While self-publishing online is all the rage these days, a grassroots project in Richmond, Va. has taken a different spin on self-publishing by creating a library of 1,000 books that will be filled with the stories of local residents. The People’s Library, started by Virginia Commonwealth University student Mark Strandquist, is a collaborative art project designed to allow people to write down their personal stories to be saved for generations to come.
Strandquist, who was inspired while creating a public, interactive monument for the Art Museum of the Americas, decided to involve the entire Richmond community in his project and enlisted the help of the main branch of the Richmond Public Library. At workshops around the city, Strandquist and his collaborators are helping residents take the pages out of discarded books donated by the Richmond library, re-pulp the pages into 5,000 new sheets of paper and bind 1,000 new books together. The books will be housed in a new bookshelf that volunteers are also creating, according to Strandquist.
“You would check it out just like a regular library book, take it home, write in your history according to a couple prompts, check it back in and then it becomes part of the permanent collection of the main branch of the Richmond Library,” Strandquist told Page Views.
Strandquist said he wanted to create a new kind of monument, especially in Richmond, a city with a contested history.
“We were really interested in seeing what would happen when we created a new kind of monument,” Strandquist said. “A monument not built out of stone but an evolving, tangible, interactive, collective and sustainable monument to all our histories, regardless of race, class and identity.”
Courtney Bowles, Strandquist’s fellow student at VCU and a collaborator on the project, said they wanted to give residents a chance to create their own histories, especially in the “capital of the South.”
“We have Monument Avenue, which is lined with enormous monuments to Civil War heroes and they’re all white men,” Bowles told Page Views. “And something that’s overlooked is it’s the largest place that humans were shipped out of, it was part of the slave trade and no one wants to deal with that.”
Both Strandquist and Bowles emphasized the importance of allowing everyone to tell their own personal story.
“We’re all prone to investing and viewing histories with significance,” Bowles said. “But that’s based on who has the power and the wealth to make them significant, so we’re trying to break that down and say everyone’s history is important.”
This summer, the project will begin hosting creative writing workshops throughout the city. Strandquist said residents will also have the opportunity to make paper and bind books at these workshops.
“They’re writing in a book someone else built and they’re making books that somebody after them will author,” Strandquist said. “So it becomes this residual project where people are facilitating the histories of others that have done the same for them.”
The project, which was made possible through a VCU undergraduate research grant, has also received national recognition. Strandquist and his collaborators will present the People’s Library this spring at the Open Engagement Conference in Portland, Ore. and the team also plans to work with the Martin Luther King Library in Washington D.C. this summer.
“The idea would hopefully be that we would be able to do this anywhere in the country or around the world that was interested in partnering with the project,” Strandquist said.
Strandquist also hopes to eventually digitize the books so they can be viewed online. However, he stressed that this is not an Internet-based project.
“I think there are a lot of interactive public art projects that are Internet-based,” Strandquist said. “We were interested in ways where it’s very tactile, its very inter-relational, where at every workshop people are engaging with each other.”
Both Strandquist and Bowles said that so far, the project has been a success. With the world changing so fast and people becoming more detached from their past, Bowles said she thinks it is important that people take the time to write down their histories.
“Writing is a passive approach and it allows you more time to think about what you want to say,” she said.
Strandquist, who is working with Bowles and fellow VCU student Riley Duncan on the project, said that they were interested in challenging the form and function of public space in an interactive and community-based way. Instead of creating an individual monument, Strandquist said he is helping hundreds of people contribute to a monument.
“I’m instigating public art,” Strandquist said. “I’m instigating an experience that inevitably allows for 1,000 other people to include their histories in the public library.”
(Photo: People’s Library Project)
