I have a special place in my heart for libraries. I have for as long as I can remember. I was always an enthusiastic reader, sometimes reading up to three books a day as a child. Stories were like air to me and while other kids played ball or went to parties, I lived out adventures through the books I checked out from the library.

    My first job was working at the Ukiah Library when I was 16 years old .It was a dream job and I did everything from shelving books to reading to the children for story time.

    As I grew older and became a mother, the library took on a new place and an added meaning in my life. I had several children and books were our main source(来源) of entertainment. It was a big deal for us to load up and go to the local library, where my kids could pick out books to read or books they wanted me to read to them.

    I always read ,using different voices ,as though I were acting out the stories with my voice and they loved it !It was a special time to bond with my children and it filled them with the wonderment of books .

    Now, I see my children taking their children to the library and I love that the excitement of going to the library lives on form generation to generation.

    As a novelist, I've found a new relationship with libraries. I encourage readers to go to their local library when they can't afford to purchase a book. I see libraries as a safe haven(避风港) for readers and writers, a bridge that helps put together a reader with a book. Libraries, in their own way, help fight book piracy(盗版行为) and 1 think all writers should support libraries in a significant way when they can. Encourage readers to use the library. Share library announcements on your social media. Frequent them and talk about them when you can.

    It was one of those terribly hot days in Baltimore. Needless to say, it was too hot to do anything outside. But it was also scorching in our apartment. This was 1962, and I would not live in a place with an air conditioner for another ten years. So my brother and I decided to leave the apartment to find someplace indoors. He suggested we could see a movie. It was a brilliant plan.

    Movie theaters were one of the few places you could sit all day and—most important —sit in air conditioning. In those days, you could buy one ticket and sit through two movies. Then, the theater would show the same two movies again. If you wanted to, you could sit through them twice. Most people did not do that, but the manager at our theater. Mr. Bellow did not mind if you did.

    That particular day, my brother and I sat through both movies twice, trying to escape the heat. We bought three bags of popcorn and three sodas each. Then, we sat and watched The Music Man followed by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. We'd already seen the second movie once before. It had been at the theater since January, because Mr. Bellow loved anything with John Wayne in it.

    We left the theater around 8, just before the evening shows began. But we returned the next day and saw the same two movies again, twice more. And we did it the next day too. Finally, on the fourth day, the heat wave broke.

    Still, to this day I can sing half the songs in The Music Man and recite half of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart's dialogue from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance! Those memories are some of the few I have of the heat wave of 1962. They're really memories of the screen, not memories of my life.

On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Side cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table.

      “Hey, aren't you from Mississippi?” the elegant, white-haired writer remembered being asked by the stranger. “I'm from Mississippi too.”

      Without a second thought, the woman joined the Welty party. When her dinner partner showed up, she also pulled up a chair

      “They began telling me all the news of Mississippi,” Welty said. “I didn't know what my New York friends were thinking.”

Taxis on a rainy New York night are rarer than sunshine. By the time the group got up to leave, it was pouring outside. Welty's new friends immediately sent a waiter to find a cab. Heading back downtown toward her hotel, her big-city friends were amazed at the turn of events that had changed their Big Apple dinner into a Mississippi.

      “My friends said: 'Now we believe your stories,'” Welty added. “And I said: 'Now you know. These are the people that make me write them.'”

      Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation.

      “I don't make them up,” she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. “I don't have to.”

Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty's people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss., from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story.