I’ve never been a theme park enthusiast, but ever since it opened, I’ve been very curious about The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Last week, we ended up on a trip to Disney World / Orlando with a group of extended family who’ve never read Harry Potter, so our family peeled off from the crowd and seized the opportunity to head off to Diagon Alley for the day. For anyone who hasn’t yet made the journey through the Orlando version of King’s Cross Station, I highly recommend the trip.

I wrote last year about the Harry Potter compromise I struck with my oldest reader (then 6 ½). Eager to immerse himself in the wizarding world he’d heard so much about, we decided to get onboard at Platform 9 ¾ and head off to Hogwarts. It was a huge hit and felt perfectly pitched to where he was as a reader right then. However, we agreed that we’d wait about 6 months between installments. We read the second adventure in the fall, and while book 2 ratchets up the fear factor with whispery basilisk speak echoing through the walls and enormous spiders lurking in the woods, the 6 months between books has felt about right.

Receiving a package with a book in it is not entirely a noteworthy occurrence for someone who owns a bookstore. Every now and then, however, one stands out even before it is opened. I got one of that variety on Tuesday, a very thin package that came from Switzerland, a point of origin I saw no particular reason for. Another thing which stood out was that it came to my home address. Inside it were two items. One was this hand drawn card.

Dear Families at Avondale Elementary,

We are excited to welcome author Joy Storyteller, who will be visiting the third and fourth grades on February 13th. Joy is the New York Times bestselling author of four very popular middle grade books, and she will be speaking with the students about writing as part of their current unit on myths and legends. We are honored to have such a nationally known author visit our school, and thank our PTO for the generous grant that makes this special experience possible for our students. Ms. Storyteller will also answer student questions about her much beloved titles, and preview her soon-to-be-released book, “The Very Best Dragon Adventure,” which will be available in May.

Technology simultaneously connects us globally and isolates us locally. All that time spent alone on our devices can deprive us of face-to-face social interaction that feeds our souls and creates a sense of true community. Back in the 80’s, author Ray Oldenburg (The Great Good Place) introduced the idea that places like cafes, bookstores, libraries, barber shops, clubs, churches, parks, and other inclusive public venues provide an essential role in the social fabric. If home is our ‘first place’ and work our ‘second,’ these ‘third places’ offer relaxed, welcoming opportunities for us to gather, meet and make friends, exchange ideas and stories, and share joy, laughter, and meaning with one another.

I’ve always thought of my bookstore as one of those third places, and recently, it struck me that storytelling events—in which people tell true, first-person stories, as in NPR’s Moth Radio Hour (or, you know, all of our ancient ancestors around a fire for millennia)—transform any space into an incredibly special third place. Nothing connects people as deeply as sharing stories.

Last week, the Eric Carle Museum was the venue for a beautiful evening of storytelling: On the Flip: I See Color, organized by EmbraceRace, an Amherst nonprofit organization dedicated to providing resources on racial equity and information for families, educators and citizens.

As they define themselves, EmbraceRace is “a multiracial community of parents, teachers, experts, and other caring adults who support each other to meet the challenges that race poses to our children, families, and communities.” Their goals are to “identify, organize – and, as needed, create – the tools, resources, discussion spaces, and networks we need to meet 4 goals:

1. Nurture resilience in children of color
2. Nurture inclusive, empathetic children of all stripes
3. Raise kids who think critically about racial inequity
4. Support a movement of kid and adult racial justice advocates for all children.”

The evening was a fundraiser for the organization, and was attended by a multigenerational audience of friends, family members, supporters, and public leaders from around the region. It was a warm, exuberant, moving evening of stories from a variety of tellers with origins all over the world, including Venezuela, Tibet, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam. The youngest teller was 12 years old. There was laughter, there were tears, there were painful revelations, and there was a lot of resilience. It was beautiful.

Nothing builds empathy and community like walking in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world through different eyes, and all of those other metaphors that mean we have been able to live someone else’s experiences for a few magical moments.

While I volunteer at (and deeply love) the Moth Story Slam in Burlington every month, it was this show that really made me want to bring first-person storytelling to my bookstore. Gathering a group of people together with diverse histories and experiences in an open, welcoming environment that invites honest sharing — well, that is the whole apple right there.

So stay tuned for an update after we’ve held our first storytelling evening at the store. In the meantime, the lovely co-sponsors of On the Flip, Amherst Media, New England Valley Voices, and Good Talk Media, will be making video available from the Eric Carle Museum evening, and I’ll update the article when there’s a link!

I also recommend getting in touch with EmbraceRace if you are a teacher or school administrator or otherwise involved in diversity education efforts, or a parent looking for great resources. Co-founders Andrew Grant-Thomas and Melissa Giraud could not be lovelier, more helpful and wonderful people. Thanks, all, for a great evening!

