

By the time she was in fifth grade, her mother was in graduate school studying to become an elementary school librarian. Long Saturday afternoons were spent in Lockwood Library at the university: Mom at the copier with piles of coins, sister claiming the best of the blocky chairs available. 

The options were limited. Ride the elevator up and down, up and down. Run out to the vending machines, having first snatched a quarter from her mother’s towering pile. Quarter in, press F8, curly-cue swivels around, out pops frosted nut brownie. Or, of course, there were the stacks.

Mostly, she spent time in the stacks. One single row of children’s books, books that sported shiny gold Newbery stickers. Somehow she got her hands on a bookmark that listed all the Newbery award winners, and she decided she would read them. Some of her favorite books were Newberies: A Wrinkle in Time, Tuck Everlasting, Bridge to Terabithia, The Westing Game, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They were quickly joined by Summer of the Swans, My Side of the Mountain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Great Gilly Hopkins, A Ring of Endless Light.

She remembers, though, mostly spending those afternoons with E.L. Konigsburg. Oh, they weren’t on a first-name basis, she and E.L., but nevertheless, she became great friends with Claudia and Jamie, wishing more than anything that she could stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that she could go to an automat (What was an automat, anyway?). She thrilled to the sound of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. She gobbled up About the B’nai Bagels, while developing A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. She even became Father’s Arcane Daughter for a while.

Those Saturday afternoons ceased, but she found other libraries to haunt. She could make a dot-to-dot design on a map of the United States of libraries she has frequented over her lifetime. It would undoubtedly look like an open book. Some of those libraries don’t exist anymore; some of them have expanded. All of them have been important to her. This one is the one she went to in college, studying with her roommates while wearing large hats (to channel the brain-waves, of course). This one she frequented when she was first married, borrowing books with unlikely plots and even more unlikely heroines. That is the one she walked to with her first baby, borrowing books on child development, as well as board books and movies for cheap date nights.

This library, here, was one of her favorites. She brought her toddler there for story time, but also to see the fish in the fish tank, and to work the puzzles on the table, and to borrow picture books to read to him, and CDs to listen to (a compilation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems set to music was her favorite). It was there that she returned to her love of children’s literature, often grabbing Anne of Green Gables off the shelf to read while her gingerbread boy played quietly. It was here that she realized she liked children’s literature better than literature for adults.

Now she frequents her current town library, an old schoolhouse built in the 1800s. It is a place where the librarians not only know her name, they know her library card number. She also volunteers in the elementary school library, where she returns dozens and dozens of books back to their places on the shelves. Sometimes, though, she sees a book that catches her eye, and she sits down right in the stacks, caught up in the pleasure of a book, just like she did when she was in fifth grade. Some things never change.

I’d also like to share another blog post titled, “Embracing Failure,” originally posted March 3, 2014 on the Quirk and Quill blog.

My sister recently posted a link to an article in the New York Times by Laura Pappano about creativity as an academic discipline.

My sister has a master’s degree in Creativity, a teaching certificate, and training in improv comedy with both ComedySportz and Second City. She is a creative and comedic genius, and has predictably provided the laugh line running through my life.

When my sister posts links, I read them.

The article quotes Jack V. Matson who teaches a course at Penn State called “Failure 101.” His favorite course assignment is to have students make a resume of failures to see how those failures have shaped choices — and, I might add, how those failures have led to good things.

Failure is something writers deal with often, sometimes on a daily basis. We cut our teeth on rejection. The blinking cursor on the blank screen beats out a rhythm saying, “You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.” Rejection can be a slippery slope into a deep chasm of self-doubt and fear. As a matter of self-preservation, we’re advised not to dwell on our failures, our rejections, our bad reviews.

That’s good advice.

However, if you’re feeling up to pulling out your sword to battle your demons, I suggest engaging in a bit of introspection Matson-style to embrace your failures and see what good has come from them.

If I were to write a resume of failures, the top billing would be given to a failed application to a Ph.d program. I looked good on paper: I had good experience, my GRE scores were in the high 700’s, I had received one of two all-university fellowships in graduate school, and I had been accepted into a different Ph.d program years before, which, because of life circumstances, I couldn’t pursue then. My application sparkled.

The program I applied for only admitted one student that year.

And it wasn’t me.

The day I found out, I had plans to meet my dear friend Julie Berry. When I told her of my rejection, she suggested I apply to this program at Vermont College.

No, I said, I’m on the rebound. I need to wallow in my suffering.

So she told me to come to this conference (the New England SCBWI spring conference). “You can submit ten pages to an editor. Then if you like it, you can apply.”

Fine, I said.

Julie can be very persuasive.

I submitted ten pages, went to the conference, and met with an editor whose name is branded on my memory forever. During the critique, she gave me her email address and asked for the rest of the manuscript.

There was no rest of the manuscript. I had ten pages. That was all.

If I ever find an occasion when our paths cross again, if I ever find an occasion when giving this editor a huge hug wouldn’t seem like a stalker thing to do, I’m there. For her small kindness, I’ll be forever grateful.

I decided to apply to VCFA.

Doing so brought me home. No quantity of personality testing or career counseling could have directed me in so succinct a manner as that one failed Ph.d application.

I am now doing what makes me happy. I wear my life — my career — like a second skin. I’ll be the first to admit that it is not an easy skin to wear; I often wish I could shed it, sliding out of it snake-like, when it gets too uncomfortable. However, discomfort brings new failures — failures which lead me onward to new successes.

From my quiet office to your ears, wishing you peaceful times spent in libraries and failures that turn into successes. And also, a reminder to donate if you can to help the people of Ukraine. If you aren’t able to, then simply review and share this podcast, and I’ll increase my donation. Until next time, be well and let your light shine.