As part of our IFOA: Ontario series, Open Book is thrilled to be hosting interviews with several IFOA: Ontario partners in addition to our author interviews. Partners include booksellers, libraries, literary organizations and more.
Today we talk with Susan Start, Deputy Chief Librarian of the Woodstock Public Library.
Open Book:
To what aspect of IFOA Ontario are you most looking forward?
Susan Start:
The satisfaction of sitting in the audience surrounded by dozens of Woodstock readers and library patrons, all so engaged and eager to hear from the authors who are visiting us.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite spot or area in Ontario.
SS:
The old Lake Erie shoreline in Elgin County, so much of it unchanged from the days of Colonel Talbot in Upper Canada.
OB:
What were some of your early experiences with public readings?
SS:
As a small town/rural teenager, I ate up public readings at U of T when I was an undergrad there in the 1970s. Highlights of those times are Margaret Atwood at Massey Hall in The Edible Woman era and a small group with the irascible Irving Layton in the common room at Trinity College.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite book set in Ontario.
SS:
I really enjoyed Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House. I recognized every road and farmhouse, her descriptions of London, Ontario in the 1960s; and I just really liked her characters. The same with Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather in the Ottawa Valley and John Bemrose’s The Island Walkers in Paris.
OB:
What is the best thing about your city?
SS:
Its wonderful heritage core and beautiful Carnegie library … but I’m a bit biased about the library.
OB:
What are you reading right now?
SS:
The short stories of Flannery O’Connor.
Susan Start has been on staff at the Woodstock Public Library for 30 years (with a few off when her daughters were born and she went to library school in the late ‘80s). Along with David, she married a century farm in Oxford County with a 140-year-old farm house, so a lot of her personal time is spent in fields, antique shops and Amish sawmills. A few years ago they bought an even older house (the first lighthouse keeper’s house in Port Burwell, and formerly a tavern) to use for a cottage and are awash in restoration heaven again. She can also be found in her perennial gardens, at her weekly book club through the winter and on the odd meditation retreat.
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