Wednesday
Dolly Parton started her Imagination Library 31 years ago, in the process giving away 332,000,000 books. Children enrolled in the program received an age-appropriate book each year up to the age of 5. According to Wikipedia, as of 2021 at least 1.7 million children in the U.S. were enrolled, with a net monthly increase of 20,000 to 30,000 children.
Apparently the charity was started as a tribute to Parton’s father. His inability to read, Parton said, “probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”
“If you can read, you can teach yourself anything,” Parton once said and, at another time, “Imagine a world where every child, regardless of their background, was surrounded with books, stories, and a love for reading.”
The first work by Emily Dickinson I encountered as a child speaks to Parton’s vision. I suspect that the Tennessee singer knew the poem:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
Rest in peace, Dolly.
Further note: A recent Emma Sarappo article in The Atlantic noted that Parton said many times
that she’d be happy to be remembered not as a generational talent or a dolled-up diva but as “the book lady”… I don’t know whether all of Parton’s fans knew how high she ranked literacy on her list of important causes, but when I watched tributes to Parton roll in this week, I noted that people I’d grown up with in Tennessee (mostly young women like me) kept posting the same tableaus on Instagram: photos of babies and kids sitting with their parents, reading a book they’d gotten from the Imagination Library.
Sarappo also quotes children’s-book author Katherine Marsh as saying that schools often fail to motivate kids to read because they “hyperfocus on analysis” and privilege individual paragraphs and sentences over entire narratives. Marsh counters that the best way to present abstract ideas to kids is by “hooking them on a story” and that the best way to hook them is by reading it aloud to them. Key to Parton’s project was building a bookshelf at home so that caregivers and kids could share stories as part of a daily routine.
