Introduction

Bridget Reistad; Rachel Wexelbaum

Introduction

The act of independent publishing on an open platform is a celebration of the local made available to a global audience. People from around the world as well as a small community can enjoy these books. Such a phenomenon can help strangers get to know one another, shatter stereotypes, and change our perceptions of each other.Let’s face it—people around the world do not understand people who work in libraries very well. If they were to describe a group of people as “creative”, “funny”, “artistic”, “sensual”, or “good with their hands”, librarians would be the last group on Earth they would associate with those terms. And yet so many talented library employees exist behind the scenes.In Fall 2017, two talented librarians–Bridget Reistad and Rachel Wexelbaum–attended a workshop about PressBooks and the Minnesota Library Publishing Project. Both Bridget and Rachel wanted to learn how to make PressBooks so that they could help their faculty and students publish their own works. They decided to put out a call for submissions of creative works—art, poetry, and prose–to all Minnesota library employees, to showcase some of the talent within our profession. The response to the call was impressive, and Bridget and Rachel cobbled together the PressBook, learning so many things about Ebook publishing along the way. While all works in this anthology were produced by library workers, Bridget and Rachel did not require that submissions had to have anything to do with libraries. As a result, they received submissions covering a broad range of subjects and emotions. For this reason, the editors organized the works by genre instead of subject or theme. Bridget and Rachel also felt that it was important to honor our artists, poets, and prose writers in an equitable way, to display their work in a similar manner as exhibits in a museum. The editors did their best to arrange the works so that readers could get a balance of writing and art, and a balanced diet of humor, tragedy, fantasy, and realism. To learn more about our contributors, please visit the Contributor bios at the end of this anthology.The editors and contributors of this book called it a “potluck”, after our Minnesota tradition of coming together as a community and each person bringing a dish to share. Bridget and Rachel hope that our “potluck” has something for everyone.

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Potluck: Creative Works by Minnesota's Library Workers by Bridget Reistad and Rachel Wexelbaum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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