For this year’s We Are C-VILLE, we asked several Charlottesvillians to write love letters to our city. The writers had the freedom to talk about whatever they wanted, in whatever form they would like. Here are five perspectives penned by David Plunkett, Miller Murray Susen, Richelle Claiborne, Michael Payne, and Edwina Herring.
A vault full of treasures
When I was a child, I was obsessed with the vault holding the rarest materials at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. My father worked at Alderman, and as a child-care measure my older brother and I were given what we thought was free rein over the nooks and crannies of that magnificent building; from the aircraft carrier-style stairways to the majestic quiet of the McGregor room, we explored and caroused. We saw library staff ever so carefully work on delicate materials from that mysterious vault. I didn’t really understand what was in there, but I was reasonably sure that it was treasure.
It turns out that it was! The rarest of materials may have been in there, like the Declaration of Independence Collection, the Jorge Louis Borges Collection, the manuscript of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and many more priceless items. This was my introduction to the world of books and libraries, and it is an apt metaphor—reading is a special combination to unlock a vault full of treasures.
I spent my childhood days in the libraries of the Charlottesville school system, and my weekends at the wondrous Central Library, ostensibly working on homework but more often relishing the freedom that came with the ability to pull any book with any new world inside of it off the shelf and dive in.
Reading in Charlottesville isn’t just in the libraries. This area is home to more wonderful bookstores and booksellers than you can count. The Virginia Festival of the Book draws readers and writers from around the world to gather and share. The Friends of the Library book sale brought RVs with buyers from out of state to the parking lot at the Gordon Avenue Library, before [the sale moved to its] new location at Albemarle Square (coming soon, April 1-9!).
Entire communities in Charlottesville, Albemarle, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson have rallied to support libraries and reading, with strong backing from their local governments, which recognize the importance of these values. Schools, homes, churches, medical facilities…wherever you go, there are books and opportunities to share them.
When I left Charlottesville to study and work elsewhere, I just assumed that this is what every community had to offer. It took leaving to make me realize that this isn’t the case, and that Charlottesville and central Virginia are unique and special in the shared love of reading.
We are part of a community that strives to grow, learn, and connect, even when that isn’t easy. Sometimes growing, learning, and connecting takes us on different paths that are hard to reconcile, but this place tries to do just that. Our community needs the shared experience and growth that comes with reading.
Come to any JMRL library on any given day and you will see just that, people gathering and sharing, meeting and discussing, or just finding their own worlds to explore. These worlds can be mirrors to reflect themselves, windows to see what the lives of others are like, or sliding doors to walk through into these new worlds and experiences. Not every community values these things like we do, and I wouldn’t want to be in any other place.
By David Plunkett
Jefferson Madison Regional Library Director
A sharpened appreciation
I have deep family roots in Charlottesville, but I wasn’t even actually born here. Neither were my parents. My dad’s parents moved to the area from New York when he was 7, and he grew up one of eight brothers on Panorama Farms in Earlysville. He left after high school and returned when his eldest, me, was 2. I attended public school K-12 (Go Black Knights Class of ’92), played soccer and acted in community theater, and enjoyed big, rowdy family dinners at the farm. But it never occurred to me to want to live here as an adult. I blasted off after high school, sure the adventures of my real life would find me elsewhere.
I explored and made homes in some great places; from the Northeast to the West Coast to the Great Lakes to a year spent mainly overseas where home was wherever I unpacked my toothbrush. I tried out all sorts of jobs along the way, like editing textbooks, project managing website redesigns, and even working on a one-woman show. I met a great guy, and we bought a little house with an orange tree in the backyard in the Central Valley of California.
I was weathering the trials of parenting a sleep-resistant toddler while pregnant, and wondering what happened to my so-called “career,” when my mom fell ill. I was thousands of miles away feeling helpless and desperate and so afraid she would die before my children even got to know her. My stress and anxiety surfaced a truth: The most important thing to me is my relationships. And so many of the people I love most in the world are in Charlottesville.
