Printed Matter

Women's History Month, Bookstores and Finding a Porch to Stand On

Last week I got myself a photo printer that prints out postcard size prints. There are 5,032 photos and 301 videos, thumbnails that comprise a grid on my phone. As my finger flicks through and the years flash up and rapidly pass by on the screen, patterns emerge of what I chose and still am impulsively moved to photograph. There are some I print. When I similarly go back in time and review my journals or diaries, I find they seem to have a way of turning my mind inside out and in the process of seeing it on the page; I find little unconscious nuggets that are hiding through and in-between the words and paragraphs, not known to me when I wrote them. Some are the kernels of an essay. In my words and photos there are repetitions, bumps, slips. There are gaps and omissions that are equally useful to self-understanding. These personal archives present practical data for the ongoing experiment of understanding my woman’s history, how it shaped choices I made or didn’t make and excavating who I really am underneath it, despite it all.

My partner asked the other day if I had regret or remorse about what I was discovering. Roads not taken, opportunities declined, big dramatic moments of “shooting myself in the foot” (I highly recommend having a therapist who is very skilled in using metaphor). To answer the question, though my answer is honest, I don’t. I am not engaged in this process of deep reflection to torture myself. I don’t view the “bullet holes” in my feet as stigmata, which ensures I must eternally suffer. What I have is a burning curiosity to understand the meaning of my life and who I am authentically before I die. To be happy. For me, being always curious is exhilarating and interesting. The process of following this thirst to know, to understand, to integrate is always a grand adventure. Even when what I discover means facing up to some hard truths.

I find many photos of bookstores in my feed. There are photos of people in cafes reading a book, sitting at tables and conversing. I found these spaces in the cities I visited during my subsidized travel years: London, Amsterdam, Cologne, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Reykjavík, Basel, and Madrid. More recently, I’ve found them sprinkled and nestled in towns and cities across the Hudson Valley. While at times I feel soothed by the repetition of retirement life days, the sameness of them has been making me restless, bored and a little isolated. Recently I’ve had recurring dreams and daytime fantasies about opening a bookstore. A small pop-up bookstore in spaces that already exist, so it is not too onerous regarding time and investment for one on a fixed income. Something that can happen when I have the time and energy. A moment, a time for conversation, community and inspiration. An event that is fast and furtive, that eludes surveillance. That appears and disappears.

The photo printer itself is small, a miniature version of the larger one that I used to print out documents made of words like journal articles or short stories I want to sit with, study, write notes on, learn from, and savor. Most likely because of the suppression and attempted destruction of the things I have most cared about during my lifetime; free speech, free press, academia, books and libraries. I am subliminally enamored with and protective of the written word and printed matter. Physical books and photos that are held in my hands or framed. I can see, feel, smell, and even hear concrete, material objects such as a newly printed book being opened. A freshly developed print. Objects that may become valuable legacies when so much is being erased. These days, my body directs me to collect and document information in a tangible way. To keep it safe for my grandchildren so they may have a different version to know when there is nothing left to look back on except the stories those in power now insist on is the only story to tell.

When I lived in the city, I never bought books on-line. That is not until COVID. Then I began to curate and populate my Kindle. Before that I frequented university libraries and public ones in architecturally beautiful buildings. There was an array of independent bookstores to choose from in many neighborhoods, specializing in interesting and competing ideas. Rizzoli, McNally Jackson, Housing Works and St. Mark’s Bookstore. My favorite before, during and after the time I lived in Williamsburg and discovered postmodern theory was called Spoonbill and Sugartown. It seems my feet carried me into the bookstores where the artists, writers and creatives were. When I entered them, I became someone different from my ordinary self. I became an explorer, a seeker, a thinker, a creative person in search of a vessel to contain my imagination.

When I was a child, the Catholic Church, 1950s suburban life and the narrow roles played by the unhappy women around me constrained my world. I discovered there were worlds outside the circumscribed one I lived in through the magic of books, especially those that were forbidden. Once I realized adults weren’t always truthful, I began trusting books for new ideas and challenges to what I’d been taught. In a family of eight that had little or no money, where there were no exotic vacations, reading gave me the ability to travel to faraway places, to imagine different possibilities for myself as a girl/woman. Books magically allowed me to lose myself, to dissociate and fly high above it all and, as such, provide a respite for what was an overwhelming, traumatic, and stressful life for me, the oldest child of six. Books were and have remained important companions that trigger new performances and projects, encourage flights of fancy, and nurture my imagination. And as my therapist will attest, provided me with a highly developed intellectual defense. I now know, with the wisdom of age, that I must constantly temper it with walks in the woods and watching the birds in the marsh.

The places where I cry.

As I write this, the Kindle is no longer my go-to library. Public ones and used bookstores offer me so much more than just a book. I am in communion with the world and the people I live with and around. I am not alone the way I am when I buy a book for my Kindle. It’s hard to remember now it all started with a guy with a pile of books in his garage. I am furious this original idea has become so perverted by greed. If I buy a physical book in a bookstore, I own the book, it’s mine forever. I can gift and share it with others if I wish. No one can take it, unlike the 671 books I paid for because I no longer want to use that guy in the garage’s now massive platform. I am curious about what I may have sacrificed these last years for the sake of convenience. Wryly, I remember how I used to chide Calvin for his distrust of all things digital, his film cameras, his flip phone, his use of a computer for word processing only. They used my book, the product of a proposal I struggled with, and four years of writing, editing, and promotion, without my permission to train AI because I have an Instagram and Facebook account. The price I am now paying for convenience and easy access is extreme. I no longer own the books I bought or the book I wrote.

