Connecting the right book with the right reader at the right time

Interviews with Authors: The librarian’s guide to bibliotherapy

Bibliotherapy is typically defined as utilizing guided reading for therapeutic means. Because librarians have access to a wide range of reading material, they can use their expertise to guide patrons toward resources that help support their personal well being. And though a library worker might not be a licensed mental health professional, they can—and do, even without knowing it—support mental health and personal growth by connecting patrons to books that heal. In their new book, “The Librarian’s Guide to Bibliotherapy,” authors Judit H. Ward and Nicholas A. Allred aim to enlighten readers on how to foster healing and connection within their libraries and the wider community. The book pulls from their shared experience with “Reading for Recovery,” (their own Carnegie-Whitney grant-funded project at the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies Library), a resource designed to assist librarians, counselors, or really anyone interested in a guided reading program to assist in addiction treatment.

And both authors bring years of related expertise from other prior work to offer a thoughtful, thoroughly researched guide to using bibliotherapy. Ward is the author or co-author of over 150 articles and seven books and has presented her research and practice related to guided reading from the librarian’s perspective both nationally and internationally. In her current role as Science Librarian at Rutgers, she provides reference, library instruction, and outreach programs, and promotes reading for mental health and wellness. She developed the “Reading for Recovery” project while in her previous position as the Director of Information Services at the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies. Allred is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. His scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and the edited collection “Scholarly Milton.” While at Rutgers, he collaborated extensively with the Center of Alcohol Studies and Rutgers University Libraries on bibliotherapy-inspired projects and initiatives, including “Reading for Recovery.”

---

BLD: First, I see the book gives a brief history of bibliotherapy. Can you give us a condensed version here? What exactly is bibliotherapy? What are its origins? How long has it been around? 

JHW: Interpreting the concept of bibliotherapy and looking back on its history would require writing two more books! Based on our experience with bibliotherapy, we opted for a working definition for librarians: “the use of books from a list created under the guidance of a subject expert to address a therapeutic need or boost wellness in any active or passive way.” In the book, we describe the library as an “intellectual pharmacy where librarians, as accidental bibliotherapists, dispense reading material from curated lists based on the library’s holdings and create guided reading programs to serve the community.”

NA: As for the history, therapeutic reading has been around for longer than one would think! The vignettes we selected from its long history range from Aristotle to today, reflecting changes in both literary history and the history of mental health.

Catharsis, as we know from Aristotle’s Poetics, is the processing of emotions through art (from Greek: “purgation” or “purification”). For Aristotle, this was part of the spectator’s reaction to tragedy on stage; but the concept has become part of our vocabulary ever since to describe the therapeutic effects of artworks across genres and media. For those who are interested, we write about some of this history in our chapter on the origins of bibliotherapy.

As for the word bibliotherapy itself, that’s a pretty funny story! The first known use of the word is in an article from 1916, not completely free from irony, entitled “A Literary Clinic” and written by Samuel McChord Crothers in The Atlantic Monthly. His conversation partner, Dr. Bagster, uses a pharmaceutical metaphor: “the reading as a cocktail of treatments, wrapped in a sugarcoating of literary pleasure.” However seriously that metaphor was intended, it effectively predicted the rise of prescribed reading over the course of the century-plus that followed.

BLD: How long have both of you been involved with bibliotherapy? What made you decide to partner on the topic for this book?

JHW: The Center of Alcohol Studies (CAS) Library that I was running from 2007 through its closure in 2016 started to offer book recommendations around 2008 as part of our reader’s advisory program. We tried to help the CAS Treatment Division operating next door to the library on the same floor, as well as the addiction counselors of the Center’s Education and Training Programs. We compiled lists of books in our collection, such as memoirs, biographies, classics, poetry, self-help, and nonfiction, that could be shared as an ancillary therapy for people grappling with addiction as well as their friends and family get us started.

The turning point came in 2014 when I was the recipient of the prestigious Carnegie-Whitney award from the American Library Association to develop Reading for Recovery (R4R) in 2015-16, a tool to achieve the same purpose, geared toward patrons, librarians, and addiction counselors. Bill Bejarano and Maria Ortiz-Myers, who worked on this original iteration of our bibliotherapy-focused project, both contributed to the book in the “Ask the Expert” section.

NA: I started to work at the alcohol library around the same time––I had just started my PhD, working on the literary significance of alcohol and addiction in eighteenth-century British literature, and was thrilled to find a science and medical library that, under Judit’s leadership, was interested in these interdisciplinary connections. After a hiatus of a couple of years, the two of us had an opportunity to expand the project into non-addiction-related topics by launching the Books We Read umbrella project in Chang Science Library on Rutgers’ Cook campus. The Covid lockdown found us in the perfect position to provide bibliotherapy-inspired programming for students of the summer session in New Brunswick. The project, called Summer Tales, was a very successful initiative involving multiple partners and participants from all walks of life.

Drawing upon all these experiences, it felt natural to share everything we learned by doing with fellow librarians. As we mention in the book, when we needed it the most, we found that there was no book to use at any step of the above process. We simply followed Toni Morrison’s advice, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

BLD: How did your personal experiences with bibliotherapy factor into the content? 

