By Marcel LaFlamme

The Backroad Librarian: Generation Next

editor — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:38:06 -0700

"PAR-TIC-I-PA-TION, or 37 pieces of library flair"
Photo: Cindi Trainor

“Aren’t you a little, well, young to be a librarian?”

I’ve heard this line more than once since the beginning of the year, when I moved to southeastern Kansas to take a job as the director of a rural community college library. I try not to let it bug me. At twenty-five, I probably am a little young to be running a library of my own, although I figure that whatever I lack in gravitas at this point, I can hopefully make up with a combination of hard work and youthful exuberance. Over the summer, it looks like my library is going to get painted for the first time in thirty-eight years. So I must be doing something right.

Part of the confusion that my presence in the library engenders surely stems from the fact that many Americans still have a pretty clear mental picture of what a librarian is supposed to look like: a dour-faced spinster in sensible shoes, with wire-gray hair pulled up into a tight, unforgiving bun. And while a handful of recent trend stories have heralded the emergence of a new archetype—the cool hipster librarian! —the unwritten assumption in these stories is that the edgy young professionals they profile are living and working in urban areas. The closest they’re likely to get to rural America are the Carhartts that they’ll ironically don on their way out to the bars in Brooklyn.

The Backroad Librarian: We Disappear

editor — Wed, 9 Apr 2008 13:19:41 -0700

book review

We Disappear
By Scott Heim
HarperCollins 293 pp., $14 (paper)

“I think I know what happened when I disappeared.”

With these words, Scott Heim’s third and most recent novel, We Disappear, takes a permanent turn for the cryptic. Part fiction, part memoir, We Disappear chronicles the last weeks of Heim’s mother’s struggle with cancer. His unflinching depictions of “the skin around the nails, the knuckles, even the webs between the fingers” flaking and peeling away recall other memoirs of loss: David Rieff’s recent Swimming In A Sea of Death, to name just one.

Yet Heim the documentarian shares the stage here with Heim the purveyor of Midwestern Gothic. The protagonist of We Disappear, also named Scott, returns to small-town Kansas to find his dying mother surrounded by photographs of missing children, convinced suddenly that she herself had been abducted for a week when she was a girl. Are Donna’s stories of being locked in a strange basement simply the beginning stages of dementia? Or do the conflicting accounts she provides to those around her contain a common kernel of truth?

The Backroad Librarian: Fifteen Miles to Derby

editor — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:32:46 -0700

View of Two Rivers Coop, in Udall, Kansas
Photo: Marcel LaFlamme

Dorothy Russell is legally blind. Cataracts, retinitis and diabetes-related glaucoma have eroded her eyesight to the point that, when she wakes up, everything is completely black. Her vision is best during the afternoon, but even then she uses a high-powered magnifier to pay bills and read labels at the grocery store. She hasn’t been behind the wheel of a car in more than a decade. Yet three times a week, somehow, Russell must find a way to make the fifteen-mile trip from Udall, Kansas, where she has lived for thirty years, to the town of Derby, on the southern fringe of the Wichita metropolitan area. Her kidneys are failing, and she must get to her appointments at the dialysis center, rain or shine.

Living in a town of 763 people, without access to public transportation, Russell’s options are decidedly limited. For the past nine months, Dorothy’s husband, who works on the north side of Wichita, has been leaving work at 1pm on dialysis days and driving the thirty miles back to Udall. He picks up his wife, drops her off in Derby, and then returns to work, only to make the same trip again at quitting time. “It really puts a lot of pressure on him,” Russell admitted. The fifteen-mile drive that she once would have made without a second thought has become a yawning, almost unbridgeable chasm.