Merci beaucoup to librarians everywhere!

We're calling on one of our very own 2k8 classmates, Kristin O'Donnell Tubb, debut author of the middle grade historical AUTUMN WINIFRED OLIVER DOES THINGS DIFFERENT, to spill about her cool librarian story. Think wrinkles and clocks, dear blogger friends. Okay, taaaake it away, Kristin.


When I was in sixth grade at City Park Elementary in Athens, TN, our librarian, Sheila Rollins, held a school-wide reading competition. The prize? The winner got to interview Madeleine L’Engle by telephone! As soon as I heard that, I started flipping those pages, and sure enough, I won! I remember sitting in a tiny conference room that only the teachers were allowed to go into (hee-hee!), and a box the size of a Kleenex container sat in the middle of the table. It was a speaker phone, the first I’d ever seen, and I just knew that this was going to be a memorable day. But honestly, I forget most of what happened. The one thing I do remember, however, helped define my life. Toward the end of the interview, I told Ms. L’Engle that I wanted to be a writer. “Good for you!” she answered. “Keep reading and you can do it.” So thank you to Madeleine L’Engle (forever!) for the great advice, and thank you to Shelia Rollins, SuperLibrarian, who always knew what reading could achieve.

And here's another example of how librarians can affect a life. Thanks for sharing, Shelly Kraal, Librarian, Universal Academy, Flower Mound/Coppell.

I am the librarian at a K-12 charter school. Recently, there was a scheduling snafu and I had a class of 6th graders added to my schedule every day. This has created a magical moment for my kinders and 6th graders. On Mondays and Fridays they are book buddies. Only this past month I discovered just how cathartic that time is for one of my 6th graders. He lost his little brother (who would have been a kindergartener) over the summer. James' mother approached me and told me that the book buddy time is actually helping James to get over the loss of the little brother to whom he read on a daily basis. It just melted my heart to discover how my makeshift solution to having two classes at one time in the library met the needs of one young man who was really hurting inside.

Merci beaucoup to librarians everywhere!