lifestyle

Why We Need to Fund Libraries 3/3

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If you haven’t visited a library in years, you might think nobody goes to libraries any more. Well, you’re wrong. In the time it takes to read this entire sentence, 40 people have visited a library in the UK.

You might not need a library today, or tomorrow, or for years. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want one in your community. Because like a hospital, or a second bridge over the Bristol Channel to Wales, or the police – one day you might need it. And when you do, just like you’d need those other things, you’ll really, really need a library. Someone else in your community needs one like that today. 

Libraries are often used by people who are in transition from one thing to another. People who are in between being born and going to school use the library for stimulation and to begin to understand book-based culture for the world of learning. Older children, learning to work independently, use the library for help finding valid references for essays. People looking for new courses or careers use the resources of the library. People who are in a new town, finding out more about their past, recovering from illness, spending hours alone in old age…all these people regularly use the library.

Where else can you go that costs nothing and always welcomes you? Where you can not only be entertained and distracted from what ever problems you are facing, but also get reliable information on solving those problems?  I said in a previous post that a library is the intellectual hub of a community – sometimes people very much need the access to knowledge it contains. And more than that, they need to be physically inside a place that celebrates and collects the fruits of human struggle – they need the companionship that place brings to their own situation. Because a library is also a place personal difficulties are recognised and normalised.

But that’s not to say that libraries are only warm and fluffy. They’re also a good investment. Libraries pay great finaincial dividends. The young people using the wifi and quiet they can’t get at home will get better exam results. People in need will recover from their problems more quickly and contribute once more to the economy. Companies thinking about locating in the area look for libraries as a marker of the quality of potential employees. Children with access to books in the home attain much better in school than children without. In pounds and pence, as well as in hearts and minds, a library has a value that is nearly impossible to overestimate.

That’s why we need to fund libraries.

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.

Andrew Carnegie

 

 

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Why We Need To Fund Libraries 2/3

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Social media networking can lead to careers

(This post has been rewritten after an earlier version was mistakenly deleted.)

A common excuse for not funding libraries is, ‘We don’t need them anymore. We have the internet now.’

We do have the internet now – my parents nearly went broke buying me a spanking set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but during her primary education, my daughter used the wifi instead. The problem with getting your information from a general search engine comes when you need to be sure of the information you get and it needs to be more extensive than a three line entry.

There’s an awful lot of information on the internet and, as we all know, not all of it is useful…or even true. Aliens, I hate to break it to you, did not kill JFK.

Another name for Librarians is Information Scientists. That’s what their special post-graduate degree is in, Information Science. In our generation, we have a great deal MORE information that needs to be managed. So why would we assume that we need FEWER people to manage it? 

Some information (broadsheet newspapers, peer-reviewed academic journals, e-books) are only available behind a paywall. This is the kind of information you want a secondary school learner to read for extension work. It’s beyond the ability of most households to subsidise access to enough paywalls for one child, let alone two or or three. However, it’s not just the kids who will sometimes need top-quality, curated information. When you’re making a decision about your future; about a career choice or a business deal or a possible house move or a medical question, you might want some, as well.

Librarians are trained to evaluate, store and discard information – and that means digital information, too. Through your library, you can often access online information that would ordinarily not be freely available. And through a librarian, you will be able to identify the latest and best information on any topic – instead of making an important decision on the basis of what your sister in law’s neighbour saw on Facebook.

And don’t even get me started on the difference between reading on an electronic device and reading a book. I do both, of course, like most avid readers. But a recent study proved that children get more enjoyment from reading paper books . That might be because they learn better from the paper version. Buying a load of paper books is expensive and they’re hard to store (I could show you pictures of my house). They get dusty (achoo!) and… But at a library, you can just borrow them and hand them back again. You get online resources and paper resources at a library, so you can decide what’s best for you and your family.

We’ve got the internet now, I know. Which is why we need properly funded libraries and librarians even more. 

 

 

Why We Need To Fund Libraries 1/3

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image1

Let’s start with the basics. What is a library?

A library is not a collection of books. Above you’ll see why it’s not. This is The Ship’s library. The Ship is my local pub and this is their book corner. It started off well, but in the three years I’ve been…erm…monitoring it every Friday evening (with a pint or two), it’s gone right downhill.  All that’s left is old tat.

That’s because there’s no librarian. Any fool can bring books onto a shelf – any fool can buy all the latest books the reviewers say are good and stack them in alphabetical and Dewey Decimal order. But librarians don’t just know how to do that…they also know what to throw away.

Librarians are trained to curate information; trained to gather information (yes) but also to evaluate it, decide if it’s still valid and get rid of the bad stuff. They’re Snopes  in real life. Only they don’t just evaluate the worth of internet memes and rumours and fake news…they can monitor and evaluate EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION ON THE PLANET. They can also store it, manipulate it, find it, file it, retrieve it and archive it and will know when to do all those things.

Let’s look at another example: A friend of mine was at the dump/tip the other day and saved a first edition of George Orwell’s 1984 from going in, not even the book bin (which gets picked over by charity shops) but the paper recycling.

Librarians also know what to keep.

Libraries aren’t stacks of books: they’re the repository of a society’s knowledge. In good libraries, everything on the shelves is of worth; good fiction, up-to-date and verified non-fiction, poetry worth reading, how-to books that actually teach you how to do something, reference materials that are collections of the latest and best thought humanity has to offer.

They’re the intellectual hub of our communities and librarians are their maintenance crew. Trying to have one without the other is like trying to run an airline without any mechanics. The planes might look very pretty. But I wouldn’t like to fly in one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actual Glamour

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For the last two years, I’ve come onto this page, posted something (usually moaning about writers’ money) and promised to post regularly.  Then I’ve disappeared again…for months at a time.

