This is a post, first and foremost, about burnout. Being a public librarian presents a certain category of problems and attracts a certain type of people - namely, the problems of social aid professions and the compassionate people who go into them. The advice in this post comes from my own experiences as well as wisdom distilled from my parents’ combined 60 years of being in the sister passion profession of teaching.
Here goes:
1) Libraries are not your life. Not your patrons, not your programs, not your advocacy efforts. None of it. Repeat this to yourself, over and over, as many times as it takes. If you want to survive - or even just be effective - in this line of work, you cannot reduce your identity down to just ‘librarian’. All the advice on work-life balance and establishing boundaries applies here, but don’t forget to think about the ‘identity’ part specifically, too.
1a) It’s going to be really easy to forget 1) when you’re in the warm, righteous, determined rush of feeling needed.
That’s a heady feeling and it’s going to make you want to ignore your boundaries. Sometimes, you will; that can’t always be helped, and breaking your own boundaries isn’t something to beat yourself up over when it happens. It’s a neutral fact that we’re wired to love the feeling of being needed, or we wouldn’t have lasted this long as a social species. When you come down from it a bit, ask yourself what parts of that experience were rewarding to you. Was it the type of social interaction - teaching, caring, giving? Was it a feeling that you had power over your portion of the situation, power to enact what you thought was right? Where else could you get those things if you needed, so that your job doesn’t have to be the only place you experience those feelings?
2) Most people are not going to remember you after they walk out that library door, so don’t do your job to be remembered by them. You’re probably in this job because someone in libraries had a huge impact on you when you were younger, but you need to recognize when and where you’re making your interactions about you and your own self-image rather than your patrons or your role in the community. This can be especially difficult with kids, since kids can be very intense and make you feel like you’re the centre of their universe. When this happens, ask yourself what need you are fulfilling for them and what that actually, concretely requires of you.
3) Suffering is not transactional. We live in a culture that’s built primarily on Christian values, and the biggest Christian story of them all is the success of sacrifice. Jesus, however, was special - that’s kind of the whole point, as I understand the thing. Basically, remember that the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that you put into something does not in any way correlate to the amount of enjoyment or learning or purpose anyone else gets out of it.
4) Understand the system. Where does the money come from? Can you trace it back, not just to grants from the city, but to the kinds of business and property taxes that fund the city? North Americans are brought up with this background noise of ‘infinite growth’ that you have to consciously tone down if you want to be able to assess a situation realistically. I had a boss once who told me, “When you’re presenting to council, always remember that the fire department is fighting for the same pot of money you are.” There might be more than enough money in the world to fund what you want - but is that money in your town? If not, can you bring it into your town? Knowing what your limits are can help you expand them, yes, but it can also save you from throwing yourself after a mirage of glory that simply doesn’t exist.
5) Everything takes more time than you think, even changes away from horrifying practises or towards things that are objectively morally right. Libraries exist suspended in a web of the relationships between multiple bureaucratic organizations, budgets only happen once a year, and most people don’t spend their working days thinking about their community’s library. You’re going to have great ideas for change, they’re going to be realistic and possible and just within reach, and it’s going to feel grindingly slow. Don’t get mad; remember the fire department. Everyone working with you to achieve this change has their own equivalent of the fire department in their life. Make sure things are moving, but make sure you don’t blame people when they’re not moving faster. It’s unlikely that you’re being obstructed out of maliciousness and even on the rare occasions you are, you will get more help from others if you don’t visibly assume it anyway. Make sure you’re using your anger against injustice to motivate you, not other people.
I need parents to understand that reading the same Lankybox graphic novel over and over is actually a gateway drug to Reading Stuff Other Than That. And shutting down books kids get excited about is a gateway drug to kids Not Reading Period.
what was it like being a librarian for you? i used to want to be a librarian but gave up so im interested in what others have to say abt their experience in the field
It was an immensely rewarding experience but I got burnt out by 1) Proud Boys taking over one of my libraries and permanently altering Illinois law with their moronic antics 2) One of my colleagues dying in a mass shooting at an event we were encouraged to attend and then having almost no time for ourselves while being expected to help the community rally.
