Heidi Uhey

Turning to the compassionate present: a counter

Active listening as care

In my first semester of library school, I took a course called “Social Aspects of IT.” The topic of the course was exactly what it sounds like. For our final project, we conducted interviews with a population or community group of our choosing to determine the impact of COVID-19 on their use of technology. I have multiple close contacts who are in Twelve Step programs, and I knew that the move to virtual meetings was having a tremendous impact on them.

During the process of finding additional folks to interview, I attended an open meeting hosted in my college town. Though it was more than five years ago, the experience sticks out in my mind as personally and spiritually significant.

Sitting with a dozen adults who were willing to speak openly and honestly about how they were feeling in that moment with no pretense or qualifiers was a rare experience. I’ve rarely experienced the sort of vulnerable connection that came from their willingness to show up as is. When someone in the room spoke, nobody looked at them or nodded or emitted other forms of backchanneling. Yet, it was evident that everyone in the room was listening intently. Dr. Gabor Maté says that addicted people need a compassionate present, and I have no better words to describe the feeling of that meeting and why it felt so resonant to me.

Acknowledging pain

Recently I was walking with a colleague who expressed annoyance at the deluge of publications bemoaning Gen Z’s supposed disinterest in learning and that we’re forgetting the trauma they endured during the pandemic. Whether it’s an overreliance on AI, an inability to read at the levels professors expect, or inattention in the classroom, there seems to be a tendency, at least by some, to focus on the contemporary student’s “wrongness.”

I’m making sweeping generalizations here, I know. But from my vantage point, it seems that most of my adult peers have been able to compartmentalize the pandemic and move forward in a way that younger people may not have so easily accomplished.

If the age range of a typical undergraduate cohort is 18 and 24, excluding nontraditional students, then most of our undergraduate students were between 13 and 19 years old when the Covid-19 pandemic shelter in place orders were first implemented. I don’t know about you, but in my own life, that window of teenage time was instrumental for self-exploration. I have fond memories of going on long walks with friends, experimenting with thrifted clothing, discovering arthouse film, and experiencing the newfound freedom that came with getting my driver’s license at 16.

So much of that exploration came from being out in the world around other people, testing the waters, figuring out what I liked and didn’t like. None of it would have been possible if I was confined to my parent’s house, separated from my friends, stuck staring at my computer screen for 8 hours a day, or left grieving a lost loved one in isolation.

Admitting misunderstanding

Though I’ve only just finished my first year in my current position, I can understand how the rhythm of the school year prompts us to detach from students, especially undergraduate students. They cycle through in four-year intervals, and in the scheme of our careers, this transience may feel like a blip in our own timelines.

Although we may have students that regularly visit us for help throughout their college career, or we might be fortunate enough to work with a particular class multiple times throughout a semester, these longer form connections seem to be the exception, not the rule.

Our time with most students is fleeting in hour-long meetings and 90-minute, one-shot class sessions. It can be hard to foster or even gauge engagement during such short windows. For example, this semester I decided to incorporate a zine collection and activity into a class on racial disparities in healthcare. Afterwards, I thought that the activity was mostly a flop, and that the students were more interested in the 17^th and 18^th century rare texts than the zines. However, their professor recently shared student feedback from the session, and at least half of them mentioned being positively impacted by the short lesson on zines.

A gentle shift

Rather than assuming that students are disengaged or uninterested, maybe we need to turn our attention to ourselves and our interpersonal decoding skills. Maybe we’re simply reading this generation of students wrong. Maybe the way they communicate interest is different than the ways we’ve seen in the past.

I don’t know whether this hypothesis is accurate or not. However, I do know that creating space in our schedules to actively listen to and simply be with our students is one place to start testing it.

As I look forward to the summer months and start thinking about the arrival of new students in the fall, of course I’ll have lesson plans in mind and activities in the queue for orienting students to the library. But I’m also setting the goal to be flexible, to find ways to genuinely engage students and learn about what interests them, to help promote activities in the library that foster creativity and self-exploration, and above all, to sit with them in the compassionate present.

Anniversaries and Anecdotes: Shared reflections from year one as an academic librarian

May 1st will be my one-year anniversary in my current position. Before sitting down to write this post, I sent out a call to my fellow liaison librarians at my institution asking if they would be willing to share a strand of wisdom with their first-year librarian selves.

What follows are their reflections woven into my own experiential anecdotes.

