Above: Mississippi children’s book author John Stark sings with a class from Dawson Elementary at the One Jackson Many Readers Summer Reading Press Conference held at the Eudora Welty Library on May 9th.

One Jackson Many Readers is a true collaborative model with the goal of preventing academic learning loss. Educational research shows that children can lose up to three months of academic learning over the summer months. Summer reading is the remedy and the gateway to more reading. As one educator put it, readers are simply successful people.

Pages of Promise is a book drive promoted by The United Way in partnership with various schools, organizations, and businesses. The books are collected and distributed to libraries and sometimes directly to students. This year we surpassed the goal of collecting 4,000 books. So far The United Way has collected 5,400 books in addition to monetary donations that have yet been used to purchase summer reading books.

A book donated to the Jackson-Hinds Public Library system encourages families to use our libraries–the coolest place in town during the summer. A book given to a student may be the only book he or she has ever owned.

Throughout the summer, The United Way of the Capitol Area with its many partners is providing numerous opportunities for students and families to celebrate and receive support for summer reading. Book club meetings at neighborhood libraries abound.

A Parent Orientation for summer reading will be held on Saturday, May 12 at The Children’s Museum. Meanwhile, churches and community groups like The Boys and Girls Club are being trained by MPB to help support summer reading in their neighborhood programs.

Several Summer Reading Parties are also scheduled: A scavenger hunt at The Jackson Zoo; a special appearance at The Ag Museum from The Electric Company, sponsored by MPB; and two more events later in the summer at New Horizon Church and The Jackson Medical Mall. See full schedule here.

The Press Conference held on May 9th was another energy booster to an already enthusiastic group of summer reading supporters. This year First Lady Kathy Johnson has taken on the role of Summer Reading Ambassador and the kids from Dawson Elementary couldn’t have been more eager or patient while the adults took pictures!

Ronnie Agnew, executive director of MPB, illustrated the importance of reading with a story from his own family. His parents worked as share croppers with a sixth-grade education and made it their goal that all eight children would learn to read and finish school. Ronnie reflected on his childhood responsibility of reading the mail for his parents. Now all eight children have surpassed their parents dreams and hold graduate degrees! Ronnie urged Jacksonians to read and show children the pleasure of reading as his parents did.

Similarly, Mayor Harvey Johnson encouraged us to reach out of our comfort zone and connect with young people who might not have readers in their families.

Above: Media coverage after the One Jackson Many Readers press conference. I like all the local networks interviewing local leaders about READING!!! Left: Carol Burger, CEO/President of The United Way of the Capitol Area; Middle: Mayor Harvey Johnson; Right: Executive Director of MPB Ronnie Agnew.

Sue Berry of Jackson Friends of the Library presented a $5,000 donation check to support summer reading activities. Berry also commented on Eudora Welty’s love of books, how Eudora loved the smell and feel of books. Many participants echoed this love for a real book, noting that it did not carry the distractions of an electronic device.

Carol Burger, president and CEO of The

Carol Burger, president and CEO of The United Way of the Capitol Area, acknowledged the Director of Education Initiatives for The United Way Shawna Davie (above, left).  For three years, Shawna has led the Pages of Promise book drive and summer events that support families in reading.  She is a core member of the OJMR steering committee.

Other core members leading OJMR are Rhoda Byler Yoder (left, center), JPS Curriculum Director for Language Arts; Ruth Davis, JHLS Youth Services Director; Rebecca Starling, JPS Partners in Education Director; Mandy Scott, UW Marketing Director, and Peggy Hampton, JPS Public Relations Director.  Together OJMR leaders are establishing a foundation for students, parents, individuals, groups, organizations and businesses to get behind summer reading.

One Jackson Many Readers is now being discussed and recognized at national conferences. Though a summer reading partnership between the Jackson-Hinds Library System and JPS has existed since 1999, the past three years have taken summer reading to a new level.