On a day to day basis I loved the work, I loved helping people, I loved when regulars would come up to me, I loved encouraging teenagers to open up, I loved getting people to read something that wasn't fucking James Patterson, I loved the programs and I loved weeding and I loved getting to go to conventions and be paid for it and I loved purchasing for collections.
The pay was excruciating though, and my libraries were completely awful about protecting staff. I complained once about a coworker calling me a slur and I was given a Feelings Chart to help regular my emotions. I reported a patron for following one of our teenage shelvers in the parking lot and was told "Oh yeah that's Creepy Steve, remind her to walk with a buddy next time."
I don't think this is necessarily representative of what most people's library experiences will be like! But for me the burnout was swift and brutal. I was in a dark place for a really long time, worse than even my current position because here at least I get paid well and I KNOW it sucks, whereas in libraries I felt angry with myself for not being better at toughing out a field I supposedly loved and I had to work a second job to make ends meet.
Moratorium on stories about the importance of stories! If I did not already think stories were worth my time I would not be spending said time reading! It's the literary equivalent of auto-fellatio, except instead of removing your ribs you've removed your capacity for shame.
God thank you. They are so exhaustingly twee. Even when it's Dark Academia and supposed to be grim and brutal it's twee. If I open a book and your librarian is even the smallest bit magical, mysterious, or mystical, I will throw the book at someone's head. The next book I find like this, I'm assigning the author remedial homework. 4,000 inspirationally saccharine words about The Power Of Having Printer or I nuke the entire site from orbit.
It feels like if farmers made a cult out of worshipping grocery store clerks.
(goverment voice) we need to protect the children from pornography so our plan is to remove their eyes so they would never see something so traumatic. if you are against removing children's eyes you are basically a pedophile
Im making a tutorial for putting multiple holds of the same title for one patron AND one for putting one hold of the same title for multiple patrons and I gotta say. This headache is going to throw me off a cliff
Before we get started today, the International Energy Agency told me to make a little announcement. If you have a radioactive isotope of beryllium in your mouth, spit it out. Doesn't matter if it's beryllium-7 or the more common -10, you can't eat that shit. Everyone should have figured that out in grade school. Thank you for your time.
Safety warnings have been getting wilder as our world becomes more intricately dangerous. I've spoken about this before: fifty years ago, most warning signs were like "don't put your cigarette out in this." Nowadays there's a ton of cautions about radio interference with your Xbox controllers if you eat a cupcake the wrong way after having major dental surgery.
Part of this is because the demands of the customer have become more sophisticated. Every day, we're doing shit that would have pissed off a NASA scientist, and not even thinking about it too hard. Last week, I got mad that the free wifi on an airplane wasn't very fast. My buddy made some kind of special collar that lets us hear the thoughts of dogs, and then he threw it out with the other clutter on his desk when his in-laws were visiting.
Unfortunately, human brains are still basically the same as fifty years ago. Most of us would still be considered "kinda weird" in the 70s. There is a much wider gap of knowledge that has to be expressed to your average run-of-the-mill ding-dong in order to explain to them just how much trouble they are in. That's where the warnings are coming from: you practically have to include an undergraduate lecture to get people up to speed with the concepts involved, before you tell them not to put those concepts in their mouth.
So the next time you see a ridiculous safety warning, make sure to say thank you to all the technical writers who had to go through a brain-blasting exercise just to fit it all on the little sticker. And read the whole thing, why don't you? It's cheaper than college.
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
Someone asked me about security cameras in libraries and in telling them to consider not collecting audio at all, I ended up with the following:
"Audio introduces the potential for additional personal information to be captured passively, which makes it very difficult to determine what the risk of significant harm even is, in the event of a data breach; I used to work a library front desk myself and can tell you that library patrons disclose a surprising amount of private information unprompted during verbal conversations".
I don't think I've ever written anything in my life in which a single word was doing so much heavy lifting.
