When I was young, I spent a lot of my time alone. Books became my way of making friends and figuring out how the world worked, even though most of the books I read came from yard sales and sites like paperbackswap that my grandmother scoured to find 99 cent books that could keep me entertained. I still think about them, even though they’re out of print. The characters were my first friends and helped shape who I am today.
I chased that feeling. I read constantly. It was the healthiest form of escape when I felt like no one understood me, and stories of civilizations far from here or stories of unconditional love for people that looked/acted like me gripped me and would not let me go. I had a real knack for understanding the themes and lessons in the books I read and was able to connect them to my life. My English teachers would later tell me this meant I was good at analysis. At the time, my mother called it “not being able to separate fantasy from reality.” Maybe she was right. My friends were imaginary and didn’t even come from my own imagination.
So, I stopped reading and tried to make real friends.
That worked for a time, but I still craved adventure that real life just didn’t create in Bowling Green in the early ’00s. I wrote my little heart out to create my own, but I wasn’t reading nearly as much as I should have been. I missed out on learning about cultures that were different than my own in a more intimate way than the history books could provide because I was not encouraged to read about people that weren’t like me.
Looking back, I realized that I stopped reading because I got bored.
I was tired of reading about the same thing, the society I already knew even though I was an outcast in it. I could still pass for being an active participant if I needed to. I understood the workings of my society intimately.
In walked The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini in my junior year of high school. An intense but very good read, and I highly recommend checking it out from WCPL through their online catalog. It was a heartbreaking look at male friendship and betrayal and learning that closure may have to come in confronting the dark secrets of your past and showing you’re sorry by acting instead of just telling.
And then I diversified my reading list!
Unfortunately, no. I rediscovered my love of reading and then kept reading the same story over and over. Girl meets someone otherworldly (usually a mysterious and creepy man; in the case of Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, boy meets mysterious and creepy girl). Girl finds out the neat secret. Girl must keep secret. Girl gets in trouble and possibly seriously hurt. Girl makes stupid mistakes. Girl is still loved unconditionally at the end.
I needed another good slap in the face. In walked my time as an Intern at Warren County Public Library, and my eventual introduction into Project Lit.
Project LIT (Literature in the) Community was started by English teacher Jarred Amato in Nashville, Tennessee. If you’re interested in keeping up with him and finding out what he is all about, you can follow him on Twitter (@jarredamato) or on his website at https://jarredamato.wordpress.com/. As you can probably imagine, his Twitter is updated more frequently. Great stuff.
But I’m not here to tell you about his Project LIT. I’m here to tell you about our community’s Project LIT, the one started by WCPL. The project is all about adding diversity to our reading lists and growing as readers and thinkers (and writers, and artists). I’m a scholar and an analyst, so I did what I do best: I researched this project by first going to WCPL’s website and looking specifically at this tab: https://warrenpl.org/lit/. I already had the book and the discussion questions that came with it. I went deeper. I watched every video (about 2-3 hours’ worth but my computer hates me, so it took longer) including Bailey’s Paint with Me Facebook Live. I’m a reader and writer, not an artist, so I have yet to touch my canvas because I’m intimidated. Maybe I’ll try my hand at that tonight.
But the video that stuck out to me the most was the brown girl dreaming discussion with Cre Dye. I can’t sit still and listen to things for an hour, normally. I must be up doing things, or I’ll go nuts.
This time, I couldn’t leave my chair.
In COVID times, getting together either means being in the same place six feet apart or being on a Zoom call. Normally, being together is more intimate. Cre made this Zoom call as intimate as sitting in a close circle together by starting it with a few deep calming breaths with our hands on our hearts. “When we breathe together, I think our hearts begin to beat together, and we become stronger as a group,” she said. I was already in tears at my makeshift desk. Cre brought an unreal amount of energy to the discussion, and all these young ladies ran with it. It was incredible. All of them shared their favorite poems and could articulate why. All of them were patient and respectful and excited. Guys, I’m talking about kids that had to be between the ages of 6-12. In their homes. Tuned into a discussion about a book of poems that I wouldn’t have given a second glance at their age. Cue more crying at my desk.
That was thirty minutes in. Just thirty minutes. No “sit down please” or “let’s get back on track,” just pure discussion about this book and what it meant for them to see someone like them being loved unconditionally by friends and family and having the courage to dream. And then these kids started sharing their dreams! Most of them talked about the colleges they wanted to go to! They wanted to be Veterinarians or Psychiatrists or Heart Surgeons or Gymnasts! And these girls lifted each other up and encouraged each other to reach for their dreams. All of them were brought together by a book.
Reading is no longer a solitary activity. Not even in COVID times. It brings us together in a way that gets our hearts and minds on the same wavelength.
So please, support Project LIT @ WCPL by joining these Zoom discussions/meetings at Covington Woods Park on the last Thursday of every month at 6pm. Follow the WCPL Facebook to keep up with each month’s pick and snag a copy with your library card through the online catalog or by going to the Bob Kirby branch or the Smiths Grove branch. More details on where to go can be found at https://warrenpl.org/.
Read together. Love one another. Let our hearts beat together.
-by Kae Delphi WCPL Intern
