Public Readings

At the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2013, the Booker prize-winning author Howard Jacobson raised the question: Are literary festivals, such as Jaipur, becoming an alternative to the activity of reading?  He was making a joke at his own expense, because he admitted that he loved speaking at literary festivals.  It was terrific fun, it was flattering, but it was not really the business of literature. “The novelist should never be seen, should never be heard, for himself.  The book should do all the work.  You open a book, you read the book—all you need to know about the book is in the book.  Everything else is just external flimflam.”

Is he correct? Is there an element of shallowness in going to hear a writer read from their work and then discuss it in front of hundreds of people, many of whom have never read anything by that author, and perhaps never will, and are more interested in the author as a celebrity than as a writer?  What does seeing a writer really contribute to the act of reading?

I ask myself this question all the time.  At the Collingwood Public Library we often invite authors to visit the library.  In 2015 we invited seven authors.  The latest was Debra Komar, author of The Bastard of Fort Stikine, who was here on October 29. We had an excellent turnout for the event, and the audience enjoyed the presentation.

Komar is a forensic anthropologist and her book is about using modern forensic methods to solve a crime that occurred more than 170 years ago.  Her discussion was fascinating. We were dismayed to learn that most of the work forensic scientists do in literature and on film is nonsense.  For example, DNA is not a foolproof method of identification.  In fact, the best it can do is offer a degree of probability. Also, fingerprints are not unique.  It is possible for two unrelated people to have the same fingerprint, which is why police want prints of all of your digits, not just your thumb.  The same holds true for retinal scans.

Komar explained how she solved the murder of a Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor in Fort Stikine in 1842.  She explained the circumstances surrounding the murder, how she recreated the timeline by reading interviews found in the HBC archives, and how she recreated a three-dimensional model of the scene of the crime using surviving sketches and testimony.  And then she stopped.

“But if you want to know who did it,” she said, “you will have to read the book.”

There was a collective sigh of disappointment at this statement, but I think it is fair to say that we will all read the book now.

Komar noted that solving the puzzle was really only part of the issue, perhaps not even the most important part.  She is more interested in questions of justice than guilt.  If we solve a crime and punish the perpetrator, is justice served?  Does mediation, for example, serve the community better than supermax prisons?

I guess what I am trying to say is that we spent a lot of the evening circling around the book, rather than discussing it.  That, in itself, made for an interesting evening.  The book, in this case, was just the hook to get us all in the room.  But not all books lend themselves to this kind of discussion. 

When Cathy Gildiner came to promote her memoir, Coming Ashore, earlier in the year, she did not read from the book at all.  Instead, she retold stories from the book and had us in stitches.  It was like watching standup comedy.  In fact, it was exactly like watching standup comedy.  But wouldn’t the stories have been just as funny if we’d stayed at home and read them for ourselves?  Perhaps.  But, in this case, there really was something wonderful about hearing the author tell the stories in person.

So maybe author events serve a different purpose than close personal reading. And maybe that is our answer to Jacobson. In 2000, J.K. Rowling, gave a reading at Skydome in Toronto to more than 20,000 people, which at the time broke the Guinness record for largest ever public reading.  The sound system was terrible, and the noise of 20,000 excited people in a confined space threatened to drown the proceedings, but the children loved it.  For them it was a celebration of a fictional world that had become as important to them as the factual world they inhabited daily.  They had grown up with Harry Potter.  He was as real to them as their parents.  We do not need an author to explicate her book, as Jacobson contended, the book is sufficient; but that is not why we go to literary events.  We attend these things to share our enjoyment of reading with others.

So join us on Thursday, November 26 at 7 pm for the last of our author events for 2015, when award-winning author Alison Pick will read from her memoir, Between Gods. Pick will be talking about unlocking family secrets and her difficult journey to reclaim her Jewish heritage.  It promises to be another thought-provoking evening.

--Ken Haigh

Georgian Bay Reads 2015

Seven years ago, three Georgian Bay area libraries celebrated the end of Ontario Public Library Week with a gala literary event to promote Canadian literature. Called Georgian Bay Reads, because of its similarity to the CBC contest called Canada Reads, the event now includes five local libraries, who duke it out for the Georgian Bay Reads Trophy and the People’s Choice Award.

Here’s how it works. Libraries choose representatives to “defend” a Canadian book that they feel strongly about and believe should be read by all Canadians. A moderator gives the defenders set questions and time frames to impress the audience with their knowledge of and passion for their chosen book, as well as the ability to convey their thoughts in a timely manner (and bells start clanging if the allotted time is exceeded). With each round of questions, a defender is eliminated until the winner is determined.

