Ellen O'Connell Whittet on the Radical Enterprise of the Imagination Library
I signed my first baby up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library when she was one week old, at the advice of her pediatrician. It was May 2020, and the pandemic was just beginning to close its fist around the world. I was a brand-new, first-time mother in a state of total freefall, sleepless, traumatized from birth, and closed off from all the support promised to me in the form of a village or any institutions. These were buckling under the weight of much bigger crises than the one I was experiencing after having a baby during global shutdown. Hospitals and businesses and schools were all straining under the pressure of what was happening outside, but my pediatrician was going through her usual checklist as though these were all things we could handle. “Have you signed her up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library yet?” she asked. “It’s free, and a book will come to your house every month until your baby turns five.” I wrote it down in my phone’s notes app, next to advice about feeding and tummy time. Dolly Parton was the one who handed me the lifeline.
And true to the doctor’s—and Dolly’s—word, once a month, for five years, my daughter received a book in the mail, addressed to her. At first, it was so surreal to see her full government name on a piece of mail, but it happened so often that we got used to the idea that one of the world’s biggest superstars was sending my baby a monthly gift. We could request the books in English or Spanish, which seems like such a momentous choice for a country in which Spanish speakers take longer in reaching standardized English proficiency compared with other immigrant language groups.
