{"id":1667,"date":"2012-01-06T00:31:10","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T04:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=1667"},"modified":"2012-01-06T00:31:10","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T04:31:10","slug":"notes-towards-ambassador-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2012\/01\/06\/notes-towards-ambassador-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes Towards an Ambassador of Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly after writing a post about the possibility of somebody making the transition from blogger to paid spokesperson for awesome books<\/a>, I remembered how I’d been at Jon Scieszka’s inaugural appearance<\/a> as the Library of Congress’s first Ambassador for Children’s Literature<\/a>, with the mission “to evangelize the need for reading” not just among children, but parents and teachers as well. While Scieszka did already have an online platform where he was working to encourage boys to read more—Guys Read<\/i><\/a>—his ambassadorship also involved a lot of public appearances, including book fairs. That, I thought, was something akin to the job description I was fumbling at in that original post—somebody who would always have plenty of great recommendations for books you could<\/i> read, but who would also be ready to hear you out on the great books you have<\/i> read, and maybe help spread the word about those books, too.<\/p>\n

“Adult” literature does have someone sort of like that in Nancy Pearl<\/a>, the Seattle librarian who shaped the whole “the whole city reads the same book together” paradigm and went on to become a regular commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition<\/i>. And in that context, I think it’s worth noting that none of her 2011 holiday recommendations<\/a> were the “obvious” books; neither, for that matter, had she taken the easy path with her picks for the previous summer<\/a>. I really like that she’s guiding people to books that they might otherwise not have heard about, or almost certainly would have heard less<\/i> about—when the highest-profile author on someone’s recommendations list is Stewart O’Nan, you know that they’ve been doing their fieldwork.<\/p>\n

I think there’s definitely room for more than one such “ambassador of literature,” though, or maybe for it to be a rotating position. At the Library of Congress, for example, Scieszka was replaced after two years by Katherine Paterson, and now, in early 2012, Walter Dean Myers is stepping into the part<\/a>. Some early reactions to his appointment have focused on the ways that he might be expected to reach a different audience than previous ambassadors, or whether it’s an endorsement of the alleged trend in “dark” YA fiction<\/a>, but it seems to me that the ambassador’s fundamental mission hasn’t changed all that much. As Myers himself puts it, “I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life.” And again: “We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”<\/p>\n

The way the Library of Congress has taken the lead in creating the ambassador’s position, and then sustaining it over the last four years, is inspiring, and I’d love to see some institution put the same kind of effort into a similar position encouraging grown-ups to keep reading, and to keep reading in a very exploratory, adventurous way, as Nancy Pearl is doing in her NPR lists. In my previous post on the subject, I suggested that the Association of American Publishers might want to underwrite a “lobbyist” or “literary evangelist,” which made sense at the time because I was thinking specifically about ways in which the publishing industry could invest in the sustenance and growth of an audience of active readers. But we don’t have to limit ourselves to an industry trade organization.<\/p>\n

An argument could be made, for example, that a position of this nature complements the National Book Foundation<\/a> mission “to recognize the best of American literature [while] raising the cultural appreciation of great writing” through the National Book Awards. You could also make a case that the National Endowment for the Arts, in addition to all the grant dispensation it does “to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation,” could authorize the literary director to get out there<\/i> and be, as current director (and true mensch) Ira Silverberg)<\/a> describes himself, “a passionate advocate of literary writers.” There might also be good reasons why neither organization is quite the right fit for what I have in mind—or, maybe, in both cases, what I’m describing already takes place to a certain extent and I need to educate myself about it. That’s a good idea, actually; I’m going to make a note to invite some folks out for some serious conversations in the near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shortly after writing a post about the possibility of somebody making the transition from blogger to paid spokesperson for awesome books, I remembered how I’d been at Jon Scieszka’s inaugural appearance as the Library of Congress’s first Ambassador for Children’s Literature, with the mission “to evangelize the need for reading” not just among children, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[252,253,255,256,254],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1672,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions\/1672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}