Tag Archives: the hearth

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.