“Mrs Pearl was a librarian in the small town of Jones, Michigan.”
“She was the one who tricked me into reading literature, when I was looking for science fiction, and fantasy, blood and thunder.”
“She was a very sweet little old bird of a woman, who I later came to realize had a mind like a steel trap, and ethics and morals that were far in advance of the troglodyte locals.”
“She’s a lovely woman, and I look back on her as one of the great mentors of my early life. Hell, my entire life. Very formative figure, that talked to me as a less experienced person, rather than as a child.”
“She didn’t judge me from a viewpoint of, ‘well, he’s a nine year old/ a ten year old/ an eleven year old’; she judged me as– anybody getting his ass beat on a regular basis and has witnessed the things that he’s witnessed can probably handle the concept in literature, and that it might be beneficient for him to see how the characters in a literary situation reacted to and handled those same exact situations. Violence within a family, physical abuse, sexual abuse, things of that nature. And it did. It did. It allowed me to have a sounding board; that I didn’t have to– I didn’t have to look for someone to bear my soul to. I could read about it in a book. And it was a safer place for me, because I had come to a point in my life, where every authority figure I was to trust and depend upon had lied and cheated me– from parents, to siblings, to teachers, to police…”
“It[meeting mrs pearl] did give me someone who didn’t deal from the bottom of the deck.”
“She would always ask me, ‘What do you think? And why do you think that?’ ”
“She deserves– she deserves to be known and passed on, her memories.”
