MIDWAY THROUGH THE INTERVIEW, Priya Charry, Adult Services Librarian at the downtown Bremerton branch of the Kitsap Regional Library, flips the script and asks if I have any recommendations on books or music for her.
My mind goes blank. I freeze up.
“I know right,” Priya laughs. “Whenever someone asks you that, it’s like ‘What is music? I’ve never even heard a song before.’”
After an awkward pause, I recommend a Canadian band that I’d seen recently in Victoria and tell her that I’m halfway through David Sedaris’ ‘A Carnival Of Snackery’ though not sure yet if I would recommend it. She’d been listening to the audio book ‘The Exiled Fleet’ by J.S. Dewes, a hardcore space opera. It was something she says she didn’t think she would be into at first, but it came as a recommendation for fans of the Mass Effect video games which she had just finished playing. Now she is deep into that world. She’s even thinking about getting back into studying physics.
Her favorite part of her job as librarian is hearing what other people are learning, or reading, or listening to. “Because,” she says, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
I always seem to get nervous when I talk to librarians. I don’t know if it’s that I’m worried I’ve got an overdue fine from that book I might’ve lost when I was a kid. Or maybe it’s a misplaced aversion to authority or misapplying some association I’d had with a less-than-pleasant teacher from the past. Maybe there was some traumatic incident of being shushed at some point in my life.
“I think the stereotype of library staff as being stuffy or inflexible is an extremely dated stereotype,” Priya puts my anxiety in check as we sit down for coffee.
“Extremely dated,” she emphasizes. “It tends to skew heavily white female, but the overall trajectory is that it’s a very inclusive space of folks that like to help other folks learn stuff at its very core.”
Beginning with the inception of the publicly-funded institution in America, the profession of librarian has, indeed, long been heavily white female with a current average median age of 47.
Priya just recently turned 30 and is already something of a Librarian Extraordinaire.
She has worked in libraries on both coasts and in multiple arenas — school, public, archival, music and academic libraries including the Harvard Botany Libraries. She comes from a multiracial heritage, grew up on the East Coast, went to college in New York, grad school in Boston and spent nearly a year working for a non-profit that supports visual artists with disabilities in underserved communities in India before landing in Bremerton.
A few years back, while she was working at Boston Public Library in her 20’s, she was featured as part of an article in a national publication about millennials being drawn to the library — both as a career and as a free public space — in an era when many may think of the institution becoming obsolete in the digital age.
She completed her Masters of Library and Information Sciences in 2016. She’s worked with Kitsap Regional Library for the past four years.
“I like in libraries how your learning journey for the day is whatever the person in front of you brings to you,” Priya describes a day-in-the-life in her current role. “So I get to learn about a lot of really neat, really random (to me) stuff, which keeps it interesting. Even if it’s not a hard research question, sometimes, it’s ‘I need to figure out how to send an email to my grandkid, how do I do that?’ It’s nice because it gets you out of your head. It’s like: ‘Alright, I’m in this person’s shoes. What do I know? What do I not know? And what do I have the capacity to handle today?’”
I first met Priya on the other end of that sentiment when we were doing some research on the history of a local building last year. I’d stopped into the downtown Bremerton branch of KRL, and my question was passed on to her. Her pointers helped lead us to tracing that building’s roots back to the 1930s as one of Bremerton’s first movie theaters.
Speaking of local buildings built in the 1930s, we could do this entire story on the downtown Bremerton library where that research was taking place.
Originally funded by the Works Progress Administration, built in 1938 and the original headquarters of KRL until 1978, Priya said the downtown library’s building itself was the “dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s” that led her to sign up for this job when she and her partner aimed for the northwest and moved here in 2018.
“I love our building, it is fantastic,” she said of the structure, known as the ‘downtown branch,’ the ‘MLK branch,’ or the ‘big yellow library.’ “It’s this beautiful Art Deco style inside and out. And it’s been a library this entire time so we have photos of the branch that were passed down from librarians prior of what it looked like through different iterations. Very austere. It used to have hardwood floors and tile and had that reading room vibe that you see in some larger public libraries… Overall the building itself has stayed the same which I think is a fantastic testament to older architecture and also the figure that it cuts downtown literally and metaphorically. It’s nice to have a landmark that’s known for a thing.”
Beyond that landmark, beyond looking into local history and helping to problem solve and pass on general research skills to the general public that walks through the library doors, outreach outside of the library building is also a big part of Priya’s work. She’s been a member of more organizations and non-profits than we can list here, including current roles as a trustee of the Kitsap History Museum Board and secretary of the Kitsap Housing and Homelessness Coalition.
Last year, she was part of a trio of librarians with ties to Kitsap who presented at the Public Library Association’s national conference about how to have conversations about racial justice within the library’s footprint and her work specifically in creating Anti-Racism Learning Circle discussion groups which she led from 2020-2022.
“The limit of library services,” Priya says, “Is that we have a building and services are typically designed for those who come into the building. But not everyone can do that. So we try to really be proactive about getting out into the community. I like to do a lot of outreach by going to community meetings, meeting people like you, setting up a table at events, or just getting in touch with people who are doing cool things.”
Last summer, doing cool things as a bit of personal outreach, Priya was preparing for her first STP marathon bike ride, an annual 200-plus-mile ride from Seattle to Portland. In training, she had planned a 60-some-mile route with nine stops around the peninsula — one at each branch of the Kitsap Regional Library.
She termed it ‘Tour de KRL.’
She started at the Manchester branch, rode as far north as Little Boston and finished the route on Bainbridge.
“The county is absolutely beautiful,” she said of the ride. “It was a really cool way to see it. I mean, that stretch between Poulsbo and Little Boston, stunning. The shoulder of the road was tiny and it was a bit harrowing but absolutely beautiful. I got a late start at Manchester and did not bike through Gorst because it is terrifying. So I took a ferry to downtown Bremerton and went from there…”
She said she’d love to try it again someday with a slightly different route. And I feel like there might be potential there for another community outreach project to add to her resume in the future.
Each branch of the Kitsap Regional Library is home to its own list of monthly events and outreach ranging from book groups and writing groups to game nights and movie nights, arts and crafts, activities for kids, discussion groups,, workshops, story walks, mobile medical clinics and more.
The library is launching a new website experience this month where you can find events and happenings–“as well as all sorts of ways to help you discover your next favorite read,” Priya adds–at http://www.krl.org.
Next month, they will kick off the annual Summer Learning Program (June through August) which is fairly well known as an equal opportunity reading and learning resource for school-age children and teens but is also, for adults, a platform to participate in and be rewarded for self-selected learning activities. It’s open to all ages, no sign-up or library card needed.
“What are you trying to learn this summer?” Priya asks. “Let us recommend some stuff…” // BILLMAN
Find more library stuff at http://www.krl.org
