My native state, Kansas, has so little money that the governor cancelled the state arts program, tried to eliminate all funding for family planning, slashed budgets for judicial support staff–putting court dates far into the future for many defendants–and even eliminated funding for a place that cares for severely brain-damaged adults, including many returning veterans.  However, good news! He has enough money to monitor every mention of his name on the World Wide Web, including a tweet by a suburban KC teen who told all 65 of her followers that “he sucked.” Today, Emma Sullivan has 11,000 Twitter followers, thanks to Governor Brownback: the gov went to her high school principal after finding the tweet and demanded that Ms. Sullivan provide a written apology.  The principal agreed.

I’ve been interested to read some of the worldwide coverage. Of course this story makes perfect pundit-fodder, and many pundits have sternly chastised Ms Sullivan for her rudeness in saying Mr. Brownback “sucks.” Perhaps she should have said, in 140 characters, “The governor’s style closely approximates that of Attila the Hun, or perhaps the angel of death, and our state will bear the scars of his destructive scythe for decades to come.”

(As of today, after the story went viral, the governor and principal have decided they “over-reacted.” Ms Sullivan need not apologize. The gov said free speech was our most “treasured” freedom. I don’t know if this is the place to point out that the First Amendment, which guarantees our freedom of speech, includes that pesky little separation of church and state clause. Which Mr Brownback apparently thinks is a fly speck on the Constitution, since I’ve been told that a number of his staffers begin meetings by saying, “I’m a Christian and we start meetings with Christian prayer.” The Kansas legislature also has a chaplain who hands out photocopies of Bible texts and commentary to state agencies to start the week with a bang. No money for the arts, but plenty for photocopying religious tracts.)

Closer to my current home, Chicago, our state attorney general went to court to enforce the state’s parental notification law for pregnant teens seeking abortions. In going to court to support the law, Ms Madigan, whom I’ve always liked and supported, went a little overboard: she said the state constitution’s guarantee of citizens’ rights to privacy doesn’t include our right to abortion.  Meaning that women’s bodies are not our own, that the state has an overriding interest in regulating us.  I think the logical next step is a law requiring all abortion providers to operate in open-air tents so that everyone can watch. Like Kansas, Illinois has major and serious budget issues, but, like every other state in the union, not to mention the U.S. Congress, the only legislation our state gets really enthusiastic about is how to add ever more burdens to women of all ages who want contraception or abortion services. (As of November 30, the state supreme court has agreed to hear Ms Madigan’s arguments and has further decided to let some conservative Catholic groups testify with her.)

I forgot another arena where we have a lot of enthusiastic legislation: making it illegal for citizens to video cops. When police sprayed pepper spray into protestors’ eyes on the UC-Davis campus, they claimed it was in response to student violence. A video of the scene showed no crowd violence, just a row of seated people getting sprayed as if they were aphids on the tomatoes. In a November 28 column, Leonard Pitts recounts the story of Emily Good, who was arrested for videotaping a police traffic stop in front of her house. He goes on to detail a number of jurisdictions that are passing laws against photographing the police in the performance of their duties.

We are a society under constant surveillance by our government. We’re a society gripped by fear, and there’s nothing like surveillance to add to paranoia. But we’re also a society with huge economic problems. I’d love to see our legislators grappling with those problems for a change.

To all friends near and far, new and old. I am grateful for another year with such good friends, grateful for my cousin Barb and her intrepid spirit, serving in the Peace Corps far from home, to my friends who keep small bookstores going, living on the most minute of salaries to keep the living words of books alive, to my husband, for caring for me with all my ups and downs, to all men and women in uniform who are on our streets or on streets in remote countries, to my family, my granddaughter, the more people I name, the more I know I’m overlooking, so forgive me for not mentioning you: you are in my heart even if not on my forgetful lips.

What I would like less of in the year to come: war, mean-spiritedness, religious zealotry, political zealotry, disrespect, homelessness, worrying about making it to the next paycheck or the next shelter to find a meal, lies about how much radiation came out of Fukushima, lies about people who can’t find work, lies about pollution, poverty, God, women, men, children, dogs, cows…

What I would like more of: peace, peacefulness, play, playfulness, homes, jobs, a time not to work, a time not to be online, time with friends, more time with friends, did I say peace?

