Author Conversation: Emely Rumble and Bibliotherapy in the Bronx (Episode 2)
Charlotte talks to therapist and author Emely Rumble about her new book Bibliotherapy in the Bronx.
Learn more about Emely, her book, and her work on her website.
Find Emely on Instagram at @literapy_nyc
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A Note from Charlotte:
Why It Matters: Every act of healing is an act of trust—a willingness to open ourselves to new tools, new stories, and new ways of being. In this episode, I talk with Emely Rumble about how literature can become a pathway to wellness, how stories help us make sense of our lives, and why returning to books can offer comfort, connection, and hope in uncertain times.
One thing I’ve learned from Emely is that healing with books is about showing up with curiosity, allowing ourselves to be changed by what we read, and trusting that even the smallest story can spark transformation.
>>> This episode is a conversation with Emely Rumble, bibliotherapist and author of Bibliotherapy in the Bronx, about her journey into bibliotherapy, the history and essence of using books for emotional healing, and how literature can serve as a bridge to belonging, especially for those navigating life in new places.
>>> We discuss the art of prescribing books for healing, the importance of integrating creative arts into mental health, and Emely’s neurodiversity-affirming approach to therapy. Emely shares practical ways to use reading as a tool for self-care, and we explore how stories can help us process joy and pain.
>>> I also invite you to reflect on the books shaping your journey. What stories have offered you comfort or clarity? Consider how literature has helped you heal, grow, or find your way home.
Thank you for joining us as we explore the transformative power of stories, the courage it takes to begin again, and the hope that comes from embracing both our wounds and our wonder
Please check out this first mini-season and subscribe to your favorite platform. I’d also appreciate you taking a minute to rate the podcast and leave a comment to help others find this podcast. Thanks so much for your support!
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About Emely Rumble:
Emely Rumble, LCSW, is a distinguished licensed clinical social worker, school social worker, and seasoned biblio/psychotherapist with over 14 years of professional experience. Committed to making mental health services more accessible, Emely specializes in the transformative practice of bibliotherapy.
Passionate about advocating for the integration of creative arts in psychotherapy, mental well-being, and self-improvement, Emely champions the social model of disability and embraces a neurodiversity-affirming therapeutic approach. A distinguished member of The National Association of Poetry Therapy, Emely's work has been featured in respected publications such as Parents Magazine, ‘School Library Journal’, Bold Journey Magazine, BronxNet News, Success Magazine, and The Bronx Is Reading.
Emely shares her expertise beyond traditional avenues through @Literapy_NYC, her dedicated platform on Instagram, TikTok, and Podia, where she provides valuable educational content.
Having earned her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College and completed her social work degree at Smith College School for Social Work, Emely resides in the Bronx with her husband, two children, and her psychiatric service dog, Montana. She embodies a holistic and compassionate approach to mental health and well-being.
Episode Transcript:
Charlotte Donlon:
Welcome to All of This & More. I'm excited to talk to Emely Rumble about her new book, Bibliotherapy in the Bronx. Emely, will you take a couple of minutes and tell us a little bit about you?
Emely Rumble (00:15):
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on, Charlotte. I'm Emely Rumble. I'm a licensed clinical social worker, school social worker, and the author of Bibliotherapy in the Bronx coming out on April 29th. I've spent over 15 years working as a therapist, and my passion lies in using stories as tools for healing. I specialize in bibliotherapy, a creative, culturally affirming approach that blends literature, expressive arts, and psychotherapy to support mental and emotional wellness. I'm also the founder of LiterapyNYC. That's the name of my private practice where I work with children, teens, and adults, often incorporating somatic healing, trauma-informed care, and neurodiversity affirming modalities into my therapy sessions. As someone who is from New York and also someone who's Afro-Latina, Black American, and Puerto Rican, I bring both my lived experience and my clinical expertise to my work as a therapist, especially in school-based and community mental health settings. And outside of that, I'm a mom of two, a proud wife, and a big fan of spontaneous kitchen dance parties with my children and our dog, Montana.
Charlotte Donlon (01:25):
And thanks for including the dog. Let's not forget Montana.
Emely Rumble (01:27):
We cannot forget Montana.
