Category Archives: Writers

This week is National Library Week, and yesterday was National Library Workers Day. Hurray! I have always depended on the kindness of librarians.

Libraries have been at the center of my imaginings for as long as I can remember. I recall being around 11 and taking out tall stacks of books at one time — we had a big leather club chair at home and I would lounge there and go through the books one by one when I probably should have been outside playing. One volume in particular excited me, about Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other supernatural oddities — I don’t recall if the witika was in it.  I remember being enthralled by E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It.

The town where I grew up had a new library with a splendid view of the Hudson River. A place I spent a lot of time pursuing my Virginia Woolf and Tristram Shandy obsessions in my teens.

By the time I was in college I realized that no one was going to come hang me if I kept books out longer than their due dates. Once in a while there was an amnesty, which saved me from paying huge fines. I loved the mellow aroma of book paper in the darkened stacks, creeping around to find what I needed or sometimes just creeping around for the mysterious fun of it.

As a professional writer I have relied upon libraries and librarians of all stripes — local, academic, the Westchester Library System (which is great), the New York Public Library, archival collections. Book stores are great and you can get many sources on line these days, but nothing matches the depth of library collections for getting the information I need. I remember when I first stumbled upon The Iconography of Manhattan Island, by I.N. Phelps Stokes, a source I have relied upon for my last three books, at a college library near my house, it was like finding gold. I could never afford the six giant vintage tomes but I could stand at the copy machine and make duplicates of hundreds of pages if I wanted to. Which I did.

I am looking forward with excitement to a conversation I will have on line this afternoon with librarians, to discuss The Orphanmaster. I know the questions will be perspicacious, penetrating and illuminating.

Click here to join in the conversation: http://penguindebutauthors.earlyword.com/episode-1/

If you don’t catch it the first time around, the chat will be archived at the same link.

Let’s honor International Women’s Day with a shout out to Alice James, the brilliant and witty invalid sister of big shots William James and Henry James. Hers was a short life plagued by what was then called “hysteria,” (this was the mid-19th century) when she resorted to cures such as massage, visits to specialists in NYC for ice and electric therapy, “blistering” baths, and stints in the “Adams Nervous Asylum” near Boston. A plague of sick headaches, fainting spells and other symptoms resigned her to “the chair,” and off and on suicidal jags throughout her life. Her father had no problem with this, begging her only to “do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends.”

Breast cancer finally claimed her, and she died in 1892 at the age of 44.

Alice James 1848-1892

Her diary, published posthumously after the usual haggle of family and friends over what to censor, can now be read in full. It offers amazing insights into the world of the time — she spent the end of her life in London and received calls from leading lights — and personal impressions which are touching and occasionally scathing.

It’s difficult to choose just one to excerpt.  Here is the invalid writing on her beloved garden, which she rarely had the strength to visit:

“In one’s careless days, one little suspects how elderly forlornities, out of sight, lap up crumbs of remembrance — not but what my little world remembers me 1,000 times more than I look for, I shall not sweetly say deserve. I went into the gardens to day, the roses exquisite, the geraniums not got supreme command as yet. When will the race be emancipated from them?  […] If I make this [diary] a receptacle for feeble ejaculations over the scenery, what a terror it will be.”