Publishers Weekly invited me to contribute an essay to their weekly “Why I Write” column. My piece ran on November 18; for those of you who, like me, don’t have a subscription to PW, here’s the essay:

Years ago, when I was in my twenties, I heard an interview with the composer Aaron Copland.  The interviewer asked why it had been over a decade since Copland’s last completed composition.  I thought the question was insensitive but Copland’s answer frightened me: “Songs stopped coming to me,” he said.

I wasn’t a published writer at the time, but I was a lifelong writer of stories and poems.  These were a private exploration of an interior landscape.  My earliest memories include the stories that came to me when I was a small child.  The thought that these might stop (“as if someone turned off a faucet,” Copland also said) seems as terrifying to me today as it did all those years back.

I write because stories come to me.  I love language, I love playing with words and rewriting and reworking, trying to polish, trying to explore new narrative strategies, but I write stories, not words.  Many times the stories I tell in my head aren’t things I ever actually put onto a page.  Instead, I’m rehearsing dramas that help me understand myself, why I act the way I do, whether it’s even possible for me to do things differently. Where some people turn to abstract philosophy or religion to answer such questions, for me it’s narrative, it’s fiction, that helps sort out moral or personal issues.

At night, I often tell myself a bedtime story—not a good activity for a chronic insomniac, by the way: the emotions become too intense for rest.  When I was a child and an adolescent, the bedtime stories were versions of my wishes.  They usually depicted safe and magical places. I was never a hero in my adventures; I was someone escaping into safety.

As a young adult, I imagined myself as a published writer.  For many years, the story I told myself was of becoming a writer. Over a period of eight years, that imagined scenario slowly made me strong enough to try to write for publication. After V I Warshawski came into my life, my private narratives changed again.  I don’t lie in bed thinking about V I; I’m imagining other kinds of drama, but these often form the subtext of the V I narratives.

I’m always running three or four storylines: the private ones, and the ones I’m trying to turn into novels.  I need both kinds going side by side to keep me writing.

Storylines are suggested by many things—people I meet, books I’m reading, news stories I’m following—but the stories themselves come from a place whose location I don’t really know.  I imagine it as an aquifer, some inky underground reservoir that feeds writers and painters and musicians and anyone else doing creative work.  It’s a lake so deep that no one who drinks from it, not even Shakespeare, not Mozart or Archimedes, ever got to the bottom.

There have been times when, in Copland’s phrase, the faucet’s been turned off; my entry to the aquifer has been shut down.  No stories arrive and I panic, wondering if this is it, the last story I’ll ever get, as Copland found himself with the last song.   If that ever happens permanently, I don’t know what I’ll do.

So far, each time, the spigot has miraculously been turned on again; the stories come back, I start writing once more. Each time it happens, though, I return to work with an awareness that I’ve been given a gift that can vanish like a lake in a drought.

(On Wednesday, November 2, I joined Robert Wislow and Stuart Dybek in presenting testimony to the Chicago City Council in defense of the library system.  Since people who weren’t there have wanted to see my remarks I’m posting them here.)

My name is Sara Paretsky and I am here today to speak against proposed library closings.  I’m a writer who is best known for a series of novels featuring V I Warshawski, a private eye who solves crimes on the mean streets of our beloved city.  My novels are translated into thirty languages; in a modest way I contribute to Chicago’s cash flow because readers come from as far away as Australia and Japan to explore V I Warshawski’s Chicago.

I am also well known for the meticulous quality of my research.  In addition to getting expert advice from Chicago cops or business figures, I rely on three libraries: the University of Chicago, which is walking distance from my home; the Newberry, a premiere research library, and the Chicago Public Library.

This past September, I chaired a panel at an international conference of readers and writers in St. Louis.  To prepare, I read works by all the members of my panel.  Books by one of them, the distinguished cultural historian Dr. Frankie Bailey, were not available at the University of Chicago, or Northwestern, or the Newberry.  Nor could I find them at Amazon or my local bookstore.  The only place they were available was at the Chicago Public Library.  Similarly, several years ago when I was invited to write an introduction to a special edition of The Maltese Falcon, the CPL was the one library in Chicago that had all resources I needed.