So, like my father before me, I returned to town with a 2-year-old and another baby on the way. Thankfully my mom’s health improved, and far from me swooping in to provide them assistance, we fell into a rhythm where my parents would take our kids for at least half a day every weekend. They’ve had many adventures knocking around Panorama Farms, getting in trouble with their doting, ridiculously lenient grandfather.
Living away for so many years sharpened my appreciation for Charlottesville. I revel in the sweet, polleny springs; the muggy green summers rattling with cicadas; the golden autumns of pyrotechnic leaves; and the mild winters where bulky snow boots mostly stay in the closet. Far from the paucity of adult opportunities I’d imagined, I’ve been lucky to enjoy a wonderful work-life balance here, taking full advantage of our incredible community organizations. I’ve taught drama and playwriting at Live Arts and Village School, among others; I contribute vocals and guitar to a band at The Front Porch; I take writing classes at WriterHouse, run the Four Miler and Ten Miler every year, and have even wrassled with the Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers.
Most important of all is family time. I was with my mom in the house where I grew up when she died this past fall—our children knew and loved her well and we mourn together, which is hard but right. Holiday dinners are as huge, noisy, and joyous for our kids as they were for me. My dad cheers at his grandkids’ plays, recitals, and games, like he did at mine. I used to ride my bike past the place we live now, not really noticing it, my head full of dreams of greener pastures. I write this looking out at our green yard, in March, my birthday month, one of the many birthdays I have spent in Charlottesville, and I’m so grateful. I may not have been born here, but I’m from here through and through, and this is home.
Miller Murray Susen
Freelance Writer, Director, and Editor
Dilly dally to the downtown mall
big dreams take small steps in Charlottesville drowned by fluff it’s enough to be talented and travel in artsy circles or with athletic teams or Bible study groups if you have no roots here don’t worry baby you can plant them with seeds from the farmer’s market and fertilize them with coffee from Higher Grounds on Hardy Drive they won’t take hold there is no soil there and sad to say very few dreams to keep you company unless you look into the eyes of a child i surveyed these streets with wonder up Gordon Avenue to the library where i could escape the day to day doldrum of my existence with Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown then down Rugby passing people who thought nothing of me or even wondered what i may become one day much less how my invisibility to them made me see myself then to the Corner for peeps in shop windows and fried ice cream from Marita’s Cantina then i’d dilly dally to the downtown mall past historic churches and monuments circling back across railroad tracks my great-great-grandfather worked on every day to home i held my dreams to my chest knowing they could not be realized in Charlottesville waiting for my great escape to freedom hoping Harriet would jump out of my books and show me the way i found freedom in college just in not being from the place i was at free to be whatever i commanded discovering parts of me that had gone unnoticed and undeveloped unattended to and unloved found it all and lost it in a crapshoot on a corner in downtown Newark waiting for a bus to take me to work i was too far away from Charlottesville and it called me back back to family both blood and self-defined back so i could discard the parts that no longer fit me circumventing catastrophe by retrieving bits of old me and attaching them to the me right now but the past is heavy and one-sided it unbalances the future in no time so instead i replanted my roots in Charlottesville balancing the sharp edges of responsibility and inspiration creating a new life from the ashes of the old recognizing there’s no place like home
Richelle Claiborne
Singer, songwriter, actress, and poet
Envisioning better futures
What’s to love about Charlottesville? A few collected memories:
Seeing Slick Rick—newly free from exile in the U.K.—at a music venue adjacent to a curiously located ice rink (now demolished for an award-winning “unique and innovative retail and commercial office development featuring flexible space alternatives”). Being swarmed by friendly toads in the backfields of Riverview Park on a spring evening. Not having enough fingers to count the people I know prepared to get into a blood feud over the zoning of a parcel. Canvassing the beautifully modest homes along Druid Ave., once affordable to working families looking to establish roots or artists with ambiguous dreams. Getting lost in unplatted alleyways. Striking up a conversation at 3am in Lucky 7. Knowing multiple UVA professors who dream of redistributing UVA’s $14.5 billion endowment to the people of Charlottesville. Meeting the resident advisors at Westhaven and Friendship Court who are cautiously optimistic about designing the future of their own communities. Catching the militantly non-commercial programming on Charlottesville Public Access TV. Paying cash for a footlong at Jak ‘N Jil. Listening to the 100 Proof Band in Tonsler Park. Planning with community organizers in the Swanson room of the Central Library. Enjoying the Dewberry Hotel as a piece of conceptual art about the U.S. real estate market. Receiving daily emails about ambitious new ideas for something that could help the community, a few of which by-and-by turn into reality.
