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The Teaching Librarian 27.2 23 At the age of ten, I fell in love with L.M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy, identifying strongly with the protagonist's love of nature and writing, her strict upbringing, and with her best friend, Ilse, who had blond hair and tomboyish ways, like me. Rural P.E.I. during the early 1900s was not like suburban Brampton during the '80s, but certain aspects of my childhood world aligned with Emily's fictional one and these stories offered me a lens through which I could explore facets of my own life and identity. When authors create lively characters surrounded by austere relatives, blooming gardens, irritating neighbours and captivating friendships, young readers willingly surrender themselves again and again to fictional worlds that become as real and familiar as daily life. Author Jesmyn Ward writes in her book, Well-Read Black Girl, "[Writers]...build vividly rendered worlds for readers to fall in love with and fall into...they create characters that are so real, distinct, and familiar to the young reader that the reader has space to imagine him or herself in that world during the reading and after they are done." This is the experience that launches children in the primary grades towards a passionate, lifelong addiction to books. Every day in my job at an Ontario library, I converse with patrons whose lives are not only enriched by books, but also made more coherent as they explore their own feelings and experiences through the lens of story. Many young readers readily access a rich selection of books that help them to validate and scrutinize their own experiences and identities. Others, though, have to look harder. Classics like Anne of Green Gables, Charlotte's Web and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe feature Caucasian children in a society that is entirely white. Race, for me, was never an issue, because all the characters I read about as a child shared my skin colour. It never occurred to me that some of my classmates explored beginning readers like Mr. Mugs and picture books like Alice in Wonderland without ever encountering characters who resembled them. Holly Dickson Silent Message in the Stacks Jesmyn Ward shares the struggle of many of my peers, who failed to find themselves in the pages of books they read as young students. She writes, "I was never privy to the parting gift of immersion that some books afford readers after turning the final page. I could not exist in their worlds because no one who even looked like me spoke or walked or sang in those worlds - not even peripherally." (Well-Read Black Girl, 5) The early reading experiences of black and Indian peers who grew up with me in Brampton differed from my own. These children went through hundreds of books before finally (if ever) encountering a protagonist who looked like them. Decades later, there is more diversity in the titles filling our library shelves. Still, teachers and librarians need to intentionally ensure that all readers find themselves in literature. I recently wandered through the stacks in my workplace, eyeballing displays, and noting a stunning lack of diversity. The demographics of the city I live in now differs from the cultural mosaic found in Toronto and the GTA, but this doesn't matter; all libraries are for everyone. It's important for those who work in every library, even those in remote or rural communities, to intentionally select display materials and additions to the collection, which reflect our belief in the value of hearing different voices and highlighting work by representatives of all community members. Allowing one group to dominate sends the tacit message that books, reading, learning, and research are primarily the domain of some, while others, absent in posters, displays and the collection are of less importance. Helping students discover mentors in the form of authors they connect with at a very personal level is the first step towards inspiring them to find their own voices and write their own stories. Let's spark a whole new generation of young readers and writers who are confident that their words have value and their experiences are worth writing about; there is a place in the literary canon for their thoughts and their characters. The library is for them! z Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash