The Library has approved a proposal for a South Carolina Center for the Book that will be affiliated with the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. It will be located at the South Carolina State Library in Columbia, and co-sponsored by the State Library and the College of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, also in Columbia.
"We are very pleased to have South Carolina join our family of affiliated state centers," said Center for the Book Director John Y. Cole. "South Carolina has a rich literary tradition and an increasingly active book and reading community. The partnership between the State Library and the library school adds a new dimension to our state center program."
The South Carolina Center for the Book will promote books, reading and book culture throughout the state, usually through partnerships with other groups. A seven-person advisory board is being formed. It will include a representative of the South Carolina Humanities Council.
For information about the South Carolina Center for the Book and its plans, contact Jim Johnson, director, South Carolina State Library, 1500 Senate St., Columbia, SC 29201, (803) 734-8666, fax (803) 734-8676.
'Letters About Literature' Grand Prize Winner Visits LC. Beth McGinty, a freshman at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester, Vt., the grand-prize winner in the 1996 Center for the Book/Read magazine national writing contest, visited the Library with her parents on May 9. Her letter was chosen by judges from more than 14,000 letters written by students to favorite authors, each letter explaining how the author's work changed the student's outlook on life.
Beth McGinty wrote to Pavel Friedman, a child incarcerated in the Terezin concentration camp during World War II who wrote a poem "The Butterfly," which was included in the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 (Schocken Books, 1993).
Beth McGinty's letter to Friedman concludes: "I would have liked to save you from the Holocaust, Pavel, but I wasn't alive to see the horror that you witnessed. Now, though, I want more than anything to show you one last butterfly; I want more than anything to give you your childhood. I will feel your pain forever."
Kate Davis, associate editor of Read magazine, accompanied Beth and her parents during their four-day trip to Washington. In addition to a behind-the-scenes tour of the Library of Congress and the newly renovated Jefferson Building, they visited members of Congress from Vermont and toured many of the city's museums. The Holocaust Museum was a special highlight.
Nineteen state centers for the book participated in the 1996 "Letters About Literature" contest, honoring winners from each state with $100 prizes. The Vermont program, guided by the Vermont Center for the Book, inspired 150 essays from 20 schools. Deadlines and procedures for the 1997 contest have been announced. For information, write the Letters About Literature Contest, Read Magazine, The Weekly Reader Corp., 245 Long Hill Road, Middletown, CT 06457-9291.
Vermont State Center Hosts Sheldon Hackney. "What does it mean to be an American?" This question is at the heart of the Vermont Center for the Book's A Conversation About the Search for American Identity, a three-year program of book discussions in 128 Vermont libraries that has been developed with the Vermont Department of Libraries, humanities scholars and Vermont's public libraries.
Funded in part with a $230,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the "conversation" is rooted in 28 book-discussion programs about core American topics, ranging alphabetically from "America Learns: Of Idealism and Practicality" (the books are: No Place But Here, by Garret Keizer; Among Schoolchildren, by Tracy Kidder; Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol; and Excellence, by John Gardner) to "Utopias and Dystopias" (the books are: Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin).
Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the featured speaker on May 30 at St. Michael's College in Colchester at the Vermont Center for the Book's conference "From Talk to Tactics: The Re-Creation of Community for the 21st Century." As reported in a major article in the May 31 issue of The Burlington Free Press, the meeting was both an assessment and a reaffirmation of the first year of the Vermont project, which Mr. Hackney lauded as "a model, maybe the model" program in NEH's "A National Conversion: On American Pluralism and Identity."
More than 125 people were present, including teachers, students, government officials and members of the public. Center for the Book Director John Cole and NEH Program Officer Tom Phelps participated in the discussion and in a followup meeting organized by Vermont Center for the Book Executive Director Sally Anderson and conference Director Nick Boke.
In describing the overall purpose of the "conversations" program, Mr. Hackney expressed his concern with "a slipping away of our sense of purpose," noting that "the commitment to democracy and self-government is less certain in the minds of people_ and that's part of what's at stake here." He listed four forces that have contributed to the "crisis of disaffilation" in today's America: (1) the social justice movements of the 1960s ("We have not yet digested these fundamental changes"); (2) the development of a global economy; (3) the displacements caused by technological change; and (4) the end of the Cold War ("For all its terror, the Cold War was a comfortable certainty. _ Now we don't know what the new world order is or our place in it.")
At the end of the conference, it was agreed that the Vermont Center for the Book, with assistance from the national center, would develop a proposal to the NEH for extending the book-based "conversations" program about American identity and communities to other states.
The Vermont Center for the Book has three basic goals: (1) change the culture - every Vermonter a reader; (2) all children are read to; and (3) make books and discussion part of the education culture. Its flagship early-childhood program, "Beginning with Mother Goose," involves parents and professionals working with infants and toddlers in early language development. The "Growing with Books" program shows parents and professionals how to use children's literature to explore developmental issues. Further information is available in the center's 1995 Annual Report and in Reading Matters, the center's new quarterly journal about books and ideas. For copies and further information, write or call: Vermont Center for the Book, P.O. Box 441, Chester, VT 05143, telephone (800) 763-2665, fax (802) 875-2790, e-mail 73021.2156@ CompuServe.com.