Tag Archives: books

Infinity Under A Roof

The following talk was given on October 23, 2025, at a wonderful storytelling event called The Hearth, in  which members of the community tell stories about a given theme. That evening’s theme was “I Remember.”

The talk can be viewed here (it begins at 34:13)

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“A library is infinity under a roof.” Gail Carson Levine

This quote by the author of Ella Enchanted has always ALMOST summed it up for me. It’s true: libraries contain the stories of the past in all their complexity and the possibilities of the future in all their potency. But that’s not all. Libraries also blow that metaphorical roof clear off the building by housing ideas, concepts, potentialities that go as high as the sky and as low as the core of the earth.

So, if you haven’t figured it out by now, this story is about libraries (and if you know me, you won’t be surprised by that). But borrowing from tonight’s theme of “I Remember,”  I’d like to take an odd sort of path through my story. There’s no narrative arc spelled out, no rising action, no denouement. Instead, it’s a story made of mental snapshots, impressions, and revelations. After all, memories are not always stories.

First vignette: 

I’m a kid, maybe 10 or 12, watching a rerun of The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough At Last.” I’m sure you’ve all heard about or seen it, but I’ll recap. 

Opening narration (imagine me doing a Rod Serling voice): “Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself… without anyone in The Twilight Zone.”

In other words, Harold Bemis is a man born to read but forced to work. One day, he eats his lunch in the vault of the bank he works in. He emerges to find that nuclear war has demolished everything he knows. Through his despair he spies an intact public library. In a revelatory moment, he realizes he now has all the time in the world to read.

I remember that feeling of elation. Imagine, reading all the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and the Chronicles of Narnia–for as long as you wanted, as many times as you desired!

And I remember the despair when, reaching down to pick up the first book on what we would now call his TBR pile, Henry Bevins’s glasses fall and are smashed.

Second vignette:

Flash forward to college. I decide to study in the fancy library, the kind with the green table lamps and polished wood tables. I see in the marble carved above me a quote, “knowledge is power,” by the Elizabethan writer, poet, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon, whose new model of intellectual inquiry sparks the scientific revolution.

Three words. Sixteen letters. A whole universe of awareness. It sticks with me.

Third Vignette:

It’s 2007 and my daughters, ages 5 and 7, are sitting at the Bluestone Cafe drinking hot chocolate. My husband and I have taken them to an election party. On the ballot was a library district–it didn’t pass. Everyone in the room is shocked–what would happen next? Would the library close? I look over to the kids to see my eldest staring at me, tears cascading down her cheeks.

Fourth vignette:

It’s 2009, I think, though the numbers are fuzzy. The nonprofit Josephine Community Libraries, Inc., is reopening the libraries with a ‘soft open’ of the children’s room. Some of us  behind the desk, frantically using the cutting board to make bookmarks to give away. When we look out the front door, we’re gobsmacked to see a line that goes all the way to the street. When the doors open, kids and their people flood into the children’s room and then check out, arms full to the brim. I cry.

Fifth vignette:

My family travels to England and my kids want to tour the Bodleian Library in Oxford because parts of Harry Potter were filmed in the Divinity School, which is on the library tour. We go to the oldest part of the library called Sir Humfrey’s library (or, to the Potter fans, where the Restricted Section is filmed). The tour guide tells us that a unique tradition of Sir Humfrey’s library was that no books could be lent out–even King Charles I had to stay in the library to read. 

I’m struck by this. As magnificent and storied as the Bodleian was in the 17th-century, almost every library in the world today is better because you can take the books home. 

In this, we are richer than kings.

Sixth and final vignette:

Last month. I’m not going to get into the politics or nitty gritty of it (that would take all night), but after ten months of uncertainty and instability, the commissioners vote 2-1 to pass a 5-year lease that allows the library to stay in the building it’s occupied since 1959. There have been rallies, countless letters to the editor, documentaries, articles, and interviews. Meetings and more meetings.