Charlotte Donlon (01:29):
So, how old is Montana compared to your kids?
Emely Rumble (01:31):
He turns two in June, so him and my son are both cancers, so there's a lot of emotions. Well,
Charlotte Donlon
Montana is the baby.
Emely Rumble
He's my baby.
Charlotte Donlon (01:42):
Yes. Okay, great. Well, it's so good to see you online. I wish I could see you in person, but this will work for now. We're going to start with a conversation about your reading and writing life, and then move into more specific questions about your book, which I love. I'm so glad to have this book. And this episode should go live on April 29th, which means this is the day the book is ready, so please buy it and read it and share it with anyone who appreciates storytelling, the power of books, the power of reading. I'm so thrilled to have this book in the world. So, congratulations.
And before we talk more about the book, I would love to hear more about how reading and writing help you belong to yourself, others, and the world.
Emely Rumble (02:35):
Yeah, I always go back to something that Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop said, which is that “Books are windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Books are mirrors that reflect us back to ourselves, windows a sneak peek into the life of another, and sliding doors, which allow us to step foot in someone else's shoes.”
So for me, reading is such a regulating practice because it allows me a practice of stillness. It allows me to engage in a practice of self-reflection. I love how when we're reading, we can really turn inward and experience our emotions and allow our thoughts and fears and deepest desires to come to the surface where they can be witnessed and felt. Judgment, right? Reading is such a deeply intimate personal thing when done alone. And then it's a beautiful way to connect with others when we're buddy reading or when we're reading in a book club and things like that.
So reading is such a integral part of who I am, how I… It's a hobby, it's a coping mechanism. It's my job. It's a lot of things. And in terms of writing, writing is healing because it allows us to really attune to ourself, our own voice, our own thoughts, our own feelings and ideas. I think the world can be really loud. People around us can sometimes be even louder with their own wants and needs from us, and sometimes other people's voices echo more strongly in our minds than our own, and that can really drown out our own needs and wants and our own connection to our intuition. So, engaging in a writing practice, whether that be journaling or working on a project, I think it brings us back to self, and that's really important.
Charlotte Donlon (04:26):
I wish we could talk about just that question for an hour, but we will move on. Although your book, I mean, the whole time I was reading it, I was like, yes, yes. This is belonging. This is so much of what I've explored and researched. And reading about all of it through the lens of bibliotherapy was so enlightening and interesting. So, another question: What has nourished you over the past few months?
Emely Rumble (04:55):
Yeah. Yeah. Lately I've been really into sound baths. I'm working with a spiritual teacher who specializes in sound baths and sound healing, and I've been loving that because I'm a big journaler. So when I'm journaling now, I always play some ancestral healing or healing frequency, no words, just a sound bath. And it's really enhanced and enriched. My journaling. I'm also really big on scrapbooking, and I have a journal ecosystem, in other words. So I have a ton of journals, and they're not all for the written word. Some of it I just use to doodle in. Some of it I use to color in. Some of it I use for symbols, archetypes. My generals are full of a bunch of different ideas, scraps, words. It is just like a process that I go through, and I just write or draw what I want. But engaging in that practice that's tethered me to myself for all these years, while having a sound bath moment is such a healing exercise that I'm really enjoying. And I think because my life feels so chaotic right now, as the book is preparing to launch, those moments, even if it's like 20 minutes a day, are so soothing and so regulating to my nervous system.
Charlotte Donlon (06:22):
I love that. I can see you journaling in this healing space, and it sounds lovely. Thanks so much for sharing a bit about that process. Alright. I'd love to hear a little bit about your writing life. So, what aspects of the writing life typically deplete you, and what about the writing life nourishes you?
Emely Rumble (06:47):
Yeah, I just love to write without the pressure of deadlines. I think that feels really depleting because it's performative in a way. I think so much of authentic writing has to happen naturally. And things rise to the surface when they're ready to be expressed.
So when I was writing Bibliotherapy in the Bronx, and I had deadlines, that was my first time working with strict deadlines. And there's so much shadow work that goes into getting the words on a page. There was so much excavation that had to happen in order for me to meet those deadlines and still write from an authentic place. I'm glad that I wrote this book over 10 years because I don't think this is something I could have written in a year or two. I don't know how writers who are professional writers, how writers do it. That felt very depleting to me.