Strand 1: Building relationships takes time—it doesn’t have to happen all at once.

I recently described by first-year librarian self as an overeager puppy. Being a liaison is so much about being relationally connected to your departments, and for me, this manifested as a sort of hyper-focus on immediacy. I envisioned myself sitting in on departmental meetings and attending guest lectures, working on dozens of systematic reviews and teaching every possible one-shot class I could. Success meant being plugged in and being productive. Success meant knowing everyone and knowing them Right. This. Minute.

Of course, it hasn’t gone like that. Instead, what’s unfolded has been a much more tempered, genuine, and slow process. Early on, the director of my department introduced me to the very small, but very fierce, faculty of our Medical Humanities Department. From that relationship, we ended up partnering to bring a health humanities scholar to campus to give two lectures and lead a multi-day workshop based on the intersection of artist books and autobiographical health narratives.

At the same time, I have three other departments that I’m a liaison to, and our relationship, while not stagnant, have been much slower going. I remind myself that departmental relationships are not boxes to check off a list, and that, with patience and genuine care, connections can and will emerge.

Strand 2: Be courageous and have the confidence to say yes. Present the projects that interest you at conferences, because they are good enough and people will be interested.

I was lucky enough to start work at the end of the spring semester, which left me with an easeful summer block of time to weather the transition into this job. Looking for projects to dive into, I began researching health-related zines. From there, I was introduced to the world of graphic medicine. I was hooked.

The two genres led to the creation of a LibGuide on self-representation and health, a conference lightning talk, and a collaboration with librarians at an institution on the other side of the country.

When I began, I didn’t know where the topic was going to lead me, but my genuine interest propelled me forward and inspired connections with other librarians over our mutual engagement with the topic.

Strand 3: Make 5-year plans that include professional development, scholarship, and service.

Following Strand 2, even if we don’t know exactly where our paths might lead us, having key goals and destinations in our sight can be grounding. For example, I know that I want to obtain my Academy of Health Information Professionals (AHIP) certification in the next five years, and there are concrete steps that I can take to do that.

I also know from my experience over these past few months that I need to continuously balance service in professional organizations with service that I can complete in person, in groups that aren’t directly connected to my university.

I have learned a tremendous amount this year by plugging myself into a community health coalition that allows me to work with social workers, public health experts, and social justice activists in the city that is now my home. Knowing that this work keeps me centered and exposes me to ideas and projects that I wouldn’t otherwise be connected to will help me to remain committed to it throughout my career.

Strand 4: Be flexible, adaptable and curious.

I recently assisted with a large, virtual interprofessional education event for our health sciences graduate students. Before the event began, the organizers acknowledged that things often go wrong during large events, but if we flowed like water, we would be okay.

When I think about flexibility, adaptability, and curiosity, my first images center around someone who is easygoing and relaxed. However, water is an incredibly strong elemental force. As we enter a season of uncertainty, information chaos, budget cuts, and DEI dismantling, what does it look like to flow like water while still maintaining a sense of urgency and strength?

I see collective action all around me exemplified in things like current data-rescue efforts, and I’m reminded of the flowing power that comes from solidarity and shared commitments.

Strand 5: Connect with another librarian for guidance and look for ways to honor your mentors as they guide you.

I loved reading this piece of advice, because it highlights the importance of reciprocity in our professional lives. I am lucky enough to have two mentors right now, and each of them have given me time, energy, and invaluable guidance during my first year here at Baylor.

Finding ways to celebrate them with things like institutional recognition awards and opportunities for collaborative projects that feel mutually exciting and beneficial are two ways to do this, but there are so many others.

Braiding the Strands Together:

How we show up for ourselves impacts how we show up for one another. For me, the reflection that comes from giving advice to an earlier version of yourself feels like a way to fold time onto itself, to reach through space and offer comfort to someone who needs it. But, perhaps more than anything, the comfort is offered for the self that exists in the present.

Recently, I’ve been reading a collection of essays on deep time called The Science of Last Things by Ellen Wayland-Smith. While the book feels like a balm in some ways—“Things will be fine, eventually, in thousands of years, for rocks,”—I’m challenging myself to stay present, to witness, to figure out how to act.

If we can hold one another in the intimate immediacy of the present with courage, confidence, and curiosity, then perhaps, in a few years, our future selves will be writing letters of encouragement to us now.

