Isak

Speaking: Katherine Anne Porter

 

 

"All this time I was writing, writing no matter what else I was doing; no matter what I thought I was doing, in fact. I was living almost as instinctively as a little animal, but I realize now that all that time a part of me was getting ready to be an artist. That my mind was working even when I didn’t know it, and didn’t care if it was working or not. It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don’t do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be. Lord, that could be a sticky moment, if you had been doing the wrong things, something against your grain. And, mind you, I know that can happen. I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can’t suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled. To say that you can’t destroy yourself is just as foolish as to say of a young man killed in war at twenty-one or twenty-two that that was his fate, that he wasn’t going to have anything anyhow.

{...}

"I look upon literature as an art, and I practice it as an art. Of course, it is also a vocation, and a trade, and a profession, and all kinds of things; but first it’s an art, and you should practice it as that, I think. I know a great many people disagree, and they are welcome to it. I think probably the important thing is to get your work done, in the way you can—and we all have our different and separate ways. But I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too."

 

-- Katherine Anne Porter, interviewed for The Paris Review, 1963

This Day

 

Well, then.

Life brims.

As I've taken a breather from this little corner of the internet, so much has filled up. I don't even know how to begin telling the story of how much work and community has been threaded through the days. It has been breathless and exhausting. The past six months, I have worked harder than I ever have before.

But the past few mornings, I woke up feeling glad. There is power and joy in making things, you know?

One of the things made: A Detroit Anthology, published this month. Tonight is our book launch. I am proud of this book, and feeling a little bewildered that it now, finally, exists. I want to tell you stories about its making -- what surprised me in what people did and didn't submit from this, what I learned about this uniquely collaborative form of narrative -- but for now: let's just pause, breathe, and celebrate. I want to remember this day.

 

 

I'm just beginning to pivot into the tenderness of hearing what people think of a book you made. It's such a vulnerable thing! But this is what it means for the book to live in the world. For all that I could control in the making of this book, the relationship between it and readers is beyond me. But I'm listening.

• WMUK, public radio out of Kalamazoo, said the anthology "allows writers to control the narrative about their city."
• From Motor City Muckracker: "The newly published 'A Detroit Anthology' is a refreshingly well-packed collection of compelling essays, stories, poems and photographs of the city and its resilient, diverse residents."
• From Detroit Ink Publishing: "It's about time for A Detroit Anthology ... If you want to know what my neighbor thinks about me, then ask my neighbor. But if you want to know who I really am, then pull up a chair. This is gonna take some time."
• The Detroit Free Press featured us in a gorgeous Sunday spread, making it the cover story of the Entertainment section. The paper excerpted the work of Shannon Shelton Miller, Matthew Olzmann, Jen Leija, and Shaka Senghor.

 

 

In my introduction to the anthology, I wrote this:

I don’t expect you to read this book straight through, any more than I expect you to explore the city by walking straight up Woodward, notching each essay and poem as if it were a mile marker. But if you do move page by page through this book, you will see a collective narrative emerge. This is a story of leaving, and of being left. It is a story of not having enough money, and of having much more than your neighbors. It is a story of fires. Of inventing music. Of trying to get from one part of town to another—by bike, car, bus, foot, or sheer force of will. A story of sports, play, and the heart-thrust of fandom. Of shame and wonder. Of laughter and self-deprecation. Of remembering and misremembering history. Of fear. Of skyscrapers and gardens. Of suburbs—little towns in their own right. It is a story of having more power than we know.

This anthology is loosely arranged like a stage play (overture, two acts, and an intermission) not because there is anything false or costumed about the writing here, but because theater is a uniquely collaborative art form; so, too, are cities. Theater stitches together prose and poetry, music and oratory; so do cities. Comedy and tragedy are the two archetypal forms of theater; likewise, I’ll venture to say that no place stages comedy and tragedy better than Detroit. And while it’s hard to shake the feeling sometimes that the spectacle of this city is defined more by the distant “audience”—watching us from their safe seats in the dark as we improvise our way through an epic drama—in the end, it is thrilling to realize that we are all players here, each with the power to impact our shared story. On this stage, each choice we make matters.

However you navigate this book, you will find the dissonant chorus of people so often tasked with justifying themselves because of where they live, no matter which side of 8 Mile they are on. A watchfulness comes forth that I have rarely seen in other places I have lived or visited. Detroiters notice the details. As a result, you will not find “positive” stories about Detroit in this collection, or “negative” ones. But you will find true stories.