The nourishing part was, well, one, the feeling of success in getting it done and getting it done my way in my voice for its intended audience, honoring black librarianship, honoring my ancestors. That feels really good to have written the book that I want to write, to have written the black librarians and social workers in our communities that have contributed to the field of bibliotherapy who are unsung heroes. I'm so incredibly proud of that. It was a tremendous amount of research. Lots of digging into the archives and reaching back to the past, and also reaching within. I tell a lot of personal stories in the book, and also, I share some stories of my clients. So that was nourishing to have my clients ready and willing to share how literature has helped them heal. And then to edit their segments with them and for them to feel nourished in telling their story, because that alone was excavation for them, right? Coming to therapy, believing in the process, trusting in me, trusting in themselves, and being guided through literature on a healing journey that ultimately ended up in their healing from trauma, being able to integrate parts of themselves that they were super ashamed of, or feeling like, okay, how do I keep living with the grief? How do I navigate this depression? Can I still be happy? And so that was so nourishing, and it still is nourishing because now the book will come out and other people will read these stories and be inspired. So that nourishes me.
Charlotte Donlon (09:37):
That's so interesting to hear your thoughts on putting the book together and the good parts and hard parts of that. Do you remember when you first had the idea to write this book and what made you want to write it?
Emely Rumble (09:55):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I had one “aha moment” where I knew that I would write a book. I think I started journaling my reflections after particularly intense therapy sessions or school, social work days. Over time, those reflections started to form a pattern, and people would always ask me, “Are you going to write a book? You should write a book about what you do and how you do it.” Some therapists who had never heard of bibliotherapy or poetry therapy that were a part of my supervision groups or a part of the places where I worked, were very interested in the work that I did and how I did it. And so I was always asked, “Are you going to tell us more about how you incorporate literature into your work?”
So, it occurred to me that here I am doing this work in the privacy of my therapy room. I'm seeing how often literature helps me reach people, especially young people in schools who didn't trust adults, seeing how stories allowed even parents to reconnect with their kids after rupture. Being a school social worker is such a dynamic job. You're working with the students and then their caregivers, and then you've got the school itself supporting the teachers and the administrators. So, this book just kept whispering to me, it's time to write, just write it down. And so it took several years, honestly, to feel like I had enough that would encompass a book. But I think between my clinical practice, between motherhood, grief in life, the pandemic, which is why I started LiterapyNYC, my son was diagnosed with autism during the pandemic, and my daughter was born during the pandemic, and I had a brush with death. I had COVID when I was nine months pregnant with her. And so that was really a time where I was like, okay, now is the time to piece this all together and put a manuscript together. And I'm really glad that I did, and I'm really glad that I held on to all those bits and pieces because sometimes when we write things, we can be the most critical of our writing, and we can just check things away. So I had a little collection of my writing over time, and it became Bibliotherapy in the Bronx.
Charlotte Donlon (12:07):
Well, I love that other people were asking you to write the book. That's usually a good sign, even if you have a lot of people asking you when you're going to write a book, it's typically something to consider. And I'm glad that you listened and moved forward and took notes and held on to things that would be included. And I will say I was wanting more while I was reading it. I'd read a section, and I'm like, I could read a whole book about that. So I hope you keep writing, and I hope you give us more books in the future.
Emely Rumble (12:41):
That's really encouraging. Thank you.
Charlotte Donlon (12:44):
Yeah. So, one question I have about the book and your work is how writing the book and putting these pieces together might've helped you notice something you hadn't noticed before about your work. Does anything come to mind? Like what surprised you through the writing process about your work?
