by Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate
Part 2 in a series of blog posts adapted from a talk I gave at the Cameron Village Library in April of 2016.
Today’s library has become, quite literally, the only great equalizer in our society. It is a place where economic status, race, gender and citizenship are irrelevant, a place where everyone is welcome and can get equal access to knowledge that can help them better their lives and the lives of their children.
In a world where people bunker down and socialize and shop only with people exactly like themselves, in many communities, libraries have also become the only place where we run into people different from us, the only place where we have a chance to see and hear other voices.
In many ways, what libraries give communities today is the living embodiment of what you will find on the shelves of these libraries: respect for all voices, an acknowledgement that we all have something to say, and a reminder that we are better as a species when we listen to and learn from one another.
In the future, libraries will be only be called on to play this vital role even more. They are the connectors of our towns and cities and communities. They are the third place that Ray Oldenburg wrote about in 1989 as so vital to our survival as a society: a neutral place in between work and home that is:
- Free or inexpensive
- Highly accessible
- Welcoming and comfortable
- A place where both old and new friends can be found
How then can we protect them? It’s simple. We must be like the NRA: no compromise. Ever.
No compromise in the level of funding our libraries receive.
No compromise when it comes to proposals to shut down library access in neighborhoods.
No compromise when reactionary nitwits who are afraid of knowledge turn on libraries and try to destroy them because they fear them.
Fight back if this happens. Be like the people of Kansas, who paid attention when their state lawmakers tried to shut down over 100 libraries. Within a week, the people of Kansas had risen up as one and forced their state lawmakers to drop their attack on public libraries. We must be prepared to do the same, if necessary.
Remember: the library is the vanguard of civilization, a temple of knowledge that connects us to the past and the future — but most of all, to each other.
For the last twenty years, I have lived on the very frontline of traditional and social media and been a firsthand witness to a volatile information landscape. At the same time, I have been living the life of a writer and experiencing firsthand the challenges that publishers, bookstores, and libraries face in this dramatically changing environment.
All mystery writers are secret criminal masterminds whose imaginations are constantly on the prowl for two things: 1) how to break the rules and get away with it, and 2) how to catch and punish those who do break the rules. Perhaps you may wonder which of these impulses drives us the most. Are mystery writers, at heart, megalomaniacs who enjoy breaking the polite rules of society through our characters? Or are we simply obedient members of society, superheroes with pens, who are always on the lookout for the bad guys and keen to bring them to justice?
When I first started out as a writer, I was a Southern transplant living in the teeming, foreign world of New York City. I was fascinated by how vibrant the city was and even more intrigued by its brash, relentlessly honest citizens. It was a whole new world, so far as I was concerned, and I had to write about it. The result was 
Fast forward a decade and I had started to long for the South, even though I was living and writing in a great apartment overlooking gardens on the Upper Westside. I missed the South and its people, not to mention its more gentle ways. I was willing to settle for a veneer of politeness, if not the real thing. I needed grass and trees and ocean waters without hypodermic needles and toilet paper floating in it. I needed a lot more personal space. My writing shifted with me. A hardboiled Southern belle named Casey Jones popped up in one of my Hubbert & Lil books and, before I knew it, I was writing a whole new series around her, one set in the South that featured a tough female P.I. whose sense of humor was strong enough to get her through any situation. 
But everyone ages, at least if we are lucky. I began to realize that my fabled good nature had its limits. That some things in life were just plain sad and that it was okay to feel that sadness. I began to notice how some people I loved had never quite found their footing in life and had fallen by the wayside. I became fascinated by the idea of redemption, karma and second chances. Enter yet another series: 
In fact, as I reflect back on my three series, I realize that every single one of my major protagonists was built on a real person. T.S. Hubbert and Auntie Lil were both real-life New Yorkers whom I met early on in my life in the Big Apple and they embodied the best of the New York spirit to me. T.S. was a cultured, Broadway-loving, upper Eastsider who was a meticulous, lovely man as well as my first boss on Wall Street and my mentor. He became T.S. Hubbert in my Hubbert & Lil series and while I invented 95% of his character, he once said to me, “Katy — your ability to guess at the secret corners of other people’s lives, and get it right, is downright scary.” (I try to use this super power for good….) Meanwhile, his real-life aunt Lil was a little old lady with such grit and directness that I often stared open-mouthed at her in astonishment. She, of course, became my fictional Auntie Lil Hubbert and I learned so much from her, both in real life and in writing about her across four books. I treasure the time I last saw her, sadly at her nephew’s funeral. She came tottering over to me and gripped my arm with a steellike vise and announced that she knew I had put her into a book. “That’s all fine and good,” she said in her trademark gravelly voice. “But just don’t push it.” !!! I still want to be her when I grow up. They are both gone now, and I love that they live on in my fictional characters.
One of the duties of the Piedmont Laureate is to conduct workshops for other writers in the area. I’ll be doing just that in the months ahead as there are few things I love better than working with other writers and talking about writing. But with the world of writing in flux, and career trajectories no longer predictable, much less known, it’s time to look at exactly what these workshops should entail.
Piedmont Laureate 