And when it finally happens, where am I? Alone in a hotel room in Grand Rapids, Michigan, watching the meeting online, staring in disbelief as, at a sparsely attended meeting in a conference room, three men determine the fate of the library.

I look around the hotel room and think, “That was it?” 

But then the anticlimactic feeling fades when I think of the library’s history and all the moments just like this that allowed it to continue. I remember all the folks over all the years who’ve dedicated themselves to the library. The people I never met, like Mrs. C.M. Stone, who served as the library board’s first president in 1893, and philanthropist Ben Bones, who in 1962 gave funds for a community meeting room. The couple who gave up their Saturdays for months to table at the Growers’ Market. The volunteers who shelve and check out books and answer a gajillion questions at the information counter. The new folks who bring energy and savvy and the experienced folks who bring local history and wisdom.

And then I don’t feel so alone.

So to close, I’d like to modify Gail Carson Levine’s quotation just a bit. Yes, the library is “infinity under a roof,” but it is also a multitude under a roof–and out on the streets, and in the halls of power. 

The library is us.

To Be Continued . . .

The talk below was given at The Hearth, a community storytelling organization, in Grants Pass, Oregon, on January 25, 2024.

It’s taken me years to be able to say this: I am a novelist. My debut book, The Village Healer’s Book of Cures, was published in November. 

As a novelist, stories are my bread and butter. As you can imagine, I think a lot about beginnings and endings and sequels and prequels.

Tonight I’ll tell a bit of my story, but I also want to talk about stories in a general sort of way, about how they allow us to preserve hope, imagine a better day, and work towards a better future.

The last time I attended The Hearth, it was February of 2020, and I was bald. Not prickly, just-shaved-my-head bald, but the kind of unnaturally smooth, eyebrows-nonexistent, eyelashes-falling-out bald that can only come from chemotherapy.

I’d been diagnosed the summer before with Stage 1 breast cancer. We’d caught it early with a preventive mammogram (AND I’M GOING TO INTERRUPT THIS TO REMIND Y’ALL TO GET YOUR MAMMOGRAMS!). My prognosis was and is excellent, but based on my age and genetic testing, my doctors advised me to be aggressive with treatment: surgery, chemo, radiation, hormone blockers. The full arsenal.

But this isn’t a story about cancer. This is a story about stories.

So, as a storyteller, maybe I shouldn’t frame the opening scene there. Maybe I should begin even earlier.

The year before, my youngest daughter had graduated high school and my husband and I would soon have an empty nest. A new chapter of my story was pretty obviously starting, and I got a part-time job as an adjunct professor my local university. 

I loved it. I loved the students, the planning, the classes–all of it. (Except for the grading. Nobody likes the grading.)

And I loved my colleagues and supervisors, so when I told them about the cancer and asked for two weeks off to recover from surgery, I thought it would be no problem. But, instead, the department took away my teaching contract and gave my classes to another instructor. Yeah, that sucked 

Since we’re talking about stories, let’s imagine we frame that scene as the end. The story becomes “middle-aged woman gets cancer and her bosses fire her.” If you end there, the story is a sad one, even an enraging one that sets up a discussion of capitalism and academia, of budgets pitted against human need and community.

But let’s look ahead a month. I went to Twitter and posted about my situation. Thousands of people liked and shared the post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Calls came in from other states, other countries even, from media and lawyers advising the university that what they were doing was discriminatory. 

They gave me my job back.

Let’s pretend that’s the end. If we frame it there, the story has a happy ending, with After-School-Special levels of good feels, and we can talk about the power of community and the occasionally happy stories made possible by social media.

BUT, remember how I said the last time I’d been here at The Hearth was February 2020? Remember what happened the month after that? 

Yup. Lockdown .Covid hit, the university was shut down, and I lost my job anyway. (Sigh.)

Stop the story there and frame it, and this becomes an absurdist tale, Kafkaesque, ridiculous and hopeless.

