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Good books, old friends

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By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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"That's quite an accomplishment!" I responded. "Are you planning a special edition to mark the occasion?"

"No," he said. "We'll just do our usual coverage of neighborhood issues and events."

In other words, although we are proud to have survived so long as a shoestring budget nonprofit organization, we will just take it quietly in our stride and forge ahead with the next year without fuss or fanfare. The medium, as this editor has told me repeatedly in the last 16 years I have been a magazine volunteer, will continue to be the message. That is the important thing.

Still, I thought, 25 years merits some pause for reflection over how we have grown and changed in that period. My love for books and desire to write about them have certainly evolved a great deal since the magazine's inception.

The magazine's first year on this earth, 1976, was my 11th. My family had just moved into its distribution area the year before, and I was finishing Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. First introduced to me by Miss Garnsey, my wonderful third grade teacher at Fiedler Elementary School, these were the books which made me a reader.

Miss Garnsey brought the Ingalls family and their hardships vividly to life in dramatic daily read-a-loud sessions which kept our entire class at rapt attention. She also encouraged us to read the books ourselves.

I was always happy to receive books for birthdays and Christmases before I knew about Wilder's books, but hers were the first titles I specifically requested. I still have every one of them, yellowed pages, cracked spines and all.

I strongly identified with Laura, who, like me, was a second child with dark hair and a much prettier, better-behaved older sister. Staying with her through all the triumphs and travails of her pioneer life, she was the first character I cared about as much as my family.

Next came friendships with L. M. Montgomery's lovable Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. I loved Anne's imagination and optimism. I envied her luck at meeting so many kindred spirits. I empathized even more with Emily's dark artistic temperament.

When I was about 14, I took a long leave of absence from children's books to discover the great classics of the western world. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, recommended by a kindred spirit of my own, was my first introduction to plot lines brimming with sticky moral complications. After that, there was no looking back.

I was so taken with the turbulent romance between Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre — two fiercely independent spirits whose passions were great enough to ignite a lightning storm when finally united — that I persuaded my parents to allow me to subscribe to a mail-order book club called the International Collector's Library Literary Master's Series.

I made the obligatory purchase of four books from the club. Then, I used its monthly advertisements as a guide to filling out my personal library at a much lower cost from JellyBean, the used book and music store still in business near the intersection of Court and Dort.

(The College and Cultural Center neighborhood, within walking distance of both a used bookstore and the county's largest public library, is truly an ideal place for a reader to grow up.)

Somewhere in my files are lists of everything I read after I became a serious bookworm. If you read my column regularly, I am sure you will not be surprised to learn that the ones I liked best were character driven.

Plucky, opinionated heroines, like Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, continue to this day to be among my favorite literary acquaintances. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins gave me a soft spot for odd and eccentric characters as well.

I was perversely drawn to characters who are either done in by their own fatal flaws (Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray) or by their environments (almost all of Edith Wharton's heroines) or by a mixture of both (Henry James' protagonists). So, naturally, I spent four years in college as an English major minutely dissecting them.

Never really knowing for sure what I wanted to do with my life, other than read, I joined the magazine's writing staff in 1985, my sophomore year of college, to see if I liked being a journalist. I spent the next four years honing my writing skills by covering planning commission and other local governmental meetings.

I stopped writing news stories in 1989 when I started working for Genesee District Library and pursuing my master's degree in library studies at the University of Michigan. (My experiences as a reporter had forced me to admit that I was better suited to answering questions than asking them.)

In 1994, having completed my graduate work, and not wanting to let all those years of learning how to write go completely to waste, I had the idea for providing the magazine with some feature content by doing a column about my favorite books and characters. Almost seven years later, I am still at it.

I have stayed involved with the magazine for several reasons, chief among them being that I share the editor's view that the magazine is instrumental in helping Flint residents preserve their neighborhoods' strong sense of place.

I enjoy travel almost as much as reading, yet I fear that eventually I will only be able to travel to places which are uniquely different from one another through reading.

Only a couple weeks ago, when my mom and I drove to Tennessee to see my sister, I realized how depressingly homogeneous our national landscape is becoming. Every major highway exit is crowded with signs for the same gas stations, the same restaurants, the same motel chains. What is the point in going anywhere, I wonder, if you are always arriving at the same place?

I appreciate being able to live in a neighborhood of varied textures and distinctive landmarks, as revealed by the magazine's photographs.

I prefer being a member of a population that is as diverse and interesting as that of any book I have read. As reflected in the magazine's coverage of neighborhood groups, I am proud to have neighbors whose deep spirit of community has remained intact in the face of a steady decline in the quality of city services and schools.

I consider it nothing short of awesome that someday I can present my niece and nephew with a stack of East Village Magazines, in lieu of a book, and say, "Here, read these! They will tell you all you need to know about the place where your mom grew up and your aunt lives."

I think 25 years deserves at least cake and ice cream.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She is the children's librarian at the Genesee District Library's McFarlen Branch.

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