Hello!

I’m Shala Howell, a career freelance writer who started working in a public middle school library in August 2021, only to fall in love with library work and decide to pursue an MLIS at the advanced age of “Has a Child in High School.” 

Honestly, it was hard for me to pick just one community. Am I more of a cat person? Marvel fan? Member of the pandemic-induced Great Resignation? Book hoarder? Bird watcher? Incorrigible over-thinker? 

Yes, probably, to most of that. But the trait that best explains why I am here is that I belong to the Community of the Curious — the folks with the widely roving minds unhindered by practical considerations.

I read books and have conversations. My mind has questions. I chase them down in my spare time. Depending on how busy I am, these journeys can take hours or days or weeks or, in one memorable case, years.

Along the way, I tell my family stories about my progress at dinner, my friends on walks, and my readers in blog posts. (I am a writer. Of course, I have a blog.) Over the years I have built up a small but faithful readership over there, with approximately 64,000 readers visiting my curiosity blog every year. Many of my readers are once-upon-a-web-search visitors, looking for specific answers to their question of the moment. But I also have a set of regular readers, including several librarians, who comment on new posts and interact with me on a daily or weekly basis on more dynamic platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

I have my daughter to thank for this virtual community. When she was born, I was a very practical human, who learned what I needed to know when I needed to know it.  But my daughter began pelting me with questions as soon as she learned to point. At first, her questions were easy to answer and didn’t require much thought. “That’s a cat. C-A-T, cat.” “This button makes the coffee.” 

Over time, as she gained vocabulary and tonal fluency, her questions became more fanciful, more complex, and more intriguing. I could not help but look them up. As I researched the answers, I learned just how much fun it could be to allow yourself to play with ideas that have no immediate practical benefit.  

Being a writer by inclination as well as trade, I naturally started a blog to record some of my favorite searches. My curiosity blog, Caterpickles, has more than a decade’s worth of posts on topics like: 

• Did dinosaurs have belly buttons? 
• Why was Darwin so obsessed with pigeons? Why not dogs? 
• Sam the Eagle: Bald Eagle, Harpy Eagle, or Shoebill Stork? 

Following my curiosity is an incredibly entertaining hobby, and one that informs my practice at the public middle school library where I work as a library assistant.

Libraries have long played a central role in my own curious journeys. It is my goal to have the library at the middle school serve the same joyful function for my patrons. I see no reason why reading for fun should be limited to the fiction portion of our collection. I pepper my book displays, library signs, bulletin boards, reading lists, and Big TV looping presentations with the humorous, the curious, and the unexpected in the hope of sparking a student’s curiosity long enough to entice them to visit a new-to-them portion of our collection to learn more. 

It’s my hope that by getting an MLIS at SJSU, I can learn more effective techniques for tapping into my patrons’ curiosity to help them make better use of our entire collection, develop essential critical thinking skills, and become hooked on the joy of life-long learning. 

Related Links & Resources: 

• The SIFT method for evaluating online source material (Hapgood), which I use when researching for my other blog and with the students at my middle school
• My other blog, Caterpickles