But fast forward: I finished a novel during Covid and the novel just got published.

Stop. Frame. Happy story.

You can all see the pattern here. In some ways, this is a lesson as old as time: it’s all in the way you look at things, the way you frame them.

Mark Twain once said “humor is tragedy plus time.” And maybe that’s why, as we get older, we (hopefully) get wiser: we have more stories, and we start to see beginnings and endings as two sides of the same coin.

It’s old, hard-earned wisdom. 

But there’s also powerful new research that shows us that the way we imagine and tell our stories has a profound impact on how we remember our past and think of our future. 

I recently came across an article written by Nick Hobson about emotionally intelligent people that focused on the medial frontal gyrus, which Hobson described as “a swath of spongy brain folds on the outside middle region of the frontal lobe. It is the seat of our identity. It is your ‘you.'”

Researchers in the journal Neuron explain that “the function of the medial frontal gyrus is to learn associations between context, locations, events, and emotional responses.” It also “facilitates decision making, long-term memory recall . . . [and] helps with the memory and consolidation in time scales ranging from seconds to years.” 

In other words, this part of the brain is a storyteller.

Ah, but the brain is tricky. The medial frontal gyrus is located next to parts of the brain that control negative emotions, judgment, and attention–it lets us decide whether to pay attention to bad feelings. It can turn our good stories into bad ones, our romances and comedies into tragedies.

So what do we do with this knowledge? How do we use it to celebrate our wins for the successes that they are and reframe our losses away from pure devastation?

Hobson’s answer? We time travel.

Scientists call it chronosthesia, a “learned capability absent in other animals and human infants.” Hobson explains that “it’s the brain’s natural ability to be constantly aware of past and future versions of ourselves. It’s believed to be the basis of human consciousness.”

 In other words, chronosthesia is a fancy way of talking about getting perspective, of moving the frame of your story around in time 

Let’s reframe my story again. Whether or not I publish another book is highly variable: sales, reviews, and market trends all play a role. My publisher may say no to the next full manuscript. But that’s only one frame. I can time travel, reimagine. Maybe they’ll say yes, and I’ll build a relationship with them. Maybe they’ll say no, and I’ll be disappointed. But maybe that will spur me on to write and publish an even better novel. 

This may not be the end but the beginning. Or maybe the middle third, or the second half of the first part of the middle 🙂 But barring something unforeseen (crossing my heart), this is not the end.

Unlike in novels, the story goes on.

Much Ado About Doodles

One of the best things about being an independent scholar (whatever that term means) is that my enthusiasms are no longer policed by the academy.

Note: Which is not to say that academics are unenthusiastic about their topics. It’s a truism that academics have a proprietary relationship–well, really, they fall in love with–the subjects of their research. One need only go to an academic conference and watch people unabashedly nerding out about Chaucer or planetary rovers or chaos theory to know that’s true.

No, this is all a very long way of talking about how I saw some of John Dee’s books—and the doodles, notes, and marginalia within—and am unconstrained in saying that it was pretty freaking magical.

Portrait of John Dee. Sixteenth Century, artist unknown. Original in Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.
Portrait of John Dee. Sixteenth Century, artist unknown. Original in Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.

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The circumstances that led up to my sitting in the reading room of the Royal College of Physicians, quietly waiting to pay my respects to Dee’s books, were a perfect example of the kind of generosity of spirit and collegiality among many academics on Twitter. I had heard that the Royal College of Physicians would be doing an exhibit on John Dee, the 16th-century magus and mathematician who is widely thought to be the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero (Scholar, courtier, magician: The lost library of John Dee). Unfortunately for me, the exhibit was ending in late July, and I wouldn’t be in England until late August. I was sure I would miss this chance of a lifetime. I bemoaned my luck on Twitter, tweeting out “Oh, to be in England, while John Dee is there…”

