The Evergreen™ Award, a division of the Ontario Library Association's (OLA) Forest of Reading® program, is presented to outstanding books in Canadian fiction and non-fiction. Adult library patrons choose the winners from nominees selected by a committee of librarians.
It would be hard to find a writer who hasn't logged a good number of hours in the local library. Whether remembered as childhood havens or appreciated as the quiet workspace in a busy life, libraries still resonate in the hearts and imaginations of writers. Today 2013 Evergreen™ Award nominee Marina Endicott, author of The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada), reminisces about the comfort and meaning of her favourite childhood library.
By Marina Endicott
When I was twelve, my true home was the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Library in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. I spent every joyful minute I could there. I dreamed about it at night; I knew its nooks and shelves better than I knew my schoolroom or my classmates. I plotted how to run away to the library, to get locked in there one Saturday afternoon (graham crackers and oranges for supplies) and stay hidden away, reading all alone, till the library opened again on Tuesday. The library was a survival bunker: enough unread books to last for years. Although there was a large children’s section, no books were forbidden to me, and I discovered some surprising and illuminating facts in the stacks, as well as many of the writers who remain my favourites. Clean and peaceful, the library was a sanctuary from both the wild girls who chased me after school, and the chaos and quarrelling I expected to find when I got to my house.
At the entrance to the library stood a huge misshapen stone, lichen-rusted, with Norse runes carved on it in grooves that fit my twelve-year-old fingers. The stone was found at the edge of Yarmouth harbour in 1812, and was supposed to have been left as a marker when a settlement was deserted. The runic stone has since been disputed and discussed and remains a mystery, but in those days the translation underneath said (I’m paraphrasing) Where were you? We waited for ages. I felt that all the books were saying that to me; and every time I went in the door, I was home.
Research for historical novels has meant that I spend a lot of time in libraries these days. Last summer I went to Yarmouth on a research trip for a new book set on a clipper ship, and spent a couple of luxurious days in the library and the country museum looking through old documents and other people’s letters. As we leap on into unknown technological territory, I’m less terrified because I know there is a librarian-army of shining souls whose single aim is to safeguard knowledge, to keep books, letters, clippings and the unconsidered detritus of one age and preserve it for the next, no matter by what digital media or gamma-ray time capsule. As handy as ebooks and email are, there is still nothing so welcoming to me as a large library full of physical books, ready to be opened and read — waiting for ages if necessary, till I come home again.
Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault, a finalist for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean. Her last book, The Little Shadows, was long-listed for the Giller and short-listed for the 2011 Governor General’s award. Her next, Hughtopia, will be out next fall. Marina will be the 2014 writer-in-residence at the Toronto Reference library while working on a new novel, The Difference.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at the publisher, Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