P.S. Book addict that I am, I couldn’t resist asking the Eric Carle Museum info desk staffer what they were reading: Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation by Sunaura Taylor, which they said was really interesting!

Today’s post involves two instances of sharing something with a bookseller.

When talking about DDG’s store mission, one phrase that always comes up is sharing a love of reading with our customers and our community. Here’s an example of why that phrase is the coin of the realm here.  I was chatting with a customer named Ellen recently about favorite books we had read and re-read as children. I mentioned that While Mrs. Coverlet Was Away, by Mary Nash was a book that I had never tired of disappearing into, that it still makes me happy just to picture it in my mind’s eye. I shared some of my deep Mrs. Coverlet thoughts with her, how much I loved The Toad and what a great villain Miss Eva Penalty was. I also shared how I had never been able to settle whether book one, While Mrs. Coverlet Was Away, or Mrs. Coverlet’s Magicians, book two, was my favorite. In my heart, I explained, I knew that book one was a better book, but book two was maybe a little bit more fun as it had more Toad and Miss Eva. Ellen declared that she empathized with this sort of titanic intellectual exercise.

Ahh, February. The season of foil wrapped chocolates, large displays of “blind date with a book” made of brown-paper-packaged titles with teasing little labels, sidewalk salt crunching underfoot on the dusty footprint-filled tile floors of the shop and burnout. Bookseller burnout – that bone-level exhaustion, lack of motivation, tired-hamster-on-a-wheel feeling that hits so very hard in the bleak months of the 1st quarter. If we were lucky, we attended Winter Institute in Baltimore, filled our notebooks with great ideas and our pockets with business cards, flew home exhausted and then the avalanche of ennui tumbled onto our desks. If this wasn’t a year for a conference or even a midwinter gift show, we slogged through the slush of January, shoveling our sidewalks and doorsteps, putting up paper snowflakes in the windows to replace the holiday lights, and waited for customers too few and far in-between. Surely, there is no year as long as the 31 days of January in retail, except that sneaky month of February, which is an era worthy of its own class of dinosaurs.

Bookstore days happen in shards of activity. A 10-minute segment of our morning might include:

• helping a customer find books for her seven-year-old nephew who is suddenly obsessed with rock collecting,
• calling the distributor to see why a title we ordered a week ago still hasn’t arrived,
• ringing up a sale,
• wrapping a birthday gift, and
• looking up book three in a series a youngster can only remember has “magic” in the title.

On a good day, retail is best suited for people comfortable holding two or three different threads in mind at any given moment. Add to that unexpected weather events, and it’s a whirlwind of crazy. (Scroll to the end for happy puppy-in-snow video.)

I have a small shopkeeper confession: when I visit other bookstores, I love meeting new bookselling colleagues, checking out interesting local sidelines and greeting store pets, but mostly, I’m there to read the shelf talkers. Those charmingly bookish handwritten cards, sometimes covered in fancy plastic protectors, sometimes laminated, and often just taped to the edge of the bookshelf are like little peeks into the soul of a store. In some stores they are all written on white card stock, and I marvel at the incredibly neat printing that fits all those words onto that little space. Other booksellers use a color coded system, with each staff member’s blurbs written on their own signature colored paper, so that customers can skip across sections looking for “their” staffer’s picks. Flurries of one color in Romance or Science Fiction give clues to that staff member’s personal favorite genre, and looking at the clusters of colors is like a Venn diagram of the reading preferences of the store team. Even fancier are the stores with custom printed shelf talkers, each bearing a photo of the staffer who wrote the review – in my store, that would be WAAAAY too many pictures of yours truly, but I love the idea, and feel that approach adds a lot of credibility to this “hands free” handselling technique.

Writing this blog can generate some strange thought processes. The truth is that a bookseller’s brain is kind of a big swirl in which wildly disparate, nothing-alike books and stories and sentences bump up against each other continuously, like mismatched socks in a washing machine (yes, I was just reading A Sock Story by CK Smouha to my 5-year-old tonight). So it’s hard to say what exactly will be top of mind when Thursday comes around. Out of the maelstrom, you can find yourself wondering unexpected things, such as: is physically putting animals to rest a new theme in children’s books? I mean, no, it’s obviously not a “trend.” Sloths and llamas and unicorns can breathe easily. But this week I found myself thinking about two new books that deal with mortality on a very practical level, albeit with different slants and for different audiences.

On a day of questions, two stood out. Here is the first.

“As you are going along writing your book, how do you stay true to your vision for it?” That was the question a high school student asked one of my favorite YA authors, Maria Padian, yesterday during a school visit. This was not only an excellent question, but one Maria had never been asked before by a student. “I lock in on my characters,” she replied.  “Plot follows character and staying true to them keeps the story in line. I always ask myself both what my characters want and what they need. That is a central tension for me and my books are always a journey between those two points.”  

Here is the second question.