I have shame.

But the fact is, things are going well. My books are being reviewed and are actually selling (I got a royalty cheque – I thought they were fictitious). I’ve got a new job…I’m now Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol…and I wrote a new book over the summer.

In the photos, you can see me hanging out in Soho, signing a stack of Coyote Summer at the Bristol Waterstones and attending my last graduation at Bath Spa University in my doctoral robes from the University of the West of England. (In case you didn’t know, your official academic robes are decided by the last place that awarded you a degree. Academics spend all their time at graduation examining each other’s robes and talking about the ones they like, wishing they’d thought about this when they’d decided where to do their PhD.)

And then there’s the photo of the most glamorous thing of all – hanging out with eminent children’s authors and discussing how to help families re-wild themselves using our narratives. Julia Green, Gill Lewis, Nicola Davies and Jackie Morris were there as we discussed the #mywildworld initiative… and I even got to meet Karin Celestine and her wee felted animals. There’s a chance that some of these authors may come onto this blog and talk about their glamorous literary lives soon.

But let’s keep it real. I spent my summer holiday mainly at the tip as my hoarding family finally decided to declutter. I wrote my book so quickly because I had a stomach bug and was pretty much tied to my bed and the loo for two weeks. My royalty cheque is going to  stop my shower from leaking through the kitchen ceiling. Then it will go towards repairing my kitchen from the deluge.

I’m still not rich and I’m still not famous. But I do love my literary life. And it is, sometimes, actually glamorous…

Being Nice

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Photo on 2013-06-27 at 10.45

 

I worked with Fay Weldon on Monday (sometimes, I really do have a glamorous literary life). As usual, La Weldon said a lot of interesting things. But one of the most interesting, for me, anyway, was, ‘A lot of women writers are held back by wanting to be nice in their fiction, because they want to be good girls and please everyone.’

Just like many young women don’t think that there’s any need for feminism anymore, many new female writers think that their fiction will be a gender-free zone, where their womanliness has no impact on how they are read. Of course, both are sadly mistaken. There is still a 10% gender pay gap in the UK, women pensioners are, according to the government, ‘significantly more impoverished’ than male pensioners. 1 in 10 men will be treated for mental illness and it’s 1 in 4 women… And, despite Hilary Mantel’s recent successes, the vast majority of literary prize winners, grant awardees, Visiting Professors, etc, etc, etc are men, even though, on any given post-graduate course in Creative Writing, women predominate.

‘Girls will read about boys,’ my first children’s editor told me. ‘But boys won’t read about girls.’ I thought boys grew out of that, but an editor interested in the book that became The Saint Who Loved Me thought differently. ‘No man is going to read this,’ she told me sternly. ‘It’s got things about tampons in it.’

I hadn’t realised that. I hadn’t realised that because I wrote about a woman’s experience of the world, and wrote about marital problems, spirituality and life choices from a woman’s perspective, I was alienating 48% of my potential readers from the get-go. Male readers very much liked Welcome to Eudora from the various reviews and letters I got from them. How they got their hands on it remains a mystery, though…it was often shelved under ‘Romance’.

If you happen to, or make up your mind to, write in accepted literary models and if you write, in a way, specifically for men, you don’t seem to be ghettoised. But if you are a female writing primarily for women, you can pretty much forget being taken seriously by the literary establishment. Even today.

How much of that problem is about the writers being too ‘nice’ in their fiction and how much is about marketing, cover design and titling (the working title for The Saint Who Loved Me was  St Rock) still remains a mystery.

But I know one thing – nobody is going to take my books seriously if I don’t. If I don’t stop being nice and wanting to please everybody.

I’m writing in the café today, because my new cleaner is in my house and my shed is still on order. While I was madly typing away (the tea here is strong enough to be a Class A drug), an acquaintance approached, smiling.

‘May I join you?’ she asked.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. I’m working.’

She raised her eyebrows and looked hurt as she turned away. I fought the instinct to run after her…to abandon my manuscript and explain. But I didn’t.

It’s a start.

Chaos and Order in the Writing Life

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I meant to write this Thursday. I meant to have my hair done this morning. My husband didn’t really want to run to the Post Office to tax his car before giving two wine tastings in two separate cities (both with flood warnings). I didn’t really want to miss my daughter’s Taster Day reception at the school we are hoping she’ll attend next year, but I mis-read the time and scheduled teaching, instead. Oh, and the house looks like we’ve been burgled.

Chaos.

I can’t write when things are this messy and chaotic.

But they get this way, when I’ve been writing.

When things are going well with my writing, I don’t really notice that I tracked in half a ton of twigs, rosemary needles and dead leaves when I go out to garden and think about what happens next in my latest book. I don’t care that I have forgotten all the paperwork to do with my daughter’s school activities. I’m not bothered about dirty dishes or the fact that we still haven’t started the decorating (and the walls look horrid). I don’t answer my phone calls and I put emails about things I should do to one side, to think about ‘later’. But then, one day, I go to write and I am noticing it all. I think to myself, ‘Really! Why is this house so horrible? I can’t work in an environment like this! I can’t deal with all these people, phoning me, wanting me to do things, asking me questions!’

I get quite shirty about it.

But it was my fault (writing too early and then too tired to cook at dinner time) that there are big pizza boxes on the kitchen counters. It was me that left all my teaching books scattered on the dining room table (getting an hour or so in on the manuscript before my daughter came home). It was me that didn’t care about filing my class registers. Now it’s time to get out the shovel and clean the place, and spend a few hours on admin, so that my writer self can get back to work…and mess it all up again.

She’s horridly selfish. But I love her.