September 4, 2008
Thursday

Pennsylvania Library Theft Act – A person is guilty of library theft if he willfully conceals on his person or among his belongings any library or museum material while still on the premises of a library or willfully and without authority removes any library or museum material from a library with the intention of converting such material to his own use.
                       — Section 3929.1 of the Pennsylvania Library Theft Act

The 2008 edition of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference has been over almost two weeks, and I’ve been back in the ‘burg a week. In the words of Margo Rabb, who taught a useful and strategy-packed class on managing the messy process of a novel, “Bread Loaf was magical.” Margo was there as a fellow, a published writer who acts as an assistant to the faculty member in a workshop. She’s attended before, and the experience was so magical for her this time that she posted only twice, with really nice pictures. You should go check them out, because they’re about the only pictures of the sky over Birch House (where I lived as a graduate student in the 70s) that you’re likely to see, since the conference was so magical and productive for me this year I didn’t post at all.

But I am back to work, determined not to let the energy I always draw from the conference dissipate this year. I started revisions on the piece I took to workshop and began reading some of the suggestions for models that Antonya Nelson gave (as well as Rabb’s and Nelson’s own work).

I write (or aspire to write) “literary fiction,” character-driven examinations of the psychology of human interaction. I’m good at creating a character with some depth, giving her challenges and writing her into them with some grace. What I lack is a facility for plot, for turning a situation into a story. Margo said that literary writers can learn plot development skills from examining popular or genre fiction, the page-turners that get made into Lifetime Channel movies. (An example would be Angels Fall, starring Heather Locklear and adapted from a novel by Nora Roberts set in Wyoming, as well as the work of Jodi Picoult.) She suggested we set aside our literary snobbishness and gave some titles of how-to books that endeavor to teach the mechanics of writing a blockbuster novel.

I went to the library yesterday for one such book, Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel. My county library system has only one copy, held at the branch that happens to be in the neighborhood where I grew up. The manuscript I took to Bread Loaf is set in that neighborhood, and Antonya suggested that I could do a lot more with bringing that community to life.

Neighborhood branches were unknown in my childhood. There was only one library, downtown, and that’s where I fed my passion for books, the place from which I borrowed the copy of Desiree I read the summer after ninth grade and Anna Karenina that I took to my place by the river the summer after tenth.

I like community libraries, the energy that is found there, and yesterday afternoon was typical. All the computer stations were occupied. There was a  college-age woman working at her laptop, a textbook open beside it. A girl about ten was telling the librarian about her first day at school. I found the Maass book I wanted, as well as The Grace That Keeps This World, the novel by a local writer that’s been chosen for the One Book One Community project this year.

Last night, during those delicious hours after dinner is finished and the kitchen is cleared and the fragrance of the late summer evening is imbuing the air, I sat at the table with the Maass book. I read a little of the introduction (“You have the power to break out: how to use this book”) and then went looking for the parts I knew would be valuable for me, the exercises.

It was easy to find the end of Chapter One, and the ends of all the other chapters, where the exercises were. The book practically fell open to those spots, because all of the pages had been torn out, leaving ragged strips that you could tell had been pages 31 and 32, 57 and 58, 79 and 80, 101 and 102, all through the book, eleven sets of exercises, the heart of the book, gone, unavailable for any library patron who might come after the one who couldn’t manage to copy out the material or borrow the book enough times to get his breakout novel written.

I felt almost as if I’d seen someone spit out the Holy Eucharist and crush it under his heel. I take the Eucharist very seriously, it is the heart of my spirituality, and there are few acts I would compare its desecration to. But I also take books seriously, especially books that are in a library. My favorite bookmark carries Anne Herbert’s thought that “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” That’s probably why the idea of altered books just creeps me out.

I’ve seen books in other libraries with photocopied pages pasted in where pages have been stolen or rendered unreadable through use or spilled coffee, but that’s usually rare volumes in academic libraries. I’ve also had the experience of finding that the one issue of a not-yet-bound periodical I needed to see had disappeared from the case, no doubt riding out in the backpack or briefcase of yet another spurious scholar who thought his or her own work was more important than anyone else’s.

I’ll take the book back later today and call the librarian’s attention to it. It’s the only copy my county library has, but chances are this book is available at other libraries where I have borrowing rights. I’m affluent, mobile, and clever, and my novel will get written with or without the help of these particular exercises. I just hope that some story that really needs to be told hasn’t been thwarted because its writer had only the branch library she could walk to for help. And I hope I never read a book by a local author that acknowledges both the Maass book and the uptown branch.