When I first came to Chicago in 1966, the library here was bigger but not much better than the one in my home town in eastern Kansas.  In the last twenty-five years, though our library has become one of the nation’s pre-eminent institutions, both for the size and quality of its collections, and for its knowledgeable, helpful reference and general staff.

It takes a quarter century to build such a collection and such a staff, but it can be destroyed overnight.

The proposed budget cuts to the library would do just that.

In these very difficult economic times, people are turning to their libraries in far greater numbers than they did during our country’s prosperity.  Library usage is up by twenty-five percent across the board from what it was in 2007.  People are going there to use books and DVD’s they can no longer afford to buy for themselves.  They are using library computers and library reference staff to help in their job searches. Children who need a safe place to go to after school are using the library—and getting an extra chance to learn in the bargain. People are flocking there for book discussions and for story hour, as they expose their toddlers to the wonderful world of the written word.

It would be not just cruel but short-sighted to close branches and cut people off from these resources and activities.  It is cruel and unreasonable to imagine that people who turn to their branch libraries, particularly the frail and the indigent, can just hop on a train and use the central library—especially now that we are making steep cuts to our transit system.  Furthermore, the central library is not equipped to take up the slack in reading programs and computer and staff resources that the local branches provide.

Perhaps we could balance the budget overnight by closing our branches, but it would be at a great long-term cost.  A city is more than its bottom line.  It consists of the lives and dreams and jobs of its residents.  If we want a city that is vibrant twenty-five years from, we must have an educated workforce.

Every week we see another story in the papers about how far American children lag behind the rest of the developed world in reading and math skills.  And just this past week, the Chicago Tribune reported that Illinois students lag behind much of the rest of the nation.  To close our libraries at a time like this would further punish our children at a time when they most need help.

The Preamble to our nation’s Constitution lists six goals for the document that made us a nation.  Two of these are “to secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” and “to promote the general welfare.”

A people can only be free if it is literate; we will lose the blessings of liberty if we turn our backs on the resources we most need to create a thinking informed electorate.

We Chicagoans have entrusted our welfare to the hands of the mayor and the City Council.  I implore you not to abuse this trust, but to restore the library’s funding.

Thank You.

Many thanks to everyone who took part in the “Name the Flashlight Slogan” contest. The ideas were all unusual and wonderful, and it was hard to choose a winner. We finally settled on: “V I Warshawski, matchless for 30 years” and Matea Varvodic has won an early copy of Breakdown. 

And no harbor like a library ,where those who love books but can’t afford their own complete collections, or those who need a computer, or kids who need a safe place to read after school, or moms with toddlers who want their babies to learn to read, can all come together and share in a great community resource.

The economic collapse has sent millions more Americans to their public libraries than used them in the past–25.4 million in 2009 compared to 20.3 million in 2006.  These are people who went to the library at least 20 times a year,not the ones who go in once or twice.  An additional 51 million Americans used their public libraries by remote computer–so one in four of all our citizens, including newborns and those in nursing homes, are using their public libraries.

The Chicago public library has already made deep budget cuts in the last three years: there’s been a hiring and promotion freeze, so that many branches are understaffed.  Hours have been cut.  Perhaps most worrying of all, acquisitions have been frozen.  No new books.  For the indefinite future.  If the economy recovers, you can build up new staff relatively quickly, but you can’t go back in time to acquire books that will have gone out of print.

I use three libraries in Chicago–the University of Chicago library, which is a ten-minute walk from my front door, the Newberry, which is a research and scholarly library, and the Chicago Public Library. When I chaired a panel this past September at the Bouchercon, the CPL was the only one of those three libraries that had books by some of the authors I was introducing.  When I wrote an introduction to a special edition of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the CPL was the only library that had all the biographies I needed to consult.  The Vivian Harsh collection is second to none in its coverage of African-American history and notable African-Americans in the arts and I have used it far more often than the university library’s special collections.

