Throwing Books Away

A “shocking” news story from KWQC of the Quad Cities was delivered to my Facebook timeline this morning, along with a full color photo.  Apparently Davenport Library books are being thrown into a dumpster by staff members!   (I’ll spare you the visual—you may find it disturbing.)  The story went on to report that even beyond the Davenport incident, librarians do this all the time.  Who knew?

It’s called “weeding,” and if librarians didn’t do it, their libraries would be featured on episodes of “Hoarders.”  I think that what is upsetting people about this issue is not that libraries get rid of books—obviously (with the exception of the Library of Congress) they are not set up to keep every book they have acquired.  Different libraries have different standards for weeding out old books to make room for new books.  The standards take into consideration the appearance and condition of the book, the date of its last circulation (the last time anyone checked it out), and its value to the collection (whether it’s a classic or needed for a particular class or interest group in the community).    

The reality is that if a book isn’t earning its keep by being checked out every couple of years, it doesn’t deserve to be taking up prime real estate on a library’s crowded shelves.  So what should be done with it?  Library book sales take a huge amount of staff and volunteer time, not to mention the storage and space requirement.  If the sale is not successful, something must still be done with the leftovers.   The reality is that schools, other libraries, and nursing homes really don’t want books that have been withdrawn from libraries—they are usually outdated, worn, or otherwise past their prime.  Shipping them to undeveloped countries is expensive, but there are companies that team up with libraries to find homes for the outcasts.  The problem with that is that libraries usually do not have the staff time to devote to sorting out which books the companies will accept.  Add to this task dealing with the plentiful donations of old books that libraries regularly receive from people in their community; public libraries of all sizes have become the Goodwill donation center for print material. 

Books are a natural waste product of a reading society.  It’s okay to get rid of them.   I am lucky in my area to have access to a fine, well-maintained recycling center, City Carton of Cedar Rapids.  There are separate bins for hardcovers, paperbacks, and magazines among the bins for glass, plastic and cardboard.  Still—I have to load the books into my car and drive the forty mile round trip to accomplish this, something that not everyone can do.  Personally, I think nothing more of getting rid of the paper between two covers than I would of any other kind of paper.  It’s certainly more desirable environmentally to recycle weeded materials, but I sympathize with overworked librarians tossing them into the nearest dumpster.  It makes for bad publicity, but it emphasizes a problem in our culture that bears thinking about. 

If you really want to help save books, go to the library and read them.  Don’t buy new print material unless it’s absolutely necessary.   If you can afford it, purchase an e-reader and download e-books (your library loans those, too).  Go to library books sales if you want, but don’t donate what you buy back to the library.  They may end up in the dumpster. 

Caesar Summer

This summer a bunch of us put on Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in the local middle school auditorium.  We did it because directing this play was the dream of a local guy who graduated a few years back, went away to college and came home to Mt. Vernon for a while before going east to further his theatre education.  It wasn't our dream--most of us had never been in a Shakespeare play before, and we all had jobs and kids and kitchen remodeling and baseball and other plays to think about.  But we like this guy, and we like challenges--one of which was finding enough folks to be in the play.  We had to answer the call. 

Our director had to give up some of his original ideas--the costumer nixed the fake blood, for example--but he held fast to his vision of this four-hundred-and-some-year-old play as an allegory of modern politics.  In our play, Caesar wore a suit, Brutus wore army fatigues and Cassius was played by a woman; the audience sat on the stage with us and looked out into the empty auditorium, which represented fallen Rome.  We learned some basic fight choreography and those of us who weren't particularly convincing soldiers were killed early in the battle scene and dragged offstage (me).  I got to play several small roles and because we seldom practiced large expanses of the play together as a cast, working instead on intense smaller segments that featured the main actors, I found it a difficult task for my fifty-plus-year-old brain to follow the sequence of actions and words.  It wasn't until we were in performance that the whole story came together for me.  I could feel my neurons firing even as some of our prop cap guns refused to go off. 

"Julius Caesar" had not been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays when I read it in high school, nor when I took several Shakespeare classes in college and grad school (I was an English major, after all).  But helping to stage the play made me feel as if I were inside the story--like a character from a book who has come to life--and I was reminded all over again not only of the value of doing something difficult, but the value of drama in education.  My mother taught English to seniors in high school for many years and always had them act out the Shakespeare plays in a sort of readers' theatre in her classroom.  Recently I talked to one of my brothers on the phone and when I mentioned "Julius Caesar" he quoted, "The fault lies not in the stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves."  It's been forty years but he still remembers this stuff.  Those lines are meant to be spoken, and learning to speak them helps us understand them better.  The next best thing is listening to them being spoken.  Next time you have a chance, be in a Shakespeare play.  Or at least, go see one.  It makes your brain smarter, even in the summer.

