An Abandoned Walmart No More!

Just an abandoned Walmart, right?  Not anymore.  Because of some civic forethought, it is now a bright and airy library in McAllen Texas.
 
City officials decided that they weren’t going to let a perfectly good abandoned Walmart location go to waste. Rather than let nearly 2.5 football fields of space rot and decay, they decided to transform it into something useful and amazing.

It has now become the largest single-floor public library in the United States of America at 124,500 square feet.

Visit this beautiful library and you’ll get to partake of a full computer lab, 16 public meeting spaces, 14 study rooms, and two genealogy research computer stations.

Cicero once said, “If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need.” Hence, it can be said that the town of McAllen, Texas has everything it needs.

According to the library directors, new user registration increased by an impressive 23 percent.
What was once a warehouse filled with numerous items humanity never really needed in the first place, now it is filled with a purpose far greater.

Non-Fiction and Ethics

Perhaps you would like to write a non-fiction book?  You are in plentiful company.  Each year nearly 300,000 books are published in the US.  About four out of five are non-fiction! 

While there are lots of non-fiction books out there to keep yours company, there are some potential pitfalls associated with the genre.  Let’s discuss that.

We all know non-fiction is just that—something that must be truthful, not concocted from our imaginations as with fiction.  Not only, however, does it have to be the truth, we as authors have to do due diligence to make it that way.  Simply put, we must hold ourselves to the highest standard to ensure the content of our work is true and accurate to the best of our ability.  Yes, it’s exactly what lawyers are expected to do, and is, in fact, a legal term.

So how do we achieve this high-minded standard and not get sued for all our efforts, which is the end game of this post.  Here are a few guideposts:

1.       If you’re not sure of your source/s be sure to investigate their credentials, making certain they are qualified and are who they say they are.

2.      Obtain confirmation from unrelated sources to support what your primary sources provided.  (More research on your part but necessary and well worth the effort.)

3.      Whenever possible, try to get confirmation from secondary sources what you learned from your primary sources.

4.      When depending on your memory or personal experiences, secure independent corroboration.  *Crucial in narrative non-fiction.

5.      If something does not seem correct, even though the source is trustworthy, satisfy whatever doubts you have about the veracity of the material. Trust your instincts.

6.      Try to avoid relying upon only one eyewitness account or what only one person remembers.  Two or more can make all the difference!

Let me end by saying I usually don’t give lists of how to do things.  These six tips, though, can save a non-fiction writer many headaches with a lawsuit on the side!  Again, I cannot stress enough the due diligence factor in tackling non-fiction, particularly with topics as medicine, history or biography.  Due diligence is first among equals for a strong, successful and well-executed work of non-fiction!

‘Frog and Toad’ Stories Ahead of their Times

Arnold Lobel, author and illustrator of the Frog and Toad series, was born in 1933 and raised in Schenectady, New York. Having begun his career doing work for advertising agencies, he started illustrating for Harper & Row in 1961, and the following year published his book “A Zoo for Mr. Muster,” about a man who becomes a zookeeper so that he can spend every day with his animal friends.

 

During his career, he worked on dozens of children’s books, both as a writer and as an illustrator, and also, in some instances, in collaboration with his wife, Anita Kempler, whom he met while studying art and theatre as an undergraduate, at Pratt Institute.

 

In his Frog and Toad books, published between 1970 and 1979, the pair visit each other at home and explore their natural surroundings together, occasionally seeing other animals, like a snail who is the mailman, or birds who enjoy cookies that Frog and Toad throw out when they can’t stop eating them. Many of these stories still make me laugh, like the one in which Toad wakes up and makes a list of things to do. “Wake up,” he writes, then immediately crosses it out. “I have done that,” he says.

 

Courtesy the Arnold Lobel Estate



As a child, Lobel's daughter, Adrianne didn’t think there was anything particularly special about her father reading her the stories he’d written.
 
It was just ‘Papa’s written another story—he’s going to read it to me now.'
 
She recalled a time when she and her younger brother Adam were fighting in the back of a car on a road trip. “My father had been very quiet for a long time, and I guess he couldn’t stand listening to us anymore, and he said, ‘Do you want to hear a story?’ So we settled down, and he recited from beginning to end in verse a story he had just written in his head.”

When Adrienne was asked why she thought the books have such staying power, she said:
 
 “It was the only thing he wrote that involved a relationship.  I’ve watched children grow up, and that whole drama that’s kind of the precursor to the hell of romance later in life—who is best friends with whom and who likes who when, and this person doesn’t like me now—it’s very painful, and I think that children really like to hear that this is not abnormal, that Frog and Toad go through these dramas every day.”

 

Adrianne suspects that there’s another dimension to Frog and Toad's sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other.  It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne said
.
 Lobel never publicly discussed a connection between the series and his sexuality, but he did comment on the ways in which personal material made its way into his stories. In a 1977 interview with the children’s-book journal The Lion and the Unicorn, he said:

You know, if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children.

Lobel, who died in 1987, was an early victim of the AIDS crisis. “He was only fifty-four,” Adrianne said. “Think of all the stories we missed.”