Did you grow up knowing exactly what you wanted to be?
Were you clear how to get to where you wanted to go?
Did you ever worry that if you didn’t do it just right, you just couldn’t do it?
Today we are talking about career paths and the meandering roads to success.
Did you grow up knowing exactly what you wanted to be?
Were you clear how to get to where you wanted to go?
Did you ever worry that if you didn’t do it just right, you just couldn’t do it?
Today we are talking about career paths and the meandering roads to success.
Hi, this is Audrea Fink, here with Julie Holton and our special guest, Jessica Werner. We are your Think Tank of Three!
Today, we’re talking with Jessica about following a career path. Even a career path, especially a career path, that meanders.
Jessica Werner:
Hi, my name is Jessica Werner and my pronouns are she, her and hers.
I’m a public librarian in Seattle. I was born and raised outside of Seattle and ended up moving right back to my hometown so that I could raise my family there.
When I was growing up I wanted to be, among other things, a vet, author, a minister and eventually I realized that I ended up on public librarian.
Audrea Fink:
And you’ve wanted to be a librarian for as long as I’ve known you.
Jessica
Yeah. I’ve always loved libraries. My first job was paging in the public library in the next town over.
So when you see those kids shelving books, it was a competitive process to get into that position, but it paid better and had better hours than any of my friends jobs in high school. And I realized that I was really happy in the library even though I got in trouble a lot for reading books that I should have been shelving.
Julie Holton
I ended up in the wrong career path. I would have loved that. Do you get to read books often at work? Because I’d consider that.
Jessica
As a public librarianI, never read at work. I am dealing with a lot of other things. I am giving the bathroom key. I’m helping someone find level M books for their reader.
I’ve helped someone find passport photo locations this week.
Gosh, what don’t I look up in the last year? I’ve looked up octopus reproduction…
Julie:
Whoa. The things you never thought you’d do.
Jessica
…including diagrams. There’s a lot of helping people find or reset their passwords. I don’t know. Your mom’s AOL password. Please ask her to stop asking me.
Julie:
So you do a little bit of it all.
Jessica:
Yeah. When you are a public librarian, you are not only doing reader’s advisories. Sometimes you are doing social services triage, reaching out to local social services to help people find the people that can get them in contact with the services they need, whether it’s rehab or shelter beds or food stamps.
I can’t put you in contact with those people directly, but our organization has contacts with social services organizations all over the city. We’re really good at connecting people to the information that they need. Or connecting people to the people who have the information they need. Libraries are definitely more than just reading books in a very quiet room.
Audrea:
Now, I grew up loving libraries as well. I think my dad used to take us there in the summers because my dad worked graveyard, and so he was home during the day when his kids were out of school, and so we spent a lot of hours in the library and I definitely have like a pretty substantial love of reading from my time there.
In full disclosure of this little relationship, Jessica and I have… Jessica and I met when I was 19 and you were 21?
Jessica:
Yep. Just after my 21st birthday,
Audrea
We were working at a hardware store together. Jessica and I became fast friends because…
Jessica:
Because we both loved Ani DiFranco and Ben Harper.
Audrea
Right. And I still do.
And then I ended up meeting her at the time, boyfriend, Josh. We turned into this little like trio of idiots. Fast forward like two decades later. And I sort of re-met her brother and then eventually made some poor decisions and married him.
Jessica:
I don’t know what decisions, but they were certainly decisions.
Julie:
Now you’re really stuck with each other.
Audrea:
So I have the luxury of having one of my closest friends also be my sister. So that’s, that’s pretty fun.
Julie:
Isn’t that like a dream of all of us when we’re little girls, like, we want to become actual sisters, and you guys did it.
Jessica:
Except for the part where I had to watch you kiss my little brother.
Audrea Fink:
Anyway, one of the reasons I really wanted you on the podcast is specifically because our life together started at a hardware store where we were basically working dead end jobs and then we shifted into different dead end jobs. Yeah. And then both of us ended up going back to school and going to getting our college degrees. We both now have our masters.
But that path was so clunky and I think that you are such a cool example of someone who took the maybe path less traveled or did things out of order, had that nontraditional experience, but still managed to get to your dream job. And so I thought that would be really helpful for our listeners to hear sort of your background and, and how you did it.
