Should writers try to change the world? Or should we just shut up and write? Lari Don

It’s Book Week Scotland this week, and like many Scottish-based authors, I’ve spent the whole week (and this weekend too) rushing around Scotland sharing stories and chatting about my books.

But I’ve done other things too. I spent one of my Book Week Scotland days travelling to the northeast of Scotland, to the town where I was brought up, to take part in the campaign to keep local libraries open. (Moray council have recently relented, very reluctantly, to keep my home town Dufftown library open, but are still planning to close four others. So I visited one of them too, a lovely wee library in Rothes, where I met 50 local school kids and we all talked about stories and how libraries help inspire us. The kids were all familiar with and passionate about their library, and were gutted at the proposed closure. Here’s the notice. It’s closing TODAY. But the campaign to save it and other libraries continues.)

So, I went up north, and I told stories to kids in libraries because that’s what I do in libraries, and I got my photo taken and was interviewed by the press. And I hope that was helpful.

And this week, I’ve also started investigating a rumour about a proposal to cut the number of secondary school librarians in the city I now live in. If it’s true, then I’ll be getting stuck into that next week…

But I’m not just political about books and libraries. I campaign for a Yes vote in the independence referendum next year. I put out leaflets and knock on doors, but I also take part in debates as “a writer”, like one on Scotland’s future at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival.

So, should I? Should I try to change the world around me, should I get involved in politics, when I’m just a children’s writer?

Why should my opinions be any more important than anyone else’s? Why should what I think about Moray closing libraries be of any interest to anyone, given that I moved away more than 20 years ago? Why should my opinions on school librarians be any more important than those of any other local parent? Why would anyone pay any attention to my opinions on Scotland’s future, any more than any other person living here?

My job is to make things up and invent happy endings. Why should anyone trust anything I have to say about the real world?

The answer is that of course my opinions are not more important or valid than anyone else's. However it might be easier for me with my “writer” hat on, to express those opinions and get them heard.

And perhaps a deeper answer is that artists of all kinds are experienced at “what if”s and imagining outcomes and creative original thinking, so maybe on big political issues we can lift the debate out of shallow ‘what’s in it for me’ waters and give a wider vision to the debate.

But here’s another question I rarely ask myself, but I thought I’d ask you: does a writer trying to change the world annoy or offend readers?

Most people might think writers have a professional knowledge of the value of libraries, so might forgive writers for being passionate about libraries, even if they don’t agree with us. But on more contentious political issues, where readers, publishers, booksellers, teachers and parents might have their own very different views, does going public with our opinions damage us as writers? Does it undermine our books and our relationships with readers?

Should I just shut up?

Personally I think that writers can do a huge amount of good – look at the money raised last week by the amazing Authors for Philippines auction – and that if we care passionately about something and if we can help raise awareness and get a bit of media coverage to help out other people who care passionately too, then it probably is justified. But I still don’t think my opinions matter more than anyone else.

And bizarrely I’m careful not to be blatantly political in my books! I suspect the underlying feminism of my collection of heroine myths, Girls Goddesses and Giants, is fairly obvious, but despite the Scottish setting of all my adventure novels so far, I've never mentioned Scottish Independence in any of them. I wouldn’t feel right using my characters (and readers) like that, in an artificial way that wasn’t part of the story.

So what do other writers, and indeed readers, think? Should writers try to change the world, or should we stick to creating fictional worlds? And has anyone ever been put off a book by the writer’s political opinions?

I’m off now, to draft a letter about school librarians while on a bus to another Book Week Scotland event. Happy Book Week Scotland, whereever you are, and please support your local library! (See, I just can’t shut up…)

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
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2015: THE YEAR THAT LIBRARIES DIED?

“If it bleeds, it leads,” is proved by the awful headlines splashed across the news  daily – but  the terrible bleeding away of the public and school library services seems to be almost invisible. 

