Pride lasts all year
“…a book was my portal to escape.”
Today I’m announcing that I’m opening my own bookstore!
I’m hard-pressed to go anywhere without a book with me. As a kid, my mother would ask why I’d carry a book with me to the grocery store, and I told her it was because I could read while we stood in line. This was well before self-check outs and in The Bahamas; the lines were long, the people were fussy, and a book was a portal to escape.
One day I read a book that featured a gay character and it blew my mind.
My mind spiraled in so many directions. This was the first and only (positive) representation I had seen in books, in a deeply religiously conservative country. I felt like if I met someone else who read that same book, and they liked it, perhaps that meant they’d like the part of me that I always knew was different. If they hated the book, I figured I’d give them a wide berth.
Just after I graduated college, I met the author of this little book, which, through life’s synchronicities, set in motion a chain of events which would lead to our connection many years later.
In a car ride on the way to my first major book conference, with the author of my favorite book, I learn that the gay character with whom I so strongly connected nearly did not exist. She felt blocked while writing him. She was approaching deadline. She realized she had been writing him wrong — he wasn’t a straight character, he was gay — and when that lightbulb went off she contacted her editor, got down to research, and produced a story that ended up in the hands of this little boy hundreds of miles away in another country.
Stories have power to change peoples’ lives. I hope that by offering my experience as a librarian and a bookseller, and soon through my own bookstore, I can help get these stories into the hands of more people.
I’m proud to share this news with you and I hope you’ll join me on my journey.
I’m also proud that around here Pride lasts all year long!
🌈