Jessica
So when I was in high school, I worked at, um, a branch of the King County library system. And it was great and I loved it. And then I went off to college for a year and I realized after that year that may be going to that college with that setup at Evergreen State College was not the path of personal success for me.
It was, however, a really great way to act out for a year. I’m very sorry to my parents about that. And so I ended up working at a hardware store and then a mall store, and then going back to the hardware store. And during that time I knew that I wanted to do more, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have the financial wherewithal or financial support to go back to school.
At the time, if I would have applied for financial aid, it would have still included my parents finances and they were in no position to help. I got married at 22 to my husband. So we’ve been together for, it’ll be 19 years this year. He has been incredibly supportive. In 2002 I ended up starting work at an independent record store in a strip mall, which was fantastic and terrible all at once.
Because it was working with people who loved music as much as I did, which was great. I loved being able to connect people to things they didn’t know they needed. People would come in and say, I’m looking for this, but I’m not sure, and I really like this artist, and then I would love being able to connect people to the music that worked for them.
What I hated was working with money and the fact that people would be totally happy to throw down over a $1 price difference. I have had people throw merchandise at me and my coworkers because they did not like the clearly posted return policy. I did not like working black Friday.
Audrea:
Whew. Right?
Jessica:
I did not like working until 10:00 PM on Christmas Eve.
Audrea:
But then your time at the record store actually was sort of like the beginning of getting your feels in for that library job, right? That’s a lot of what you do now.
Jessica
Yeah. I realized that I was always at the record store. And then on my time off I was still at the local library. Which incidentally was also the branch that I’d worked at in high school and I was remembering how much I loved the library and I was still reading voraciously. I have always read at least a hundred books a year, if not more, even when I was in grad school.
It’s always been something I’ve enjoyed and loved talking about it.
Julie:
And also, half the battle is figuring out what we don’t want to do or what we dont liike, which helps kind of redirect us. And also I have to say like, so sometimes we think that we have to follow this certain perfect career path, which you know, you were talking about too, like you went off to college, you were starting to do that thing.
Even if you made other choices along the way that kind of steered you away from that path. But that’s not right path for everyone. And so like we talk about this nontraditional career path, and I’m starting, especially with all of our, the feedback we get from our podcast, the traditional path is kind of becoming non traditional right?
Jessica:
It really is it, um, it requires a fair amount of financial privilege to be able to just go off to college for four years and
Audrea
or gender privilege.
Jessica
Gender, race, ethnicity. There’s a ton that goes into being able to just like go off to college for four years.
Julie:
And knowing at 18, what the heck you want to do with your life.
Jessica:
Right. I knew nothing at 18. I thought I was going to become a Unitarian minister. I thought I was going to go, I was going to get my degree and I was going to become a minister because I was raised Unitarian and I really appreciated what it had done for me. And I thought that being a minister would be pretty cool cause I liked our minister at our church.
That’s clearly not where I ended up. I mean, I still help people find things they want and that they need, I guess.
But I ended up going back to first I was going to night school, like night classes at Bellevue college. Bless it. I love Bellevue college so much because they are community college. I was able to take night classes and still work full time. And I did that for a quarter and I took some time off and I was able to go back a couple quarters later and then take really early morning and online classes and still work full time.
And I was able because they structured their classes in a way that they knew people still had lives and families and responsibilities outside of college. So I was taking a 6:30a sociology class or a 7:30p philosophy class.
Audrea:
Oh. Brutal.
Jessica:
I was able to do these online classes and I was able to take a full load of classes and then still work 40 hours.
I was not a fun person at the time, but I was getting pretty solid grades and still working. For the last year that I was at BCC, or then it was Bellevue community college, my husband suggested just taking time off work and focusing solely on making sure my grades are high enough because I knew that I wanted to transfer to UW.
By that time, I’d realized that library school was the path I wanted. And to become an actual librarian, like not just someone who works in a library, you need to have a master’s of library science from an ALA accredited school. The closest ALA accredited school I got lucky is the Uiversity of Washington Information School, which is one of the top three in the country.