I'm ... Not sure libraries should be on the same list as the moon and the sunset, in a post about persisting.
The moon and the sunset and even the sea and trees are sort of unstoppable. There is not much anyone could do to make these things not persist, even if they made a really concerted effort. Libraries are unfortunately not in that category - we are in fact kind of the opposite of that category in that actually we disappear frighteningly quickly and easily without constant support.
It worries me a little to see people paint us as anything other than fighting a series of pitched battles to survive. We persist because we're fighting those battles, all the time, but your help fighting them is not just appreciated but specifically and extremely necessary.
Using libraries is a really helpful first step in helping us persist, but at this point, we may need more people to go on to the second step of telling your local municipal politicians about it when you do. I'm not sure where Tumblr got the idea that increased library use translates directly into increased funding for libraries, but that hasn't ever been true in my experience. It's just an effective argument you can make when asking for an increase. And the politicians don't much like listening to us about it, even when we are giving them the Very Impressive Numbers you help us get to by using our services, because when we do it we are usually asking them for money, which tends to make every argument less compelling.
So, your voice has a really outsize impact compared to ours - it really does help! We got our asses saved recently by a group of about 20 concerned citizens just showing up at a council meeting where they were discussing stopping payments for library support. They didn't get to speak or anything, they just sort of showed up and made it clear why they were there and stared down the mayor about it. And they did, in fact, keep the payments going! I cannot overstate how incredibly efficient your voices are, compared to ours.
If we are going to stick around, I think we're going to need the extra oomph that efficiency provides. Please, if you would like libraries to persist... Help us do that.
I cant go to my local libary anymore because last year when I stopped by a librarian was reading a book I wrote under a pen name years ago. This book sold under 10k copies and I've literally only heard people talk about this book online *if* I went looking for it so I went up to them and tried to start a conversation like "oh hey I've heard of that book is it good?" Like hoping for some real feedback and she goes "yeah I love reading things by queer writers" and in a moment of terror I was like "oh but- hold on, I thought the author was some old hetero white guy?!" A thing I thought because I used my own dead grandpa's picture for the author pic because grandpa never had internet. I fake looked it up and was like "yeah if he was queer its not public?" And without looking up this absolute unit goes "oh the author bio is obviously fake. I'd bet my left leg the author is a west coast millennial non-binary queer who has never lived on the east coast." And then proceeded to rattle off a dozen linguistic flourishes that are specfic to the pacific northwest that are in the book and several that are nearly ubiquitous in the state where I said my pen name lives that are somehow completely absent from the book.
So you know. Got read for fifth and didn't even find out if she liked it.
this actually makes more sense to me than like anything else happening in the world currently. like it blows catastrophically to be sure but it checks out
Jane Yolen was a Jewish-American children’s author, poet, and young adult novelist. Yolen wrote more than 400 books for children and adults,
If you didn’t become acquainted with the work of Jane Yolen as a student being assigned her famous, award-winning Holocaust time travel nove
If you didn’t become acquainted with the work of Jane Yolen as a student being assigned her famous, award-winning Holocaust time travel novella “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” it’s likely you will once you become a parent, reading one of her many, many, many books for kids. My young boys are especially partial to her “How Do Dinosaurs?” series with its captivating, realistic dinosaur illustrations and snappy, funny text (and yes, there’s a Hanukkah “How Do Dinosaurs” book).
The prolific children’s book author, who was the recipient of multiple children’s book awards and six honorary doctorates, passed away this week at age 87. She was just about to release her 450th book. “Monsters of Fife: Terror Birds” will come out posthumously on July 14.
Yolen wasn’t raised particularly Jewish, and her exposure to religion was mostly at relatives’ homes, she recounted in a piece for the Jewish Book Council. As a teen, she did become fascinated with Jewish texts and traditions, getting confirmed at her local Reform synagogue; she was one of the first girls to read from the Torah on the bimah at that temple. And she minored in religious studies at Smith College.
But it took a while for Judaism to become part of her children’s book-writing career. In fact, she was two decades into her career when she got “noodged” into writing Jewish tales.
