A dream noted on July 11, 2016:
A dream come true:
Every once in a while, my husband, Jesse, likes to give me writing advice. When I told him about the reading tonight, he said, “Oh! You should say you wrote one of the chapters here! In the coffee shop!” That would not be true, and when I write, I try to handle what’s true.
What’s true is Literati was the first place I found all by myself when we first moved here two years ago.
I’ve wanted to live in Ann Arbor since I was 18, and I read Betsy Smith’s Joy in the Morning on a park bench the morning after Kurt Cobain died. I met Annie McGairy, Smith’s protagonist, and she became my favorite heroine of any book I’ve read. Annie came to Ann Arbor with her husband, who was studying at the university down the street. Annie loved words and stories. She loved them so much she sat outside of lecture halls just to listen. She loved them so much she hand copied books to get close to them, understand them, and to make them a part of her. She didn’t just know a word’s definition, she felt it in her bones; like when she heard a group of young men sing their Alma Mater, their voices – sweet and sad – mixed in with the air on a spring evening that didn’t quite feel like spring, but nevermind how the weather felt, things were growing, it was the eve of commencement, and Annie felt that word’s meaning when she heard those boys sing: to begin.
It is time to grow, I thought when I finished the book (a miracle back then because I wasn’t a reader, and I didn’t finish anything). Maybe I could grow up and be like Annie.
And so that’s what I was doing when I found Literati – trying to do do a bit of growing up, and trying to look at this town the way Annie would’ve. I am certain Annie would’ve gone into Literati had it been around back then. When you’re at an intersection and unsure of what to do next, and there’s a bookstore on the corner, it seems like the right thing to do is walk in and sit awhile. So that’s what I did. I’ve been in countless times since, sometimes lost, sometimes quite certain of where I’m going, always happy to find stories on whatever journey I think I’m on. Literati has served as a sort of compass for me.
It’s also the place where I stood with Jesse on a January afternoon when I was in between jobs and unsure and a little afraid of what I’d do next, and I saw the blackboard calendar filled with the names of authors who’d be coming in to read their stories, and said to him, “This is what I want to do.”
“What?” Jesse asked.
“This!” I said, waving my hand in a circle to include all that was around me.
“What?” Jesse asked again. He likes precise, exact thoughts and statements.
“I want to work with words. I want to tell stories.”
It was no business plan. I said no hashtaggable words, and I didn’t have a clue about what action to take next, other than reading and writing.
Other than choosing to stay in the story, to move towards what delights me, and to handle the truth long enough so that I can make it into a story.
So while I didn’t write The Teacher Diaries in this place, Literati is just as important to me. It serves as a symbol of a beginning for me. It is my definition of a barely there spring evening when change and growth are supposed to happen and they’re going to happen, and it’s sweet and sad, like a group of boys, perhaps walking down State Street, ties loosened, shirt sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up, singing so they won’t cry, and together, shuffling slowly toward a beginning.
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