I got even luckier because they also have an online program and an in-person program, so you could take core classes for your masters online or in person, depending on which program you are in. But at the time, all I knew was that I wanted to go to UWfor my masters and the best college that I could afford and get into to finish my undergrad was UW.
I took a year off working and bumped my grades up as high as I could to apply to UW. I got in. I took two weeks off between BCC and UW and then I started at UW. When I was at UW, I majored in English lit and minored in art history. Those have always, those have been subjects I love.
Audrea:
And while you were in at UW were you still working full time or were you?
Jessica:
No. when I went to UW, the first thing I did during the first summer at UW, I worked as a temp.
I was doing data entry for a local nonprofit all summer long in a windowless room with like eight other temps. It was boring, but I listened to music all day, and so I did it.
But then in the fall, I applied to one of the libraries on campus, and I spent two years, almost two years working in the University of Washington Drama library because they have a master’s and doctoral program in theater and acting.
I’ve never been a drama nerd, but it was great to be so immersed in the possibilities of a field. I was dealing with a couple of hundred year old collections of Shakespeare or plays from artists I’d never heard, but because they were right there, I’d ended up reading them.
It was great to get the head of the library knew that I wanted to be a librarian, and so she was very open about the challenges and benefits of the field and very open about what it took to be a college librarian versus a public librarian versus a corporate librarian.
Audrea:
So she acted as kind of like a mentor for you through college? So that was a lucky break for you.
Jessica:
Yeah. One of the things I also loved was that she was really good at modeling how to put limits between your personal life and work.
She commuted by bus and she lived in Federal Way, so about 25 miles from UW because she said she didn’t want to be that person that they knew they could call in when the weather was bad to cover the library. She was like, my time is my time and when I’m not getting paid to work, that’s my time.
And I really appreciated that. That was something where I saw someone being able to draw lines for mental and personal health reasons, and it was great.
Audrea:
And it’s, I think it’s not only is it great, it’s also pretty uncommon, I think for women. I don’t think men seem to have the same issue. I shouldn’t say they don’t have the same issue. You don’t see it as frequently. Yes. And I think you can see that a lot where women take it home. Right. And so it was great for you to have that example.
Jessica:
Yes and even now working in a public library, it’s fairly uncommon to see staff really firmly draw a line between their personal and professional time.
Our union has gotten after many of us repeatedly for even looking at our email when we’re not being paid. They said, if you’re not getting paid, stop checking your email. If it’s work, it’s work. If you’re not being paid, don’t work.
Audrea:
Once you graduated from UW, then you went into the masters program, but even that you had kind of a twist because you got pregnant with your first kid.
Jessica:
Yes, so I had only applied to one master’s program. I had applied to UW because we had family in the area. I knew I wanted to have a child and my husband worked here and we just didn’t have the support financially or like family support to move to another part of the country for me to go to my masters.
Andalso it’s expensive to apply to grad school. First you have to pay for the GRE. Then you have to pay for your application fee. And I think it was like 50 to $75 which when you’re a one income family in Seattle with a high cost of living is rough.
So I got in, I spent another summer. Temping this time at an office design firm as a receptionist. And then the week that I officially started grad school, I was in the online program, so it was taking all my core classes online, which was great because I could watch the lectures when I could. And then as long as I made sure to write my essays and participate in the online discussions, I could live the rest of my life.
And I also managed to get pregnant within the first month of starting grad school. Being pregnant was terrible for me, so it was really nice to have a community. Not only of fellow students, but also all of my professors were not only teaching grad school, a lot of them were still working or were parents working as public or corporate librarians and being parents.
And so they were very understanding when I went to them all after about a month and said, okay, so I’m pregnant. Uh, just a heads up. And they all said, you know, do what you need to just keep us updated. And it was great because I had really terrible, it’s not morning sickness if it’s just, you know, going on for months. And that was nice.
Audrea:
This brings it back to something that you talk about a lot that I think is important that we acknowledged is that you had a really horrible time being pregnant. You didn’t love it. You didn’t want to be le pregnant goddess. You didn’t have a good time. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t easy.
