I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11
Sara ParetskyThere is no frigate like a book and no harbor like a library, where those who love books but can't afford their own complete collections, or those who need a computer, or kids who need a safe place to read after school, or moms with toddlers who want their babies to learn to read, can all come together and share in a great community resource.
Sara ParetskyThese events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.
Sara ParetskyAnd the fury in my community was just staggering. The young priests in the parish were behind the message. The older priests weren't necessarily, but they all followed the orders of the cardinal and read the letter. Every Sunday, 2,000 people came to mass at that parish. The following Sunday, the attendance dropped to 200, and never recovered.
Sara ParetskyOrganizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.
Sara Paretsky