one book book club.
/Why did people ask, "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
I signed up for English 160 on a whim.
It looked interesting (it was), it was a night class (which meant more time to hang out in the Atrium, my college's social hotspot, during the day), and it counted for a required humanities credit (thanks, liberal arts).
On the first day, after passing out the syllabus and talking through the assignments and giving us a short break halfway through the three hours, Dr. Joan Kopperud showed us author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's now-famous TEDTalk, "The Danger of a Single Story." I had never met Dr. Kopperud before, and I still didn't know what to expect from this course, but after hearing Chimamanda speak the words, "When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise," I realized two things: one, that Monday nights from 6:00-9:00 pm were going to be a literature heaven-on-Earth, and two, that I needed to get to know this professor.
The class came and went each week. I would dash across town from my internship, dash across campus to Academy Hall, dash up to the third floor, books and dinner and highlighters in hand. I would sit in my desk (the same, awkward, left-handed one every week), listening to freshmen and seniors and Dr. Kopperud share thoughts on each book we read. We read fiction and nonfiction and poems and plays that were single stories from India, or Saudi Arabia, or England, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I questioned why I had decided not to become an English teacher; I wondered how I could live a life that wasn't surrounded by reading and sharing literature with others every day. I panicked that I hadn't chosen the right major; I poured through the course catalog and my senior year schedule, trying to squeeze any other English courses into my last two semesters (I didn't). And, I (eventually and timidly) asked Dr. Kopperud if she would have coffee with me outside of class. She, with all her energy and kindness and openness, agreed.
A class that started as a core curriculum requirement quickly became a space to confront the unknown in each chapter, ask questions about each story, and write not-totally-researchy papers about them. A professor that started as a name next to the most ideal class time quickly became a mentor, cheerleader, and permanent book-recommender. She also became the person who gifted me a hardly-used food processor before I moved across the country, who makes time in her schedule to grab coffee when I'm back home from across the country, and who ventured to my new home across the country with another of my college-year-and-still-now mentors. The whims -- the things you hardly think about, the things that require minimal brainpower at the time, like entering the Course Registration Number for English 160 as you register for the spring semester of your junior year -- can burrow deep into your heart and stick around to shape your own story.
During our coffee date this January, over Starbucks and swapping book titles, I mentioned how I wanted to join a book club in Portland, but felt a little overwhelmed by the idea. (Once a month? Sometimes it takes me two months to get through two short stories. Saturday mornings? I don't leave my room until at least 11:00 am. Through a Meetup group? Maybe I'm more of an introvert than I think I am...) Dr. Kopperud, with that same energy and kindness and openness as when I first asked her to coffee three years before, leaned in and smiled. She went on to tell me what she's been doing with her girlfriends for years: a One Book Book Club.
So tonight, I made a sign for my apartment door and threw some frozen pizzas in my oven as a group of women gathered around a pile of Americanahs in the middle of my living room floor. Some had read the book in its entirety in two days; some had yet to crack open the cover. We were from Arizona and Zimbabwe, rural and "urban" North Dakota. We were full-time employees and students and volunteers, part-time writers and dancers and yogis. We shared our own stories and learned more about each other's as we talked about this single story and all that it brought up -- race and gender and love and privilege. One book, one evening, and one club that (I hope) will shift and grow and share more books and more evenings and more stories; a One Book Book Club.
I still have each book I read during English 160. They sit ear-marked and underlined on my bookshelf, next to an ear-marked and underlined Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, reminding me of the danger of a single story (and how whims and 20-minuted TEDTalks and energetic, kind, and open professors can make your own story much more interesting and full circle-y). Now, every book that is a part of the Portland edition of One Book Book Club will, in some small way, be part of that semester -- and will be a part of my story too.