Jessica:
I peed myself in public. I was nauseous all the time. I had terrible antinatal depression, which is just when you get your depression comes on because of your pregnancy, and I was doing all this and still taking a full master’s degree course load.
Julie:
At some point you just like strapped on your cape because you’re sounding like super woman.
Jessica:
I have to say I was not working. All I was doing was gestating what turned out to be a 10 pound baby and working on group projects and writing papers and researching and trying to keep up.
Julie:
Oh that’s all? That’s all you were doing.
Audrea:
So there was privilege in the fact that Josh worked and you didn’t have to, but there was also struggle in the fact that you were taking on maybe like multiple life achievements at once.
Jessica:
I just wanted to get them all out of the way.
Uh, yeah. So I, I had my first a month after I finished my, my first year of grad school and I took that summer to be miserable and nursing for like 24 hours a day for three months. And then I went right back into the grad program in fall semester. Again, doing online courses. Again with very supportive grad school advisor and my grad school professors.
The great thing about the online program was it was designed for people who were working or who did have outside commitments in their life, and so they were very understanding when I came in and said, I have a three month old baby and no childcare. There were things that I had been told I needed to do in order to get a public librarian position, including doing a directed fieldwork.
This is essentially not even an unpaid internship because you, you are paying for the credits.
Audrea:
So it’s like a you’re paying internship. An it costs you internship.
Jessica:
Yes. The more credits you wanted, the more you paid and the more you worked. So I was never able to do a directed fieldwork because I could not afford childcare in order to make it happen.
And I had been told that the best way to get into public libraries was to have a directed field work on your resume. The one time I met with one of my professors and he said, it was the nicest thing. He sat down with me. He said, I want to know what your questions are. And I said, how do I get a public library job as fast as possible?
And he worked at the local library system and he said look up common interview questions and then think about your answers to them. Think about them until you’re comfortable with them. Ask librarians. Go and talk to librarians at other libraries. Librarians want to help people.
Whether you’re looking for car repair or you’re asking about library jobs, we want to help you. And I found that to be true over and over again in the system. Not when I say the system, I mean like the general system of libraries.
Julie:
So what I love that I’m hearing too is that, you know, instead of being told no, you were guided. If this isn’t the tradition, if the traditional way isn’t going to work or if this doesn’t work for you, what else can we do? How do we get you there?
And what I love too is that you, you didn’t say, Oh my gosh, okay, well this is never going to happen. Like I can’t do this, or I don’t know. You know, because so often it’s easy to fall into that trap of how we can’t achieve something rather than saying, “Okay nope, we’re just going to figure this out.” If that’s not going to work. Something else is, but you obviously did.
Jessica:
It was a great part of that is after I finished, so I finished my master’s degree in fall quarter of 2012. So I had my baby in June of 2011 I took that summer off and then I started back up fall quarter 2012 and then I took classes nonstop from. I picked up a couple of classes that summer and just kept working because I wanted to get my degree done as fast as possible because babies are expensive.
And so I finished my degree because I was doubling up. I finished my degree two quarters early. I finished it in December, 2012 after starting in September, 2010 and I immediately started applying for jobs.
Audrea:
So there’s a lot of tenacity in that, right? Like pushing.
Jessica:
I really have a problem finding my limits sometimes. I really thrive on being overstressed and it’s not healthy.
Audrea:
I share that. Yeah.
Julie:
You are in good company. Yeah. Right.
Audrea:
So once you started in the library system, did you feel like you had just arrived or or was that…
Jessica:
No! I applied to literally anything I could find online that looked vaguely like it might take my skillset that I had developed over the last 15 years of work and school.
Audrea:
Sorry, I want to interrupt right now because I, we hear all the time that women wait until they’re like 100% qualified to apply for jobs and you were like, nah, I’ve got some skills. We’re going to try it.
Jessica:
Yeah. I was like, you know what? Sure. I’ll write a cover letter. I wrote terrible cover letters.
But I sent my application off to anybody. So Seattle has this incredible library school and all these people move here to go to library school and then they never want to leave because Seattle is beautiful. And so there are all these unemployed librarians lurking around any possible library job opening.