My hope is that the pieces in this Detroit anthology will ignite recognition: not (just) for our similarities, but for our differences. Our experiences are not the same, after all. Sometimes our search for connection leads to the washing away of our distinctive shapes, as if difference equals conflict and futility. But it needn’t be so. Friction creates energy, and it is our choice how we use it.

We are a city moving through the fire of transformation. We are afire. There is no place I would rather be.

 

There are more stories I want to share with you, hammered out over the past month or so. But one thing at a time.

Detroit 1968

 

 

This deserves your notice: Detroit 1968, a collection of photographs -- mostly portraits -- from a city at its pivot point. It was originally published in 1972 under the title New American People, which fascinates me. The nameless faces peopling this book are photographed while they are in the midst of something: their work, their families, their breakfast, the business of their lives. At the time, they were understood as the faces of modern America. As the original introduction put it, written by the curator of the Art Institute of Chicago (which exhibited the photos): "All the photographs in the present collection were taken in 1967–1970 in Detroit, which in no way restricts their presentation as a brief of how Americans look and live today. These scenes and incidents might have occurred anywhere in the United States in this time when regional characteristics are disappearing ... this is a view of a situation and condition, not a localization.”

Now, under its new title, their representation has narrowed significantly: they collectively incarnate this particular city, at this particular time. It is exactly a localization.

 

What has changed? Not the people. Not the photographer. It's us. Forty years later, we now need these images to mean something different. We know now, as the people in these images did not, that Detroit was on the brink of a radical transformation that for many would resonate most in the disappearance of people. Neighbors leaving seemingly overnight. Familiar bustling corner stores now empty, or a vacant lot. Seeing the faces of the people who were once here is what we now need most.

 

 

 

It is as if we are afraid that we could forget that Detroit -- for all this city's epic backstory -- is a city of everyday life. Of people who do things.

 

 

Enrico Natali originally came to Detroit in 1966, working as chief photographer for Hudson's department store. He told Lee DeVito of Metro Times that he never conceived of these images as individual photographs: they were always meant to be a collection.

“I was like a photographer monk,” he says of the three years devoted to shooting for the book. “I put these constraints on myself: I’m going to only photograph people. I’m going to try to photograph as broad a cross-section as I can. I’m going to use only one focal length, one kind of film, one developer, one size print.”

{...}

“I put all these constraints on myself, and that allowed the photography to fade into the background so I could just go into situations and work on automatic pilot,” Natali says. “At some point that situation starts guiding you. You get a message that’s bigger than you are.”

 

 

 

The Detroit 1968 collection was one of Enrico Natali's last major projects. At about the time he took these photographs, he began a meditation practice that began to take on greater and greater meaning in his life. He eventually abandoned photography altogether, and made his life in Calirfonia's Los Padres National Forest.

The new edition of this collection includes an introduction by Mark Binelli, author of Detroit City is the Place To Be.

The Heirs of Steinbeck

 

 

I wrote for the good folks at Pacific Standard about the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath -- such a fierce and fearless novel. As the magazine's intro text puts it, "The Grapes of Wrath is still a staple in most American classrooms. Is that because we haven’t yet written anything that does a better job of portraying the devastation of not having enough?"

The 1939 New York Times review of The Grapes of Wrath called it “as pitiful and angry a novel ever to be written about America … it reads as if it had been composed in a flash, ripped off the typewriter and delivered to the public as an ultimatum.”

It’s hard to imagine similar words describing today’s fiction (and not just because of that typewriter). Despite our recession-era reckoning with economics and inequality, fiction that examines both the macro and micro experience of poverty is all too rare. Of the writers who do venture forth in the tradition of John Steinbeck, many are finding new and riveting approaches to an age-old subject. But there are crucial gaps, still. And as brilliantly as Steinbeck wrote about poverty, we cannot rely on him to comprehensively tell today’s story.

{...}

Steinbeck was a moralist—he wrote of the Depression in Biblical terms, after all—but he was not a polemicist. That’s a tricky balance to strike ...

At the height of the Depression in 1933, Dorothy Day co-founded the Catholic Worker movement. She often wrote that the defining feature of poverty is not the lack of money; it is precarity—of not being sure if tomorrow you will be fed, sheltered, and safe. There is a lack of security. Will this leaking roof collapse? Will my kid eat breakfast tomorrow? Will the money I’m owed arrive before I have to pay the rent? Will I get picked to day labor today?