There’s no gory red stuff on show, no heart-rending images to display, so even as financial axes have been slashing and cutting - and are now being freshly re-sharpened, there’s little response in the news media.

Library cuts don’t make for sustained headlines or passionate press campaigns. Even  the reports on cuts to Birmingham’s showcase library – the one that was supposed to be the glory of that authority’s much pruned provision - had a world-weary touch of “what else did you expect?”

 In honour of the Great Austerity, central government cut all regional funding so steeply that councils have little money to support essential services. However, because the funds are now in regional and local hands, the government can raise its political eyebrows and say it’s not their fault when those cuts hit home. With community centres, care of the elderly and more being hacked away, the idea of a library service comes across as almost luxurious. Books rather than bedpans? Pages of text rather than playful toddlers? You elistist! 

There have already been cuts and casualties: the closure of 324 libraries, the handing over of 400 more to volunteers, and the loss of 6,000 staff jobs since 2011 - and probably many more. Statistics have a way of being out of date by the time they appear. However, the cuts planned for 2015 – possibly concealed by both the noise and the silence leading up to the election – will be truly severe.

Furthermore, librarians are not, I heard elsewhere, allowed to comment on the matter. Most I know are desperate to keep their library services running in a positive way - but how hard to do that against the onslaughts of rationalisation; hours reduced means usage reduced means less need. Isn't that how it works?:

Visiting my local library, in the centre of a prosperous conference town, as well as the “middle class readers”, I see elderly people on their own, families with young children, students working at the few tables, newly arrived immigrants and more: people to whom the library service is essential.

Lucy Mangan, writing recently in the Guardian, mentioned the Independent Library report that Ed Vaisey – not a name trusted by many – commissioned a couple of years ago. He asked William Seighart to investigate the current state and possible future of libraries. According to this report, 35% of people in England use their local libraries, rising to 50% among poorer and immigrant groups.. The report points out that “The [socioeconomic] AB group, who run the country and the media, don’t use libraries. They do not understand how vital they are, or how many social problems they deal with.”

Hooray for Lucy for even writing about libraries, though she suggests a far more optimistic picture of the future library service than I’m witnessing.  Meanwhile, too many of the pitilessly bright political and media folk seem to be giving a cultural shrug, happy to disregard the damage being done to the libraries. After all, there’s still the London Library isn’t there? And everyone has wikipedia on the computer at home, don’t they? Or is there, somewhere, a belief that stripping the library service of its assets until it is unsustainable is a valid thing to do? Or is this another version of “the poor don’t deserve libraries” attitude of the past? What do you think of that, Andrew Carnegie?

Of course, damage isn’t called damage. It is presented as a “new model”, given a fresh positive spin. Here in North Yorkshire, people are being “consulted” about new library service proposals, because by 2020 this County Council’s library budget will be half what it was in 2010. How about where you live?

I, being lucky, live near what is proposed as the “core”library for my district. (Less lucky are the many library staff losing their jobs under these proposals.) There will be one core in each of the seven districts of this large and often rural county, acting as an “engine”; advising the remaining libraries, says the document.

What “remaining libraries”? Five “hybrid” libraries will remain in towns where there are large and busy daytime populations. Each will have access to a librarian but be run by volunteers. Will the librarian be based at the library? Not necessarily. Is this one of the now very few librarians back at the core? Yes.

The rest will remain, but not as we know them. They will be become twenty “community libraries”, where not only the running but the cost of maintaining the building will fall on the local users and fund-raisers and these will be staffed by volunteers. Not surprisingly, these smaller libraries are mostly in rural and poorer areas of the county.

In addition, everyone who fills in the form is asked to tick the “volunteer” box, because that is how libraries will be run in the future. I have to say that, looking ahead, my heart sinks. Volunteers are good-hearted, capable people, eager to help when it doesn’t inconvenience them or interfere with the other, very real demands on their time. How will the leadership & structure work out among these often strong-minded people? Who will tell who what to do once the librarians have gone? Where will the responsibility lie? What about the maintenance of these community buildings a few years on? And who will cough up the money for replenishing book stock – a subject that is hardly mentioned in all the proposals? (Reduce stock, reduce use, reduce “need: that useful model again.)