Iowa Theatre: "Writer's Skirmish" Tackles Strong Stances

Iowa Theatre: "Writer's Skirmish" Tackles Strong Stances

Story Quilting

I always thought I’d enjoy quilting if it weren’t for all the cutting and sewing.  But really, it’s not like I don’t do needlecrafts.  I learned to sew in 4-H Club during the early seventies and made my own prom dresses (did I mention it was the seventies?).  Compulsive cross stitching got me through some difficult times; I finally learned to knit a few years ago and have moved well beyond scarves.  But, seriously--quilting?  All those pointy corners and multiple layers to work with?  It just seemed so precise. I love the finished product but didn’t think I had it in me to make one myself.  Plus, they’re so big! 

Turns out, there’s more than one way to make a quilt.  The Gee’s Bend quilters are six generations of African American women in Gee’s Bend, a tiny community in southern Alabama, who learned to sew out of necessity as young girls.  They designed the tops of their quilts individually--using their personal visions to choose colors and patterns--and quilted them communally.  Their creations were colorful, expressive, practical pieces of art that drew the attention of visual artists in other parts of the country and were featured in “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”, an exhibition of seventy quilts that toured the United States.  The photographs of the quilts in the exhibit were published in 2002 in a book with the same title that I noticed a year or so ago on display at my local Mt. Vernon, Iowa library.  What caught my eye was the way the quilts’ strips and blocks didn’t necessarily line up or repeat themselves, but were pleasing in their lopsided way.  And the stitches were large and didn’t run in straight lines.  I liked the imprecision. 

So I wanted to make one, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked.  There are published patterns for Gee’s Bend quilts, but the Gee’s Bend quilters didn’t use patterns—they just made them up as they went along, which is what makes the quilts so unique.  I wasn’t sure how to go about doing this until my dear sister-in-law, quilter Cindy Loope, took me to an exhibit in the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in her native Lincoln, Nebraska—“Yvonne Wells’ Quilted Messages.”  On display were a variety of small “story” quilts, all with their very own titles and vivid, incredibly appealing primitive images.   Wells, an African American folk artist and former physical education teacher also from Alabama, made her first quilt when her home was being renovated and she was cold.  She loved making quilts that told stories and said “What my head sees, my heart feels, and my hand creates.”   I stood for a long time looking at one of her quilts that looked like the floor of my younger son’s room when he was a teenager.  In it she used up all her scraps from other fabric projects and even included a tube sock.  I thought:  I want to do this. 

With Cindy’s and my quilter friend Cathy’s encouragement and advice, I set about finishing my own version of these beautiful freeform quilts--more Gee’s Bend than Yvonne Wells--and it turned out great.  It’s on its way right now to my oldest son in New York City. I’m ready to think about making one with more of a story theme for my youngest—definitely with a sock or two in it.

A Year with Frog and Toad

I’m really excited about the upcoming Mt. Vernon/Lisbon Community Theatre production of “A Year with Frog and Toad.”  The musical play is based on the wonderful “learn-to-read” books written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel and published in 1970 (which means that they have been around for at least two generations of eager learners).  Arnold and his wife Anita (also a writer and illustrator) had a daughter, Adrianne, who married an actor and adapted the books for the stage.  These books were favorites of my sons (now in their twenties) and they are checked out regularly at the Lisbon Library.   I am delighted to see our favorite stories on the stage:  Toad in his funny bathing suit, Frog and Toad on a cookie-eating binge, the snail who carries a letter from Frog to Toad.  

Going to a play can be such an important event in a child’s life.  There is nothing like the magic of live theatre, and making this available for children in our community has been a dream of our theatre group for years.  Don’t you remember the excitement of the lights going down and the curtain opening?  I sure do, and years later I still credit my mother, who drove many miles to take me to every children’s production in the tri-county area, for my lifetime interest in drama.   Plays are just another way to enjoy good stories, so reading books to children (using your best funny voices) is the key to creating future playgoers.  And everyone should be a playgoer, right? 

Give yourself a treat and take a child to a play.  Watch her face as she watches the actors on stage.  Come to “A Year with Frog and Toad” at the First Street Building,

221 1^st St. E.

in Mt. Vernon, on November 17 and 18 at 7 PM or on November 19 at 2 PM, if you live close enough.  Then come check out the book at my library! 