This year, Georgian Bay Reads took place on Saturday, October 24 at the Station on the Green in Creemore. It included the following libraries, defenders, and books:

• Clearview Public Library: Beth Crawley defending Unless by Carol Shields
• Collingwood Public Library: Susie Saunderson defending Still Life by Louise Penny
• Meaford Public Library: Cindy Lou LeDrew defending The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay
• Springwater Public Library: Linda Collins defending Emancipation Day by Wayne Grady
• Wasaga Beach Public Library: Ian Adams defending No Relation by Terry Fallis
• 2014 Georgian Bay Reads winner and moderator:  Lorraine Gruzuk

Although they defended their books with well-reasoned explanations and spirited debate, Susie Saunderson and Beth Crawley were voted off in the first half, with Ian Adams succumbing in the third round. Linda Collins and Cindy Lou LeDrew were both passionate regarding the value and meaning of their books, but Cindy Lou LeDrew was the victor, winning both the Trophy and the People’s Choice Award.

Because of Cindy’s win, Meaford Public Library will host the 2016 Georgian Bay Reads event.

-- Dorothy Gebert

Left to right: Susie Saunderson, Linda Collins, Cindy Lou LeDrew, Ian Adams, Beth Crawley, Lorraine Gruzuk

Seed Library

On Saturday, October 17, we wrapped up our seed library for another year.  The seeds we saved will go into a cool dry place until next spring when we start thinking about gardening again.

We started the Seed Library in September 2013.  The idea originated with two local residents, Ivan and Shan, who were also members of Transition Collingwood.  We invited Jacob Kearey-Moreland to come and address a small group on the topic of saving garden seeds. Jacob had founded the Orillia Seed Library, which is housed in the Orillia Public Library. At the time, the Meaford Public Library was also starting a seed library, so the idea was in the zeitgeist.  The following April we organized a fundraiser, screening the film Revolution at the Gayety, and used the proceeds to purchase heirloom organic seeds to launch the seed library properly. In the spring of 2015, we decided to move the seed library from behind the desk to the public area and encouraged people to help themselves. Within a few weeks, all of the seeds were gone—out into the world to feed the families of the Collingwood area.

What is a Seed Library?

A seed library is a place where local gardeners can share seeds saved from their own gardens.  Public libraries are good repositories for these collections, because they are community spaces, their mandate is to facilitate the exchange of information and to create community cohesiveness, and libraries are open long hours, so they are accessible.

How Does a Seed Library Work?

In the spring, we put out bins of donated seeds.  The seeds are packaged in small envelopes and labeled.  The labeling can be minimal—e.g. “Red Sail Lettuce – 2015”—or more detailed, with planting instructions, etc.. Obviously, the more detail, the better, for the gardener who will plant them.  The seeds are free, but we ask that if you take some seeds home to plant then please harvest some of the seed and return it to the library in the fall.  If you are unsure about how to save garden seeds, help yourself to one of our brochures or check our website for some helpful advice.  You are welcome to donate any extra seed you have to the library.  We have launched the seed library with heirloom seed varieties, which we purchased with generous financial donations from the Collingwood community.  Heirloom seeds breed true to type, which is to say, when you plant these seeds, they will grow plants just like their parents.  This can’t be said of commercially grown hybrid varieties.

Why Start a Seed Library?

The idea is to develop a stock of seed over time that is well-suited to the Collingwood environment. Seed sharing builds community resiliency and fosters healthy eating habits.  As seed saving has fallen out of fashion, and as we turn more and more to large commercial operations for our seed stock, many heirloom varieties have disappeared, contributing to a loss of diversity.  Local varieties are often very well adapted to local conditions and generally taste better and are healthier than something you might buy in a supermarket that has had to travel a long way to reach your dinner table.

Also, it’s just fun.

Seven Wonders

People like best-of lists.  It’s fun to argue over what was included and what should have been included.  So in the spirit of fun, I am going to create a best-of list for the Collingwood Public Library.  Here are my nominations (in no particular order) for:

The Seven Wonders of the Collingwood Public Library

       1.  Our Local History and Genealogical Collection – For a library of our size the collection is really quite remarkable, and is the result of many years of careful collection development.  Of particular interest to researchers is our copy of the Jesuit Relations, all 73 volumes of it.  The Relations are letters home from Jesuit missionaries in New France in the seventeenth century to their supporters back in Europe. It is from these documents that we know so much about the First Nations people who lived in the Collingwood area.  The Relations are also the only volumes to be rescued when our old Carnegie library burned down in 1963. If you open them, you can still see the water and smoke damage.

