Seeking Sarton

Update: fixed broken second link

At 4:30 pm yesterday, I was approaching the fourth and final half hour of a very slow Friday afternoon shift at the Reference Desk. Three questions on "where's this call number?" were the highlights of my shift. The other two questions were "where's the stapler?" and, from our student worker, "could you file a trouble ticket on this printer that keeps jamming?"

My email and my Bloglines feeds were caught up--staying current on these is proving to be one of the most useful aspects of having regular reference shifts--and I still had thirty minutes to go. So, I did the most librarianly thing I could think of: looked over the new reference books that our Reference Collection librarians had put on a book cart behind the desk for us.

That's how I came to read the entries for "diary" and "memoir" in the Encyclopedia of women's autobiography. Those entries reminded me that I've always meant to read May Sarton when I got a bit older, so I pulled out the second volume to read the Sarton entry.

Sarton's first second memoir, after several novels and volumes of poetry, was Plant Dreaming Deep. It's about being a woman in her mid-forties who has lost both of her parents and buys a house for the first time. Too many parallels with my life to resist. I started to request it from my public library, like I do most things that I intend to read for fun. Then I remembered that Wash U has a Women's Studies program. Sure enough, we have a large collection of Sarton, including Plant Dreaming Deep. After work, I checked it out on my staff card and this weekend I get to enjoy beautiful prose, charming black and white photos, and the occasional snippet of poetry.     #

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