Within a day I was thrilled to have a response from R. Satterley (@rsatterley), tagging the curator of the exhibit, Katie Birkwood. Katie generously offered to show me some of the highlights of the exhibit when I was in London, a month after the official end of the show. Katie spent almost an hour with me, and we talked about a wide and fascinating array of topics: how the books were stolen from Dee’s library and found their way to the Royal College of Physicians; Dee’s wife, Jane Dee, and what her life might have been like (in a word–odd); and Dee’s mathematical interests and drive to codify and record everything from the weather to his wife’s menstrual periods. Katie was so very kind and immensely knowledgeable. Thanks, Katie! <waves>

The first thing Katie showed me was, she said, one of her favorite parts of the exhibition: a doodle Dee had drawn (probably in 1545 when he was a student at Cambridge, as Katie notes in the video below starting around 2:40). It was found in a compendium of Cicero’s work’s, tucked in a corner by a poem about the “foaming, frothing seas.” The drawing is of a ship that seems almost to glide off the page, the perspective foreshortened in such a way that it floats toward the viewer. I had viewed the digitized image before my trip, but seeing it in person had a much more visceral effect. I was embarrassed to say this to Katie, fearing it would be too fanciful, but it reminded me very much of the scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis, in which Eustace, Lucy, and Edmund stare at a painting of a ship rolling on the sea, staring gape-mouthed as it materializes in front of them until they are drawn into the cold, salty ocean.

That idea—of a picture, a doodle, a painting that manifests itself in person, that jumps the dimension between concept and object, the materiality of that idea—captured my imagination. I started thinking about the differences in seeing a picture of an object and the object itself. Why did it seem different, somehow, to experience these books in person rather than to view them on my computer, 7,000 miles away? Do we know, at some deep, molecular level, that we are in the presence of the thing itself? Does that materiality connect us more intimately than an image separated by distance and time? Is it all in our imagination, and if so, is that any less real?

I’m reminded of one of the best stories I’ll ever be able to tell in my life.

Five years ago, the magnificent Ursula K. Le Guin came to my local library with photographer Roger Dorband to talk about their book Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country. At dinner after the presentation, the table talk drifted to how, let’s be honest, there’s something a little weird about wanting an author’s signature on a book. As Le Guin put it (paraphrasing here), “I’m happy to do it, of course, but I do think sometimes, ‘I’ve just given you my words—thousands of them!’” We talked about how the signature seemed like a material proof of connection, of experience. My husband nodded sagely and said, “Hmmm, maybe you could just lick the book instead?” (For the record: Le Guin laughed and laughed, and when it came time to leave, she gave my husband a little pretend air lick.)

It was all great fun, but really, I think there’s something there.

At the risk of sounding as esoteric as Dee, I think books and writing retain some residue of the people they’ve encountered. “Books speak to us,” we say, and sometimes I wonder if we’re being strictly metaphorical. Why else do we run our fingers over their spines, trace the lettering on their backs and covers, flip through pages as though visiting an old friend? There’s something profound about the physical manifestation of our most cherished ideas, thoughts, experiments, and emotions made solid and shared, a way for people to connect across time and space through the simple touch of a pen to paper.

Or you know what? Maybe this is just a flight of fancy of my own. Maybe this deep sense of connection we feel when seeing somebody’s actual writing, or doodling, or jotting of notes, the joy and connection people find when an author has signed their book, is all in our imaginations. But I ask you: If so, does that make it any less magical?

Ex libris

“King Charles I at the Bodleian Library,” by William Gale

I believe that most people (or at least the people I want to know) have a special “library place” in their hearts. It’s what causes the smile that breaks when entering a new library; the shiver on catching the familiar whiff of old books; the frisson of anticipation after realizing that stacks and stacks of books can be taken home and savored.

Libraries have been a big part of my life for the last five years.  In 2007, my community’s library was closed for lack of funds, leaving 82,000 American citizens without access to any public library whatsoever.  Unthinkable, right?

