#vted Reads with Jason Broughton
Lovely listeners, we have such a treat for you today. Joining us on this episode of the show is Vermont State Librarian Jason Broughton. Now, when I asked him to be on the show, I also invited him to choose the book we'd be discussing, and he chose the wonderful graphic novel 'Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me', by Ellen Forney. And I learned so much, both from the novel, and from Jason Broughton.
A content note for this episode: as the title of Ellen Forney's book suggests, we're going to talk about mental illness. If you're not in a space for that right now, we still love you but want you to take care of yourself, and understand completely.
That said, we had a wonderful conversation, about art, about teaching, creativity, Led Zeppelin, getting to know your parents as an adult, and what, specifically, the Vermont State Librarian gets up to.
And on that note: I'm Jeanie Phillips, and this is VT ed Reads, a podcast by, for and with Vermont educators.
Let's chat.
The 21st Century Classroom · #vted Reads with Jason Broughton, VT State Librarian
Jeanie: Thanks so much for joining me, Jason, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Jason: Hello, my name is Jason Broughton. I am so thrilled to be with you today to talk about a book. And this case is a very interesting book. But about me, per se, I am your State Librarian for Vermont, and Commissioner of the Department of Libraries. And within that, my role is to assist our department, assist the libraries of the State and we act as a State library for State government. We like to call ourselves "the library for libraries".
Jeanie: Well, as a librarian I’m super excited to have you on! I feel like I’m having a celebrity on, so thanks so much for joining us. Do you want to talk a little bit before we jump into this book? Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re reading right now? What’s on your nightstand?
Jason: Oh my goodness. Well, right now, there’s a couple of things. And one of them I’ll probably bring back up.
One of them is a book, can’t think of the author right now [EDITORIAL NOTE: Jenny Lawson] but it’s called Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. And it really is a conversation about a woman talking about the experiences of her father. I haven’t finished it completely because it’s quite amusing.
She brings out her history in which her father was a taxidermist. You have to imagine him, she says, basically, in the middle of the night going out or something hit an animal like roadkill he’s dragging it home. He’s reconstructing it. Once she talked about an example of she was reaching in the refrigerator, and he had put a snake in there so it could die and she was trying to find a sandwich. So, she pulls out this half alive, half frozen snake. It’s a weird thing.
But it’s really a conversation about when people think they know their parents, and they tend to want to say, "Well, you don’t understand: my parents are much worse than yours."
Jeanie: That sounds like a lot of fun, actually!
Jason: It’s a really comical book, yes. It’s really light-hearted and funny. And it just makes you get a sense of: if you think your parents -- which we all do at a certain point in our lives -- don’t understand you as an adolescent. As you age, you’re like, "Wait a minute, my parents had to be teens as well. What am I talking about? They too had these situations!" So, she kind of helps people recalibrate their understanding of their parents a bit when they want to complain. I know my parents were very different, but my father never took on taxidermy to explain things to me, so…
Jeanie: This sounds like a great gift for my son, actually.
Jason: Correct.
Jeanie: You said you were reading something else?
Jason: Yes, I have a book that was recommended because of the visualing images of it; it’s much more sobering. It talks about the transatlantic slave trade,