Ink and Vein

One year ago, I started writing the newsletter for the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative. At the time, I was still adjuncting for the college, though I had made the decision to leave at the end of the semester.

The Narrow Gauge was already a place I loved to go. I’d browse for books, I’d chat with the book sellers, I’d go to author events. I connected with Allison, there, and Al, when Katherine Standefer came through on her book tour in June of 2022, for Lightning Flowers. The four of us went out to eat afterwards, and I felt a creative community blossom for me in a way I hadn’t experienced since leaving Oklahoma.

I started writing the newsletter in February of 2023, as a volunteer effort. I wanted to contribute to the NGBC, and this was a way I could do it on my own time, without feeling the overwhelm of committing to working shifts on the floor.

Soon after, Allison started discussing transitioning out of her role as general manager, and transitioning Delilah, our floor manager, into the role. Then, they would need someone else to step in, and also take on marketing tasks, as that was something that kept slipping to the bottom of the priority list.

I slipped into the role at the end of May, as a volunteer, and came on as paid staff in June of 2023. Working retail after being a college professor might seem like a step back, but it’s been the best decision of my thirties, after the decision to leave higher ed behind. I love being there. I love working there. I love the connections I’ve made, and the increased community involvement that’s grown out of my time there.

It has only been a year, already been a year, but also it feels like I’ve always been there, always been a part of the fabric of the cooperative. My life, to me, is not recognizable from my years of stressful hours working at the college, frustration with things I was unable to change, and isolation from overwork, exhaustion, and not having much interaction outside of work.

Nothing is perfect, and I still cope with depression and anxiety, I’m still healing from and navigating the ways past traumas influence my current actions. I’m still figuring out my financial situation.

Making that one major change, of leaving my career, led to a cascade of changes. I write more. I have more connection and community involvement. I stopped numbing out my emotions and experience greater joy (and sorrow). Life feels expansive, instead of restrictive.

To celebrate these changes, I’m sharing the opening from my first Narrow Gauge newsletter. (it should be noted that I misattributed the second quote to James Baldwin, in the original post. It is actually from Maria Popova, author of The Marginalia.)

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”        

                    Ida B. Wells

One of the powerful things about a bookstore is how it can help us find the light of truth. A well-curated bookstore offers us volumes we might not have found without seeing it on an Instagram post, featured in the Around the World Book Club, or in a Black History Month display at the front of the store.

The Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative continues to be a light in the San Luis Valley, and a place of warmth, community, and learning where we can find and share our truths. I’m so pleased to share this month’s news and upcoming events with you.

Happy reading, and I hope to see you around the store!

Jean Alger

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” James Baldwin, from Nothing Personal       

             Maria Popova, “The Light Between Us.”

And, to illustrate the difference between the years, here is my opening from this month’s newsletter:

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.”

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.”

bell hooks, All About Love

February is Black History Month, and the month that many celebrate their love for romantic partners, for friends, and for themselves. As I often do, I find myself making connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. In this instance, those concepts are Black History Month, and all the thoughts this month summons, and the various ways we mark, or don’t mark, Valentine’s Day.

When we discuss liberation movements, such as the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we talk about fighting for rights, fighting for justice, struggle, striving, and suffering. Some, I suppose, talk about “getting over it” and want to insist that the wrongs of the past have not carried into the present.

What I have started to think of when I think of any liberation movement, (the underground railroad designed to carry enslaved people to free(er) states in the 19th century, networks in Europe to hide Jewish, Romani, LGBTQ, disabled, and other people whom Nazis deemed as “deviants” and “subhuman” during the 1930s and 1940s, whether it be the American Civil Rights Movement, the Red Power movement of the 1970s, the people who cared for and fought for the rights of those with HIV and AIDS during the mass deaths of the 1980s, of the bravery and brutality at Standing Rock in 2016, those who fight, now, for their lives in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo) is love.

At the heart of every liberation movement is love, and the righteous rage that grows from that love.

It is not the love of things, of property, that is at the root of this powerful energy. Love of things might produce fear, and anger, but not the cleansing, earth-moving rage of floodwaters, or the immense heat of fires, that comes from love.

It is the love of community, of life, of land—not as possession, but as our home, as our mother—that drives those who seek liberation, that drives those who can hope and imagine a future where we know how to love each other, where we know that acknowledging others’ right to live, to choose, to have full autonomy, is always the right choice. It is love of community, of earth, where we are able to remember that every person is a human with a mind, a heart, a life, just as we are.

The realization that, as bell hooks writes, love is an action, not a feeling, helps me see the liberation movements throughout history, throughout the world, as testaments of the love that people can hold for one another, for those who live across the globe, for those who we don’t even know. We can act out immense love by choosing people, choosing our humanity, every time we have the option.

—Jean A.