One-shot to make a first impression: a three-act library story

Act 1:

Last month, a professor contacted me to lead an instruction session for her undergraduate public health class. It was a class that hadn’t hosted a library instruction session before, but the task was simple enough—help students navigate the library databases to find articles for a grant proposal project. The class was one week out, there were around twenty students, and I’d have 45-minutes to speak with them about finding supporting evidence for their grant proposal.

I communicated my learning objectives to the professor and asked if she’d like to add anything. I created a lesson plan. I even concocted a quick LibGuide to aid in the process.

I’m currently working on a grant funded project with my county’s public health district and figured it would be a good example to use during my demonstration. I brainstormed keywords and looked up relevant controlled vocabulary in the databases I planned to show the students (Medline and Academic Search Complete). I came up with an active learning assignment and printed out materials to share.

In short, I was prepared.

Act 2:

The day of the instruction session arrived. I packed up my laptop and handouts and walked from the library, outside along the Fountain Mall, and to the academic building where the class was held. As I stepped into the building and navigated to the classroom, I felt my nerves pick up.

The room was a small lecture theatre. The students were poised in curved rows that seemed to trail up and up, as their serious gazes fixed upon me. I shook hands with the professor. She was warm and kind, and explained that she’d introduce me to the class, then sit in the back row to learn along with her students. I awkwardly tried to fit my things onto the room’s small podium and opened a browser window to project my LibGuide.

I realized that my hands were trembling as my nerves ramped up even more. I’d taught dozens of classes before, both in my previous semester and as an assistant instructor in grad school—why was my body suddenly betraying me like this? I took a deep breath and smiled up at the students. They stared back blankly at me.

After the instructor introduced me to the class and I began to speak, to my surprise, I felt the words in my mouth coming out confident and strong. I presented the short session’s learning objectives. I spelled out the importance of generating keywords, synonyms, and looking for controlled vocabulary terms. I briefly talked about Boolean operators and explained that I’d show the students an example search first, and then we’d work on their own topics together.

But then—things began to turn sideways.

As I walked over to the podium and started typing on the computer, some rogue version of myself lurched to take over. We weren’t going to search in Medline or Academic Search Complete like I had practiced ahead of time—no! We were going to use Web of Science! I clicked on the link and opened the purple interface that I used much less often than the other resources I had practiced with. And we weren’t going to search for articles related to the public health project I was currently working on. No! We were going to search for articles about intergenerational crafting projects to combat loneliness in older adults!

On top of that, we were going to go straight to the advanced page, and I wasn’t going to build my search concept by concept using the search history as I normally did. Rather, I was going to manually input my order of operations and delineate my fields all at once!

Some inner part of me was screaming inside my head—what are you doing!? But it was too late. The Rubicon had been crossed. As I typed in my keywords and pressed “search,” an error message popped up. My nested parentheses were off, and I awkwardly tried to troubleshoot in front of the class as the error message persisted like a wasp at a cookout. I flushed. Students looked pained. I avoided the instructor’s stare, who was no doubt regretting extending the invitation to me at this point.

“Well, sometimes this kind of thing happens,” I said as my inner voice shouted at me: Run! Run!

“Let’s pivot to another database and see if that works better.”

Act 3:

The rest of the class did indeed go better. We moved to Medline, and I successfully helped the students find articles on their topics through live demonstration, abandoning my niche improvised example. We talked about truncation and subject terms and ways to expand and limit searches if you weren’t finding the results you were looking for.

At the end of the class session, the instructor very kindly asked the students to share three things that they learned from me that day. This is what we do as a community, she explained, we support one another.

Although I still left feeling embarrassed and confused by what had happened, I tried to focus on the positive. I hadn’t completely melted down and ran out of the room. I somewhat recovered the session after my bizarre improv moment, and the students, hopefully, came away with skills that they didn’t have before.

That afternoon, thankfully, I had another instruction session with a small group of PhD students that went wonderfully. I got to show them super advanced search techniques, and they were engaged and asked fantastic questions throughout the two-hour session. When I got back to my office, I sent a follow-up email to the public health instructor thanking her for her time and apologizing for my mishap.

Debriefing with a colleague afterwards, she shared some words of wisdom that I’ve tried to keep in mind as this day’s events have vaguely haunted me. Not every search goes perfectly, she said, and when we practice ahead of time, we give students a false impression. You were just being real, she said.