      2.  Our Stained Glass Windows – these were made by Gary Wilkinson,

and each window depicts a Collingwood scene in a different season of the year.  Beautiful.

       3.  Our Living Roof – The new library is housed in a LEED certified building, which is more energy

efficient than traditional commercial buildings.  The living roof absorbs heat in summer, reducing the “heat island” effect created by conventional black-tarred flat roofs, acts as a layer of insulation, creates a habitat for birds and insects, and collects water, which can be returned to the environment through evaporation instead of being directed down storm sewers.  Some of the water is also collected in a cistern and used to water the green roof in times of drought.  Tours of the roof can be arranged, but we can’t let people go up on their own at this time, because the parapet is not high enough to insure visitor safety.

       4.  Our DVD Collection – You might think, in these days of video streaming, that no one uses DVDs anymore, but you would be wrong.  Our large and varied collection is heavily-used.  In fact, DVDs are the most frequently circulated items in our library collection—perhaps because DVDs can be consumed much quicker than novels, so they are in and out of the library faster than books, but perhaps also because we have such a large collection with something for every taste.

       5.  Our Children’s Area – Walking into the children’s area of the library is like entering an enchanted forest.  The architects hit exactly the right note here.

      6.  Our ArtWalk – The main entrance of the library is the perfect place to display art work.  We have new displays of work by local artists every two months.

        7.  Our Donor Pillars – The brick pillars in the interior of the library are graced with the names of local donors who helped to furnish the new library, and are a great tribute to the spirit of generosity found in Collingwood.  What many people don’t know, however, is that the pillars are constructed of recycled brick.  Some of the bricks came from the old livery stable that once stood on this site.  Other bricks were rescued from the old Carnegie library when it was pulled down after the fire.  Something old incorporated into something new. 

Also:

      8.  Our Wonderful Staff and Volunteers – Of course nothing happens without people, and we are blessed with a talented crew of staff and volunteers whose passion for library work makes the library a special place to be each and every day.

Culture and Belonging

The Province of Ontario is currently holding a series of “Culture Talks.” These are town hall-style meetings across the province designed to help shape Ontario’s first culture strategy.  The goals are: (1) to establish what Ontarians value about culture, (2) to identify opportunities to better meet the needs of the arts and culture sector, and (3) to ensure that the government’s policies and programs reflect Ontario’s diverse populations and communities.  Much of the discussion, I’m sure, will revolve around the issue of why culture matters.

There are many reasons to promote culture, but I am going to suggest one that doesn’t often occur to people.  I think artists—and I’m thinking primarily of writers and painters here—create a sense of place.  Wallace Stegner, who memorialized the southwest corner of Saskatchewan in Wolf Willow, wrote: “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.”  He went even further: “[N]o place is a place until it has had a poet.”

Bruce Feiler, writing in Walking the Bible, wonders why, as an American, the landscape of the Holy Land feels so familiar to him, almost like a homecoming, even though he has never visited before.  At the end of his long journey, having travelled through Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, he is resting on Mount Nebo, sharing the same view of the Promised Land as Moses once did, and he asks his guide, Avner, if this feeling of “coming home” is rooted in his DNA. No, says Avner, it’s your cultural DNA—your Bible. In other words, it is the stories Feiler was raised on that link him to Holy Land. It is the stories in the Bible that create the feeling of coming home.

By contrast, many Canadians do not feel at home in their own country.  Writers and critics as diverse as Susanna Moody, Douglas LePan, Northrop Frye, and Earle Birney have complained of Canada’s newness and our lack of ghosts.  Canadians from our First Nations and from Quebec have stories and myths which root them in the landscape, but many of us still look elsewhere for home. Yann Martel famously (or infamously) compared Canada to a large motel, and he was chided for it, but he had a valid point.  

Diarist and diplomat Charles Ritchie wrote that he thought of “this country not as young but as old as nature—antedating Athens and Rome—always these hidden lakes and waiting woods.” I’ve always felt the same way about the Canadian Shield country.  It feels ancient. Men feel insignificant, as if our ascendency is also insignificant, a blip, a ripple on the stream of time.  We have yet to fully inhabit the landscape.  Northrop Frye accused us of having a “garrison mentality” and felt that there was some part of the Canadian identity that fears the emptiness of Canada and builds a psychological barrier against it.  I would argue that this is where artists and writers can help. They can give us images and stories that help us to imaginatively inhabit the landscape and allow us to begin to feel at home.

