Weeding and Writing

            Though I try my hand at writing on the side, I used to make my living by being a librarian.  This is not unusual as more and more writers these days have to have some sort of primary source of income, writing not paying very much, if anything at all.  And the choice of librarian as a profession is not surprising for someone who loves language and literature, and there are notable precedents, the most obvious being Philip Larkin.
            No matter what career writers choose to help them pay the bills, that career will have an effect on the writing they do.  Now that I’m working as an English professor again, the works we discuss in class tend to have an effect on how I write, and the students’ behavior often has an impact on the subject matter of my writing.  When I was a librarian, though, the effect on my writing was decidedly different.  I seldom drew any ideas for poems from my day-to-day work in the library, and my interactions with the students was markedly different and much less likely to provoke a new poem.
            One aspect of my job, though, did affect the way I approach writing or the way I think about writing, at least:  weeding.  In the two library positions I have held, I have come into libraries that are in sorry shape.  In the first case, the school had not had a professional librarian for ten years, and many of those years, they had no one at all running the library.  In my most recent position, I took over for a  woman who had been there for over a decade and who did a fairly good job adding to the collection, but she didn’t seem to understand the importance of weeding.
            Most people outside of the library don’t seem to understand the importance of weeding, either.  So before I discuss how weeding might affect my writing, I should briefly talk about why one weeds at all.  When Bill Clinton was first elected President, he went back to a library in Arkansas to illustrate one of the problems with education.  He went to a school library and took a book off the shelf that discussed whether or not men would ever go to the moon.  I, too, have pulled such books off of shelves, as well as books that discuss what the future might look like in the year 2000.  Much as we would like to believe that books are timeless, many of them, especially in school libraries, aren’t; thus, they need to be taken out of circulation to avoid giving students outdated information.  When I was in high school, I entered a speech competition where I gave a speech about computers.  Unfortunately, almost all of my information was at least five years old, and one judge asked me about that directly.  My public school library simply did not have any more recent materials, and my speech suffered for it (I finished third, for the record).
            However, not all the books we weed are removed because they are outdated.  Some are simply removed because they are no longer applicable to that generation’s interests.  Every generation tends to believe that the ones that follow it are not as interested in learning as they were.  We wring our hands and talk about the kids today with their video games and television and DVDs and computers and how they just don’t like to read anymore.  Of course, the generation before mine talked about rock music and movies and television and how we didn’t like to read any more, too.
Our library still has the check-out cards in the backs of books, though we have automated our library, so that students can check books out when we are not there.  Thus, it is easy to determine when a book was last checked out.  In weeding, then, I have found two distinct breaks in the reading patterns of students.  The first comes in the early 1970s.  A good portion of the books I weed were last checked out around 1971.  I’m not sure why 1971 in particular, but it is easy to see, culturally speaking, why fewer books were checked out in the early 70s.  The philosophy of the times was one of dropping out of mainstream society, so why should the books that the authorities say are worthwhile be worth reading?  It’s not that students stopped reading books then; they simply stopped reading certain books and started reading others.
The second break comes in the late 1980s.  I am much more at a loss to explain why this break occurs.  This was about the time I graduated, and I know that I and my friends were not reading many books in high school, but I really don’t know why we weren’t.  It’s not that we thought it was uncool or that we were too busy; it simply never occurred to us to read for pleasure, as we didn’t know anyone who did such things (the science fiction geeks don’t count here, as they really weren’t people we hoped to emulate).  The only thing I can say with any kind of certainty is that the students at the schools where I have worked stopped reading to any large extent in the late 80s, and they haven’t started back.
Sometimes students don’t stop reading overall; sometimes their interests simply change.  In the early 70s, books on conscientious objectors and Gandhi and King were checked out frequently, but few people have checked them out since.  Instead, during the 1980s books on finance and Wall Street became popular, and, in the 90s, we moved to an interest in popular culture, and books on celebrities, both living and dead, became the more frequently circulated books.  Kurt Cobain, Elvis, Madonna, and Marilyn Monroe became topics for research papers where before students had sought out Abraham Lincoln or even Jack Kerouac.
Thus, when students’ interests shift, and no students are checking out books on a subject for over a decade, those books get weeded.  And it is here that the writer in me becomes worried.  As part of my recent weeding, I pulled out a few hundred collections of poetry by writers I have never heard of, some recent, some older.  These poets were talented enough to convince at least an editor that they were deserving of publication, and those publishers convinced the librarians that those books were worth purchasing, but now they were relegated to being weeded by a high school librarian, not even worth the fraction of an inch of shelf space they took up.  We all know that writers fall in and out of favor and that several authors we now consider great were ignored by their generation and vice versa.
Yes, we all know that this is what happens to almost all writers, but almost all writers do not have to face this on a regular basis, as I now do.  At least once a week, I pull out a book that might have been a wonderful book and might even still be beautiful writing and remove it from circulation, and there is no way that I can not look at the book and wonder why I bother to write at all.  And, of course, this assumes that I will one day get my writing into book form.  Until now, I have only seen my writing in magazines and on the web, and I am grateful for every avenue that exists, but probably every writer wants to hold that book one day with his or her name on the spine.  Unfortunately, I look at the spines of the books I’m weeding, and I wonder about these writers.  Are they like me?  Will I be like them?
We continue to write, of course, because we have to or simply because we want to, but I have become a realist about my future.  When I was a child I went to basketball camp one summer, and the coach asked us how many of us wanted to play in the NBA.  Of course, almost all of us raised our hands, myself among them.  He then told us the statistics of how many kids currently playing basketball would make it, and they were not encouraging.  But I thought at that time that I would be the one who beat the odds, and I’m sure the other kids did as well.  None of us did, of course.  I know that I won’t serve as poet laureate, nor will I even hold down a cushy creative writing position at a school like Iowa, but I would like to think that my writing will pass the test of the librarians of the future.  Even if it doesn’t, though, I have to believe I’m better for trying to pass that test just like I believe those kids were better for believing that they could beat those odds.  And so I will continue to weed to make a better collection for my students, but I continue to write to make me better.

Kevin Brown currently resides in Cleveland, TN, where he teaches English and writes.  His poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, Connecticut Review, South Carolina Review, h2so4, Jeopardy, Pinyon, and The Pacific Review, among other journals.  He has published essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, InsideHigherEd.com, The Teaching Professor, and Eclectica.  His book of poetry, Exit Lines, will be published later this year, as will a book of scholarship:  They Love to Tell the Stories:  Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.