(Public) Spaces that Empower Participation

When I graduated from college, I moved to the suburbs of Chicago and in order to give myself time to write the Great American Novel, I took two jobs: I was an assistant minister at a local secretly-baptist church and I was a librarian at the public library. 

After a year of these jobs I moved across state lines to try three DIFFERENT jobs simultaneously, but I emerged from that year knowing that I would never work in a church again and that I wanted to spend as much of life as possible in libraries.

Because I grew up as a Christian Fundamentalist - I always knew that libraries were dangerous subversive places - what with their unrestricted access to ideas that had not been vetted by the pulpit nor the deacons, but they never felt dangerous to me.  They felt like the most peaceful, comforting and curiosity-provoking places imaginable. And what a combination that is?  Peaceful.  Comforting.  Curiosity-provoking.

I stumbled upon the Chronicles of Narnia as a child which blew my brain open.  Later I would find voices in the stacks that would articulate true things that I knew but that I had never said out loud.  And I worried that I was the only one who thought them. I would read stories that would re-shape my vision of what a life could be.  Re-shape my sense of what a story could be.  New genres, new meanings, new endings, new possibilities.

Only later would I understand that the really amazing thing about libraries was not the openness they had about what they would keep on the shelves, but the openness to all who wanted access.  In a world where private interests and profit motives increasingly dominate the public sphere - I love these spaces even more.

(And not JUST libraries, I do love museums and parks, too.  But yes,  ESPECIALLY libraries, I especially love them...)