Aliens in the Ice Cream Parlor

Last month I participated in the All in a Day 24-Hour Play Festival at the new Coralville Performing Arts Center.  It was cosponsored by

City Circle

and Dreamwell Theatre companies and was the fourth time I’ve been involved.  Here’s how it worked:  seven writers, seven directors, and almost forty actors gathered on a Friday night at the Coralville Public Library (there were signups online ahead of time to determine who was doing what).  Seven teams were created by random drawings, each consisting of one writer, one director and an assortment of actors.  The writers drew a genre, a setting, and a “trope” (a specific line or a character type that needs to appear in the script), the teams chatted for a few minutes about ideas and casting possibilities, and then the writers went home and wrote a ten-minute script, which they emailed to the producer by 7 AM the next day.  The directors and actors met up at 8 AM to read the script and got busy blocking, rehearsing and memorizing.  At 8 PM, the seven plays were presented to an audience. 

The first year I did this, I signed up to be an actor and ended up playing a hardboiled crime photographer in a “noir” detective genre play written by my friend Joe.  It was set on the Empire State Building and someone had to say the line “Pretty is as pretty does.”   I’ve been a writer the last three times and find that job somewhat less stressful.   My first draw was a western set in a castle and last year I drew a “noir” drama set at a cast party with the trope, “wrong turn at Albequerque.”  Both of them were fun to write because I was comfortable with the genres.  But this time I drew my hated and dreaded genre:  science fiction. 

I love Star Wars and read Ray Bradbury as a kid, but I’m no hardcore sci fi fan.  I was intimidated, to say the least.   Our play had to be set in an ice cream parlor and had to have a “creepy child” character who creeps everyone out.  As it turned out, our team of actors included several sci fi fans and a guy who had managed the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Parlor for years.  The director had been trained in Las Vegas as a fight choreographer.  Another real plus was that a petite adult actress was willing to play the role of a creepy child.  (There were several very young actors involved in the plays, but none seemed sufficiently creepy.)   After I went home, I mulled over some ideas with my long-suffering husband and called my son in college (a real sci fi expert).   We all agreed that a plot involving aliens was the way to go.  I had an alien patronize the ice cream parlor in order to lower his body temperature.  He had been sent to investigate earth as a possible future site for his kind, but discovered that global warming had already compromised this planet.  Because he looked perfectly normal, no one believed him, except for the creepy child, who ended up leaving with him in the spaceship (offstage).  I decided not to write in any fight choreography, figuring the other constraints were challenging enough.

It was a great evening.  Our alien won the Best Actor award, and we watched some really funny plays—a western set on an elevator, a tragedy on a toboggan slope, and a fairy tale that had to include a fatal disease.  I no longer fear sci fi—in fact, I asked my son to recommend some books for me, and I would welcome more recommendations.    

Majestic Wedding

My husband and I got to attend a fun wedding in Madison, Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago.  It was especially fun because we have known this lovely young bride since she was a toddler and we were new parents ourselves.  Her parents, like us, were new to the community, so we became good friends.  Suddenly here we are twenty-five years later at the Majestic Theatre in downtown Madison, an old movie house that was beautifully renovated as a “venue” (a wonderful word with French and Latin roots that you hear a lot in wedding planning and theatrical circles and just means “place”), and we are all grown up and enjoying this festive occasion together.  The original seats had been removed during the renovation so that folding chairs and tables could be set up for the guests to sit for the wedding and then have dinner.  Later the floor was completely cleared of furniture for a dance.  We had a great time.   

A wedding is a theatre piece of sorts, and this seemed like the perfect place for these two young people who met while studying the dramatic arts in college.  Currently, he is going to graduate school for theatre, and she is getting her library science degree.  I think of her as my modern counterpart:  a young version of the librarian/actress who is passionate about serving the public and promoting literature by day and equally passionate about making theatre happen in her free time.  What an exciting time to be in library school!  It’s all about marketing and networking and using wonderful technological innovations to increase connectivity—not just about memorizing the Dewey Decimal system anymore. 

One of Laura’s projects for library school was to compile stories of artists who were connected to libraries in some way—inspired by them or working in them.  Libraries are not just for bookworms anymore and are giving the public a place to go to share or create art.  Because libraries are public and free and everyone feels welcome in them, they are the perfect place to inspire or showcase art projects.  We use Heritage Hall, our library’s second floor, for concerts and theatrical productions several times a month.   Local artists have created both permanent and transient pieces to enhance our library’s interior.  Libraries are always morphing and changing, even as theatres are morphing into “venues” for other sorts of events.