And we are ruthless. Like we want that job. We have a lot of student debt, and so I was watching my systems. What our system does is they post that at the time, they would post a pool opening, and so that meant that you would apply to interview to get into the hiring pool.
Which means that once you’re in the hiring pool, if a children’s librarian position opened up and you were in the children’s hiring pool then you could apply for the children’s position. Same for teen. Same for adults. S
Audrea:
You had to apply twice. Essentially you had to apply to a pool and then that gave you the opportunity to apply for the job?
Jessica:
Yes, so I applied to the teen services school because my goal was working with teens in public libraries because they’d meant so much to me as a teen.
And so I went to apply and I interviewed, and of the two people who interviewed me, one of them was the professor. Who had told me to practice my interview questions when I’d talked to him.
Audrea:
Oh, fun.
Jessica:
He did not remember me. I don’t know that he remembers me now.
Julie:
I thought there’s going to be like a fun twist on that.
Audrea:
Yeah right?! I thought you say, “And he advocated for you” but no!
Jessica:
And so I went in and I didn’t say anything about that. I just did the best I could and they said, okay. We’ll let you know. And they said, we’re also hiring what they call LIPs, the library intermittent pool and those are basically substitutes. If someone’s sick or if someone is going out to do outreach? We need someone to cover the desk.
So you go where they send you and you sit at the reference desk and you answer reference questions and non reference questions.
And I was young and hungry and I said, yes, I will. And I did not think about the childcare issue with something like that. But I got in and so by the time I graduated my program in June, I’d been working for two months as a professional librarian in the lip program.
I was able to find a fantastic nanny who lived less than a mile from me with a daughter, my son’s age, and she was willing to work on call, bless her. Being able to hire a nanny basically took all of my paycheck. I was paying for my car payment and my childcare when I worked. But if I didn’t work, I was never going to be able to get into the field otherwise.
And so I just, I hustled. I took as many positions as I could. I learned how to research what positions were coming up. When I worked with other librarians, I asked them how they got into their position, where they’d gone to school, what their favorite part of their community was or their position, and I watched how the libraries interact and function as part of their communities.
And every library is different. Some are incredibly intertwined with the schools around them. Some of them, like mine are almost more tourist information because we are across the street from the busiest park in Seattle. We get a lot of tourists for about six months out of the year, just popping in to see what’s going on.
So I need to know the history of the park and the area and the best way to get around Seattle in addition to helping you find a picture book for your kid.
And so there are 28 libraries in Seattle, and I have worked at 25 of them.
Audrea:
So one of the things that you and I have talked about a lot and you’re, you’re really passionate about is the, the idea that libraries still have a place in society today, given that you can buy your book on your Kindle, on the internet, like why do we still need libraries and how are they beneficial for maybe society as a whole? For professional women? For people who like to read?
Jessica:
Libraries don’t cost money to walk into. All we ask of you in a library is to follow the basic rules of conduct.
If you want to sit in a library all day and color in a coloring book, great.
If you want to come into a library and find books about vegan baking, we can do that.
If you want to come into a library and learn how to get a passport, we can do that.
The library is there to help people find what they need. That’s all we’re there for. We want to find what you need and we want to help you learn how to find what you need.
When someone asks me to look something up for them, I turn my monitor so they can see how I do the search.
It’s really powerful. You’re handing the reins of this tool. You’re showing them how you do it so that they can learn how to do it, and hopefully they can show other people.
Audrea:
The way you’re describing it is like a cross between like a church where everyone’s welcome as they are, and then also like an empowerment tool.
Something where you can, you can come in and color or you can come in and learn some things that hopefully helps you.
Jessica:
Yeah. I spent hours in the Bellevue branch of the King County library system, researching graduate school when I was an undergrad, because at the time the internet was not the greatest.
And I really, for me personally, when I’m reading nonfiction or fact finding, I really prefer the tactile sensation.I’m a kinetic learner. I like to learn with my hands.
And so being able to look at college guide books was really helpful for me. And a lot of people still really prefer reading books in person.
People like to come in. And ask for help because I do my best to just be upfront and honest. I’m not going to judge you about what you’re reading.Do you know how many romances I’ve read? I don’t care what you’re reading. I want you to read. I want it to make you happy.