It all happened in the 1980s, she wrote in her essay for the Jewish Book Council: “One of my editors, who happened to be a rabbi’s wife, asked me why I had never written a Jewish book. And I had to think long and hard about that. And she noodged. Boy! Was she an expert noodge. The result was ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic.’ And then the Jewish stories began to tumble out.”
The books that came tumbling out were as gripping and wonderful and magical as the rest of her oeuvre.
There came magical stories about Jews and dragons and golems (co-written with her son, Adam Stemple).
She published illustrated books about Miriam and other biblical women (and even the children’s book adaptation of the famous “Prince of Egypt”).
She came up with her own twist on the tales of the Wise Men of Chelm.
She perhaps became most known for her three young adult tomes that tackle the Holocaust in novel ways. She wrote the “Sleeping Beauty” inspired “Briar Rose” and the “Hansel and Gretel”-esque “Mapping the Bones.” And of course, she penned the Nebula Prize Winning “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” about a Jewish teen who finds herself transported to 1942 Poland, which continues to be taught in schools to this very day, even as one Texas school district pulled it out of the curriculum for AI-detected “DEI content.” The book was famously turned into a 1999 film starring Kirsten Dunst, Brittany Murphy, Paul Freeman and Mimi Rogers.
Yolen also wrote books about Jewish holidays: “Milk and Honey,” and the lovely “Jewish Tale Feasts” (with her daughter, author Heidi Stemple), a book that my Jewish food-loving family adores.
Heidi, Adam and their brother Jason were all by their mother’s side when she “passed gently with no pain or stress,” Heidi shared on Instagram. Adam was playing his music while Heidi read from her mother’s book “Owl Moon.”
“As you all probably know, she had one of the most brilliant creative minds of our time,” Heidi wrote of her mother. “She has mentored, inspired and nurtured so many authors and illustrators through her words both on the page and off. But, beyond that, she was our mother and grandmother.”
May Jane Yolen’s memory be for a blessing; her books will certainly remain part of our lives for a long, long time.
Would you be willing to tell a little bit more about what blind spots authors of kids' books have in their work? (You mentioned it in your reply to the author asking how to get their book into their local library, which I found very kind and informative).
For me, I would say the most common blind spot I run into from would-be children's authors is if the book is written from a place of authority, correction/dogma towards children rather than joy, genuine help/compassion, or curiosity.
For me, the author whose works most exemplify this is Julia Cook. Not only are her book's illustrations ugly as hell, but they heavily focus on correcting bad behavior in kids, usually with an overarching theme of "You're having a hard time making friends because you're loud/annoying,/unable to take responsibility/any number of things that it's perfectly natural for a kid to be because they barely have a concept of self yet, let alone awareness of other peoples' experiences and needs." I feel these books ultimately operate from a place of shame towards their audience and it's baffling to me that so many parents are like "Yes! That's exactly the book my kid needs!" On top of all that I feel like Julia Cook's books are also overly-texty. I think the blind spot here is that a lot of would-be kid's authors think they've figured out an approach to correcting kids' behavior, but they actually haven't been able to separate their own frustrations from communicating more constructive ways for kids to build social and emotional skills, which is how you end up with a book from at first glance makes me (a librarian) ask, "Do you hate kids, or something?"
A better example of a book focusing on social skills and emotional regulation in kids would be the "Big Bright Feelings" series. These books actually center the kids' emotions and experiences and are really compassionate with regard to where these feelings come from. Also, in my opinion, the illustrations are cuter.
Like, Ravi's Roar is focused on anger and emotional regulation, but it takes time to build up all of Ravi's frustrations throughout the day and actually gives Ravi some credit with how much he's tamped down/swallowed up before his anger finally gets the better of him because guess what! Kids are dealing with a lot! So much is new to them! They don't have an emotional baseline for so many of their experiences! It takes time to tell kids that it's okay to be angry, to show the adults reading how to support kids and steer their anger in a constructive way, and the metaphor of Ravi turning into a tiger makes the story feel both more accessible and more broadly applicable.