Emely Rumble (13:10):
Wow. I think that because people always ask me how did I become a bibliotherapist? And we focus so much on education and credentials and stuff like that, but really it started out with my inner child. Literature gave me language when I had none. I grew up in a home where mental illness went untreated, and often I felt physically and emotionally unsafe. So, for me, books were more than just a literary escape. They were literally anchors for me. My grandmother raised me, and she was very sick throughout my life before she passed when I was 14. So there were things that I was seeing and having to figure out and make sense of for myself. So, I learned about myself that I'm very guided by my inner child, and that even though she was so vulnerable as a young girl, and then when my grandmother passed when I was 14, I go into foster care and I legally emancipate myself at 16, and that's all in the book too. But, I think that that little girl who was so curious and so brave and so clear about who she was, maybe not about why things around her were happening, but clear about who she was. (Shout out to my first grade teacher, Ms. Perkins, who taught me how to read and got me my first library card.) I hadn't realized how much my work as a writer, as a healer, as a lightworker is informed and really guided by my inner child. She's pretty badass.
Charlotte Donlon (14:43):
That's amazing. I love that, and I love that through the writing process, you returned to that and were able to recognize it. So, I would love to hear a little bit from your book. I have a few prompts for you to read some passages, and then I may have questions after you read each one. The first one is 200 words or a couple of paragraphs that you wrote because you needed to read these words.
Emely Rumble (15:18):
I don't know if this is 200 words, but I'm reading on page 102. This is where I write about one of my favorite poets, Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was a prominent American poet, essayist, and feminist icon whose literary contributions left an indelible mark on the landscape of 20th-century American literature. Her style as a poet is characterized by bold and unapologetic explorations of complex themes, including gender, sexuality, politics, and identity. Rich’s poetry often employs vivid and evocative language, making extensive use of metaphors and imagery to convey her ideas and emotions. These lines always resonate with my clients, no matter what walk of life they come from. (And with me, which is why I'm reading it.) “I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes, the words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.”
Doing the work of healing while self-reflecting and bringing our awareness to painful memories and experiences that have impacted us feels like exploring the wreck. This is also a great metaphor to explain why it takes time to see outcomes in psychotherapy. Where there is a wreck, there is lots of damage. There is wounding. It's best not to dig, but to go slow, to sit with and observe the wreckage, to give ourselves time to process the things that will never be the same.
Charlotte Donlon (16:57):
Amen. I mean, there are so many wrecks in life.
Emely Rumble (17:05):
So many wrecks.
Charlotte Donlon (17:06):
And around us right now, and that we can see about to happen. So, you read this portion of the book and bring this image of a wreck into our minds from Rich and her words. And what is your relationship to that passage now. When you read that now, what comes to mind?
Emely Rumble (17:32):
Yeah, what comes to mind is how much I have had to let go of and grieve in this process of becoming a debut author. In order to move into this next season, I've had to let go of so much that I love and that I hold dear, but in this new iteration of me and my journey and myself, I have to allow myself to be transformed. And that's hard, right?
I shared with you before we started recording, leaving the Bronx on the eve of my book coming out was hard. My husband accepted a position in a new state, and so we live in Massachusetts now. And saying goodbye to my community, my home, my clients familiar. You come out with a book, and people suddenly begin to view you differently. Sometimes that's not such a bad thing because you learn who truly supports you and who doesn't or who can't have the capacity to be happy for you, and that's hard. So when I think about exploring the wreck, it's kind of like the tarot card, the tower. Everything's kind of falling apart. It's a death. But there has to be death in order for a new beginning to arise. And so that's really what speaks to me in this season of my life right now.
Charlotte Donlon (18:51):
Thank you for sharing that. Is it weird for someone else to ask you questions that you might ask your clients?
Emely Rumble (18:56):
Yes. Yes, but I've already had to ask myself a lot of the hard questions to write this book. So I feel like it comes much naturally to me now. Had you been asking me these kinds of deeply emotional spiritual questions a couple years ago, I'd be bawling on this podcast episode, but I've done a lot of the work to get to this point. So talking about it is the easy part.
Charlotte Donlon (19:21):
Great. I'm so glad. So, can you read a passage from the book, an excerpt that represents, at least in part, the mind, body and soul space you're inhabiting right now?
Emely Rumble (19:36):
Yeah. Okay. I'm reading from page 105.