If you want to read James Patterson, that’s great. If you want to come along with me on the fact that I am reading a series about warrior angels in New York, awesome. I’m not going to judge you.I just want you to be happy and find what you need.
Julie:
But I love to, when you talk, you talked about this a little bit earlier, is you know, you’re talking about all of the social services that you provided as well. And so sometimes I think that when people say almost judgemental way of like, why do libraries even need to exist, like we’ve got the internet.
That question alone comes from such a place of privilege because in that question, you’re assuming that everyone has a computer and access to internet in their homes, and not everyone does. And so some of these social services, I mean, I think that, I mean, how much a part, I know it’s a part of her job, but how much of your job does that take up?
Jessica:
It’s not a ton. It varies. It really does vary based on which branch I’m at.
Audrea:
So what communities are made of?
Jessica:
Yeah, I mean like, so I work, my main branch is in a really privileged, well off part of Seattle, where houses average over 1.3 million with waterfront views.
Julie:
So they’re not coming in to get access to food stamps. At least not from that particular neighborhood.
Jessica:
But there’s still people who live in that community who do need help figuring out how to apply for an EBT card, even though you just don’t see them.
And then my other branch is much smaller and in the same building as two different social services groups and so it’s great to be able to say, go across the hall and talk to this person here.They will be able to help you find this.
We have, I think, two or three social workers. Or a social worker and a couple of social work interns who work with the library system full time. Right now they work at our central library and then two of our libraries are our neighborhood branch libraries, and they’re there and they walk around and just say hi to folks and they just let it be known that if you have questions about social services, this is who you talk to you.
They have stuff like clean socks. Toothbrushes, deodorant. They usually have a lot of shelf stable snacks available. Seattle does have a really high unhoused population and they know that libraries are warm and dry, and as long as you can function within the rules of conduct, we’re not, we’re not going to ask you to leave.
It’s not, it’s not my job to believe what you do on the in the library. If you’re using the computers, do it quietly when your time is up, go do something else in the library. That’s all I ask.
Julie:
So Jessica, you work with children in your role at the library and, and both of you have talked about your memories as, as teenagers, as children. And mine was in the summer, we’d, my mom would take us kids to the library and get 8 to 10 books per week, and I’d, you know, novels and I’d take them home and I’d read them and go back the next week. So I was definitely, you know, a voracious reader as a child and just like page turner.
And so to me, like I think I’d be working with children and I know that my foundation really started in a library and really having that encouragement to read and, and like you said, to read what I wanted to read. I read just a variety. I mean, mostly Nancy Drew’s, but a variety of, of types of books. And I love to get your opinion on this.
Do you see any correlation between reading at a young age and success later in life?
Jessica:
I’ve only been in my position for five years. My first round of baby Storytime babies have outgrown baby toddler and are going into kindergarten.
I don’t know that there are any direct correlations between early literacy and later in life success. There are, however, plenty of correlations between availability of books in homes and early literacy. So more than anything, how’s books in your house.
If you have kids and you want them to read half books in your house, have books available for them.Model reading.
Even though I’m reading on my Kindle, my kids see me reading all the time and they know that I’m reading. If I’m on my phone, I’m probably not, but when I have that Kindle out. They know that all I do on there is read and I have it out all the time. And they see me bring home books.
We recently, our system got rid of fines this month. It’s fantastic. It’s much more equitable. And I’ve had so many kids come in and say, my parents said I can check out books now because they’re not afraid of a 25 cents a day per item, late fee. That means four items or a day overdue. And that the buck, if you have, you know, eight items that are overdue by a couple days.That’s a fair amount of money, especially if you’re not really able to afford it.
So we’ve restructured our, not late fees, but basically the carrot and the stick of fines and checkouts. Our circulation has gone up more.
Bring books into your home, use books, new books, library books. That is going to be the best indication of literacy.
And don’t police what your kids read.
Audrea:
For either the non-kid world or just people in general, how do you go about finding library resources? What is the best way to get involved with your local library?
