Allan Appel photo
Author Winsome Bingham, at Possible Futures-hosted reading.
Over the course of just three days, the following all unfolded on the modest corner of Hotchkiss Street and Edgewood Avenue: A regular monthly meeting of a major local nonprofit; a happy hour for exhausted educators; three authors’ readings, and a two-hour-long neighbors’ knitting circle smack dab among the displays, plants, comfy couches, and shelf after shelf of shiny, new, colorful volumes.
Is that any way to operate a book store?
It not only is, it also is a key measure of success if your store is Lauren Anderson’s – and her community’s – Possible Futures, a cozy, living-room style book emporium and unique community-building meeting space that is marking its first anniversary at 318 Edgewood Aev. All of the above-described events, and more, took place between Thursday and Saturday last week.
“It’s a miracle to make an independent book store work in 2023,” Anderson said Saturday as she greeted guests, executed credit card transactions, offered a plate of white chocolate cookies, and readied the morning event, a reading of Winsome Bingham’s new kids’ book, The Walk, by the author herself.
Winsome’s previous book, Soul Food Sunday, was a New York TImes Best Books of the Year-award winner.
As the theme of the new book, now in its third printing, is the importance of voting, and how a little girl learns from her grandparents how the African-American community, based on Bingham’s own childhood in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, often turns that citizens’ obligation into a joyous community event, Anderson was also tying ribbons on stacks of that volume to be presented, after the reading, to every single public library and elementary school in New Haven and Hamden.
As Bingham reads, Gabriela Diaz followed along
Make that about 60 books! That’s a very good morning both for a small community bookstore, the community, and the future of local democracy.
The donors of the books – representatives of the local chapters of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters – were also among Bingham’s avid listeners.
The arrangement came about through what Anderson termed “a swirl of generosity,” which was also a reflection of her vision of the store in action and her whirlwind and very considerable organizing skills.
“We call it a ‘book space’ intentionally,” said Anderson, who has a deep background as a teacher and teacher trainer, at U.C.L.A. and Connecticut College, among others, and she currently also serves as president of the New Haven Free Public Library Board.
“People want a place to go, to do things that are important to them, to gather,” and to feel reflected in the books on the shelves.
“What’s here are primarily books by authors from groups who have been historically under-represented in publishing and on public shelves [schools, libraries, bookstores]: Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Queer, and Bilingual people,” she said.
Anderson (left) with New Haven Federation of Teachers organizer Meagan Fountain
There’s also what Anderson termed an “intentional curation” reflecting people in the neighborhood, where she has been living for the past 12 years. (And that’s also important, she said, for a white person like herself to have street cred enough to operate such a store.)
As the neighborhood includes, Anderson went on, a growing number of refugees, so there are lots of books on that theme too, on migration, labor, and housing, and the store partners, as reflected in the NAACP/League of Women Voters’ event, with other nonprofits that work to advance these issues.
So while it is a miracle to make an indy bookstore work these days, it is, as Anderson continued multi-tasking and graciously chatting with a reporter, “also not a miracle. We’re very busy, not in [from out of the area] foot traffic,” as Edgewood is a decidedly non-commercial but residential corridor, “but in [local] groups meeting.”
“And they often request and propose their own events,” as local community gardening activist (and former Whalley/Beaver Hills Community Management Team chair), Nadine Horton, was the mover-and-shaker behind the newly formed knitting group.
“The events are really helpful. They bring people to a place that is off a commercial strip,” Anderson said. “People come and tend to come back and that balances out the non-high traffic area. We’re mostly driven by local people and their contacts”
And also very much by reader-centered events and what readers want, especially young readers. Case in point: the children of Jenny Heikkila Diaz, ten-year-old Magdalena and seven-year-old Gabriela.
“Except for paying bills, I spend all my money here,” said Diaz as her daughters cuddled with her on the comfortable white sofa facing the Edgewood side of the store, and Magdalena read from Winsome Bingham’s The Walk – and continued reading the book, following the author, intently, word-for-word as she read.
Earlier this year, Diaz reported, when the girls became interested in the work of prolific YA author Debbi Michiko Florence (Just Be Cool, Jenna Sakai), Anderson arranged for Florence to give a reading at Possible Futures. Anderson attended to the preparation and details, but guess who interviewed the author? Magdalena and Gabriela.
Anderson and Bingham surrounded by Hamden School Superintendent Gary Highsmith and NAACP chapter chair Dorie Dumas
“I plan meetings here, I meet people, I meet new people. Lauren brings people together,” Diaz added. “She doesn’t center herself. Yet she’s indispensable to the centering of others.”
Anderson estimates often two formal events a week are occurring, sometimes two a day.
And during the store’s first year Anderson guesstimates more than 50 events unfolded in the charming, well-lit, living room style space, frequently overflowing both with kids and, to use a favorite Anderson term, “book joy.”
Motioning to the many plants (largely donated and cared for my patrons — “I have no green thumb!” —) and an equal number of word-filled inspirational posters decorating the store walls (James Baldwin, Amanda Gorman, Malcolm X), Anderson declared, “Things grow here.”
Have we mentioned the “Book Joy Fund”?
That’s another initiative at the store.
It came about, Anderson recalled, in the early weeks of Possible Futures being open when Babs Rawls-Ivy (a WNHH radio show host and editor of Inner City News) was there and overheard a young family discussing among themselves how they wanted to buy several books on the shelves but couldn’t afford to do so.
“I’d like to buy books for you today,” Anderson recalled Rawls-Ivy offering, and thus the fund was formed.
To learn more about The Book Joy Fund or the half dozen reading group/book clubs that meet regularly there – from, for example, on the first Thursday of every month, “Short Rad Reads,” that is, slim volumes for busy activists, to the fourth Thursday of every month’s “Steamy Futures,” love and romance lit, — the best place to visit, if not the inviting book space itself, is the site.
See below for other recent articles about small businesses on Edgewood Avenue:
• The Corner Store Re-Imagined, On Edgewood
• Black Corner Students Study For Financial Freedom
• “A Hustler’s Vibe” Comes To Dwight
• BLOOM Blossoms In Buy-Local Holiday Spotlight