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Home > No Shush Zone

No Consonants, Just a Vowell

Mar 18, 2009 2:24 PM | 0 comments

At the end of this month, BPL will host Brooklynite Sarah Vowell for a reading from her newest book, The Wordy Shipmates.

Sarah is a This American Life contributor, a NY Times guest columnist and a board member of 826NYC, a creative writing center for kids. We asked her a few q’s to find out what makes her tick.

Q: What are three of your favorite books?
A: Three recent favorites are The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta, Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris and Winston Churchill's History of the English-speaking Peoples.

Q: What drew you to working with 826NYC?
A: Dave Eggers (who founded 826 Valencia) roped me in. In the beginning, there were about six of us sitting at a table at Old Town Bar dreaming it up. I had no idea what I was getting into -- how hard it would be to get going and sustain, but mostly, how much my life would change for the better because of the people I've had the privilege of working with there. It's been so satisfying to watch our Park Slope space morph from a raw hole to a place with floors and, eventually, students and volunteers and the growing sediment of ongoing publishing and film projects. It's very homey and lived-in now, as if it's always been there.

Q: What drives you to write about history?
A: There are certain themes or topics I'm always attracted to: community, misfits, good writing. The founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony sure had all three going for it -- a communitarian ethos, a smattering of outsider weirdos and a literary heap of journals, letters, sermons and religious tracts.

See Sarah on Saturday, March 28 at 4PM at Central Library.

No Consonants, Just a Vowell

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