Levar Burton and Me

 Recently, I've gotten into the habit of starting my day listening to a podcast called, "Levar Burton Reads," while I stretch on a yoga mat. I do this for several reasons: I have a bad back, I enjoy Levar's voice, and I love stories. I've always loved a good story. Levar Burton has been reading and recommending great stories to me for a long time, now. He's yet to steer me wrong. Like me, he's a fan of science fiction and good writing generally. He's featured some of my favorite authors like Nnedi Okorafor, Ken Liu, and Charlie Jane Anders. He's also introduced me to new favorites like Lesley Nneka Arimah.

When I was a child, I read books. I did other things too. I fished, climbed trees, and accompanied my stepfather on hunting trips where we never shot even a single deer. On the way home, as we trudged through the gloaming, he'd tell me a story. That was my favorite part. I've always loved stories. I was a voracious reader, racing through whatever books I could get my hands on. That's why I loved The Reading Rainbow so much. Levar loved stories, it was clear. Throughout the fourth grade, my teacher routinely let us spend Friday afternoons watching episodes. It was a treat if we'd done well that week. Often, his wife made brownies or popcorn balls. It was fourth grade's version of a party and my favorite part of the week.

I was one of six kids, and our family was pretty poor. We often lacked very basic things like food, clean clothing, and sufficient heat to combat the Michigan winters, but we always had books. The only thing I loved as heartily as I loved Levar Burton was the library, or more specifically, during the long, hot, hazy summers -the bookmobile. A library on wheels, one that brought books right to me. I can't think of anything better. I usually spent at least part of the summer on my grandmother's farm as well. I'd haul my cache of books along. I remember once trying to read while riding my bike on a gravel road. My thinking at the time was that these were both things I enjoyed, so surely combining them would be a great success. Sadly, this was not a combination that worked out well for me. Long before the cell phone was invented, and pedestrians learned to dodge those distractedly perusing tiny screens, I walked the world with an open book in my hands, barely seeing the world I walked through until I bumped into someone or something.

Being a reader- a fast, avid, voracious one; being an autodidact and a story fanatic-that has shaped who I am. I was admonished in kindergarten for writing my A's the way they are in print, as though I were a tiny typewriter, rather than a child. I was once required to rewrite an essay that my teacher presumed I'd copied from the encyclopedia. Surely those words weren't mine. Nobody speaks that way. But I did. When I was immersed in a book, the voice in my head was shaded with the author's intonation and diction.

I'm a first-generation college graduate, not simply the first in my immediate family, but the first person in my extended family to graduate with a BA. I earned both BA and MA from San Francisco State University. Both in World and Comparative Literature. My focus area included Literature of the Americas and Jewish American Literature. I guess I decided to pick the major that involved the greatest number of novels.

I worked in education throughout the time spent on my own. Tutoring, teaching, and facilitating workshops. But I found classroom teaching was not right for me. Too many people, too much talking. Smaller groups and one to one had always been easier for me. When I took my current position, I was interested in working with teens and had spent a significant amount of time working with students with mild disabilities as they transitioned from high school to college. I began to seriously consider becoming a librarian when a group of my youth and I began spending time in a youth space in the local library. I was impressed by the youth-led aspects of the space, and the commitment the librarians have toward youth. There's a way in which that space was the epitome of the democratization of education, and that is something that interests me a great deal.

My interests collide in that space. I have always loved public libraries. As a poor child, they felt almost magical. I spent hot summer afternoons hidden in the furthest reaches of the stacks. When I began to explore my world, trying to understand what it meant to be a queer woman and a feminist- I began in the stacks at City College of San Francisco. I have yet to zero in on my exact place in public libraries, but they have always felt like home to me.

The public library beckons readers with the offer of a story but ultimately offers so much more. On his podcast, just before he begins to read, Levar urges the listener to take a deep breath. That moment of silence, of inheld breath, includes an expansive sense of so much possibility. The world opens up in that brief few seconds before the noisy exhale, before the beginning of the story. In a real sense, that's what the stacks represent too: almost unbounded possibility.