Of course, what makes Charlottesville a city worth loving is the people. Charlottesville at its best is an ideal it often strives for but only occasionally achieves: a place where people can come together across divides to collectively create community and envision better futures. To some, it feels as if this is already the reality of Charlottesville. To others, it feels like a dream they’ve been left out of.
Charlottesville is not immune to the trends of 21st-century America: increased atomization, rising economic inequality, a growing affordable housing shortage, corporate monopolization, the erasure of local community for increased profits, divisions accelerated by algorithms engineered to maximize time on platform.
There’s no stopping the reality that significant change is coming to Charlottesville over the coming years. But it’s up to us to determine: To whose benefit?
With cautious optimism, I continue to believe that Charlottesville is filled with people who love our community enough to collectively find good answers.
Michael Payne
Charlottesville City Council Member
We make each other better
How to measure the immeasurable?
I can’t. But I’ll try.
I love you, Charlottesville.
Here’s the shape of my Why.
I love you the way that I like to be loved.
With a clear and honest gaze.
I love you with my eyes and heart open.
Not only through a sentimental haze.
I love you beyond Beauty.
But please allow me to proceed
to briefly honor your loveliness.
For Beautiful you are indeed.
I love your elegant frame. Your good bones,
Exquisite. From eloquent skyline to rustic cobblestones.
The way the sunset blushes fuchsia, as if it is thrilled
to be settling languidly in the embrace of the hills.
I love you all-natural.
Dappled in the sunlight’s sight.
I love reaching out for a cluster of stars.
Nestled, like diamonds, in a velvety jewel box of night.
Love you festooned in Dogwood.
Crepe Myrtle. Red buds.
Love the grass under my feet
and my hands in the mud.
I love the melody and the cadence
of the river’s laugh.
As my heart dips its hands
in its restorative bath.
I love the well-trodden paths
on your gently care-worn face.
Love how your countenance reflects your
experience. And Grace.
I love you beyond Attraction.
Love is more than chemistry.
But I cannot deny my reaction
to our shared proximity.
I love to follow you into blue moonlight.
Breathing music in and out.
Your rocks, your rolls, your Symphonies.
The whispers and the shouts.
I want to dance out my troubles
until I’m Cville Strong.
Through Starchild nights that crescendo
and dissolve into daybreak and birdsong.
I love your theaters, restaurants,
venues and galleries,
Want your bakeries, beverages.
Your salt, heat and calories.
You are food and life.
Several senses of delight.
I haven’t tried everything on the menu.
But I might.
Let’s talk about Love.
Love like a light in the window.
Love like a beckoning shore.
Love like the one that knows you best.
Familiar as your own front door.
Love like visitors on their way through town.
And the ones who stay a while.
Love through years and generations.
Love through tears.
Love in truths and in trials.
Love for Family and friends that I hold dear.
Love for our neighbors.
For the eclectic, collected stories
of our community’s collaborators.
Love is not even defined by uninterrupted
togetherness.
We can also take healthy space from each other.
Sometimes love includes Leaving. Living.
Learning something new.
Sometimes love is returning home with renewed
energy and appreciation for what I have.
Returning with the knowledge that
I do love Charlottesville.
Not out of habit, or by default, or through muscle
memory, or nostalgia, or complacency,
but through my own deliberate and discerning
Choosing.
I think there’s something very life-affirming about
this kind of love.
And I just think we make each other better.
Charlottesville.
I hope that you agree.
And I feel grateful to be here. Loving you.
In the ways that I love to be.
Love,