blueprints

About River of Words | 95
writers on both coasts, in the new work coming from Europe and Latin
America and Asia. This stuff (except Cather, of course, who is great) was the
stuff on the Local Authors shelf in the used bookstores I browsed, about
which I was supremely uninterested. Now, looking at it, I thought that if it
added Loren Eiseley and a few scientists and naturalists who had written
about the flora and fauna of the Plains, it was just what I had in mind. Eiseley
was born in Lincoln in 1906. It was his study of the fossil collection at a
university museum that set him on the path that led to The Immense Journey,
that classic book about the wonder of life and its evolution. The books of a
place, I was thinking, were a legacy, an inheritance. Young people, if they
were going to become stewards of the places where they live, and have the
inspiration of the writers who have made sense of life in those places,
needed to know those books. Not only those books, of course. We live in a
large world, increasingly connected, and the nature of that connection gets
revealed in the formal inventions in writings that come from everywhere.
The talented young with their radar needed to know that, too. And they
needed to be given the literature of their place.
John Cole has devised a number of programs for the Center: Letters
About Literature, a contest that invites children to write short essays about
books that matter to them and to win grants for their school or community
libraries; a new Young Readers Center for Washington, DC, children and
for the thousands of visiting children who troop through the library; a collaboration
with an organization called Read It Loud! (founded by Wally
Amos, of Famous Amos Cookies, a passionate and inventive literacy advocate),
which encourages parents to read aloud to their children; in collaboration
with the White House, the National Book Festival, which has a
strong children’s literature component. When I spoke to John about our still
nascent River of Words project, he was interested. It would make sense, he
thought, if the program brought children to Washington and the Library for
the Watershed conference, for the Center for the Book to host the children
and their parents and teachers. Dan Boorstin had been a fan and a scholar
of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, one of the first regional
classics of our literature, and John thought Dr. Boorstin would like the idea.
In the event, Prosser Gifford, the director of special programs, and James
Billington, the eminent Russian historian and current librarian, also welcomed
us.
Just before this conversation, I had been at the Dodge Poetry Festival in
New Jersey. It was created and produced by James Haba, a poet and profes-