Today’s best fiction about poverty is brilliant about tracing the nuances of precarity—how to survive when there is nowhere else to go. But there is another story about poverty that deserves to be more fully developed for our twenty-first century: It didn’t have to be this way.

Detroit, We Have An Anthology

 

 

I've had my head down the last few months working on an anthology about and from the city I love. And now it's actually taking shape. It is going to be a real thing. And seeing it just takes my breath away.

We debut our cover today, with design by Haley Stone and photography by Amy Sacka of Owen Was Here.

We scheduled our Detroit book launch and you and everyone you know is invited! Think: drink, food, stories, music, bonfire.

Saturday, May 31
7pm
Practice-Space
2801 14th Street
Detroit, MI 48216

And most importantly, we've released our table of contents. These are the extraordinary makers behind this book. I assure you, they will bend your mind, break your heart, make you laugh, and leave you amazed.

 

Overture

Introduction
Anna Clark

 

Act I

We Love Detroit Even If You Don’t
Aaron Foley

Notown
Thomas J. Sugrue

I’m From Detroit
Shannon Shelton Miller

Turner Ronald Carter the Third
Kat Harrison

Gas Station on Second Avenue
Matthew Olzmann

Hommage à l’avenir: Desire Lines
Michael Eugene Burdick and Francis Grunow

Things I Lost in the Fire
dream hampton

Letter from Detroit
Ingrid Norton

Infernal
Tyehimba Jess

Greektown 1983
John Counts

Coming Soon
Nichole Christian

what you’d find buried in the dirt under charles. f. kettering sr. high school (detroit, michigan)
francine. j. harris

Fort Gratiot
Steven Pomerantz

Sketches of Eastern Market
Nina Misuraca Ignaczak

When the Trees Stop Giving Fruit
Shaka Senghor

Hungry Days in Detroit
Tracie MacMillan

There Are Birds Here
Jamaal May

Per Fumum (After Smoke)
Jamaal May

Desolation Angel
John Carlisle

Detroit: A City of Superheroes
Ingrid LaFleur

Hommage à l’avenir: Streetcar Tracks
Burdick / Grunow

Legally Blind In The Motor City: A Pedestrian’s Lament
Pamela Sabaugh

On the Automobile
Rachel Reed

Carlessness
John G. Rodwan, Jr.

The Line
Maisha Hyman Sumbry

January in Detroit
Ken Mikolowski

Trembling in the Temple of Tears at the Feet of Buddha
M.L. Liebler

 

Intermission

For the Long Haul
Desiree Cooper

still of it
adrienne maree brown

In the House Where Poetry Lives
Peter Markus

Belle Isle Song
Nandi Comer

The Imam I Knew
Omar Syed Mahmood

The Fixer
John Carlisle

The Next Move
Ryan Healy

Hommage à l’avenir: Ghost Shops
Burdick / Grunow

The Fauxtopia’s of Detroit’s Suburbs
James D. Griffioen

 

Act II

My Detroit
Joseph Lichterman

By the Time This Reaches You
Deonte Osayande

Music As The Missing Link
Keith A. Owens

Awakening
Maisha Hyman Sumbry

Game Not Over
Veronica Grandison

Misguided Faith
Karen Minard

Leaning To Roll Our Tongues, Detroit 1986
Nandi Comer

Up in the Morning & Off to School in Detroit
Tracey Morris

Hommage à l’avenir: Apartments v. Houses
Burdick / Grunow

Stand
Steve Hughes

SOBs and Dummies
Karen Minard

Down in Detroit
Terry Blackhawk

Playing Ball
J.M. Leija

Night, Briggs Stadium, 1960
Gail Griffin

Lost in Hockeytown
Matthew Lewis and Aaron Mondry

Hommage à l’avenir: Street Lights
Burdick / Grunow

Lily-Livered New Yorker Seeks Lion-Hearted Detroiters
Jaclyn Trop

Motown Atlantis
Chantay “Legacy” Leonard

Strange City
Chantay “Legacy” Leonard

The Detroit Virus
Shaun S. Nethercott

Detroit’s Good-Food Cure
Larry Gabriel

Planting Seeds of Hope
Grace Lee Boggs & Scott Kurashige

The Kidnapped Children of Detroit
Marsha Music

 

With photography by David Clement, James D. Griffioen, Kofi Handon, Patricia Lay-Dorsey, Aaron Mondry, Kevin Robishaw, Gabriela Santiago-Romero, Amy Sacka, Melanie Schmitt, Joseph Smedo, Megan Snow, and Aaron Waterman.