Although my ego was bruised, my colleague’s kind words did wonders to ease my anxiety. In live instruction sessions, sometimes we go off script. Mistakes happen. We can’t be perfect, and we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be. But we are a community, and when things go wrong—as they inevitably will—we support one another.

“Tell me about despair”: the power of poetry for self-soothing

When I tell someone that I’m a librarian, I often either get a joke about the Dewey Decimal System, or a sighed-out exclamation along the lines of, “Oh, I wish that I could spend all day reading books!” in response. To the former, I usually mumble something about LOC and move on, to the latter my response is, “Yeah, me too.”

Although I don’t get to sit down with a good book at work unless it’s on my lunch break, since November, I have been engaging with literature in a deeper way by memorizing a poem each month. My new practice was inspired by a friend who recited Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese from memory during a zoom call the day after the election. The words felt like a medicinal balm, her soft, Louisiana accent enveloping me in comfort despite our distance across two time zones.

This illustration for Oliver’s Wild Geese was created by my librarian colleague, illustrator, and friend, Naomi Canale

Equipped with verse

That month, I couldn’t help but memorize Wild Geese. In December, I carried the practice over with Sweet Darkness by David Whyte to celebrate the longest night of the year. This month? The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

A dramatic turn, I know. While the previous two poems soothed with their melodic sounds and intimate immediacy, The Second Coming evokes pure doom. There’s a dreadful powerlessness that Yeats conjures, amplified by the countless cultural references to the poem. Despite this, I’ve felt oddly empowered as I’ve committed this poem to memory. Perhaps it’s the simple ability to focus my energy on the memorization process so that I can pull the lines out like pencils or pocketknives during moments when the weight of current events looms heavy: The falcon cannot hear the falconer…vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle…

The neuroscience behind reading literature

Or perhaps something is happening on an even deeper, neurological level. In 2021, I came across the neuroscientist and literary theorist Angus Fletcher as he was rounding the podcast circuits after he published Wonderworks: Literary Inventions and the Science of Stories. This is an interdisciplinary book about what Fletcher describes as “inventions” in literature that readers can call on during any number of life events from confronting personal trauma to experiencing deep heartbreak.

Throughout the book Fletcher describes mechanisms in the technology of literature such as the “Hurt Delay.” Fletcher uses Greek tragedy to explain this invention. In short, if we know about a traumatic event before it unfolds (the prophecy of Oedipus), this can help our pre-frontal cortex to process the horror from a safe distance and to feel empathy while still maintaining a personal boundary. This process increases our self-efficacy, Fletcher explains, “when we experience our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.” (p. 24)

For a much more complete and detailed explanation, I recommend checking out Fletcher’s book yourself, but for the purposes of this post, what I’m really trying to get at is the power of literature to help us care for ourselves when we need it most. Wonderworks hinges on the concept of prose and poetry not as texts to close read, dissect, or analyze, but rather, as therapeutics.

Doom poetry beats doom scrolling?

Especially of late, I completely understand the impulse to numb out and scroll through your feed at the end of the day or when you wake in the morning. I can also understand, with the way our information feeds are broken up and designed to capture our attention in leap-frog bursts, why it is so difficult for many of us (not just the younger generations) to sit down and really focus on a piece of writing.

Memorizing poetry has allowed me to focus on the words in front of me, bit by bit, in profound ways. Much like aspects of librarianship, the process is iterative and reflexive. As I’m learning a new poem, I often find myself re-reciting the lines I’m trying to get down throughout the day in moments when I would’ve checked my phone. I must stay present and attentive to each word, often catching myself when I’m substituting words that aren’t in the poem (centre, not circle!) during the process.

By the end of the memorization dance, I feel connected to the poem. It’s no longer something outside of me, but something within me that I can pull out to occupy myself when I’m feeling anxious. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a Health Sciences Librarian with a deep affinity for the humanities trying to make everything I love relevant to my job, but I truly feel the process has been good for my health these last few months.

I wonder what it would be like to focus on this deeply personal, therapeutic process of connecting to literature in our libraries. I wonder if this process could offer the kind of quiet, lost in the stacks solace that feels so rare and needed right now. Perhaps there’s a poem out there that could help me articulate exactly what I mean.