This is my example, but I know the same is happening all across England and Wales. Truly, I fear that once the dynamic central expertise has disappeared, the whole library system will be so weakened it will fade.

 

Of course, then it will cease to be a bother. Proof again, no doubt, that the people just do not deserve libraries. Besides, as many young people probably won’t have had librarians or libraries in their schools, they won’t feel the loss anyway. Job done, eh? Spit spot.

Oh dear. 2015, what bodies will you bring? Maybe if there was blood on the carpet, the media would notice. Where’s Professor Plum with the hammer when you need him?

Otherwise, Happy New Year! 

(Money for fireworks but not libraries, eh?)

Penny Dolan

The Library Story

I was lucky enough to receive a beautiful early Christmas present at the weekend, a handsome and heavy volume of architectural history entitled "The Library, A World History", by James WP Campbell and Will Pryce. It's quite a story of some incredible buildings, although of course that is scant comfort to those today facing the loss of their livelihood or an essential local service. In 2012, we had 4064 public library buildings and 548 mobile libraries. Around 300 of those have closed, with up to 400 threatened with closure, meaning we could lose up to a quarter of our library service by 2016, according to The Library Campaign. The recent grim news about The Library of Birmingham just adds to this list.

As a writer, never mind a regular library user, those are the kind of statistics which keep me awake at night.

Because beyond mourning the vital community roles all our libraries play - there is a deeper fear, isn't it? That allowing libraries, even grand new ones like Birmingham, to stumble and fall, is the icing on a cake of long term cultural and intellectual decline.

Libraries are, by primary definition, book storage facilities. And if we don't value the book as an artefact worthy of proper storage and archiving in recorded collections and don't cherish those collections as resources of immense public value, which we should all have access to - then we are in slow retreat from the calm seas of wisdom, knowledge and reason offered by the printed page.

"The Library: A World History" doesn't allay those fears, or make our current situation any less desperate, but it does provide a fascinating story to while away those sleepless hours. The evolution of the library as a physical space is, appropriately, as good a tale as many of those stored inside one.

We know surprisingly little about the first great libraries of antiquity - many in ancient Egypt, which stored clay writing tablets are lost forever, as is the most famous of them all - the classical library of Alexandria. The legend runs that it was destroyed by fire, and there are many myths about invading Ottoman armies burning the books to fuel the bath houses. But the more likely truth is that the first significant library of record dwindled as the material classical Egypt's archives were comprised of - papyrus - rotted and crumbled away.

Artist's impression of Library of Alexandria

These libraries were splendid buildings by reputation, but for the benefit of a military and clerical elite. It was the Romans who first devised the concept of the public library as an important civic space. Of course, not too much remains of them either. Although not just because the barbarians at the gates sacked them all. In truth, accidental fire did for one of the earliest examples - the Palatine Library in Rome. By the time the Ostrogoths came to Rome, fading financial support for public libraries had already done their job for them, which might strike a chord. ...

The Tripitaka Koreanna

The fire at the Palatine was not helped by the fact that the scrolls were packed tight in locked cupboards... to protect them from the damp. One of the oldest existing libraries in the world, the stunning Tripitaka Koreanna in the mountains of South Korea, owes its eight hundred year survival largely to an early but excellent ventilation system. The Rococo 17th century Mafra Library in Portugal, believe it or not, has been maintained by a permanently resident colony of bats, who eat the insects that would have otherwise long since destroyed the books.

Mafra Palace Library

Ironically, the Mafra Library itself was funded by money from the savage destruction of another civilization's archives. The Incas did not have books, but "kept records on knotted and braided ropes, which the Spanish destroyed, believing them to be bad omens." But even worse, the entire history of their peoples was recorded in 1450 on golden plate, which the invading European armies melted down and used to (in part)...fund their own library.