Kalamazoo as a Literary Boom Town

 

 

I hear a lot of writers talk about being priced out of New York, San Francisco, and other cities. New creative communities must be created in new places. While I chose Detroit for myself, one of the most interesting and exciting emerging literary cities is Kalamazoo, Michigan. Halfway between Chicago and Detroit, it's home to extraordinary writers, bookshops, academic programs, literary festivals, publishers, readings, journals, and more. In the piece I wrote for today's Detroit Free Press, I was especially interested in the homegrown aesthetic:

Kalamazoo’s industrial history is tied to Southern influences because many Southerners migrated north for jobs. (Author Bonnie Jo Campbell) sees parallels between Michigan writing and Southern writing, particularly in the way writers "treat our eccentrics" and their intimate engagement with the natural world. "We all have a bit of survivalist in us, the sense that if it all collapses, I could get by," she says.

Like other cities in Michigan, Kalamazoo also has experienced more than its share of economic precariousness. Campbell wonders whether “the very things that create and exacerbate economic stress are related to the things that create great art.” Specifically, she means uncertainty — and the questioning and wonder that come with it.

“I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but great writing rarely comes from people above the middle class, unless maybe in the 19th Century,” Campbell says. “People who are poor don’t write (much) because they’re too busy getting by. But it’s the people who figure out how to get by, who know the uncertainty that comes from having been poor, they make great art.” Kalamazoo, she suggests, has many of these writers.

Writing Through the Weeds

 

 

Here are things that happened over the last three weeks:

• I turned in the 74,000-word manuscript of the Detroit anthology to the publisher
• I went on a homemade 4.5 day reading/writing retreat in Charlevoix, Michigan (up at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula: that's Lake Michigan frozen over in the above photo), which included good food and an epic incident involving snow, vehicles, strangers, and being trapped for six hours
• Through Literary Detroit, I helped host the debut of our new Motor Signal Reading Series, and an unusual book event involving anonymous family secrets and art (and we are hosting Bill Ayers tomorrow evening!)
• I talked about why Americans don't read (barely any) translated literature on Wisconsin Public Radio
• I had a happy weekend visiting family in my hometown, St. Joseph
• I wrote, revised, and went through the rigorous fact-checking process on a 5,000-word article about Houston that comes out next week
• I reviewed Hannah Arendt's last interview for Waxwing
• I wrote about the epic newsroom drama in Cleveland, and about how journalists are and are not benefiting from a push for government transparency in Wisconsin
• I talked about why Obamacare is awesome for freelancers
• I taught poetry and drew pictures with high schoolers two mornings a week through the InsideOut writing residency program (weather permitting!)

Here are things that did not happen over the last three weeks:

• Sufficient exercise
• Balanced eating (which is not to say that there weren't great meals in there, especially up in Charlevoix)
• Sufficient sleep
• Email
• A great deal of friend time
• Regular cleaning of my apartment
• I had been making a ritual out of reading for at least 20 minutes, first thing each morning, as a sort of meditation practice. I completely lapsed on that.
• Editing

The things on the "not done" list are only palatable to me if they are temporary conditions, not a practice. I'm proud of the work done over the last few weeks, but it felt breathless and out of joint.

You know that Charlevoix retreat? It only happened because we were intentional about it. We planned ahead. We got to joyfully look forward to it for months. While there, we kept ourselves offline. And it was a perfect trip -- I experienced those days as a proper de-icing. My itch to get things done relaxed, and I basically did nothing that anyone expected or needed me to do; only things I felt like doing. (Mostly reading, as it turned out.)

Over dinner just before Charlevoix, a friend shared an exercise that she went through (in a much more involved way) on a facilitated retreat. It basically goes like this:

Step 1: What is a strength of yours?
(I picked that I'm not afraid to work hard.)

Step 2: What is a pitfall of your strength? That is, what happens if you have too much of it?
(I get too busy, and I don't leave time to care for myself or for the other meaningful parts of my life that are not work. I mis-value things: if time isn't spent "productively," I fret that I am wasting it.)

Step 3: Given your pitfall, what is your challenge? That is, what is an action to take to keep you calibrated right, so that you're acting from your strength, and not your pitfall?
(I can intentionally create space for things that are not "productive" but have meaning and delight for me. I can catch myself trying to strain, say, a lazy afternoon with a friend into something that is "useful," or when I try to problem-solve things that are not a problem I need to solve. Basically, I can learn to be attentive, to slow down, to pivot more easily into other ways of being. I can work less.)

