Mr. Inspiration

We’re witnessing a revolution—a revolution in library services to young adults. Teen rooms are popping up across the country faster than Starbucks (well, not quite); teen collections, and formats, are expanding; the ranks of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) are burgeoning; and teens themselves are having a say in library services, sometimes—shockingly!—even creating them. Leading the charge is Patrick Jones.

Jones, winner of this year’s Scholastic Library Publishing Award (formerly known as the Grolier Foundation Award), is 44—seemingly too young to receive what is, after all, a lifetime achievement award. Given annually to a librarian “who has made extraordinary contributions that promote access to books, encourage a love of reading for lifelong learning, and exemplify outstanding achievement in the profession,” Jones has done all that and more. In addition to the many teens he has influenced, he’s defined what it means to be a young adult (YA) librarian with the publication of Connecting Young Adults and Libraries: A How-To-Do-It Manual (Neal-Schuman, 1992), and then spent part of the last 14 years “on tour,” challenging a new generation of librarians to develop a “YAttitude” and think about teen services in a fresh way.

School Library Journal asked Michele Gorman to catch up with Jones—now the outreach coordinator at the Hennepin County (MN) Library—at the recent American Library Association conference in New Orleans. Gorman, a teen services manager who considers Jones a mentor, coauthored (along with Jones and Tricia Suellentrop) the third edition of Connecting Young Adults and Libraries (2004). She spoke to Jones about his iconoclastic career, the current state of YA services, and his future plans.

Patrick, when you went to library school did you want to work with teens?

Absolutely not. I didn’t know such a thing existed.

Did you take any classes about teen services?

None whatsoever. I totally bullshitted my way through my first young adult job interview.

So how did you get started?

I was in Savannah, GA, in 1985, working as a reference librarian at the Chatham-Effingham-Liberty Regional Library, and all these kids would come in—this was pre-Internet—and ask for “them there brown books about them there authors.” Like a lot of folks, I had a negative reaction. I was sick of showing these kids the exact same books over and over again. I decided to do a library instruction program and got together with another librarian who’d been a school librarian. We contacted people in the Savannah Public Schools and started a program. I found high school students to be mouthy, funny, and energetic. This led to my first professional publication in RQ, “What to Do When the World Book Is Missing.” Because our joke was if the World Book was gone, kids wouldn’t know how to do research.

When did you get your first YA librarian job?

In 1986. Jim Fish, now director of the Baltimore County Public Library, hired me at the Springfield City Library in Massachusetts. I was their first full-time YA librarian. He took me into his office and symbolically wrote me a blank check, saying: make us proud. “I want more kids in the library,” he said. “I want circulation to go up.” I have more or less been doing that for 20 years.

How has the YA world changed over the past two decades?

There are several huge changes. One is just the awareness. When I published the first edition of Connecting Young Adults and Libraries that was it. There was nothing that looked at overall services to teens in libraries. There were a couple of books on YA literature, a book on YA programming. Now people really get that serving teens isn’t about books—it’s about looking holistically at all the different ways we serve teens in libraries. When I first started, all people wanted to talk about was the new Richard Peck novel. People today are much more into the kids than into the books.

The second thing is the idea of teen spaces. When most new public libraries open today, the thing they brag about is their new teen room—just look at the new Minneapolis Public Library. Big libraries are thinking: teen, teen, teen. They are saying this service is important, and they want to profile it. This is a huge change.

Then there is this explosion in media. It’s all teen friendly, and it’s teens that are driving it. They’re coming to the library and looking for graphic novels. It’s teens who will push us to stop buying CDs and set up MP3 files so they can download music. I think people are realizing that teens are on the cutting edge of our culture. Libraries will never be cool, but we can do cool stuff if we listen to teens.

A final change that is just gigantic is this movement from teens as customers to contributors. We’ve always had teen volunteers, and there’s always been a few people doing youth advisory groups. But now it’s all over the place, from YALSA allowing teens to go to Best Books for Young Adults to teen reviewers in VOYA. Every teen band in the world has a MySpace page. Teenagers are self-publishing their own books. This democratization of media is being driven by teens.

Look at library Web sites. The most successful ones are the ones driven by teens. They help with the content and design. Look at the ones where the librarians are blogging the books and guess what? Zero comments. But where teens are writing the reviews, you see a lot more activity.

What does that mean for those of us who work with teens?

Let youth drive content, and don’t have librarians telling teens what they should read. Let the teens tell us. We are guides. A lot of people think youth participation means the YA librarians don’t do anything. Exactly the opposite. You’ve got to set up the structure. You’ve got to support, you’ve got to advocate. It’s not easy. Let’s face it, a lot of us librarians are control freaks. I am. To delegate something to another staff member is hard, let alone to delegate it to teens. There are youth librarians out there who won’t let other people cut out the name tags for storytime because they have to have the tail on the bear just right.