Jessica:
Ask your local librarian. Come in and say, “hey, I haven’t used the library in a while, or I want to get a library card.” If you come into my branch and say, I haven’t used the library since I graduated from college and I want to start reading more this year. We’re going to say, awesome. Here’s where you fill out your library card application. We’re going to give you your library card in less than five minutes. We’re going to tell you about the resources the library offers, your checkout limits, and if you want, we’ll talk to you about eBooks, digital audio books, all of our resources.
I’m trying to think. We have had, in the past, we’ve had access to Lynda.com and Safari tech books. We have thousands and thousands of digital audio books and digital eBooks that you can borrow. We loan out wifi hotspots and wattage, uh, they’re called the kilowatt. You plug them into your wall and plug your electronics into it and then see how much electricity it’s draining even though they’re not on. We have more than just books and audio books. We have DVDs and CDs and online resources. You can read the New York times going back 150 years through your local library.
Audrea:
Since this is a podcast for women about women empowering women. Can you tell us if there are any books that you would recommend for today’s professional woman?
Jessica:
Yes. So I am doing a lot of thinking on the concept of emotional labor and unequal labor outside of the work space because I think what happens at home tends to affect how you’re doing at work. So these are some of the books that I have checked out recently that I have at home.
There is a book by Darcy Lockman called All The Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership.
I’ve been hearing wonderful things about The Manager Mom Epidemic. This is by a guy named Thomas W. Phelan. I feel like maybe a guy telling women how to do this is a little questionable, but I haven’t read it yet.
Also, Successful Time Management for Dummies. This is something that I should really just read in general. I’m
Overwhelmed by Brigid’s Sheltie and Forget Having it All, how America messed up motherhood and how to fix it.
I’m also making sure that I listened to my colleagues who may not have as much social and. Professional privileges. Me as a librarian, I make more money and I am a white lady, so I am maybe listened to a little better than my colleagues who are black or indigenous or people of color, and I want to make sure that I lift their voices up.
Librarians are a very white profession. Frontline librarians are most often white women, but library management is most often white men. And how does that reflect to our patrons who are not white? How does that make it? How does this make it a welcoming or unwelcoming place in the library? If everyone you go to talk to doesn’t look like you or may not understand the intersectional issues that you face on a daily basis as a person of color or a disabled person or an LGBTQIA person moving through the world today, not only do I want to raise the voices of my coworkers, I want to make sure that other people are listening to their voices.
So I do a lot of listening and shutting my mouth, which is really hard when I know so many things, but I don’t know their lived experience and I want other people to know that.
Julie:
Jessica, I don’t think we could start to wrap this up if we didn’t ask. What is like, what are you reading right now that’s like maybe your guilty pleasure? Like what’s something that you’re enjoying? Maybe not necessarily like professionally focused or work focused, but like what’s something fun that you’re reading.
Jessica:
Well…
Julie:
I wish our audience could see your face right now because I don’t know what you’re about to say.
Audrea:
I’m terrified right now because I know what you read.
Jessica:
I know what you read too!
Audrea:
I know. Like, don’t out me.
Julie:
Oh no, it’s going to get good.
Jessica
I will defend romance to my death. I love paranormal romance because it’s this perfect intersection of fantasy and romance. I know there’s going to be happy ever after, and hopefully there’s gonna be some magic and maybe some swords.
So right now, on the seventh book of a series called the Guild Hunter series, it is by a Kiwi East Indian author named Nalini Singh, S.I. N. G. H.
The first book is Angel’s blood.
Audrea:
Oh, I’ve seen it. Yep. I’ve not read her series, but yeah, I know. Yeah.
Jessica:
Yeah. So I carried around the first book of this series for years, cause I heard it was good about three weeks ago, we went out for the weekend and I finally, I checked out the audio, the digital audio book, because I couldn’t get into the book.
So I was like, well try it on audio because sometimes that makes a difference. And I loved the narrator and then I blew through the book in a weekend.Then I checked out the ebook and the digital audio book of the second book. And I would listen to the book in the car and then sync up my ebook to where I’d left off in the car and then read and just keep going.
And so in the past three weeks, I’ve read seven of them. Um, so it’s the Guild Hunter series by Nalini Singh, and they are about angels and vampires. And the people who hunt and work with them in the world. It’s a really well-built world and really great developed.