In the words of author Jeanette Winterson, fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. For some individuals, the way back to connection with imagination is easiest through a poem. Poems are usually shorter than stories, yet have such powerful stories to tell. Stories about our inner worlds and how we experience the outside world. Stories that distill the essence of our human nature into just a few lines. Sometimes a poem can be three lines long and pack a therapeutic punch that provides just enough enrichment to help elicit some emotion. I immediately think of Lucille Clifton's “out of body” where she writes, “I am saying, I am trying to say from my mouth, but baby, there is no mouth.”
Charlotte Donlon (20:36):
Clifton, I love Clifton.
Emely Rumble (20:39):
Yes, miss. She rest in power.
Charlotte Donlon (20:42):
And I love your words on poetry and how you honor poetry in your life and in your work. Are there any poems that are helping you navigate these current days, in addition to the words from Clifton that you just read?
Emely Rumble (21:01):
Yeah, I've been reading a lot of, a lot from Frederick Joseph, actually. He recently released a collection called We Are Alive, Beloved, or We Alive, Beloved. I love that collection so much. And maybe this is connected to the inner child piece we just talked about, because the cover of the collection, it's like a little black boy in this textured collage holding a balloon up to the sky. It kind of reminds me of a Banksy art piece. But it's textured in this sepia black and white overcast shadow. And the cover drew me in. But then I started reading the poems, and I was just like, oh my gosh. I'm obsessed. Frederick actually has his first young adult novel coming out in May, and I was honored to read an advanced copy of it. It's not poetry, it's a narrative. But it's a story about Ozzy, who is a young black athlete who gets a scholarship to go to this prestigious school, a basketball scholarship, but then he has an ACL injury and he can't play.
He is totally depressed because now this shatters his entire identity and sense of self. Being a black boy, being one of the only black boys from a different neighborhood going to this prestigious school for basketball, and he can't play anymore. But he ends up learning that he's actually a really great writer, and he gets into this writing program in the school where he's encouraged to write his poems and his essays, and he starts reading the work of James Baldwin and really tapping into his identity as a writer. And there's a line in the book that says something about to the effect of “how would you live differently if you considered your life as a poem?” And I love that so much. So I've been holding that in my heart lately. How would I live differently? How would I navigate this anxiety differently? How would I hold space for my grief differently if I consider that my life is a poem? And that's just really anchored me in this time leading up to my book release.
Charlotte Donlon (23:08):
That's such a beautiful question to consider. And you said his book comes out in May?
Emely Rumble (23:13):
Yes. It's called This Thing of Ours. It's his first young adult novel, and it comes out in May.
Charlotte Donlon (23:19):
Okay. Poets are my favorite prose writers. I'll fall in love with a poet, and then I'll read their fiction or nonfiction or essays. I'm like.
Emely Rumble (23:29):
I agree. Philip B. Williams, one of my favorite poets, he recently released Ours. That's his novel. He has a few collections. Mutiny is my favorite, but he came out with Ours and I loved it. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, one of my favorite poets, wrote a collection based on the life of Phyllis Wheatley. She wrote The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. That was her first novel. Oh my goodness. I am here for poets who write novels. I'm so here for it.
Charlotte Donlon (24:00):
Yes, yes. Have you read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar?
Emely Rumble (24:00):
Oh my goodness. I've read it like five times, and I look forward to reading it again. I love that book. I use that book often with clients who struggle with addiction.
Charlotte Donlon (24:13):
Oh, that's wonderful to hear. He's one of my favorite writers.
Emely Rumble
Beautiful writer, beautiful and poet reminds me a lot of Tommy Orange, and I didn't know they're actually friends. They're very good friends, which makes sense.
Charlotte Donlon (24:27):
Yes. They went, I mean, I know this from Instagram. They went on a book tour together recently in California, and I was like, do I want to fly to California to see them? I actually considered doing that, but I didn't.
Emely Rumble (24:42):
I wish I had major FOMO seeing that. I was like, this is literally the book tour stop of my dreams, and I can't be there.
Charlotte Donlon (24:50):
Exactly. Maybe they'll come together again one day on this side of the country or in a way where we can be there more easily. So, one more prompt and passage from your book is a couple of paragraphs from the book that you wish people who love you would read and reread regularly.
Emely Rumble (25:29):
I love that. Okay. This is actually going to be on page 149, Embracing Stories of Trauma and Healing.