The importance of this sense of belonging goes beyond mere comfort.  If we don’t feel we belong in a place, we will not value it.  We will allow terrible things to happen to that place, like strip mining, clear cutting, or farming the soil to the point of exhaustion and using our water as a source of income or as a place to dump mining sludge or industrial effluent.  There is a difference between a place we simply live in and a place we call home. We protect our homes, we don’t see them as things to be used, but as places we inhabit and value.

Canada has a number of writers and painters who have helped to define us.  They are often, by necessity, regional writers, but that is not a bad thing.  Lucy Maude Montgomery has shaped the way we think of Prince Edward Island.  Orillia will always be the “little town” of Stephen Leacock’s invention.  The Yukon has been claimed by Robert Service’s “men who moil for gold.”  Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven have given us a vision of northern Ontario that has become iconic.  Whenever I see a twisted tree on the shore of Georgian Bay, I think of Thomson’s painting “The West Wind” and the world I see is beautiful and familiar.  It feels like home.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend.

--Ken Haigh

Libraries and Privacy II

I’ve been following an interesting item in the news over the past few weeks.  A small public library in Lebanon, New Hampshire has decided to become the first library in the United States to run a TOR server.

The TOR browser was designed to assure user anonymity while on the Internet.  It was developed to protect users (according to Tor's website) from “traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.”  TOR is used extensively by journalists, human rights’ groups and citizen activists.  It is also used by criminals, like the peddlers of child pornography.

The TOR browser “protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.” In order to work, TOR needs organizations to volunteer some bandwidth on existing servers.   The Lebanon library felt that protecting online privacy was a worthwhile goal and decided to become the pilot project for the Boston-based Library Freedom Project.   But it almost didn’t happen.

When the Department of Homeland Security caught wind of the move, they alerted local law enforcement, who asked for permission to address the Library Board.   The project was put on hold until a public meeting could be held.  In the end, after hearing from all sides, the Board decided to go ahead with the project.  They felt that the right to privacy trumped the risk of criminal activity.

How would you have voted, had you been on the Library Board? Is our online privacy sacrosanct? Or should we give it up for the greater good, on the principle that if we are doing nothing wrong, we have nothing to hide? Personally, I find it creepy that someone is tracking my online activity, that every click of my mouse is being studied and analyzed, even if it is only to sell me something.

If you want to learn more about TOR, you can visit their website here.  Here is a good article on the New Hampshire library story.

--Ken Haigh

Censorship

Every month, the newest issue of School Library Journal lands on my desk. One of my favourite columns is “Scales on Censorship” by Pat Scales, a former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. In each issue, librarians write-in telling of their censorship challenges from co-workers, supervisors, caregivers or Boards, and Scales provides words of wisdom and guidance. When I read this column, I often have visions of the book burning scene in the movie Footloose, and I find myself wondering how censorship remains such a prevalent issue.

In Canada we have a Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to ensure access to all forms of knowledge and creativity, and the freedom to express our own opinions. The Canadian Library Association has a Position Statement on Intellectual Freedom outlining the responsibilities of libraries to maintain access to the widest variety of materials, even if society deems them “unacceptable.” Collingwood Public Library has adopted this statement, and also has a policy on Collection Development to ensure a balanced collection is purchased and maintained without biases. Although there are no guarantees, patrons are able to submit a Re-evaluation of Library Materials form, detailing the reasons they feel a title should be removed from our collection.

Every year the American Library Association compiles a list of the top ten frequently challenged books. You can see the 2014 list here – Collingwood Public Library holds nine of the titles on the list. The most frequent objections are offensive language, violence, sexual content, and being unsuitable for the intended audience.  Between 2000 and 2009, 5,099 challenges were reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom, demonstrating that the attempt to censor is very much alive and well. In fact, challenges are so frequent that, in America, Banned Book Week is taking place from September 27 to October 3, 2015. In Canada, we have the same event running from February 21 to 27, 2016, called Freedom to Read Week. Libraries and bookstores across the nation celebrate our freedom to read by displaying banned books and hosting events to promote awareness.

Despite legislature and documents ensuring our intellectual freedom, censorship remains a sensitive issue, and raises many questions, the most important of which is who has the authority to make censorship decisions? In a public library, trained librarians decide what ends up on the shelves, but it is up to patrons and caregivers to decide for themselves and their children what is appropriate.

                                                                                                                           

--Ashley Kulchycki