And like, it’s not like this is a lesson about being a black Guild Hunter. It’s just these people are who they are. And it’s a very multicultural world. Fantasy can be really, really super white and so can romance. And I love seeing someone write a world that much more reflects the New York of, of right now. I’m blowing through it. I’m having so much fun.
The narrator is Justine Eyre and it’s been fantastic. She reads fast enough to, a lot of times I have to speed audio books up to like one and a half speed just to keep me interested. And she reads it a good pace. I’m listening to it when I walk the dog, I listened to it in the car on the way to work. I listened to it at the gym and then I read. I catch up and I read and so I’m blowing through them.
I’m also working on very slowly through the Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by guy named Steve Brusatte. Someone who was like 13 when Jurassic park came out and loved dinosaurs enough that he actually got his degree, his doctorate in paleontology and he’s talking about the complete reimagination of dinosaurs from what we thought in the 80s when we were kids, to what they know now based on computer modeling and DNA. It’s just so cool. It’s really fascinating and it’s making me completely rethink everything I thought about dinosaurs as a dinosaur and ruptured child.
Julie:
Well there you have it. Oh my gosh. You’ve blown through eight books in three weeks. I love how you sync up like what you’re listening to. I’m going to have to do that.
Jessica:
I can’t recommend that enough. Check out both. It is a game changer. My commute is also at least an hour each way.
Audrea:
So she also introduced me to the Kate Daniel’s series, which is one of my all time favorite series, speaking of paranormal romance, I feel like we can’t end this without talking about lona Andrews.So good.
Jessica:
Everything Ilona Andrews writes is so good.
Audrea:
Everything they write.
Jessica:
Yeah, it’s a husband and wife team and they are just fantastic. A great combination of like relationship building between the main couple as well as flushing out these really awesome supporting characters and this really vivid world. And I think Nalini Singh does that really well in her books too.
Audrea:
They also have really strong female protagonist, anti whatever they’re, the lead is always a female…
Jessica:
The female protagonists are always very strong, strong, but aware of their weaknesses and not afraid to let admit to them with people they trust and knowing that the people they trust around them will support them.
Audrea:
All right. We’re going to start wrapping this up, but before we go, we are collecting advice from successful women in our communities to share with other women.
So we have three rapid fire questions for you.
Question number one, is there a lesson that you’ve recently learned that you wish you could have learned earlier in your career?
Jessica:
Handwriting things means I am more likely to remember them. I write them in my bullet journal, I write them on a sticky note, and then I put them in my Google calendar and hopefully then I’ll remember them.
Julie:
What advice would you offer to your younger self, say about 10 years ago?
Jessica:
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid that you won’t be able to get it. Make sure that you’re able, you’re keeping track of all your grad school projects and papers in a place that is going to be easily accessible in the future because I don’t know where half of them went.
Audrea:
What do you think is the most important skill for a woman to hone in today’s professional setting?
Jessica:
Make sure to listen to people whose lived experiences are different than you and then incorporate their experience in to how you function in your workplace. Listening to folk. My coworkers talk about how their lives and their backgrounds have affected how they function in libraries and then as patrons, not just as employees, and then incorporating that into how I work.
Because as a able bodied cis-gendered white lady in Seattle, I’m pretty much the target audience of everything and I need to make sure that what I do in my professional life is also going to be able to raise the voices of those who may not have that level of privilege.
Audrea:
Awesome. Thank you Jessica, for joining us today on the podcast.
Can you share with our audience the best way to get ahold of you if people have questions or they want to ask you about the library or they just really want to know what you’re reading?
Jessica:
Because I am not doing this as a representative of my library system and I’m not going to give you my extremely unprofessional Twitter accounts, I’m going to just give you my email address. Which is jessicawerner@gmail.com. If you have questions, feel free to email me and I will happily do reader’s advisory for anybody. Tell me something you’ve loved, something you’ve hated, and what you’re looking for, and I’m happy to make some suggestions.
Julie:
This has been so much fun. Jessica. Thank you for joining us today. That is all for this episode of Think Tank of Three.