Librarians tend to be creative people, and what profession other than library and information sciences could be more encouraging for writers? We are surrounded by books, technology, and people, which provides the opportunity to write not only for the profession but also poetry, novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction for children and adults.
Writing and Publishing: The Librarian’s Handbook was prompted by a desire to acknowledge the many contributions by librarians who write and to encourage beginning librarian-writers. A great benefit from writing, as observed by the well-known writer Natalie Goldberg, whom one of my creative writing classes studies, is that “when we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind.”
In compiling this book, we asked published librarians to submit two 1,900- to 2,100-word unpublished pieces to show their writing range, and we encouraged them to follow Gustave Flaubert’s advice in order to help readers: “Whenever you can shorten a sentence, do. And one always can. The best sentence? The shortest.”
Calls for submissions went to school, public, academic, and special librarians, as well as library and information sciences faculty from the United States and Canada who have been published in librarianship as well as outside the field. The ninety-two chapters are grouped by topic in the table of contents and indexed by subject and author. It has been a pleasure working with these forty-seven creative librarians who are willing to share their hard-won success.