An important aspect of narrative therapy is the mindset shift from a victim mentality to understanding all the ways we each resist oppression. Even where conflict is present, each of us puts up some kind of fight. Nobody openly receives oppression without resisting in some way. As humans, we are inherently wired to survive and resist any harm being done to us. This is a major mindset shift for someone who has been made to believe they've had no agency in life. The entire heart of a narrative therapy approach is about centering ourselves as the main character of our own lives and owning everything that happened before us around us and to us. It's about putting agency and power back into the hands of the client. It's about helping the most conflict-averse client understand that there's a fighter inside of us all.
In therapy, it's like being the hero of your own story. You're not blamed for what happened to you, but you're given the power to change how your story goes from here. It's about realizing that even if life has been tough, you still have the strength inside you to keep going and make things better. Many people start therapy because they're looking for answers. We want to understand why things happen and why they've happened to us. We want help making the larger connections to draw meaning from experiences that are hard to accept. Clients often come to me burdened with the inner conflict that emerges from being cast as a villain in someone else's narrative. Reading offers us the profound gift of self-reflection, helping us discern whether our turmoil stems from conflict within ourselves, discord with others, or the broader landscape of social issues. Just because you've been cast as a villain doesn't mean you are one, and it doesn't mean you can't change the narrative.
Charlotte Donlon (27:44):
Thank you for reading that part of the book. And, I will say as I was reading your exploration of archetype and the Shadow Self and those things were really intriguing to me and helped me think more broadly about the books I read and why I love the books I love, and when books disrupt me and disturb me. Why is that? And I think a lot of it has to do with how we relate to villains and being thought of as a villain or even making mistakes that we can correct hopefully or have an opportunity to have reconciliation or restoration.
Emely Rumble (28:29):
I'm so glad you brought that up because that's an important piece for me. As a social justice-oriented therapist who uses bibliotherapy, that piece around reconciliation and redemption being possable, it's so, so crucial to not just our personal healing, but our collective healing and wellbeing. You see this with cancel culture. We're so quick to want to cancel someone or cast someone aside, and we've kind of forgotten how to be in relationship to one another. And we've kind of forgotten that it's possible. It's possible to heal, it's possible to change. You absolutely have to make amends where you've caused harm, but you can change. No one is subject to a life sentence of having to stay one way. There will be challenges, and especially if we're talking about mental illness, I don't want to oversimplify it either. There's definitely challenges to overcome and things to be addressed. But I'm just really glad that you brought that up around reconciliation being an important part of this work because, absolutely. What happens when we've convinced ourselves that we're too broken, we're broken beyond repair.
Charlotte Donlon (29:45):
Can you speak a bit more about bibliotherapy for the collective and for all of us, and maybe some hopes you have for this moment that we find ourselves in?
Emely Rumble (29:57):
Yeah, absolutely. I was just talking with a librarian yesterday who's writing a piece on Bibliotherapy in the Bronx for the School Library Journal. And she was asking me, I said something to her about how, for me, censorship book banning and things like that, it's a mental health issue. And she was fascinated by that. She was like, I'd never thought about it as a psychological issue. I thought of it as a political issue. And while it is a political issue for me, I consider it a mental health issue because when stories centering the voices of those in the margins of BIPOC, queer, disabled, neurodivergent lives, when those stories are censored or just straight up banned or pulled from shelves, it sends a message that your story doesn't belong here. And that internalized message can become shame, silence, and further isolation. And our society doesn't need further isolation; it needs more connection.
And so I think that there's a danger involved in silencing voices of those who society harms the most, or who society just straight up doesn't acknowledge. We want to keep certain people invisible, and that's what's happening. We're seeing it in real time. The erasure of not just stories, but people's realities, their lives, their wellbeing.
I have a colleague of mine who's HIV positive, a wonderful clinician, and they were telling me that with some of the recent legislative changes, they're worried that they won't have access to their medication anymore. I get emotional talking about that because, oh. This is one of my very close colleagues who I love very much. But hearing them share that very personal truth with me as I'm also working with trans kids as a therapist who are saying to me, “our president, our government wants me to not exist.” What do you say to a 12-year-old who can see it for what it is and is trying to grapple with the idea that there's certain people who don't want them to exist? And so that's why it's a mental health issue and a psychological issue, and not just a political issue.