JHW: To begin with, we are avid readers and runners too! On our long runs, we often discussed texts and interpretations over the years. Running definitely gets those creative juices flowing!

Professionally speaking, I had some great opportunities too. One was the SALIS Conference in Denver, Colorado, where Bill and I had the chance to field test some of our tools with fellow substance abuse librarians. We ran a moving session reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sleeping and waking, using a version of the Discussion Guide Nick developed (we share the template in the book) with a series of eight posters related to bibliotherapy as the backdrop. Each member of the original Reading for Recovery team, including members from overseas, contributed with a poster, meant to inspire librarians to experiment with bibliotherapy.

I mentioned overseas participants. I was also fortunate to work with some of our Hungarian colleagues with formal training in bibliotherapy, as my native Hungary offers this type of training for librarians, teachers, social workers, and more. Sharing our resources and experiences with them, I learned a great deal about the potentials of bibliotherapy, and how they can be adapted to our purposes, as we are not licensed therapists, but librarians offering bibliotherapy-inspired programs, resources, and approaches. I also wrote and published two bibliotherapy readers in Hungarian turning my own short stories into discussion topics, which taught me a lot about texts and the reader from the author’s perspective.

BLD: The book is organized into four main sections, as well as an epilogue and appendices with sample templates. How/why did you decide on this format?

 NA: This is a question that reminds us to give a shoutout and lots of credit to our developing editor, Jamie Santoro, who encouraged, supported, and cheered us on throughout the whole process in her especially inspirational style. When we submitted the book proposal to ALA Editions, where our book was published, we didn’t realize that the final product would be quite different from what we planned to do––as we delved into the content, the format had to change to match. From the very beginning, one of our key goals was to share as much as possible from our positive and negative experiences with bibliotherapy. We wanted to encourage librarians in a friendly, collegial, respectful way to experiment with programming, build on their existing skill sets and resources, and avoid rabbit holes. That includes some labor-saving shortcuts that had worked for us, such as templates and checklists. With Jamie’s help, what emerged during the writing process were more explicit sections of coaching where we leveraged our expertise to advise readers on how to envision and run a program, and we had a lot of conversations about how to offer that advice without sounding condescending or preachy, which we were determined to avoid.

BLD: Were some topics and concepts more difficult to describe than others? If so, why?

JHW: Although not full-blown therapeutics, our bibliotherapy-inspired approach still touches upon a lot of therapy-related topics. As we are not licensed psychotherapists, anything along those lines needed our special attention, especially in terms of using that ever-changing language in the field. We like to believe that being familiar with the addiction field helped us avoid major pitfalls. The other challenge was addressing our largest potential audience: public librarians. Although we both have extensive backgrounds in literature, which includes countless hours of teaching, as well as discussing, moreover, dissecting, books, short stories, poetry, and other types of text, reader’s advisory in a public library setting is outside our comfort zone. Again, our fantastic developing editor came to the rescue and connected us with experts in this particular field. Kudos also to Molly Stewart, a former R4R founding member and librarian, first at CAS, then in a public library, who taught us a lot about public libraries during the original R4R project.

BLD: I’m curious to learn more about bibliotherapy by discipline. Can you explain how the library field is different from others in terms of approach to bibliotherapy?

NA: This is a great question as the process of deciphering differences and similarities in various disciplines was quite eye-opening for us. We both come from a literature background rather than psychology or psychiatry, but we worked enough with addiction counselors and other therapists at the Center of Alcohol Studies to discover that similarities would probably outweigh the differences. For example, discussing a poem that is relevant to a particular age group, such as teaching English literature to college students, will often involve some approaches that resemble or resonate with bibliotherapy: readers always come to texts in the context of their own lives, and in my classroom I’ve found that getting students to connect with a piece is a great first step in helping them to understand it. Bibliotherapy can even offer lessons for the classroom: how to bring personal experience to bear in a constructive way, how to approach sensitive and difficult topics respectfully, and how to get students to see the value of studying and talking about literature for their own lives.

Without specialized training, direct therapy is out of the question in libraries, but we believe that librarians as well as teachers and professors can creatively incorporate the principles of bibliotherapy in their guided reading programs. That can mean anything from personal reflection assignments in the classroom (as I’ve occasionally incorporated) to a visual art component, as our colleague Megan Lotts practices with Urban Sketching and graciously described for us in the book.

JHW: This site, Books We Read, seemingly has nothing to do with bibliotherapy, right? Well, if anyone starts reading our very posts, often quite personal and touching, with tons of book recommendations from the Rutgers collection at hand, what is it if not recommending reading lists curated by librarians to connect our users with books? Per definition: bibliotherapy. Our students benefit tremendously from these posts, whether they are reading for fun, which enhances general well-being, or realize that Rutgers Libraries will probably have more authoritative resources on the problem they are struggling with than the Internet.

BLD: What do you think is the most difficult hurdle for a library to start a bibliotherapy program?

