My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

(third in an occasional series on BOOKS THAT MATTER & THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM)

Leslie Stack speaks in tongues.

Not like that. 

Like this:

While listening to audiobooks, Leslie has a subconscious tendency to assume their voices, mimicking them with convincing accuracy. Once, when her two sons were boys, they drove to Washington DC to visit the Smithsonian and tried using the Metrorail to navigate the city. After missing their train, they perused the schedule board to determine a better route, and as she considered their options a man nearby interrupted to ask what part of London she was from.  Chagrined, she blushed and admitted to playacting. She’d been channeling Jim Dale, narrator of the Harry Potter series she and her boys were reading. 

Her boys just rolled their eyes. “They’re used to me,” she said, shrugging. “I do it all the time.”

And no wonder. 

When I asked Leslie to explain her bio’s claim that her books are “plotting to take over,” her description of her house sounded like a description of a library, with bookcases in every room and every shelf teeming. There’s a memoir shelf, a biography shelf. Shelves for history and inspiration. For travel and quotations. Fiction and how-to. There’s even a book closet and a shelf that contains only books she rereads. 

Smiling, she leaned toward the camera and tapped a black ballpoint against her mouth. She’d wanted to be prepared for our video chat and had taken detailed notes. “It used to be much, much worse,” she confessed.

Worse? I wondered. 

That sounded like heaven.

“[You should] put as many books as you can in front of kids. You need to give them that opportunity.”

In books as in life, there are people who try to learn from their mistakes, and people who won’t. People who reflect on their own and others’ tribulations and determine to do better, and people who use their own suffering as justification for self-interest. No one helped me, those latter types say. Why should I help anyone else?

In books as in life, I am no fan of those types.

Leslie, however?

Her, I like.

While Leslie’s relationship with books is a signature theme of her adult life, influencing personal and professional endeavors as a musician, educator, writer, and mom, she wasn’t always as possessed by books as her Metro memory suggests. 

In fact, she told me “reading was not a big thing” in her childhood family. Her history teacher mother’s resources populated a single bookcase, and their Maryland home’s isolated location made acquiring books difficult. “Other than school, you couldn’t really go to the library. You couldn’t really walk anywhere.” Nor did her elementary school seem to encourage reading for pleasure, instead limiting access to its library to scheduled turns. “And if you missed your turn for whatever reason,” she explained. “You had to wait.” Middle and high school routines followed similar patterns.

So what changed? 

She recalled reading My Side of the Mountain and the Little House series, then borrowing her mother’s books on the Holocaust at around age twelve. But it wasn’t until she earned her driver’s license at about 17 that the literary world began to open up. She began driving herself to bookstores and libraries, and reading about significant American events and figures such as Kent State, Woodstock, and JFK. However, she didn’t really fall in love with books until her early twenties, when she moved to Norfolk and began working full time in Virginia’s Old Dominion library.

“That [experience] was definitely a turning point for me,” she said. 

Decades later, the memory still evokes a noticeable joy. Typically, she explained, you go to a library or bookstore and you head to the same sections because that’s what you like. That’s what you know. When you work in a library, however, you have to shelve books. All kinds of books in all kinds of genres about places and people and subjects you’ve never heard of, let alone known to imagine. She would peruse the carts of new titles and titles needing to be reshelved, then investigate the sections of ODU’s library where they were housed. “I saw what I’d been missing,” she said. “And from that point on, I was hooked.”  

A self-described lifelong student, Leslie constantly seeks opportunities to learn something new and to create those opportunities for others. She gravitates toward stories about overcoming and about people (real and imagined) striving to make our world a better place for all of us because such works inspire and challenge her to be her best self. 

And that’s one of my favorite parts of Leslie’s story.

While she “didn’t have the mentors or teachers [she] needed,” she loves “helping others to become lifelong learners” and tries to be the type of role model her younger self needed. That theme is key to understanding why books matter to her and why she believes you should “put as many books as you can in front of kids. You need to give them that opportunity.”

Just as she did in her own classrooms and with her own family.

“Because you can’t have peace without hope,” Friday nights, she, her husband, and boys would have dinner at Peace A Pizza and dessert at Hope’s Cookies before heading across the street to Borders. The four of them would scatter to their favorite sections, then gather their finds and meet in the store’s cafe to compare notes. While her sprawling home library includes works from some of those forays, most were discovered in independent bookstores or secondhand at the flea markets and thrift shops she and her husband love to treasure hunt.   

Eventually, her collection numbered in the thousands, spilling from the shelves into the hallways and stacked in teetering columns. Even the basement housed the portion of her collection intended for students and other recipients. Whenever someone expressed an interest in a new (for them) subject, she’d recall her own reading and scurry downstairs to retrieve titles she thought might meet their needs, then she’d allow them to borrow or have her copies, or note the titles and authors so they could find copies later on their own. 

Adult Leslie often wonders how child Leslie’s life might have unfolded had someone done more of that for her. 

*****

While Leslie occasionally still mimics her favorite audiobook personas, her boys are now in their early thirties and she’s cut back a bit on buying books, instead increasing her library patronage because physical copies remain her preferred medium. A few years ago when her books really threatened to take over, at least in terms of square footage, Leslie began purging her collection, donating between six and seven hundred books through the Little Free Library her husband built and installed near their local Veterans’ Park. At the time, she was serving as her Rotary Club’s president, with education and literacy issues the focus of her term, and becoming an LFL steward seemed a fitting project. You can see Leslie and her husband, Chris, in the photo above.

As our scheduled time drew to a close, I asked whether she had anything else she wanted to share. Anything else she wanted me to know. “Oh yes,” she said, rifling her notes. “My favorite quote.” 

She didn’t need those notes to recite the line perfectly. “‘Make me a blessing to someone today.’ It’s from [Jan Karon’s] Mitford series. Father Tim says it after every prayer.” She explained that the line reminds her the world’s needs are greater than the individual’s. That she shouldn’t just ask for or expect change, but rather act on things that matter most. 

I could understand why that line resonates with her and suggested it’s the thematic thread weaving together her life’s many ambitions. I’d certainly noticed it while reading drafts of her own fiction and essays over the five-ish years I’ve known her.

“Hmm,” she said, nodding and tapping her pen once more. “I like that. I never thought of it that way, you may be right. I may have to write that down.”

*****

LESLIE STACK is a musician and retired teacher who is surrendering to her love of writing. You can usually find her doing research behind dark glasses on a park bench. She lives with her husband in a house in Pennsylvania where the books are plotting to take over.

two BOOKS THAT MATTER to Leslie Stack 

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS, by Tracy Kidder

The non-fiction narrative focuses on doctor and humanitarian Paul Farmer, who spent much of his life fighting disease in Haiti, Peru, and Cuba. 

A YEAR BY THE SEA, by Joan Anderson

This memoir recounts the author’s experience reinventing herself after her sons have grown and her husband takes a job far from home.

*****

Looking for more posts in this series?

You can find them HERE and HERE.

Coming up on MY NAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ELIZABETH ANN–

I’m working on a couple of pieces and am not yet sure which I’ll be posting next month. However, I do know I’ll be participating in May’s StoryADay challenge. This year marks founder Julie Duffy’s fifteenth challenge, but only my sixth. You can learn more about StoryADay’s annual writing challenge HERE.

Fun fact, I met Leslie through StoryADay’s online writing community.

Thanks for reading!