That may just be one of the reasons why gold plate is not used to make books anymore.

Indeed, the changing physical nature of books - from clay tablets to papyrus scrolls to wooden printing blocks, to parchment, vellum and paper, has forced libraries to constantly remodel to accommodate not only their changing shape, but their increasing number. More books than ever before were published worldwide last year. No wonder that coincides with the first ever "bookless" library opening in Texas to offer its long range readers a space efficient digital service. But digital data is physical too. The Library of Congress in Washington has to store about 20 terabytes of data on its 830 miles of underground shelving, including a record of every tweet sent in the world ever.

Shelves at the Library of Congress Ft. Meade Storage Facility

The 19th century vision of the municipal public library for all in the US and the UK may be under threat from a malign political ideology, but the truth is the library has never been a static or permanent public space. Countries like China are building new and amazing public buildings at great speed.  For centuries in Western Europe, the library was a spare room off a cloister where a tiny number of educated monks could read a few hand inscribed volumes that were chained to the shelves to prevent theft. Now, anyone of us can download most books published in a second, often for free. That should never be used an argument against the value of the civic space our public libraries provide, but as the story of the book changes - so does the story of the library.

The Liyuan Library in China (2012), featuring a radical design entirely made of bookshelves

Piers Torday

@PiersTorday

www.pierstorday.co.uk

The real Summer Reading Challenge? Lari Don

Exactly a week ago, I was privileged to launch the Tesco Bank Summer Reading Challenge Scotland (I needed to take a deep breath every time I said that!) in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. In case the title doesn’t make it clear, it’s the libraries’ Summer Reading Challenge, in Scotland, sponsored by Tesco Bank. I was also privileged to also launch the local Summer Reading Challenge in Dundee two days later.

Launching the Tesco Bank Summer Reading Challenge Scotland

This year’s theme is Mythical Maze. And there couldn’t be a better theme for me – I write collections of myths and legends, I write contemporary adventures inspired by old myths, and one of my books even has a Maze in the title.

So that’s probably why I was asked to launch this year’s theme and challenge in Scotland. (And yes, I know it seems a bit early to all of you south of the border, but we grab summer earlier up here in Scotland, so the schools are already out and the libraries are already challenging kids to read books during the holidays.)

The launches were all positive and smiley. I met kids who had done previous challenges and were keen to do it again (which was great) and I met kids who had never done it before but were keen to give it a go it this year (which was even better.) So I had hoped to post a really cheerful blog for you all about summer and reading, with these wonderful illustrations by Sarah MacIntyre.

With lovely librarian Ruth in Dundee, and a dragon behind us.

But when I posted pictures of me with posters and books and dragons and kids online last week, someone who had been involved in a campaign that I supported to keep their local library open, a campaign that sadly failed, contacted me to say, this is lovely, Lari, but what about the kids who don’t have a local library any more? 

And I didn’t have an answer. Sad face emoticons don’t really do it.

The Summer Reading Challenge brightens up and invigorates libraries all over the country and allows them to run fun family-focussed events. The different themes every year make reading relevant and exciting to lots of different children. Kids get involved, families get involved, authors get involved. It’s a brilliant scheme. Well done the Reading Agency for organising it, and Tesco Bank for supporting it in Scotland. But it can’t reach every child, because not every child has access to a library.

And perhaps that’s the real challenge for all of us.

I had intended to write a really cheerful summery sunny post for all you Awfully Big Blog fans, but the shadow over it is that even the best things we do with books can’t and don’t reach everyone. Not until we make sure every single child has access to a library.

So clearly my challenge is to get away from that dragon breathing down my neck and take up my sword again on the subject of library closures.

In the meantime, have a fun summer, losing yourself in mazes and finding new myths!

(Lari is now away polishing her sword…)

Lari Don is an occasional library campaigner, and also the award-winning author of 21 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
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