THE INTERNATIONAL PULPWOOD QUEENS AND TIMBER GUY BOOK CLUB
Janet Oakley’s Favorite Independent Bookstore - Village Books One of the secrets of being a good writer, is being a reader. My love for writing certainly came from my many trips to the Wilkinsburg Public Library in Pittsburgh, PA where I grew up. Once a week, my mom would take my brothers and I to this branch library of the original Carnegie Library to return and take out books. Here is where I learned about Narnia and little houses on a prairie; jumped through chalk paintings on a sidewalk with Marry Poppins. Books let my imagination soar. When we went camping every summer for two weeks in either Pennsylvania, New York, or New England, we always looked for bookstores in the little towns nearby. There only independent bookstores back then. Buying a book to read while we tent-camped and hiked, was a singular joy on a hot summer day. Ivanhoe, long a favorite story of mine, came from a shelf in an indie bookstore in Ithica, New York; Shogun and Lord of the Rings came from the shelves in bookstores in Honolulu and Hilo, Hawaii. I have always been a reader, but in second grade, I started to write my own stories. When my husband and I moved from Hawaii to Bellingham, WA in 1977, the second thing on our minds after adjusting to the autumn cold, was to find a bookstore. Bellingham was a small city then and going through the economic slump like the rest of the nation. 18
APRIL 2022
