Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000

 Lori Teresa Yearwood, "Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000", New York Times January 2, 2022, p. SR10.

By the beginning of 2015, I had become a woman forlornly clutching plastic garbage bags as she makes her way from food pantry to shelter to public library to park bench.  I had once been a writer who helped to cover the Dalai Lama's visit to Maiami.  I had traveled to Ireland to interview a famous self-help author.  By contrast, my homeless existance was limited to a two-mile radius.

...

He began appearing every morning at teh entrance of the shelter and he would follow me until I got to the public library.  One day he said he would give me a duffle bag to replace my garbae bags and told me I could keep some of my other belongings in a shtorage shed he owned.  When we arrived, he pushed me inside, where he sexually assaulted me. 

COMMENT

The library is a safe space, but also a dangerous space.  The predator follows a homeless woman to the library because he knows that's where she'll go, and makes a false offer of help to lure her into a bad situation.  Librarians are not social workers, and the library doesn't save this woman.  An actual social worker does that, taking her to lunch and helping her sort out impossible medical bills in order to help her get a place to live and resume working as a journalist.  

N. Mexico Author Delivers Books to Migrants

Angela Kochera, "N. Mexico Author Delivers Books to Migrants," Salt Lake Tribune (original to Albuquerque Journal), January 7, 2020, p. A6.

     Along with giving books to migrant children and their families, the book drive helps a small library that serves children in Mexico living in Anapra.
     Chavez, Lenander and volunteers with the Border Servant Corps make monthly visits to the Biblioteca para la Vida to participate in Saturday morning storytelling sessions.
     "The kids will come in their pajamas and just put blankets and pillows all over the floor," Lenander said.
    In December, the children each got their own book bag with a book and toy and celebrated the season with a piñata shaped like a big book.  Chavez read from "Dragones y Tacos" during he Christmas party as the kids munched on tacos. 

COMMENT

    The article describes a project called Libros para el Viaje that collects books in English, Spanish and Portuguese for migrants at the U.S./Mexico border.  Part of the project is a children's library located in Mexico that offers story time, community, food, books to keep and a small sense of normalcy for migrant children.  The books help migrants pass the time,  and provide language practice, but most importantly they are a deeply humane gift.
    The Biblioteca para la Vida provides an opportunity for volunteers to hold story time.  The books and stories become a connection between people who might otherwise never meet each other.

Fighting for Life on Death Row

Lauren Gill, "Fighting for Life on Death Row," The Nation, April 22, 2019, pp.22-26.

     A couple of month after he arrived on death row at theWilliam C. Holman Correctional Facility, Drinkard met Darrell Grayson, who offered him coffee, cigarettes, and an invitation. Each Wednesday, Grayson and a group of other death-row inmates would meet in the prison's law library and work on a plan to raise awareness about  inequity in the criminal justice system.  Dubbed Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, it was -- and remains -- the nations's only anti-death-penalty organization run by death-row prisoners.

COMMENT

     This library serves some essential function of libraries, but in extremely constrained circumstances. The inmates are in the prison library hoping to become knowledgeable enough about the law in order to avoid getting executed. It's hard to imagine library research with higher stakes, Particularly since the men in Project Hope are trying to make up for the inadequate legal representation that landed them on death row in the first place. The article says that people rich enough to hire a lawyer were never sentenced to death no matter what crimes they were charged with;  impoverished  defendants with court-appointed lawyers were sentenced to death even though some of them were innocent.

     The prison library also serves as a meeting space.  The article says that the group, which has existed for 30 years, is allowed to meet so long as they do not discuss prison conditions.  There is a law class for Project Hope and members share information in a quarterly newsletter written on typewriters and printed by an outside board member who distributes 1,300 copies to subscribers.  Since the library has no digital networking or news databases, the board members also have to gather and share articles about the death penalty.

   

   

   

A Haven Like No Other

Sean P. Means, "A Haven Like No Other, Salt Lake Tribune, April 5, 2019, p. D1.

     Estevez--whose onscreen history with libraries goes back to The Breakfast Club in the 1980s-- was so taken with Ward's essay that he bought the film rights to it and worth a script inspired by it.  After several starts and stops, Estevez's move, The Public is opening Friday in theaters nationwide,
     Estevez saw what Ward was describing years before the essay was published. Estevez did most of the research for his 2006 drama Bobby about the days before Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, in the Los Angeles Public Library. 