Please, Chicagoans: the future of our library is in the balance.  The next budget hearing is November 2. Please call your alderman and urge him or her to save the library budget.  It could be your kid who needs that place for a research project, it could be the book you want the library isn’t buying, it could be your job search you can’t conduct because the library is shut, or isn’t upgrading its computers.

Libraries in every jurisdiction in this country and in the UK are under similar threat.  If you live outside Chicago, the American Library Association can help you find out your library’s status, and how to take action to protect it.

Is not a spent force.  On October 11 I attended the dedication of the University of Chicago’s new library, the Mansueto library.  At a time when many libraries, public and private, are cutting acquisitions to the bone, or moving books to remote storage facilities, the U of C has made a bold and strong commitment to the printed word. The building itself, designed by Helmut Jahn who perhaps can be forgiven in time for the United Terminal at O’Hare, looks like a space module, but the students adore it; kids wait in line for seats in the reading room.

The Mansueto library at sunset

The library has underground storage space for 3.5 million books, whose call numbers we hope have been entered correctly, since all the retrieval will be done by robots.  The library is space age meets writing.

I learned a few fun factoids at the opening, which I’ll pass along.  The famous library in Alexandria, whose collection burned down, stole some 200 scrolls from Athens–the collected works of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus disappeared forever when the library burned down.  The Sorbonne library is the oldest university library in the west, and the first institution to work with Arabic numerals instead of Roman.

Google books has digitized original works in a random way, so that you get parts of different editions of books by Eliot or Dickens or Austen–if you want to get the complete copy of a particular edition, do try to use the printed book. Which, I also learned, is called a codex.

Yesterday I finished making my final edits, responding to the publisher’s final edits, on a new book (Breakdown, which will be in stores on January 3).  This should be a time of euphoria, but endings are for me melancholy times.  I typically go around in a kind of brain-dead fog for several weeks.  This time I’m trying to short-circuit the fog by going out of town–my husband needs me to attend to some personal matters in his home town that he doesn’t feel well enough to handle, and then I’ll take a few days for hiking or whale watching or whatever is happening this time of year in the Pacific northwest.  And come back incredibly buoyant. even exuberant, for my fall travel/lecture schedule.

This coming January, V I Warshawski will turn thirty.  It makes me gulp–a whole generation of readers and writers has matured since the brash Chicago PI first came on the scene in 1982.

I have plenty of time to brood about age and aging, but very little time to figure out how to celebrate this milestone.

There will be a new book in the series appearing on January 3, but there isn’t time to add something onto it.   I need ideas from you on how to celebrate.  I will be creating souvenir pocket flashlights that everyone who pre-orders Breakdown will receive, but I want something festive to mark the occasion!

And I also need a slogan for the flashlights.  30 years of lighting the way is way too corny, not to mention tendentious and sententious.  The person who comes up with the best slogan does get a free book.

Thanks to everyone around the world who’s stuck with this stubborn, quirky, smart-mouthed lady.

Breakdown is the title of the new V I novel, which will be published early next year. In this excerpt, an old law school friend of V I’s has called on the detective for help, and V I is trying to find her. V I describes Leydon like this:

Leydon Ashford was the first person I ever encountered who had two last names.  We’d both grown up along the shores of Lake Michigan.  The difference was, her family owned an eighteen-room mansion backing onto three hundred yards of private beach, whereas the Warshawskis’ five-room bungalow was separated from the lake by a century of cyanide-laced landfill.

When I first met Leydon, in our Civil Procedures study group, I’d been prepared to despise her, along with her family, and the Austin-Healy Sprite her father gave her when she graduated from Wellesley.  Leydon looked like a fairy-tale princess—she had hair like spun gold, and she seemed to float when she walked, like a feathery ballerina. I wasn’t a ballerina, I was a street fighter, product of the mills and ethnic wars of Chicago’s steel city.

12

Murder in the Cathedral

“Leydon?  Leydon, if you’re here, come out!  It’s me, Vic.”

I was standing in the doorway to the old library at the Divinity School.  The narrow mullioned windows were so clogged with ivy that even on a light summer evening, the room was too dark for me to see anything.  I ran my hand along the walls, fumbling for a light-switch, but finally had to dig a small flashlight from my briefcase.

