You Can't Learn to Ride a Bike Without a Bicycle

 Hey, everybody.

I can't say for sure that the blog is back--check with me in a few weeks, we'll all see if I've written again. There was a pandemic, and my daughter came home for an 18-month-long spring break, and a couple of big writing projects took up a lot of time but will never been seen by the world (it's not just a long story, it's a couple of long stories--let's just say that the stories weren't only mine, so I couldn't completely control the outcomes), and then I was researching the Holocaust, which wasn't exactly smooth sailing during the pandemic--and also I'm thinking a bit differently about what I want to write about here. I really want to be aware of whose story I'm telling, and make sure it's truly mine. And I don't want to be up on my soapbox too often. I'm glad I care about injustice but I can also write about other things.

However.

You saw that coming, didn't you?

Last night I had the sublime pleasure of my first in-person writerly event since NCTE in November of 2019. I spoke in conversation with Katherine Paterson, right here in Bristol, as part of King University's annual series on Faith and Culture. It was a lovely evening, not least because I absolutely love being with Katherine Paterson. She's won every literary award there is, many more than once, and the Library of Congress has named her a "Living Legend." But also she approaches writing the same way I do--I'd say she's one of the very few writers whose entire process seems the same as mine. She's funny, warm, genuine, curious. She's turn 89 on Halloween, and honestly, I want to grow up to be like her.

Martin Dotterweich, the King professor who runs the series, who's also a longtime friend of mine, moderated the discussion, and kindly gave me a chance to talk a little about Appalachian Literacy Initiative, the nonprofit I co-founded to give low-income Appalachian students new books of their choice. I'm ridiculously proud of ALI, especially of the growth we've achieved in the middle of the freaking pandemic. This year we've gotten grants from Ballad Health Care and Walmart along with a strong flow of private donations, and it means we've been able to expand into 3rd grade AND add more schools. We're serving 3600 students this school year. Bristol Faith in Action has very generously loaned us a large room I now call ALI World Headquarters. It's stuffed full of books and every week we mailed out a couple hundred pounds of them. It's so good.

Yesterday, when I was talking off the cuff, I came up with the perfect analogy for why book access is so crucial. You can't learn to ride a bike without a bicycle.

Think about it. Remember, if you can, the days when you were first learning to ride a bike. It was impossible. Wobbly. Scary. You probably fell. You wanted your parent or whoever to hold onto the back, to steady you while you pedaled. And then with enough practice you learned until you were probably quite competent. And you never forgot. Years later, if you got on a bike, you'd still know how to ride it. 

But if you never had a bike--no matter how athletic you were, no matter how much you would have loved to ride--you couldn't have learned. To learn you needed to practice, and to practice you needed a bike.

So you've got kids with no books--lots of kids. At school they've got books they're learning from. But they don't have books at home, they can't get to libraries, their school library doesn't allow checkouts (it happens, and shouldn't) or doesn't have a librarian to match kids with the books that suit them (happens all the time, and shouldn't). Kids go home for holidays and summer break and while they're gone, they're not reading, because they have nothing to read, whereas the kids whose houses are filled with books--they're like the kids who have shiny bicycles of their very own, that they can ride around the block all the time. Those kids are going to be much more proficient at bike riding reading.

So we're giving kids bicycles books. And it works. They learn to ride read.