Another blind spot which I think is tricky is adults like and agree with this book, therefore they think it is up to children's standards. You see this a lot with a lot of well-meaning independently published liberal books (about community gardens, voting, recycling, etc.), and to be fair, how much a kid relates to or values a book can vary wildly depending on the kid and their state of development, but like the above point about dogmatism in children's books, you can tell when an author is assuming a lot about their audience's priorities. And again, with a lot of independently published titles, you often get this combo of too much text and mediocre illustrations,
I love a community garden. I love indigenous ethnobotany. But if you're going to go this high-concept for a young audience, I mean this with all kindness, but you're going to want to get an illustrator with enough of a professional background to be able to tell when their illustration's background is a busy mess.
Sometimes the enthusiasm of the adult reading the book to a child can bridge the gap, but speaking as someone who's done her fair share of story times, kids can absolutely tell the difference between something they want to do, and something adults are trying to convince them they want to do. Again, this is definitely a more subjective blind spot, and some books can make up for text content that doesn't quite land with their intended audience by having illustrations that capture the imagination and bridge that gap--like, I loved the book Weslandia as a kid even though the concept of "This kid created his own staple crop-based civilization" kind of flew over my little head at the time because I was so enchanted by the illustrations and I think there was also the factor of Wesley, the main character, operating a lot on his own curiosity and drive. It's a book of solitude and curiosity and discovery and invention eventually blossoming into something you can share with others. As a kid so frequently distracted by my own imagination that I had trouble connecting with peers, that emotional honesty landed with me even though other parts of it were a little high-concept.
I think the takeaway there is, you don't always know how a kid might connect with a book, if they connect at all, but kids are way more emotionally perceptive than we give them credit for. They know the difference between when something is being shared and something is being taught, and if the ultimate goal of a book is connecting with a kid, you want to share more than you want to teach.
Okay just to add on to this because I feel like in terms of content, Weslandia doesn't quite hit the mark in terms of looking at the ways that "No Place for Plants" falls short (and also it's an older title) but anyway--if we're going to talk about a well-executed children's book that features a pretty context-dense concept like indigenous ethnobotany, we can look no further than the Caldecott Winner Berry Song.
Berry Song basically has the reader join a little girl and her grandmother on a foraging trip in the Pacific Northwest. The book expresses gratitude and responsibility towards the land through joy and wonder. It doesn't feel the need to whack kids over the head with "Pollution bad! Forest good!" Again, it's about sharing more than teaching, giving kids the space to make their own connections and judgments with the material. It makes you feel safe while simultaneously making you feel like you're a part of something much bigger-- I think that's also another mistake a lot of would-be children's authors make: trying to jam too much into their book's overall thesis. Kids are capable of grasping nuance, but if a book starts jamming in too many "Yes but's" and "yes, however's" and "Yes, but on the condition of--'s" it muddies up the impact and fucks up the book's overall execution fast. Walk your book's thesis back to its original "yes" and you'd be surprised at how much content you get out of that core concept alone.
The illustrations are huge. I was just at a service planning workshop where Indigenous libraries and community members looking to start libraries were being asked what their dreams were - what would be different if libraries were suddenly perfect? A lot of the room worked in education in some capacity, and they all talked about how difficult it was to get kids interested in reading when the only relatable books all immediately advertise via Indie Book Illustration that they are mid. One teacher expressed it as, if everything were perfect, she could buy Indigenous books that felt mainstream. And I think this goes for anything you want to write a book about to express to kids. Even apart from helping connect with the content, having a professional illustrator and presentation can make kids feel more connected to society at large, because it makes them feel like that subject that's relevant to them isn't just a single person's passion project.
this is going around again and the tags are full of people talking about printing it out to put in their breakroom or cubicle or sending it to their coworkers, which fills me with great joy. vast diversity of professions represented also. zoos. labs. summer camps. restaurants. garden centers. libraries. schools. many reports from the brave warriors of assorted retail. a truth universally acknowledged: if there is a sign a customer will not read it <3 and they don't read emails either <3
