A WORD FROM THE AUTHORJ. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great MidwestAs a skinny, un-athlet

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

As a skinny, un-athletic, book-loving kid growing up in a Minnesota hockey town in the 1980s, the local and school libraries were more than my sanctuary—the books they held were like personal messages in bottles from a larger world. I knew I’d never fit in with the boys who spent their days on backyard ice rinks, and I found not only a community, but a focus for my intensely curious young mind in the libraries of my childhood..

Like a lot of kids, I loved dinosaurs, and in second grade, the librarians in my elementary school put me to work on a map describing the “Dinosaurs of North America.” This wasn’t a school assignment—it was completely voluntary—but when they suggested it to me, I knew exactly what I wanted to be doing after school. When I had exhausted the library books at my school, they sent away for others. One of them, The Dinosaurs of North America, by Helen Roney Sattler, became my favorite.

The librarians urged me to write her a fan letter—and to my unspeakable joy, she replied. I remember her envelope had a “Help End Hunger” stamp, and her typed response emphasized the importance of readers like myself. It was both magical and demystifying to receive a personal letter from an author; until then, I had thought of writers as deities, and this letter was proof that they were actually people—kind people who wrote letters back to little kids in Minnesota. It was the first time that I thought, I could do this too, someday. And it was all thanks to the urging of an astute and caring librarian.

As I got older, I expanded into U.S. Presidents and Greek mythology, and by then, the local school libraries couldn’t sustain me; my grandparents had to drive me up to the Twin Cities, where I could find the intensely detailed books on these subjects in the Minneapolis and University of Minnesota libraries. It seemed that, as my intellectual curiosity grew, there would surely be a library somewhere with the answers I needed, and indeed, that has always been the case.

I also attended my first reading at a library—not a story time for children, but an adult reading for adults (though I was eleven at the time)—and it blew me away. It was a writer reading from his book about voyageurs, the early French explorers of northern Minnesota. I’m not sure if the topic even mattered to me; I was transfixed, and if my heart hadn’t already desired being an author someday, that evening confirmed it.

Today, with my first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, coming out at the end of July, my publisher, Pamela Dorman Books/Viking has scheduled a book tour, but the first place I scheduled on my own after the official tour concludes is an appearance at my hometown library in Minnesota. My childhood would have been vacant and lost without it, and without the responsive, engaged librarians of my childhood. Even though it’s not the same building I knew as child, it’s going to be incredibly moving to read there as an author, among the books and the people that started me on this path, so long ago.