April Updates and Follow Ups
Our Monthly Look Back
I want to get into the habit of giving you all little updates and information on previous posts that may have garnered some attention when they came out and now deserve follow up. I’ll try to do this at least once a month, near the end of the month.
So here we go!
Taylor is a Giver: Our little essay on Taylor Swift shilling for my library generated quite a bit of attention, so much so that my dear friend and fellow librarian Tammi Truax reminded me that Swift did indeed shill for libraries in a 2014 reading PSA for the American Library Association! Here’s that poster.
If you’d like to read the original essay, click here - A Modest Proposal for Taylor Swift
I’ll leave it to cleverer minds than mine to make some witty crack about the book she selected to hold. But still, that’s cool! I bet doing something like this now would take on a whole different level of meaning for libraries.
Freeze the Fall Update: Little Bean’s interview with the up and coming teen hard rock band out of Canada is coming along! As we wrote about a couple weeks ago, the band reached out and made contact with her and sent her a bunch of band merch! In return, she developed a written interview with and for the band and we just got back the first round of interview answers. You can read that story here - Finding Freeze the Fall
The next steps will be for me to assemble her interview into a readable story (we may do two parts) and present it to subscribers. In other words, I’ll serve as her editor. The band’s first EP appears to be headed to release in May sometime so we’ll try to time the drop of the interview with that.
AND, as a special treat to all of you subscribers in this community, you’ll get the story first and exclusively with some extra questions just for you and only you as a thank you for being part of our community. Stay tuned, we promise Little Bean’s first story is going to be fun.
We’re Still Looking Up: Not surprisingly, our most viewed post this month, by far, was our story on the eclipse party that our library held for our community. Here’s that story: A Town Looks Up
The fact that it was the most popular made me really happy because the whole point of the post - and the event - was to take a moment and come together and just sit there in awe. Even for two seconds. Even if we only got 97 percent coverage.
Just a bunch of humans looking up at the cosmos, together, leaving everything else behind, and saying, “Wow!” Heaven knows we need more of that. But here’s the thing. We can do that every day. You can do that right now. I know that I prattle on and on in these pages about how awesome the dumb little every day things can be, but they really are. Really.
The fact that we are so tiny, and so insignificant in the face of the universe is, first, a strength, because it allows us to take advantage of the time we have and just suck it all in. But second, to understand that awe can be found anywhere - washing dishes, picking a flower, playing with your dog. Those aren’t small things.
Let me say that again. The mundane is important. Maybe the most important. Don’t forget it.
If Taylor has promoted libraries once, maybe she'll do it again at some point. I think she does some kind and generous things "under the radar", to be cliche, just because they're the right things to do.