The Woman Behind The Curtain

As a writing librarian I will lose my voice on the Web a week from tomorrow. For 30 months now I have maintained the cheerful fiction that Icarus is the voice of the whole library, and that our library's patrons surely might be interested in whatever interests me at a given moment: new mapping sites, tag clouds, OCLC bloggers, search statistics, catalog changes, and all. I have poured all of my librarianly self into those 800 or so mini-compositions mostly with the subliminal theme 'Librarians love their work', and didn't partition anything off into another blog that would be mine to take with me when I leave.

Even now, any ideas I may have I need to save for my last seven or eight posts on the library's blog... Then what? I'm not sure I even know how to speak for myself. Or who might care to listen, if I no longer have a place of work.

Timetable

July 6th will be my last day at Santa Fe Public Library, where I have worked for the past 22 years. Right away I will go pay a visit to my teacher, Baker Roshi, at his practice place in Germany. And then move to the Olympic Peninsula.

Closer to the ocean.

I'm not done with my profession. By early August I'll be looking for library work, ideally in a public library. So though I am landing for starts in Port Angeles, exactly where I will settle and build my new life cannot yet be known.

But I'll be there, not here.

High Tide, First Beach, Quileute Reservation
April 14, 2007, La Push, Washington