All of the supporters of One Jackson Many Readers have one thing in common: a huge heart for Jackson and its young people. Mayor Johnson couldn’t resist saying it, and I can’t either: It takes a village to raise a child. It sure does feel like a lot of people are coming out to support our young people with this program. If you’re not already involved, The United Way of the Capitol Area has many ways to contribute. Click here to learn more.

Lemuria was even recognized in a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly for its community involvement with the Pages of Promise book drive. Read more here. Lemuria is honored to be a part of One Jackson Many Readers and the Pages of Promise Book Drive. You can still donate one book or a thousand and receive the 20% discount!

Recently, while doing section work, I chanced across Parker J. Palmer’s gem of a book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. The title alone resonated with me. Being in my mid-twenties and still searching for a way to be self-sufficient as well as sustained both spiritually and temperamentally in my work, finding Palmer’s book was something like the still, small voice of God.

Discovering that he also had written a book considered a classic in the field of education—The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life—was even further evidence that Palmer’s was a voice I would be spending a good deal of time with in the coming months. Slated to teach my first class in the fall, I’ve been in need of some encouragement, insight, and awareness of the joys and pitfalls of teaching vocationally. After finishing Let Your Life Speak, I dove into The Courage to Teach, and have found Palmer’s wisdom enormously calming and enlightening. If there is only word one I could use to describe Palmer’s work, it is just that: wise.

Palmer is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker), and he has dedicated his life to teaching, education, and writing about the necessity of our inner lives existing in harmony with our outward vocations. He also leads retreats for the Center of Courage and Renewal. Let Your Life Speak is Palmer’s personal account of his descent into depression and the awakening and insight gleaned from his journey out of that darkness. Ultimately, this experience had enormous implications on his vision of vocation. Let Your Life Speak is most definitely not a how-to book, which is one of the reasons why it is so appealing to me. Authors of how-to books too often promote their work as definitive for the human race and its problems, and nothing about such claims gets at the complexity and unpredictability of being alive. Palmer states:

“But what is true for me is not necessarily true for others. I am not writing a prescription—I am simply telling my story. If it illumines your story, or the story of someone you care about, I will be grateful. If it helps you or someone you care about turn suffering into guidance for vocation, I will be more grateful still” (58).

Such an approach proves that Palmer is conscious of the power of plain storytelling, and also aware of his limits.

The idea of our human limits is one thing that Palmer stresses in his approach to vocation. All of us possess gifts, and all of us have limits. When we ignore our limits and pursue work unsuited to our authentic selves, we cause “violence…to others and ourselves by working in ways that violate our souls” (The Courage to Teach, 30). For a long time, Palmer worked in such a way.

He says, “I was in my early thirties when I began, literally, to wake up to questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one’s own” (2). It was during this period that Palmer came across the Quaker saying, “Let your life speak.”

Palmer admits that his initial thoughts on letting his life speak were misguided:

“I found those words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: ‘Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.’…So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self—as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out.” (2-3).

Much of Palmer’s focus is on our inner selves—a place he feels we are consistently failing to do much necessary work, be it with our families or in the workplace. Inner work allows us to acknowledge our limits as well as our gifts, to become more secure and aware of our authentic selves and our imperfections:

“When we are insecure about our own identities, we create settings that deprive other people of their identities as a way of buttressing our own…[H]ow often I phone a business or professional office and hear, ‘Dr. Jones’s office—this is Nancy speaking.’ The boss has a title and a last name but the person (usually a woman) who answers the phone has neither, because the boss has decreed that it will be that way” (86).

Such passages from Palmer not only encourage us to discover and live out our authentic selves, but also induce us toward compassion—a characteristic we are desperate for in a 21st century wracked with greed, despair, and a need for purpose and meaning.

Let Your Life Speak has encouraged me to continue pursuing and working toward those avenues of work I feel are suited to my authentic self: writing, reading, thinking, and soon teaching. Being in my mid-twenties, the pressure has increased to be making more money, to do work considered more “professional” or “grown up.” Being the son of a lawyer, there have been times when I’ve felt pushed to fall in line and join the “family business.” I am certain that to separate my work from my heart would lead to what Palmer deems a violence against myself and ultimately others.

