Libraries. Making Book Dreams Come True Since 1962…
by Tina deBellegarde
Last month I went to a writers’ conference and did the usual: I spoke on a few panels and listened to many talented panelists, I bought books and got them signed, I reunited with my author friends and made new ones. And I met the Guest of Honor, Jeffrey Deaver. I don’t read his books, although I hear they are wonderful (and I bought one to start soon). But I was thrilled to stand next to him and have my picture taken because unbeknownst to him, and without reading a single word of his books, he has been a great impetus behind getting my first book published and on a library shelf.
I feel like all my stories start and end with a library. How many of us have spent innumerable hours in a library, in our own worlds, in our happy places, dreaming about the worlds we were reading about? Or about the romances and the adventures we were experiencing vicariously? (I became a hot air ballooner for a short while because of my all-time favorite childhood book The Twenty-One Balloons.)
The summer I turned 13, I had no friends since we had just moved to a new town, so I thought I would read the entire library from A to Z. I encountered many obstacles. I hadn’t thought it all through. Should I read all the books, fiction AND nonfiction? I decided on fiction and I took the first book out – my first Margaret Atwood novel.
When I returned it, there were two more books ahead of it on the shelf. I wasn’t making progress. I persisted but the anxiety of not getting to the books I truly wanted to read was too much. I decided there was a reader for every book and there were books for me and some that just weren’t.
Besides, if I wanted to write, I couldn’t read them all. I needed to write them. But that was just a tiny seed that I was too afraid to allow to sprout. I squashed it over and over.
Later, I discovered love letters such as The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran to Mary Haskell. And I started to imagine what it would mean to live a love of that type. It took two tries, but eventually I was lucky enough to marry a poet and be loved in that way.
Then I discovered women who thought and worried like me. And I discovered feminists.
And I became a feminist. Not because they brainwashed me, but because they spoke to me, resonated with me. They articulated things I thought about, but never put into words. Thoughts I needed to put into words.
Eventually, I started writing. And writing. Until I thought that I might have something. Finally, I told my husband and my son. I told other people. I kept writing.
And then I started to wonder about where my book might go on a shelf. On each visit to the library, and later when I worked at the Catskill Public Library, I would make my way to the Ds. I discovered that my book would snuggle up with Jeffrey Deaver. And I dreamt of that moment. Often. When I wrote, I thought to myself, finish this book and place it next to Jeffrey Deaver.
And I did.
Another book dream came true. When Winter Witness hit the shelves, there it was, right next to Jeffrey Deaver.
Yes, Virginia, book dreams do come true.