Step 4: Who is your trigger person? Or, what is your allergy persona? That is, what is the persona that drives you mad? This is your shadow self. You know you got it when just thinking about this person/persona starts working you up! (No naming names here, but my trigger persona is people who have time and resources -- but no will or passion. People who have a lack of curiosity about the world: I just do not understand that. People who opt out. Lazy people. People who say they will do things and don't follow through. People who can't be counted on. People who skirt the edges. People afraid of effort, or snobbish about what kind of "work" is worth their time. In my experience, it is the same persona who has all these traits! And it reveals a lot about my shadow self -- the side of me that I repress, that I'm afraid of, that I'd be horrified to be known as.)

I was really struck by this exercise, because it crystallized the fluidity of our strengths and pitfalls ... and it gave me a stern look at how my irritation at my shadow self/trigger persona (Step 4) has me overcompensating, leading me straight into my pitfall (Step 2.) Once that was revealed, I started seeing it everywhere.

Our Charlevoix retreat was a way of creating space that intervenes on those old well-worn emotional patterns. I was starved for it, and am seriously and happily considering making my annual writing retreat into a twice-a-year ritual, or maybe even a seasonal one. The somewhat spontaneous decision to travel three hours each way to visit family this weekend was part of that same instinct to disrupt the habits that incline me to spend my time "accomplishing things."

But that's still not enough. I am alive every day, and I want to learn how the "creating space" model can get outside the vacation set-up.

I've been in the weeds, and I've gotten a lot done. I'm proud of it -- especially this anthology. But I'm ready to experiment with more ways of measuring worth than in output. I will try. It is hard for me to not work hard -- constantly -- because I fear that I will go hungry if I don't accept every possible assignment, and because I fear I will disappoint people, and because I've grown very accustomed to conflating my worth as a person with the worth of my work. I was a good student in school, and this came to seem like a moral good, you know? And I want to be a good person.

It's tiring, though. And while my ability to work hard is indeed a strength, it is not my only one, even though it's the one that gets all my attention and trust. Vulnerable as it feels to let go of concrete markers of value of usefulness, I'm ready to pay more attention to my shadow persona instead -- the side that says no, that lays down, that wanders, that takes great joy in not working -- to see what power she has. Writing isn't the only way to get through the weeds that choke up the days, after all. What if I relax through them instead? What if I skip rope through them, or do nothing through them? What if I just laugh?

Let's see.

The Best Books You Can't Read

 

 

American readers are not likely to discover today’s Borges, Neruda, or Kafka until long after they are dead (if ever). I wrote about why for Pacific Standard:

When Alice Munro, a Canadian, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, you could almost hear the howl of relief from America’s readers: finally, a winner whose name I know! And, perhaps, whose books I’ve even read!

American authors, journalists, and readers have been criticized for being “too isolated, too insular ” about literature published outside our own borders, as a member of the Nobel committee once put it. Americans “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” When the internationally celebrated author Herta Müller won the Nobel in 2009, Europeans poked fun at the bafflement of Americans with headlines like: “Amerikaanse Media: ‘Müller, Who the f*** Is Müller?’”

Is it true? Are American readers woefully out of touch with international literature? Is our bookish insularity limiting our imaginative lives and suffocating our understanding of the world, while inflating our own sense of self-importance?

Well, yes. But there’s more to the story than that.

A meager three percent of all books published in America each year are translated from another language. The majority of that is computer manuals, instructions, and other technical material. An even smaller percentage accounts for reprints or new translations of classics—this is where War & Peace and Madame Bovary come in.

That means that contemporary global literature—fiction and poetry written by living authors—is a vanishingly tiny portion of that three percent. ...

Things are worse for female authors: only a quarter of this already microscopic number of contemporary literary translations is of works by women. No female authors have ever won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and four out of 22 have won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. For all the seeming diversity of books available to American readers, the scope is actually breathtakingly narrow.

Maxine Kumin, Yes.

 

 

In the literary world, I'm thrilled by the conversations, and especially the action, that the VIDA Count has inspired. It's crucial to elevate and engage with the best writing by women. But I believe the work on the other end is important as well: elevating and engaging the work of writers who have passed on.

