The author is the founder of Vive la allée and content director of the Group of Fifty. He also collaborates in washington post.
Do you remember the first teen party you attended? Is it a good memory? Maybe it was a little dodgy, probably in an apartment emptied for the occasion of its usual inhabitants or in a damp basement somewhere with a bunch of guys and girls you didn’t all know? I also imagine that no one really knew how to behave?
It’s true that it’s a difficult period, the beginning of adolescence: you have to learn to socialize in a whole new way, you have to manage totally new feelings, and all this in a body that you barely recognize. . I remember this period as being rather nightmarish. And that’s why I was so intrigued when my 11-year-old daughter came home with an invitation to a teens’ night out at the library. Of all the possible places, they had chosen a library?
No adults allowed, the flyer said, which made me raise an eyebrow. It also said a lot of other weird things to imagine in a temple of books: DJs and dancers, arcade games, sumo fights (!), foot pool, minigolf, temporary tattoos. It was unlike any teenage party I had attended when I was his age. My daughter left with some friends, and I was told to pick her up at the end, at the unthinkable hour of… 9 p.m.!
When I arrived, it seemed to me that all of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie was piled up on the stairs of the Marc-Favreau library. Dozens of parents craned their necks to take a look at a library which, oddly, we weren’t allowed to enter. Shadows of children ran up the second floor, the boom-boom-boom of dance music sounded. Around me, many puzzled faces.
“They’re setting fires, aren’t they?” suggested my friend Caroline, whose child went to daycare with mine, when I met her. “Really,” I replied. She had a big smile, just like my friend Anne-Frédérique whom I met a little later. Gabriela, on the other hand, looked a bit more concerned. She’s from Venezuela, like me, and the idea of throwing a big party in a library seemed as strange to her as it did to me.
Soon I began to understand that there was a pattern here: all the immigrant parents seemed… I don’t mean “horrified”, but certainly worried, while all the parents born here treated this matter as the most more normal in the world. “Ah yeah, big party, library…it’s normal, you know. »
When the girls came out, they were super excited. They were shouting, clapping hands, showing each other their temporary tattoos. They had danced like crazy and loved every minute of their party. All the kids who came out of this party seemed to have discovered a new side of themselves. The square was crowded with young people in ecstasy.
When I later asked Rémy Marcotte, section head at the Marc-Favreau library, how they had thought of organizing all that, he replied that various libraries in Montreal had started holding these teen evenings in 2009, but that the practice had been interrupted due to the pandemic. The problem, according to Mr. Marcotte, is that “often, at this age, teenagers come to the library a little less. It’s as if the library were less coolor they have other interests”.
The idea is that young people continue to find something that still speaks to them at the library, continues Mr. Marcotte. “We, what we are looking for is that if a young person can feel comfortable here at a moment in his life, which can be destabilizing, if he can feel good, find refuge in the library , it’s better this way. »
Remembering my first teenage parties, otherwise shady and traumatic, I left there smiling. This difficult time in the lives of our young people, the librarians of Montreal have found a way to make it fun, safe, welcoming and exciting for all. They succeeded in creating links between the neighborhood and its library in an absolutely captivating way.
Then I remembered that my friend Anne-Frédérique Champoux is a librarian herself, so I called her to ask her how she found all this. Like me, she was impressed by the success of the party. And then she reminded me of a phrase from library scientist R. David Lankes learned in his professional practice: “Bad libraries build collections, good libraries provide services, great libraries build communities.” »
We Montrealers are really lucky to have such large libraries.