Literature, Learning, and Love
T-Wolf (he/him/his, she/her/hers)
Editorial Team Member
I don’t remember when my parents first got a membership for the Austin Public Library. I only knew that my father always brought along the plastic card when my siblings and I piled into the car for the fifteen-minute drive. Bags full of books lay beside my feet as we neared the familiar parking lot, and my brother would always be on duty to haul said bags over his shoulder. Even after returning our last borrowed set, those bags would not stay empty for long, as my siblings and I split up across the shelves to find whatever graphic novels, fictional series, and science magazines we yearned for most. Our father would glide between the stacks of information as well, checking on each of us, and eventually, reluctantly, tugging us up to actually check the books out and go home.
I don’t remember the first story I picked up from those shelves, either. Perhaps it was one of the comic books my siblings read, or a simple text about Greek or Egyptian mythology. But with our parents bringing us back to the library every other week, perhaps it’s not surprising that the first story was forgotten. After all, what I read first wasn’t what truly mattered. What mattered was the wonder I felt in every story, delving into these worlds of knowledge, both fictional and non-fictional, available to me for seemingly forever. I would get engrossed in book after book, willing to stay there an eternity, if not for my father patting my shoulder when it was time to go. I always wanted more from the library. I needed more, with a growing desire to match the words and the worlds that authors seemed to create so easily.
Though the trips to the public library died out as my siblings and I grew older, the hunger to create stories of my own only grew. I tried to mimic the styles of authors I loved the most- Erin Hunter, Rick Riordan, and far more. I thought up characters, universes, and plotlines of my own, dreaming about how proud I would be to one day have my stories on the shelves of public libraries too. Anyone and everyone would be able to read and fall in love with my writing, thanks to a simple membership and a simple drive. Even as that level of popularity remains a faraway motivation, the notion of having my own books available to the entire public is fascinating. The notion of having reading be available to the entire public is fascinating. And I have no doubt about how invaluable it can be to anyone, to have a place to go and absorb all the information they could ever dream of, for little to no price at all.
Long after those local library trips, I’ve seen how all public libraries can host thriving communities for story-lovers of all kinds. I’ve been to open mics and workshops hosted within them, both as a participant and a helper, with audiences from less than a dozen to the hundreds. I’ve listened to published authors hold readings of their beloved works, spellbound by their honesty about the difficulty, the intimacy, of their creations. Even those who claimed they weren’t writers, weren’t poets, weren’t storytellers, could eventually have a hold of the mic too and have something to share. Public libraries have served as homes of information itself, of emotion itself, of the power that comes from sharing knowledge and passion via words. They ignited that potential in myself, and no doubt many others.
So it pains me to see how public libraries across the United States have been undermined in recent years. They’re under attack by growing book-banning movements, hurting families’ trust and keeping more children from reading the stories they want to. The digital age has made the attention spans of younger generations lessen, and their enthusiasm to read for fun is diminishing with it. Libraries have their funding cut and are dismissed as less important than other services, placing further barriers on an open source of information. Though it encourages me to see counter-movements against these developments, the threat to a center of community and information is higher than it’s ever been in my own lifetime. I am lucky to fall back on delightful memories of getting lost in the dozens of worlds I have read. Today’s children are lost in the politics and animosity of only one.
I hope public libraries will continue to survive, despite the challenges they face now. Because reading deserves to be public. Literature, books, and stories all deserve to be free. After the inspiration and passion I have found from my trips to my public library, I refuse to believe otherwise. I refuse to believe that there are not kids out there, young as I was when I first began reading, that would thrive too if they were given a place to explore stories and history, possibilities and realities, all the same. Knowledge is power, and I delight in knowing that public libraries offer it all for free- but they must be maintained. They must be given support, given funding, and given trust if they are to continue. They are a sanctuary of discourse and discussion within pages, countless arguments and ideas yearning to be read and set free in our minds.
I want to walk through those automatic doors of my local library at least once more when I’m on my last legs. I want to watch the children of a new generation sitting on the carpeted floors, buried in a set of pages they love until their fathers finally tug them up to go home. I cannot make it happen alone, but I can certainly pour love and longing for that future into what I write. I can give back to libraries what they gave to me, and know that surrounded by all those books, I am not alone. No one in the library ever has to feel alone.