By Susan Jevens

Monroe Public Library

For this month’s column, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kathy Hennessy, the new Executive Director of the Monroe Arts Center, about what books and reading (and writing) mean to her. 

Can you tell us what you’re reading right now?

I’m actually reading two books right now, which is really unusual for me. One is “Little Bets” by Peter Sims, and the other is “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker Palmer. “Let Your Life Speak” is about listening to your inner voice and letting that guide you, as opposed to creating a set of values you force yourself to live by. 

And “Little Bets” is a book I’ve had on my shelf for about a year. It’s about figuring out little, tiny steps that you can take instead of having a huge plan that you gamble on, and accepting failure as part of success. By taking those little bets, you’re able to accept the failures and integrate that understanding into your work and self-plan. It uses a lot of examples — they talk about Google, how Google was actually founded, and Pixar, which started out as a software company.

They’re both really interesting. One’s upstairs in my house and the other is downstairs, so depending on where I am, that’s what I’m reading. 

Is there a particular book that you’ve read in your life that inspires you?

There is. When I was very young, I met a gentleman by the name of Bill Strickland who runs Manchester Bidwell Corporation, a nonprofit organization in Pittsburgh. He’s very charismatic, and, very much from the sidelines, I watched his career grow and blossom. He wrote a book called “Making the Impossible Possible,” which was really life-changing for me. He’s just so inspiring, not only for overcoming the obstacles in his life to achieve his dreams for himself, but to help so many children along the way and create this amazing organization that continues to really affect the lives of so many children and adults. 

Do you tend to gravitate toward non-fiction or do you also like fiction, too?

I do like fiction, and I am a closet sci-fi freak. I will say that I was probably the first person in North America to read the entire Outlander series eight times, because I’m totally obsessed. It’s all about time travel. I’m just so obsessed with time travel, and I just love those books. So, I started reading about Claire Randall, and then when it became a TV series, I was like, “ah, life just doesn’t get any better than this.” And, I was very fortunate last year to be able to go to Scotland. I was on Culloden field, and you know, all that stuff just came back, with reading that level of detail, and knowing the history of what had happened there through those books. I was in awe. 

Did you read a lot when you were younger?

Yes, I always had a book in my hand. I was very fortunate I was always allowed to read whatever I wanted to read. If I could read it, if I could actually understand it and read it, I was allowed to read it. But I have to say that I did settle on Trixie Belden. 

For Christmas, I would get 20 books and that would be my present, and I would just ignore everyone for a month. So, growing up, I just started reading all different kinds of things. I remember reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and thinking “wow.” That was a discovery. 

Have you ever had a book that you were really looking forward to reading and it turned out to be a disappointment?

One was “Follow the River” about Sacajawea. I was thinking, “this is awesome. I love this story of a strong woman.” Then, halfway through, it stops. It was, well, we don’t really know what happened to Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark lost track of her, so we’re going to make the rest of her story up. No, I don’t want to read your made-up story. It should have said on the jacket that half of this is made up. Then I could have maybe gotten over it, but no. Because I was so into it being, “Oh, we can follow in her footsteps…”

If you could be a character in a book, who would you be?

Oh, my gosh, I don’t know. I want to say Claire Randall, because, like, who wouldn’t? She’s very cool. Yeah, I think I’m going to go with Claire.

Do you like to recommend books to people, or do you like to take recommendations from people for books? 

I do both, actually. I’m so excited by “Little Bets” that I sent a note out to the MAC board of directors last week. I’m like, “everybody needs to read this book.” I love being in a book group, too. Because then, you get to read what other people think is a really good read. And I love, when everybody reads the same book, hearing the different perspectives. 

If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take one book, what would that book be?

People usually ask that question, say, what album would you take, right? What three albums would you take? Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t know that I could pick, because I’m such a collector of books. When I moved, oh my gosh, I had so many cartons of books. It was the first thing that I unpacked, because having my books makes me feel comfortable.

Is there any question that we have not asked you, that, like a topic you wanted to bring up, or something you thought about?

I don’t know if you know it, but I actually wrote a book. It’s called “Anything But Silent.” My kids were born without the ability to speak, and so my daughter and I co-wrote a book about the journey that we took for them to find their voices. They both speak now, and are out in the world, doing things on their terms, but when they were little, they couldn’t talk. It took us, to be honest, about 15 years. We just were messing around with it, and then, in 2014, it was actually published. 

I’ve always been a writer, and I’ve always kept journals. And so, for years, I had been writing these essays on what it was like to raise these two kids who couldn’t talk, because I didn’t want to forget. My daughter picked up one in my office and was reading it. It was a farcical story about how we found a Santa Claus who could sign. And she said “well, that’s not how I remember this.” I said, “Why don’t you write your version and we’ll put them together and see what it looks like.” This is the cool thing about this book — all the essays I had written, we turned into chapters, and she wrote a response to each one from her perspective. When we were done, we thought, hmm, there’s something wrong with this. And then it dawned on us that we had talked about my son throughout the entire book, but we hadn’t heard from him, so my son wrote the final chapter. Well, the funny part is, Katy and I, we think of ourselves as artistic, and my son’s an engineer. So, when we sent the book off to the editor, it came back and my chapters had red all over them, and Katy’s chapters were, “take this paragraph out, put it here…” And with Andy’s last chapter, there wasn’t a red mark on it, except to say, “Great work, Andy.” I was like, “Are you kidding me?”

— Cover to Cover is provided by the Monroe Public Library and is published the fourth Wednesday of the month.