Transforming the thumbnails that sit in a grid on my phone onto a piece of photo paper I can pick up and look at, perhaps write from, remember from or since they are postcard size, write on and send to a friend right now feels like a political act. I think of artists who use both technologies to help us see differently, and who I love, Sophie Calle and Annie Ernaux. In this process of transformation from digital-to-analog, the books, articles and postcard photos that are now on my desk feel private once again. The conversation is between my body and these objects that evoke memories, ideas and inspirations even though I recognize my digital footprints can still be found across the internet and will take a very long time to fade.

When structures and institutions are being destroyed as they are now, one must protect and nurture our curiosity, our experience, our history, and our imaginations. There’s work to be done in the aftermath. We must protect books, and we need to write them. We must find and support physical spaces, like libraries and independent bookstores, where important, transgressive, and new imaginings for the future can be found. Where face-to-face, in real life, empathetic conversations can break through the fear and distrust we seem to have for each other. To preserve public libraries, one of the few places left in the world we can use for free.

For women now there are challenges to our right to vote, our bodily and physical autonomy, our worth defined, and privilege gained only through the men we attach ourselves to and the children we bear. Those of us over 65 remember what that time was like. Some of the women behind us do not because they have only ever lived in the time where the rights we secured were theirs to take for granted. Perhaps that is why women over the age of 65 were the only group to move towards Kamala and away from Trump during the last election. We find ourselves here again, hauntingly familiar, woman, female on the list of words to be erased. Women’s History Month wiped off the calendar. We are being disappeared from government websites, from the Departments that created policies that sprang from the imaginations of women and support ourselves, children, elders, disabled, that created Social Security. Women who wrote books that are now banned. I find inspiration in women from the past, who were in the situation we again find ourselves as women. Throughout all social movements, many women wrote publicly about the issues that concerned them, regardless of personal cost.

This women’s history month, I have been reading a book about how groups of radical women in Ireland and England became publishers of private printing presses, writers of dissident texts and political campaigners against censorship and challenges to intellectual freedom. They generated literary prizes, held social events, published magazines, formed reading committees, writing clubs and sold books at book fairs all to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for women writers. The control not only of information but also the means to distribute it and of access and attention determines who has power right now.

The announcement this week that the writer Roxanne Gay and her wife Debbie Millman (Design Matters Podcast) have bought the magazine, Rumpus, one of the longest running independent literary and culture magazines reflected a small glimmer of the history I have been reading. The magazine’s core mission is publishing both emerging and established, risk-taking authors that the popular press and publishing world might not notice or care about. This week, people touted The Atlantic’s owner, Laurene Powell Jobs, as the Katherine Graham of her generation for refusing to yield to this administration’s strongman tactics against dissenting institutions. She supported the publishing of texts about war plans from an unsecured group chat a reporter at the Atlantic was included in after the administration accused the reporter and magazine of lying. Another glimmer.

This week as I look at the photos of bookstores, read history and explore my dreams and daytime fantasies, I find my porch to stand on. I have signed up to volunteer at my local library’s used bookstore. I don’t need to start my own. There are two used bookstores in my city. They are undeveloped sites of possibility because right now there are no events, no formal gatherings (though plenty of informal ones). My used bookstores do not keep a list of what I buy and present me with an overwhelming pile of selections the next time I walk in. I am free to wander, to experience the surprise and joy of discovery. To be drawn to that book that unconsciously I know I need to find. No more striving, reaching towards, just standing on the porch and seeing what comes. In this small imminently doable action for a 71 almost 72-year-old, I support people in my community; I use my time and creativity to support my public library, problem solve with neighbors, support a circular economy and protect the environment. So much activism in one small act.

On Saturday, I met the manager of the bookstore. We sit down at a table to go over basics, another volunteer joins, soon a customer and I am lost in an expansive far-reaching conversation once again in the clouds high above our little city. I am surrounded by shelves of books all around me about every imaginable subject. Book clubs, discussion groups, dissident ideas, intellectual freedom — all are open topics. I am told I may be creative here. While I can’t afford to open a bookstore or buy a magazine, this is how I see myself surviving, preserving and contributing at this moment in history.

I will also make sure I tell and pass on important stories. I’ve told my daughter all my secrets from when I was a teenager and young woman in the time before. We both tell honest stories to her daughter about what life can be like for some women. I heard her tell her one today. I wish my mother and grandmothers had told me theirs. Now as I try to know them, because I now know how profoundly their presence and absence influenced my life, I can only imagine what their lives were like. We need to keep telling our stories, passing down the ones we know. Trying to understand the ones we don’t. That is how I will honor this last day of Women’s History Month. The last time it will automatically appear on my calendar.

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