Zachary Pace in Columbus, Ohio
Introduction by Brett Gregory:
Zachary Pace is the author of I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am. This book is special. It's accessible and informative, yes, but it's also poetic and groundbreaking. We had the pleasure of hosting Zachary Pace in Columbus, Ohio at our brick+mortar HQ last week, in addition to so many of our publishing friends and librarians from across the country to town for the Public Library Association conference. The following is a piece that Zachary Pace prepared and presented to folks attending the Library Freedom Project "Radical Book Buzz" event:
From Zachary Pace:
I’m visiting from New York City, where, since December, the public libraries have been closed on Sundays, owing to budget cuts by the mayor, who is a villain right out of a Marvel comic. And in this comic book of a city without a superhero, police presence has been heightened and heavily armed, especially in the subway system, where they mainly patrol fare evasion. These two threads of reality are connected both financially and spiritually; both are tied to the scarcity and diminishment of spaces that liberate the mind and body: what I would call “queer spaces.” I believe that libraries are queer spaces, because they exist as far as possible outside the normative rhythms of capitalism. For instance, in the library, books aren’t bought and owned; books are borrowed and shared.
Anyway, I’m here to tell you about my book, which is a collection of fourteen essays about women singers, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Madonna, all of them majorly important to my sense of identity. By telling the stories of turning-point moments in the lives and careers of these singers, I’m able to tell my story—of continually discovering and accepting my queerness. It’s hard to imagine my book in a library, because my book is almost too queer, and I can easily imagine it will be among the first books banned and burned if American politics go as horribly as I fear after November of this year.
But on an upbeat note, Eric asked me to share a reader’s response to the book, and the best by far is this. A month ago, I went to do a reading in my hometown, Oneonta, New York, and I read from the afterword of my book, which contains six mini essays on the B-sides of six singers. I read a bit about Joni Mitchell, and after the reading, someone named Carey introduced himself and said, I’m named after Joni Mitchell’s song “Carey,” and as soon as you said Joni’s name, time slowed down. (He actually said this as reassurance after I apologized for reading too fast.) Carey hadn’t planned to be at a reading; he was there with his wife at their favorite café for their twelfth anniversary. Carey was surprised and elated, telling me that Joni has been and still is majorly important to his sense of identity, and that Joni’s music has helped him process “things I haven’t even told my wife.”
In that intense and intimate moment I thought I’d not only put him in touch with his life-affirming connection to Joni, I put him in touch with his queerness; and further, he felt what we call “queer time,” which is presence and duration unhooked from the clock, a Sunday afternoon at the library of the mind, when Monday morning’s rhythms of capitalism are still a distant, dull drumbeat, and here, now you can exist in a kind of fermata, which is a musical term, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a prolongation at the discretion of the performer of a musical note, chord, or rest beyond its given time value,” and that is the formative and formless freedom of real life and free time.
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