From the Farmhouse Table: October 2023
Radical Librarianship and the Pages of Solidarity
Hedgebrook. Writers arrive. Writers depart. Changing seasons of creatives, energies and projects inhabit the six little cottage “industries.” Looms of imagination spin yarns; threads of storyline and song become in the forest’s dapped light. Alongside the shifting, altering, rolling schedule of writing residencies, some things feel like an evergreen constant. Evie Wilson-Lingbloom is one of them.
Rommi and Evie researching in 2014.
I first met Evie in late summer 2014, when attending my first Hedgebrook residency. I seriously felt that my book-project had gained its own PA! I made lists of books I needed; they arrived like morning. A little while into my first stay, I learnt that Evie, like me, had suffered a recent and major bereavement. The kindredness and soul work of making order from the chaos that is loss was, and still is, a unifying force.
Every dream needs its allies. Evie understands that the dream is also the Dream – the Bigger Political Picture – and the collective act of dreaming towards the manifestation of betterment and social change. In each successive movement towards racial justice, as Black people, we are so often asking our white allies to step up; to work with us towards action, rather than sit on the side-lines lamenting the sorrow at what is so. Mine and Evie’s conversations, during my second visit to Hedgebrook this summer, concerned Senator John Lewis, The Freedom Riders and Evie’s ongoing, long-term passion project, writing about how her own Southern roots entangle with those of her beloved sister-friend Carolyn Head; a history of how race, family and the Transatlantic period intersect. Evie is a woman not only of words, but Action.
Rommi and Evie during a recent visit.
Hedgebrook’s renowned and hallmark life-source is Radical Hospitality. In reflecting on Evie’s role at Hedgebrook, and the content of our conversations, I’ve been thinking about the concept of Radical Librarianship. Every movement has its bibliographers and its librarians – its keepers and custodians of knowledge curation, dissemination and distribution. Hedgebrook has Evie. Her work is quiet and vital. Even if you have never accessed her support, you still know from the farmhouse noticeboard that she is there – and that knowledge (and resource) is a powerful thing.
In re-reading the scholar Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoys blog, and her post entitled: Complaint as Queer Method (2022), I've been reflecting upon her deconstruction of the word secretary, and the revelation (to me) in her deconstruction of the word sitting quietly within it: secret. I sit with the word librarianship and think of Evie’s work at Hedgebrook. I notice within the words such as aria (denoting song), lib – short for libre and liberty (meaning free and freedom, respectively) and arian (meaning to have a concern or belief in a specific thing, rather than the use of it as a term to describe a (mistaken) belief in white supremacy).
Hedgebrook’s Radical Hospitality is intended to free the writer up from the labour of daily domestic duties which (often) distract from the time available to devote to the craft of our work. Evie’s and Hedgebrook’s offer of Radical Librarianship frees us up from the immediate labour of fetching and gathering hard copy knowledge(s) to invest into our writing; it is the song of knowledge given to us in the unstinting belief in what we came to Hedgebrook to do.
-Dr. Rommi Smith, Hedgebrook Alumna