COMMENT

     Technically, this whole article is about libraries and falls outside the scope for this blog which is dedicated to libraries that appear in stories that are not otherwise about libraries or librarianship.  The article is about programs for homeless patrons at the Salt Lake City Public Library. [1]  However, the embedded anecdote about library use is simply too good to leave out.   Where else besides a library is it possible for a famous Hollywood actor and homeless people to coexist in a state of social equality?

     So I'm going to count it in because it relates an organic library use. Like the story of Micky Hart at the library, [2] this library anecdote involves a person who is famous enough that he might be recognized.  Yet there he was, apparently anonymous, at the public library researching history for his next movie.  Honestly I would have imagined that the rich and famous would hire someone to do research for them so it makes me happy to know that Emilio Estevez went to the library to do his own research.

     The article also recounts how Estevez read Chip Ward's essay in the Los Angeles Times and then looked it up again on TomDispatch.com where it originally appeared.  The daily newspaper provided inspiration for the movie by providing a curated collection of articles.  Estevez went back to read the article online, but he might never have found it in the first place without the newspaper editorial page.

[1] See Stony Mesa Sagas
[2] See Drumming at the Edge of Magic

The Stack

Katherine Schulz, “The Stack”, New Yorker, March 25, 2019, pp. 28-31.

It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure.  I do know that when he was nineteen he let Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America.  Instead, he found penury on the Bowery.  To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.  Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.

COMMENT

Here’s another version of the same story Frank McCourt told [1]— an immigrant finding the American   at the public library.  When the father has a bit more money and his own house he becomes a bit of a book hoarder, saving everything he has read in a large, sorted stack in his bedroom. 

In the essay, his daughter says that she keeps two photos of her father on her desk— one that is an image of him and another image of his stack of books.  Of the book photo she writes, “I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally. Defy a camera.”  As in other library stories,  the reading list is described as a reflection of a person’s soul. From stories like this it seems clear that one of the reasons that people love libraries is that the books they have read are in the stacks.  The collection reflects a little reflection of the true self of each and every library borrower.  

Reading is a reflection of both true self and an aspirational self. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile is a haunting graphic novel in which a reading list comes to seem more representative than real life.  [2]

[1] New in Town

[2] Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.

At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

Mark Miller, "At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length: Fewer Field Offices and Longer Waiting Times as the Number of Beneficiaries Mount," New York Times, November 25, 2018, p. BU5.

Along with other community leaders, Ms. Holt mounted a campaign to save the office, proposing ways to the Social Security Administration to reduce expenses.  But the Quincy office closed anyway, in March 2014-- a casualty of the cuts required by eight years of Congressional budget tightening.
     For anyone without a car, public transportation to Tallahassee is severely limited: There is a once-daily commuter bus, s. Holt says, and it is often overflowing with riders.
      Social Security did install a video kiosk in the Quincy library. That kiosk connects benefit claimants with the Tallahasssee office; today it serves 75 to 100 people daily during library hours. But it's not a trouble-free solution, Ms. Holt said. " We have people who can barely read because of vision problems, or hiring problems. Video is not the answer for many of these people." 

COMMENT

     Since 2010, Social Security has closed 67 field offices causing long wait times, a jammed phone line and long delays in solving appeals and errors. Meanwhile, each year  about one million more people begin to receive benefits.  When this particular Social Security office closed, the public library became a substitute for a staffed office.  However, it's not a very good substitute. The video kiosk,  is not accessible to people with certain kinds of disabilities and is staffed only by librarians who lack institutional knowledge about  Social Security and can't trouble-shoot problems. 

     Social Security has tried to address budget shortfalls by increasing the use of technology, but has run into a problem that would be familiar to any librarian -- the digital divide.  Older people, people without internet access, people who lack of computer literacy, people who are not fluent in English, homeless people, people with disabilities -- all sorts of people have trouble using computers un-aided.  What's more, technology is hardly ever really do-it-yourself.  Customer support and human intervention are needed to help people fill out complicated forms correctly. For instance, the complexity of IRS forms has created an entire industry of tax-filing software and accountants. 

     When libraries used to hand out paper tax forms it was always problematic that people wanted advice about which forms they needed, but they were asking the wrong people for help.  The reported 75 to 100 people per day is a lot of people in need of help.  It seems like one solution might be for Social Security staff to periodically visit the library kiosk in order to offer personal help, similar to the way some large urban  libraries staff social service desks to help homeless people.  While it's a great idea to  put a Social Security  kiosk at the library, but it's still not free. The library clearly needs more support in order to make it work. 

Stony Mesa Sagas

Chip Ward. Stony Mesa Sagas. Torrey House Press. 2017.

But in his last story, the one he didn'’t complete, he learned he leaned that sometimes It's hard to distinguish the the good guys from the bad and the bad guys do get away and the truth is suppressed. He’d investigated the shooting deaths by police of homeless men. Not just homeless. There were many people who are temporarily homeless while trying desperately to land on their feet, but the people who had been killed were chronically homeless. They are the ones we point to, the ones who live on the streets, sleep in parks and alleys, spend their days reading in public libraries, and sometimes rant on sidewalks, piss in the courthouse shrubs, and scream in the subway when visited by their inner demons  They’re the ones who cry with joy in fast food lines when angels appear above the condiment bar. 

     America, Buchman realized, had kicked the mentally ill out into the streets and then punished them for expressing the symptoms of untreated illness. Often, way too often , the ranters and screamers who didn’t or couldn’t respond to the police when confronted were coldly executed.  In case after case, an order was given once and given again. If the raging didn’t stop, a cop would calmly and deliberately take aim and then fire. These incidents had a cold and calculated aspect and they were becoming almost routine, like removing pests from a garden, bullets instead of bug spray. [p. 36-37]

COMMENT

      This is fiction, so it's made up, but the premise is drawn from real life. Ward's essay about homeless people at the public library [1] is probably the only essay ever written for an audience of librarians that has been turned into a Hollywood movie [2]. In the novel Buchman, Ward's fictional alter-ego (get it?), is a journalist who has quit his job and moved to a small town in Utah after a cover-up involving the murder of homeless people. There he continues to serve as a sort of  reference librarian/detective, helping people find and use useful information.  

    I don't think that Ward knew of any actual cover-up as horrifying as this fictional one, though I'm sure he was aware of abuses. After Ward's essay came out, many libraries actually made an effort to be more helpful to homeless patrons. [3] The Salt Lake Public Library, for example, staffs a Volunteers of America desk to help connect people with food, shelter and other services. 

     Public libraries are a key institution for democracy, one of the few places where people of all ages, ethnicity and social class all share the same space. It's hard to imagine a privatized space that would find ways to mitigate the disruption of homelessness or welcome homeless people in any way.

[1] Chip Ward, "How the Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel," TomDispatch.com, 2007 .
[2]  The Public (2018)
[3] Dowd, Ryan. The Librarian's Guide to Homelessness: An Empathy-driven Approach to Solving Problems, Preventing Conflict, and Serving Everyone. ALA Editions, 2018.
[4] [Book Review] Stony Mesa Sagas. Reviewed by Amy Brunvand in Catalyst magazine, November 2018.

Seeing My Son Read is a Bittersweet Joy

Viet Than Nguyen. Seeing My Son Read is a Bittersweet Joy. New York Times, August 5, 2018. p.4SR.

Books were not a priority for my parents, so we never had them in the house. I would go to the public library every week and stuff my backpack full of books, which were barely enough for a week. I never owned my own until high school. My son has a bigger library than I ever had.  While my parents showed me they loved me by making sure that I always had enough to eat, I show my love for my son by making sure that he always has enough to read (as well as to eat). For me, the library was a second home, and I want my son to have his own home

By 11 or 12, I knew how to get to my second home by myself, on foot or on the bus.  But in remembering that childhood library, what I also know is that libraries are potentially dangerous places because there are no borders. There are countries called children’s literature and young adult literature and adult fiction, but no border guards, or in my case, parents to police the borders and protect me. A reader could go wherever he or she wanted. So, at 12 or 13 I read Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Larry Heinemann’s “Close Quarters."

COMMENT

     We may not normally think of letting kids get inappropriate books as a desirable function of the library, but considering how often reading the “wrong” book influences the course of someone's life it strikes me as a particularly valuable service. There is a kind of coming-of-age that happens when a child starts reading books that reveal  truly shocking adult knowledge. Reading these books becomes a formative experience precisely because the reader was so ill prepared. Some kids can find such transformational books on their parents’ shelves, but Nguyen’s refugee parents didn’t have any books at all. The library had to facilitate his coming-of-age.  Luckily, the librarians provided guidance for curious kids by dividing books into shelves for children, young adults and adults. Any child who wanted to sneak a peek at adult secrets would know exactly where to look. Nguyen, now a protective parent himself, is absolutely right that by learning to read his son is “one step further on his own road to independence, to being a border-crosser, someone who makes his own decisions, including about what he reads and what he believes.” I like to think that Banned Books Week helps this coming-of-age process along.