JHW: You mean other than funding? Bibliotherapy can only be conducted by a properly licensed therapist. I don’t think many libraries can afford to hire one. But it doesn’t mean that a librarian aiming to broaden the library’s offerings to promote self-help and wellness shouldn’t experiment with one or more forms of bibliotherapy-inspired programs. There are so many options, both passive––such as thematic book displays and recommendations, LibGuides specialized on a genre or topic, thematic anthologies, blogs, and social media posts––and active, such as bibliotherapy-focused book clubs, reader’s advisory, readouts, author talks, online book discussions, and more, for example during Banned Books Week.

The fact is, most librarians, whether they admit it or not, are halfway there! They have the skill set, they have the resources, they have the audiences, and most importantly, they also have the interests and often the buy-in from their communities. It’s in everyone’s best interest to improve their wellness in general. Librarians excel in engaging their patrons in multiple ways. We also have anecdotal evidence that librarians do get inspired a lot by other librarians. Unless sidelined by leadership, librarians tend to be innovative and love to experiment. Librarians love anything that resonates with them as individuals, whether it’s a book club for non-native speakers of English or a large event with a bibliotherapy focus open to anyone in the community.

BLD: What is the biggest takeaway you’d like to convey to the readers of The Librarian’s Guide to Bibliotherapy? 

NA: As we claim in the book, we would like it to transform librarians from an “accidental bibliotherapist” into an intentional bibliotherapy-informed librarian. We believe that learning more about bibliotherapy provides a new perspective for librarians on the work they already do and empowers them to do that work more intentionally.

JHW: I would also add that we would like our colleagues not to underestimate or overestimate bibliotherapy-inspired programming. It is not the panacea for every little ailment, nagging complaint, or frustration, as some of the funny books promise. Also, the librarian should not feel discouraged if the discussion doesn’t go as planned. However, launching a program with an open mind and considering the community outreach aspect as one of the most important factors, a bibliotherapy focus can do miracles in promoting library resources very casually, whether through book displays or blogging. It gives the librarian another chance to curate resources that will be very useful for the reader. Our motto in the book is “connecting the right book with the right reader at the right time.”

BLD: Co-authoring a book requires synergy, time management, and mutual concessions. Any tips or advice on your style, process, decision-making, etc?

JHW: In my blog posts earlier I mentioned the gains from intergenerational friendship, as an opportunity to read books and authors not on your radar, such as Colson Whitehead, recommended to me by Nick several years ago. Sharing lots of experiences, and I don’t mean only similar backgrounds or education, also helped us come up with a collaboration method that worked for both of us. Before writing this book, we co-authored several scholarly articles, posters, and webpage content. You name it, we did it. The decision-making process was rather simple: we both have our strengths and weaknesses (and we are not afraid to admit them), our backgrounds entitle us to claim expertise in one area or another, and neither of us gets territorial in the murky waters.

As for writing style, we believe we were able to come up with a rather coherent language. So coherent that sometimes even we can’t tell who wrote a particular sentence! With lots of editing after the first draft, which included Jamie’s recommendations, we used the Comments function of Word very liberally! The stories hiding in those threads show that it was fun to work together. Nick’s creativity and amazing editing skills cranked up the book to 11! We both like writing, and that helped a lot.

NA: Working with Judit has been wonderful: she’s someone with an extremely broad disciplinary range and perspective (an ideal librarian in that way!) and a real commitment to funneling credit and opportunities to the people working with her. The hardest part in writing this book was never the collaboration, it was simply the time management: after the proposal had been accepted I had to defend my PhD and then start a new job with a long commute and a much larger teaching load than I ever had before. On Judit’s end there were a number of projects to juggle, including another book and the digital alcohol archives (a culmination of the CAS Library’s legacy) along with the day-to-day operations of Rutgers’ Chang Science Library. Communication was crucial during the actual writing process, which took place in large chunks including vacation time. Without our well-established collaboration, including the five Ask the expert contributors (William Bejarano, Megan Lotts, Maria Ortiz-Myers, David Tate, and Viktória Tóth), it couldn’t have happened the way it happened––that is, we met every single deadline, and the book was published as scheduled, without compromises and major sacrifices.

BLD: What’s next for you both – any sequels to this book in the works, or other books in progress?

JHW-NA: We were happy to see that our book generated a lot of interest in the librarians’ community and beyond. We received several invitations from diverse groups for speech engagements, but unfortunately, it’s more and more difficult to fulfill those requests. Nick has a full-time teaching position now and Judit’s focus is on the alcohol studies archive collection, still tying up loose ends after the Center was closed in 2016. We do have some other projects in the pipeline that we are working on together, but none of them are related to bibliotherapy. I doubt any of them would end up as a new book contract for the two of us.

We are not abandoning bibliotherapy! Here is our Books We Read, for one. I (Judit) also hope to continue writing my Hungarian short stories for bibliotherapy purposes. My colleagues over there [in Hungary] have amazing activities related to bibliotherapy in libraries and beyond and I’m proud to be part of it. I’m sure Nick will continue incorporating bibliotherapy into his teaching as he discussed in the book.

---

Available from Rutgers University Libraries