Long story short: a group of very cool folks got together and fundraised and fundraised some more and re-opened the library as a nonprofit.  There are hopes that we can pass a library district in the near future so that the library is again sustainably funded, but in the meantime we all work like crazy to keep the doors open (more here: www.josephinelibrary.org).

So last year, when I planned my first solo trip to England—sans husband and kids, free to direct my steps wherever I wanted without worrying about potty breaks, snacks, or pending soccer matches—it was only natural that at the top of my must-visit-or-else-what-the-hell’s-the-point-of-going list was Oxford’s storied and magnificent Bodleian Library.

The Bodleian, built in 1320, was Oxford’s first university library (meaning it wasn’t attached to one specific college). That original library, smallish and uninspiring, expanded when Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, donated over 200 valuable manuscripts in the 1440s, so the university constructed a new room over the Divinity School. (Harry Potter fans: note that the hospital wing scenes with Madame Pomfrey were filmed in the Divinity School, and all of the Hogwarts library scenes were filmed in Duke Humfrey’s library.)

Duke Humfrey’s library, finished in the 1480s, lasted about 60 years until, under legislation passed under King Edward VI meant “to purge the English church of all traces of Roman Catholicism,” the library was stripped of all books and manuscripts containing “superstitious books and images.”  (Why do I include this in my short history of the Bodleian?:  it is perversely of some comfort to me to know that my town’s library is not the only victim of shortsighted thinking on the part of autocratic politicians.)

The Bodleian was resuscitated in 1598 by an injection of funds from Sir Thomas Bodley, after whom it was renamed. Bodley established three guidelines that have shaped the Bodleian’s character:

1)      He established an agreement with the Stationers’ Company of London that would direct the mission of the Bodleian to this day: a copy of every book registered with the Stationers’ Company was to also be deposited at the Bodleian. This agreement transformed it into a critically important repository of learning in England for the next four centuries.

2)      He determined that scholars from all universities should have unfettered access to the holdings of his library, a generous and liberal policy that allowed the Bodleian to transcend the relatively parochial constraints of English scholarship. (While all scholars were welcome, however, they all had to swear the following oath: “I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.” I know this because I couldn’t resist buying the tea towel with the oath printed on it.)

3)      He ordained that no books were to leave the building. No borrowing of books or materials, period.  This policy is in place to this day for the majority of the collection.

I find this last policy fascinating, because in the early days of my library’s resurrection, we faced a critical decision: invest in the (rather expensive) software that would allow us to circulate books or just house the collection for patrons to view in the library. A very sage and experienced librarian decided the point by declaring that if books and materials didn’t circulate, we would have a reading room, not a proper library. If we agree with that definition (and I do), the the Bodleian, one of the most famous libraries in the world, is technically a reading room.

Even King Charles I, facing a mutinous parliament in London and escaping to the relative security of Oxford in 1642, was denied borrowing privileges at the Bodleian (though in order to appease His Majesty, the librarians had a little stall built inside Duke Humfrey’s Library so the King could taste the fruits of scholarship in privacy). By the doctrine of the divine right of kings, this was the man who was, in Shakespeare’s words, “the figure of God’s majesty/His captain, steward, deputy-elect,” and yet even he was denied check-out privileges.

After my tour of the Bodleian, marveling at the majesty of most influential books and manuscripts in history, I stopped by a pub (as I am wont to do). It occurred to me, as I re-acclimated to the noise and smell and colors of everyday life, that the American library tradition–begun by Benjamin Franklin and brought to fruition by Andrew Carnegie and countless American communities–of enabling every citizen to have free and unfettered access to information is one of the most radical movements in history.

In Oxford, at the Bodleian, I could gaze at magnificent books chained to the shelves, marvel at the scholarship contained in the august buildings, and admire the history of the furniture, the paintings, the architecture.  But in little Grants Pass, Oregon, I could walk into my community’s library and check out almost any book in the building.

In this, I am richer than kings.