Celebrating our interconnectedness in the season of annual reviews

This time of year, at my university, and perhaps at yours as well, we are preparing to submit documentation for our annual performance reviews. As I get my activity reports ready for my first cycle in this process, I can’t shake an idea surrounding the nature of academic evaluation. From report cards in elementary school to doctoral dissertation defenses to tenure and promotion procedures, the academy structures itself around the individual. There is one name at the top of the CV, the exam, the LibInsights report, this blog post. Yet, on both theoretical and practical levels, the work we do is inherently collaborative. Our efforts connect to many names, not one.

As a first-year academic librarian, I lean on my colleague’s expertise in big and small ways. In my first few weeks here, I was constantly shuffling over to my neighbor’s offices when a question I couldn’t answer arrived in my inbox. When I’m brainstorming ideas for instruction sessions my first instinct is to reach out to my colleagues who I know excel at lesson and activity planning. In November I helped with two major outreach initiatives, a conference and a multi-day medical humanities event series, neither of which would have had any hope of success if they had fallen on the shoulders of one individual as opposed to a team.

Apart from initiatives that I’m directly connected to, I see my colleagues co-authoring posters, papers, and book chapters. I see them working together on interdisciplinary initiatives and serving on joint committees inside and outside of our institution. And though I don’t have the stats to back this statement up, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to find an academic department that doesn’t lean on words like “teamwork,” “relational,” or “collaborative” in their guiding documents.

Culture of Personality

So, what’s with this dissidence? Some might argue that it’s necessary to evaluate the individual in relation to the group. That there’s no logical workaround and that this individual-centric procedure ensures accountability and ambition. Some might say that even though we go up for reappointment on our own, the work we do together is still highlighted, shining brightly on our computer-generated activity reports. Some might say that this emphasis on the individual is just life. That it’s an unavoidable symptom of existential solitude and to stop worrying about it and get back to work.

In the first chapter of her book, Quiet, Susan Cain succinctly traces the rise of the “Culture of Personality” in America in conjunction with the industrialization and urbanization of the turn of the century. As much of the population moved into cities where they no longer knew their neighbors, the art of selling yourself became a crucial means of survival. It was no longer enough to be proficient at your job—you had to demonstrate extroversion, charm, and an unwavering commitment to self-development. At the same time, social anxiety and compare-despair style competition ratcheted higher with each passing decade (go figure!)

Some possible antidotes

So, what is the point of voicing this qualm? Although completely restructuring the way we think and talk about evaluation, promotion, and tenure into a more relationally oriented system might be impractical for now, I still think there are steps we can take to highlight and celebrate our interconnectedness. Considering the nature of this post, I’d love to hear from others about what this idea brings forth. However, some starting points are:

Giving flowers: Recognizing the accomplishments of your colleagues and letting them know that you see and appreciate them. While my university has official channels for doing this publicly, I’ve had some of my most meaningful exchanges in informal interactions. It’s important to note that this requires us to be inquisitive and curious about the projects and activities of one another—I speak to myself here. I get so wrapped up in my own work, that I forget to come up for air and pay attention to what my colleagues are doing, too.
Reflecting on how our individual work connects to the whole: Okay, now is the point in the post where I confess that I love working alone. While I don’t completely shut off at the thought of group work, I’ll admit that the term “team building” does turn my stomach, and I revel in an afternoon without meetings. I’m an introvert and I love alone time. However, even in my most solitary moments, I still know that I am connected to the world around me. I connect to the librarians that had my role before I did as I build on the blueprints and scaffolding that they left behind. I connect to the ecosystem of my library, as I hear my liaison colleagues in meetings with students, or the Letterpress Lab down the hall boisterous with cheers from students. I connect to health sciences librarians across institutional boundaries, and I look up to the librarians that I encounter through conferences, workshops, and online courses.
Celebrating your peer’s accomplishments as your own: No, I don’t mean taking credit for other people’s work. In line with the above bullet point, I am pointing out the connection between your colleagues’ work and the work that you do. Serving our students, faculty, and staff is a group effort. I could not effectively hold a reference interview if it wasn’t for the work my colleagues in cataloging, electronic services, or ILL do. Nor could I facilitate the same level of hands-on, contextualized learning without our librarians in special collections and archives. Our Help Desk and Public Services teams are integral, and none of the events any of us have been a part of would be possible without our Marketing and Communications Team. I cannot imagine my job without our Data and Digital Scholarship librarians. The list goes on.

We are points on an interconnected web, supporting one another in visible and often invisible ways every day. In this season of my first annual review, how grateful I am to not have to go it alone.