 

Maxine Kumin has died at age 88. The writer who told us that all poems are elegies, who wrote of the natural and the strange, who resigned the Academy of American Poets to protest the lack of inclusion of women and minorities, who championed poems as sound to learn by heart, who herself learned to swim by the meter of poetry: she deserves our attention.

To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston: Let us be a people who does not throw our geniuses away.

Here is a dark pearl of a poem from Maxine Kumin in 1969, four years before she won the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country. (That year, The Boston Globe featured her in the above photo.)

 

The Masochist

My black-eyed lover broke my back,
that hinge I swung on in and out
and never once thought twice about,

expecting a lifetime guarantee.
He snapped that simple hinge for me.
My black-eyed lover broke my back.

All delicate with touch and praise
he one by one undid the screws
that held the pin inside its cup

and when I toppled like a door
–his bitch, his bountiful, his whore–
he did not stay to lift me up.

Beware of black-eyed lovers. Some
who tease to see you all undone,
who taste and take you in the game

will later trample on your spine
as if they never called you mine,
mine, mine.

 

Maxine Kumin's story -- how she balanced ferocity with even-headedness, seriousness with earthiness -- unfolds here, here, here, and here. But her writing is most important. Here is a poem of hers from 2002:

 

Last Days

We visit by phone as the morphine haze   

retreats, late afternoon, most days.   

Our mingled past is set against the pin-   

hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets:   

we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz,   

honors students carrying heavy course loads   

tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding   

our virginities on the altar of inverse pride,   

ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars   

to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders,   

ensigns in training for the Second World War   

in the Business School across the Charles River.

We called ourselves the Unholy Four.   

Whenever any three of us met on campus   

we huddled to bray Austria! Russia! Prussia!

in unison. It came out sounding like Horseshit!

Post graduation one year, look at us:   

my new husband atop your even newer   

one's car singing the bawdy verses   

of "Roll Me Over" in a drunken tenor   

while the scandalized uncles and aunties   

—it wasn't enough that you'd wed a Chinese—   

wrung their hands. You drove off   

trailing Just Married in two languages.   

Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say,   

only days. It is my plan to go with you   

as far as the border. I've been that far—   

Did I come back from there morally improved?   

Somehow better equipped to support you   

this side of the douane and wave,   

your two cats curled like commas beside you   

as the barrier lifts and you drive on through?

Viva la Library

The best-kept secret about libraries? They are wildly, deeply, and incontrovertibly popular. They are as actively used as ever, if not more. Here's my piece for Pacific Standard in its "You Don't Know America" series ... and below, an excerpt.

...this “amazing decentralized mutual aid” creation, as one librarian described it, was founded on a radical belief that all citizens have a right to information, art, and literature. That these things are not a luxury, but a necessity, is an idea that turned the old elite concept of private libraries and ivory towers on its head.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the people locked out of the traditional venues for knowledge are the ones who pioneered the public library. By donating book collections, fundraising for better buildings, and lobbying for political support, women’s clubs around the country were key forces in cultivating public libraries: 75 percent of America’s libraries were started by them on humanistic principles.

{...}

Funding cuts be damned: more than 16,000 public library branches in the U.S. serve 96.4 percent of the population, according to the “State of America’s Libraries Report 2013” by the American Library Association. (The ALA was founded in 1876, the same year the Dewey decimal system was developed.) Public libraries circulated 2.46 billion materials last year, the greatest volume in 10 years. Over this same period, the circulation of children’s book and materials increased by more than 28 percent. Attendance at library-hosted programs for kids hit 60.5 million in 2013.

{...}

The assistance of librarians was also cited as important to 76 percent of library users surveyed by Pew. About the same number said that the space of the library itself—as a quiet and safe place—was meaningful to them. All but six percent agreed that “public libraries are a welcoming, friendly place,” and a staggering 91 percent said they personally have never had a negative experience using a public library, either in person or online.

Also, I gotta say: I really like how the photo Pacific Standard used is of the Bates Reading Room in the Boston Public Library, down the road from where I used to live. I went there when I needed to breathe. Many, many wonderful days spent in this room.

Tonight: The Freelancers Guild of Detroit

For the sake of fun, community-building, and learning to sustain the work we love to do, the new Freelancers Guild of Detroit is calling on all freelance writers, editors, designers, artists, chefs, and other hustlers to join us tonight. The special guest, by the way, is Denise Scally, the CPA who has been imeasurably patient in effectively coaching me (and occasionally talking me down) while I have made a go of full-time freelance journalism for the last four years.

See more about our Guild here and here.