“There are times when we must work for money rather than meaning, and we may never have the luxury of quitting a job because it does not make us glad. But that does not release us from continually checking the violence we do to others and ourselves by working in ways that violate our souls…What brings more security in the long run: holding this job or honoring my soul?” (The Courage to Teach, 30).

For anyone who cares about the impact and meaning of their work, I hope you will give Palmer’s words a chance to seep into your heart, and perhaps enhance your ability and desire to live from there outward, instead of the other way around. Though Palmer is adamant in his claim not to have a monopoly on some universal truth, I am certain his words speak to our basic human needs. We would do well to listen and apply.  -Ellis

Feeling like too many other responsibilities are pulling you away from reading? I just dusted some of the dirty furniture in my house and arranged them there. That will have to do for today.

What inspired this collection of books? A new temptation has just been moved into the fiction room: Memoir–a section long-loved by fiction room booksellers!

This photo features these brand new memoirs, essays and letters: Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Cheryl took a 1100-mile hike after life got to be too much!); Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen (loving this!); Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen (We have signed copies!); Living, Thinking, Looking by Siri Hustevedt (look for these reflections on philosophy, neuroscience, psychology & literature in June); This Is How by Augusten Burroughs (He claims to rid us of the need for any other self-help book!); The Other Walk by Sven Birkerts (I would read anything Birkerts writes.); Against Wind & Tide (letters by Anne Morrow Lindbergh–always an inspiration for women who feel compelled to do everything in life plus dusting).

A few years ago, I had a wonderful and very well meaning Harper sales rep named Kate. She was a Yankee from Wisconsin, or somewhere up there, and we had quite different personalities. Lemuria was the bottom of the pile of bookstores she called on, being her southern most store. This Yankee gal came to deep Dixie to sell books.

Kate loves books and is one of the very best book reps I’ve ever had call on me. For you independent bookstore fans, having a great publisher rep who cares about books, her company and her bookstores makes such a difference. This work, when good, adds to the diversity and quality of the bookstore, and especially to the chosen volumes for sale on the bookstore shelves which reflect the store’s soul.

Kate grew fond of the Blues and Lemuria and she even put up with my orneriness. We also respected each others work and desires to get the right books to the right readers. We grew fond of each other and our work together was good for our readers, our bookstore and her publisher.

As our real book related friendship grew from working together, we began to genuinely share books with each other.

My blog’s purpose is to share with you a special writer, a Kate favorite she shared with me, Jane Hirshfield. To continue celebrating poetry month even after it’s officially passed, I share my favorite touches of Jane’s grace from Come, Thief, her new book of poems.

I thought long and hard about these first lines from “Decision”:

There is a moment before a shape

hardens, a color sets.

Before the fixative or heat of kiln.

The letter might still be taken

from the mailbox. (5)

How interesting it is to write a long sincere letter and then never mail the words. Words written and never shared. Later, when reading what emptiness the writer can feel. What changes in life, if mailed, would have occurred?

From “Vinegar and Oil” (6):

From “Big-Leaf Maple Standing over Its Own Reflection”:

A boat’s hull does not travel last year’s waves.

And later from the same poem:

Lightning, like luck, lands somewhere (8)

From “Tolstoy and the Spider” (33):

From “Sheep”:

and your heart is startled

as if by the shadow

of someone once loved.

Neither comforted by this

nor made lonely.

Only remembering

that a self in exile is still a self

as a bell unstruck for years

is still a bell. (45)

This wonderful business of real book selling is about sharing. In closing, I’m happy to share with you what my real book friend shared with me, my favorite poem by Jane Hirshfield.

From “Fifteen Pebbles”:

Transparent as glass,

the face of the child telling her story.

But how else learn the real,

if not by inventing what might lie outside it. (62)

Epilogue for my real bookselling companions–Also from “Fifteen Pebbles”:

Like moonlight seen in a well,

The one who sees it

blocks it. (60)