Charlotte Donlon (32:20):
And I'll be honest, when you first said it's a mental health issue, I was thinking of the people doing the banning, of their mental health issues.
Emely Rumble (32:26):
Yeah. Right, right. Talk about it, talk about it.
Charlotte Donlon (32:31):
And of course, I'm aware of the mental health issues surrounding those affected and those whose stories are, who some want to erase. And I think it's hearing these specific examples about your colleagues and clients, I hope will help others recognize that these are real people who are being affected. I think so many people in this country erase the human element when it comes to political agendas, and whenever we can uplift stories and share stories and highlight and feature actual human voices and stories, I think that's one of the most powerful ways to combat some of the political tragedies that are happening daily.
Emely Rumble (33:27):
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Charlotte Donlon (33:30):
So thank you for your work and thank you for this book, because I think that's a lot of what you're doing and a lot of what you're going to help others do as you spread the word about bibliotherapy. And I'm sure people will want to get trained in it and want to have their own practice one day, or even just glean good things to use as a parent or a friend or a partner. And, I have so many good hopes for this book, and I'm wondering, what are your hopes for this book, and what do you want to see happen?
Emely Rumble (34:04):
Yeah, I love that question. Honestly, I just want people to feel seen and validated. I want people to know that if you're reading as a care practice, you are healing. And to know that we come from lineages of storytellers and that we don't have to depend on society or the government or the president or any of that to validate us and empower us. And this is something that gives me hope, that even with the defunding of the library system on a federal level and some of the other things that we're seeing happen or the efforts being made to defund the education system and things, one thing that I know for sure, just based on my experience, my career and the people in my life who are doing great work in the book community, in their specific communities, whether that's through free little libraries or book swaps, or getting together with other parents and caregivers to do story time in the park, I know that there are so many lightworkers in this world.
And so I hope that when people read Bibliotherapy in the Bronx, they're reminded of that, that we may be all we've got, but we're all that we need. And I think we did see this during the pandemic. And it doesn't take away from some of the harming things that we saw, but I think there were efforts that community made to come together, especially in New York City when we were fighting for toilet paper and paper towel. I know in my building, we were like, Hey, do you have butter? Do you have paper towel? We were sharing resources. And I believe that, I believe that. Of course, there needs to be a balance, but where there's darkness, there's light. And there's more light than darkness. I truly believe that. And I think that books like mine remind us of our shared humanity, of the importance of sharing our stories, of standing in our power, of exercising our agency. Even when we may feel like, well, who am I? I am just one person in the grand ecosystem of the world. What influence do I have? If that influence is walking somebody by and saying, good morning and giving them a smile, if that's all the influence you have, then that's influence, right? To shift somebody's day, mood, to make somebody feel seen. And so that's what I hope. I hope that my book is encouraging, inspiring for folks and resource hope and our shared humanity and in our personal and collective power.
Charlotte Donlon (36:36):
May it be so. I would love for you to close this out with, I need to the last words of the book, the affirmation that you included in the end. Can you read that for us?
Emely Rumble (36:52):
Oh, I love that. First of all, thank you for reading.
Charlotte Donlon (36:57):
My pleasure, my honor.
Emely Rumble (36:58):
So honored when people have read it, because sometimes you do interviews and people didn't read it or they didn't finish it, so that just means so much to me. I needed to take a moment to say that. Thank you. Alrighty. And when you say, read the last page, it's the Bibliotherapeutic Reflection.
Charlotte:
Yes. Thank you.
Emely Rumble (37:26):
Bibliotherapeutic Reflection: “Affirm to yourself out loud: I am a reader. I'm a storyteller. I am always learning. I am forever evolving. I do not have to be anyone or anything other than who I am today. My story matters. My story is still being written. I give myself permission to write, read, and revise.”
Charlotte Donlon (37:54):
Wonderful. Thanks so much for closing us out with those wonderful words. It's so good to be with you.
Emely Rumble (38:01):
I feel the same. Thank you.