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 Donna Morrissey, author of The Deception of Livvy Higgs (Viking Canada), recalls the childhood wonder of the travelling library and the enduring comfort of the book stacks.
By Donna Morrissey
I grew up in an isolated Newfoundland outport: no roads till I was about 8, no electricity till I was about 11. Our school was a one-room school with 35 kids (not bad considering the outport contained only 12 houses). I loved books — what books there were. Typically, comics and schoolbooks. I never saw a children's book. Didn't know they existed. Dick and Jane and Sally, the primer books, were the first young reader books I ever saw. And yet I learned how to read early and read voraciously.
I was in Grade Four or Five when a 'travelling library' came to town. They gave our teacher a box of books. I remember we weren't allowed to open the box till recess time. Then Miss Tucker took out the books and held them up to the room, asking who wanted this one.
I will never forget those beautiful glossy covers. I put my hand up for a crazy blue cover with a crazy-looking cat wearing a white and red-striped hat. And I was transported to a world of awe and wonder. My next choice was about green sludge falling from the sky. I stayed in the schoolhouse every day at recess, most times just two or three of us choosing to read those books over playing games outside.
And when I'd read them all three and four times, maybe more, gloriously, the travelling library returned and took the box, leaving us with another, different, box of books. I thought my life was full. That this could possibly keep happening coloured for me a world of bounty and richness.
When I was 12 or 13, I was bussed to a high school some three to four miles away. It was Grade Seven. No library, just school books. And again, someone, somewhere, sent our high school boxes and boxes of books. I immediately became one of the first librarians. And the riches rolled themselves out before me: The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Little Women. I read them everywhere — in bed, on the school bus, walking home; I hid them behind my textbooks in class, behind the covers of the Bible during church services, in the bathtub, in the woods. I can still smell those thick, yellowy pages, see the intrigue on their on their hard covers.
And then came a box of books that rocked my world. Trinity. The Grapes of Wrath. Mila 18. Gone With The Wind. My world broke through the boundaries of the little outport and I never felt settled again. I was as restless as the characters peopling those extraordinary books. I became 'useless' as my father called me, forever reading, hating housework, outside play or anything that took my nose from one of those books. And always, in that school library, I kept looking at the titles on those bookshelves (believe me, this was not a sophisticated library — a back room where we also ate our lunches). I was always selecting another title I'd yet to read, worrying that soon all the books would be read, that there would be no more, and the thought always left me with feelings of unease.
And then there were more: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. I fell into fantasy like a gambler into sin and I never heard another word spoken to me by a teacher or professor in a classroom.
Years later, I was 23 and living in Edmonton, and rented a house smack dead next door to a library. I knew no one and was alone (my husband worked the rigs). And I took up residence in the library. I found all the books by the authors that I had loved in that little school library (Steinbeck, Uris) and read everything they'd ever written. I'd take home books by the armfuls during the evenings and weekends. I never felt alone, I never missed anything, and with the hundreds of titles on that library shelf, and knowing there were libraries all over the place — well, for the first time in life, I felt secure.
Donna Morrissey is the award-winning author of Kit’s Law, Downhill Chance, What They Wanted, and Sylvanus Now, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She recently wrote a children’s book, Cross Katie Kross, illustrated by her daughter, Bridget. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches, a small fishing outport in Newfoundland and now lives in Halifax.
For more information on The Deception of Livvy Higgs, see the Viking Canada website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at the publisher, Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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