The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a partnership between young readers in Homewood, Illinois, and Homewood, Alabama.
The village of Homewood already has a sister-city agreement with Homewood, Alabama, but the libraries’ partnership for the Cookies & Comics program was born from online confusion.
“We get their calls a lot,” and vice versa said Kelly Campos, youth programming librarian at the Homewood Public Library. A Google search doesn’t necessarily distinguish one library’s page from the other.
Cookies & Comics was first organized at the Homewood, Illinois, library about a year ago. Campos said she knew the program would draw an audience because the library’s collection of the comics has high circulation numbers. Raina Telgemeier and Jonathan King are a few of the favorite authors.
“Some adults look down on graphic novels saying they’re not real books, but they absolutely are and many graphic novels have a higher word content, a higher vocabulary than traditional novels,” Campos explained. “They’re just packaged differently, and they speak to kids in that visual genre, as well as the literary language, which is so important in today’s world.
“It’s just how kids think with emojis and movies and video games and TV. And, everything is visual as well as text, and graphic novels just really speak to that.”
“Pre-COVID, I had a platter of cookies and we’d talk about the graphic novel we read and eat cookies,” Campos said of the monthly Thursday evening discussions. “We read comics for all ages, and we’d have kids with their parents, single adults. It was a big mix of ages and interests and all different kinds of comics.”
With COVID restrictions, Campos decided Zoom would be the best way to keep the program going. But, what about the cookies?
“At first, no cookies, and that disappointed me because that’s the whole point of Cookies & Comics,” she said. Campos asked participants to register and worked with Walt’s Foods to make individual packets of cookies for each participant to pick up.
Then the program took an unexpected turn.
Campos sent a reminder note for a recent meeting and realized she had two names on the list she didn’t recognize. Turns out they were sisters in Homewood, Alabama, responding to her note about picking up the cookies. They said they’d make their own cookies.
“If kids email me that they’re so excited to come and they’ll make their own cookies so they could still come, then I’m going to do everything I can to get them on the same page as everyone else,” Campos said.
She found a bakery a few blocks from the Homewood, Alabama, library that agreed to package cookies for the sisters so they could participate like their counterparts in Homewood-North.
“It worked out perfectly and they came and it was a blast and we had a great discussion. After that, I was like this is going to keep happening,” so Campos called the youth librarian in Alabama and the partnership was born.
“They take care of the cookies and registration on their end, and I’m doing the same,” she said. Rather than reading one select book, the group is working off of themes with a collaborative book list online. This month’s theme is families.
Campos said another plus to Zoom discussions is that it draws in the authors, who otherwise couldn’t make a trip to Illinois or Alabama for a book club meeting.
Right now, there are about 14 participants on Zoom, but Campos said sometimes there are two or three participants per Zoom connection which is limiting discussion. She wants to keep the long-distance participation going, but it likely will move to being a local Cookies & Comics meeting one month and Zoom for north-south discussion the next month.
“We definitely will continue the partnership in some way,” Campos said.