I shone it around the room, looking for the switches, or for some sign of Leydon.  I kept calling her name, but when I finally managed to turn on the lights I didn’t see any sign of her.

The old library had vanished, as well.  The angels still soared overhead, which meant I was in the right room, but the library tables had disappeared along with the old biblical studies journals.  I’d thought—hoped—I might find Leydon hiding in the stacks, but those were gone.  The walls had been replastered and painted a bright white.  It was like one of those movies where the villains drug the heroine and try to pretend that the strange house in the country where she wakes up is really her home.

In a corner of my mind, one I didn’t like to visit, I could see Leydon as I’d found her twenty-five years ago: under her kitchen table, hugging herself, as she rocked back on her heels, weeping soundlessly.  She’d been up for three days and I’d been looking for her—we were presenting a case together in Moot Court and I had tried to condense the hundreds of pages she’d spewed out into a document acceptable to the judges.  I’d finally let myself into her apartment and found her.

I tried to think where she might have gone today.  If she’d been calm enough to think, perhaps she would have gone to the coffee shop in the basement—our study sessions often started there.  She might feel safe in the basement.

I stopped at the third-floor landing to call Leydon’s name.  I ducked down to look underneath the stairs, but didn’t check the seminar rooms.   At the second-floor, I shouted her name again.  I was startled when a woman opened a door at the end of the hall and stuck her head out.

“You looking for someone?”

It couldn’t be Leydon, my flickering first thought, unless she’d been transformed from a slender red-gold sylph to a heavy-set grey-haired earth goddess.

I apologized for disturbing her.  “I thought the building was empty.  I used to be a student here and I’m trying to hook up with an old friend.”

The woman looked me up and down, deciding whether to trust me.  “Is your friend on the nervous side?”

“The far side of nervous.  Have you seen her? Slim, fair, a bit shorter than me.  I’m V I Warshawski, by the way, if she asked for me by name.”

“She was sitting on the stairs, sobbing.  I thought maybe someone had died, but when I asked her it turned out she was crying over the reading room, the old library—she was horribly upset because we’d turned it into a conference room. You’re not her case worker, are you?”

“Just an old friend,” I repeated, depressed.  “I’m going to see if she went to the coffee shop.”

“It closes at four in the summer.  You might check the chapels, Bond, or Rockefeller.  She wanted to know where else on campus angels soared and I suggested those two places to her.” She hesitated. “I did wonder if I should call campus security.  I can still do it if you think—well, do you think she might be a danger to herself?”

I scrunched up my mouth—I didn’t know what Leydon might do. “I haven’t seen her for awhile, so I don’t know how shaky she is these days.  If I don’t find her at either of the chapels, I’ll call the cops myself.”

I moved as fast as I could on my sore feet to Rockefeller Chapel, whose carillon tower dominates the neighborhood.  The tower is almost twenty stories high and I wasn’t sure they locked the stairwell.

I pulled open one of the heavy doors and entered into silence and twilight. I stood at the entrance to the nave, involuntarily hugging my arms across my chest: the stones seemed so cold, so ominous that I felt chilled, despite the heat outside.

The building is the size of a cathedral.  The mullioned windows didn’t let in much of the late-day sun, and the lamps hanging from the vaulted ceiling were so remote they might as well not have been switched on.

I strained my ears for any sound, a sob, a laugh, but heard nothing.  “Leydon!  Leydon?”

My voice bounced around the walls and gave me back a mocking echo.  I started up the central aisle toward the chancel, my shoes setting up what sounded like a drumroll.  Too big, too loud.  If Leydon were in here she’d surely hear me, but if she  were feeling abandoned, depressed, she might not be able to respond. I pulled the pencil flash from my bag, shining it under the pews as I searched.

I found her lying face-down near the chancel steps.  Her red-gold hair glinted under my flashlight.  I knelt next to her, smoothing it back from her forehead.

“Leydon, I’m sorry I was late.  Was that too much for you to bear? Did you decide a nip or two of Jim Beam would carry you while you waited for me?”

I kept my voice soft, a loving croon despite the words.  I’d learned long ago how cruel it was to add my criticism to the demons already attacking her.