Following Footsteps

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It could also be that Ma got me the job because she started working at Antoine’s when she was sixteen, my age. Most parents who want their kids to follow in their footsteps are doctors or senators, stuff like that. But Ma wants me to work in a convenience store. Stay in the neighborhood. Support my community, because that’s another thing about growing up in Jokertown—it’s the only home some of us will ever have.

The Thing about Growing Up in Jokertown (A Tor.com Original) by Carrie Vaughn

Star-Finding Storyteller

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He wore old soft clothes and sat in an old chair on an old green porch and told stories. The stranger they were the truer he looked and I believed every one.

My Friend the Starfinder, written by George Ella Lyon and illustrated by Stephen Gammell

Community Defined

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If diversity’s what it’s all about, then our neighborhood is all that and a bag of chips. But without a shared sense of purpose, diversity spells conflict and isolation, not opportunity. I figure that tract of land is what brought us together. None of us is about to give that up.

Before I stepped out of my house that cold morning three years ago, I might have told you “community” was some kind of Up with People fantasy—like-minded folks sharing a Norman Rockwell moment. Now I think community has little to do with like minds. It has to do with very differently minded people finding a way to get along because we all live in, are connected to, and share a sense of place.

Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food by BK Loren

Blue-Collar Neighborhoods

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“It starts along Chicago’s smoky industrial corridor, passing old blue-collar neighborhoods that resemble the one where I grew up—tiny bungalows where women look old at forty and men work and eat themselves to early heart attacks.”

Blacklist (V.I. Warshawski Novels) by Sara Paretsky