What do you want as your library legacy?

Wrestling magazines.

Yeah, right.

I say that facetiously, but I think I really got libraries to think about pop culture in a different way. I always thought: give teens what they want. I’m very pop driven.

My real legacy is if you and Tricia [Suellentrop] mentor the next generation. I was mentored by Mary K. Chelton. We never published together, but she helped me when I was getting started, and now it’s your job.

Do you feel it’s a professional responsibility to mentor new librarians?

We absolutely have to do this. Sometimes it’s just encouragement or it’s saying to somebody, “Oh, that’s a great idea. You should write that as an article.” Sometimes it’s just getting out there and talking. I’ve presented workshops since 1988, and in the past five or six years, I’ve been out at least once a month. I’ve trained librarians in every state.

Indirectly, I bet you’ve influenced 40,000 to 50,000 librarians.

I think so. I’ve done everything from PLAs with 700 to 800 people to a workshop in Kansas where I had 13 in the back of a truck-stop restaurant. I will not take credit for it, but I do think it’s interesting that in the years after I and other people have been doing so much training, the membership of YALSA has exploded to the point where it now has more members than ALSC [Association of Library Services to Children]. And there’s a heck of a lot more children’s librarians than there are teen librarians.

I noticed you have a MySpace page—aren’t you too old for that?

I got the page more as an author, to reach teens who I’ve met through author visits. But it’s a good question. When you and I did a workshop at [the 2006 Public Library Association conference], a woman asked me how to do reference with text messaging. I had no idea. I can barely use my cellphone. When you train people, they want to hear three things: theory, purpose, and practice. I can still do the theory part really well, and I think I can still do the purpose part, talking about outcomes. But what I can’t do with as much credibility is the practice. Take graphic novels. I can tell people graphic novels are a great format, and why they should have them. But I have no personal interest in them, and at 44, I don’t want to learn to appreciate graphic novels.

Is there anything in your career you wish you could take back?

I wish that early on I was more patient with people who didn’t share my vision of youth services. I was presenting the message that I’m hip, I’m cool, other people serving teens are hip and cool, and if you don’t get it, you’re not worthy.

That and not realizing that the reason that people didn’t serve teenagers wasn’t because they hated teens but because we had not made a good, strong, compelling case to library directors why it was good for the library. We just said, “Oh well, they just hate teenagers.”

You’ve published two YA novels, Things Change (2004) and Nailed (2006, both Walker), which present a frank, honest look at teens’ lives. Have you had any censorship issues?

I haven’t been banned. But I’ve been uninvited to schools, or asked not to talk about a certain part of a book. Also, I think when I’ve contacted people about doing school visits, they are reluctant [to invite me]. I’m not writing for middle school students. I’m writing for high school students about teenagers doing things that teenagers do and [some adults] don’t want to acknowledge that.

People have to understand that these are stories. Some parts of the story a teen reader may totally relate to, other parts they do not. I absolutely do not believe that the power of my writing is so great that a teenager who’s never contemplated having sex is going to go out and do it because I’ve made it in my book seem so appealing.

If anything, what reading should do for teens is make them think, to see characters constantly making decisions. In Nailed, Brett makes a lot of the wrong decisions. I want to show kids who screw up and make bad decisions. But it doesn’t always have to work out tragically.

Every teenager is sexual. They may not be doing anything with another person, but they are sexual beings. They’re horny, and that isn’t really in books. What I want is not a book that is about sex. But I can’t imagine writing a book for teens where the teens aren’t thinking about sex.

As a YA librarian, what are your future plans?

I’ve spent 20 years doing teen services—either doing it or writing about it or presenting about it. I feel I have accomplished everything I’ve wanted to accomplish. I am winding down. I will be engaged in some training, but for the most part I want to concentrate on a second career, which is being a young adult author. I can’t wear both hats.

If you could pick one adjective to describe your career as a librarian, what would it be?

Inspirer, which probably is not a word. Someone who’s inspirational. Often, when I give workshops, I only have an hour, maybe two. I can’t teach skills. The best I can do is inspire them, maybe entertain them, which makes them inspired.

A lot of librarians won’t have the opportunity to attend one of your sessions. What’s the one piece of advice you’d like to give them?

Make a difference, but do it on your own. Don’t bother saying things like “they won’t let us.” Just do it. Find the niche that works for you and your community, and do it.

I was in a community where I was trying to attract boys; so I collected wrestling magazines. Find that one niche that you can fill. You’ve still got to do everything else, but find the one thing that you’re going to excel at and then do it well.

And share it with other people. We are an unbelievably humble profession, and that isn’t good. We have to share information with each other formally and informally. We could learn from the social networking that works among teens. Every time you have a successful program, there should be some way you in Charlotte, NC, could let people in Hennepin County know, here’s a great idea.