Ep. 58 - Clare Wallace: Looking At Life Through Rosewater Glasses

This past weekend many people recognized Independent Bookstore Day, a day to be extra appreciative of their local bookstores and booksellers that give booklovers all the feels. Everyone loves a bookstore, don’t they?

Our guest today certainly does. When Clare Wallace visits a new place, she always looks for the closest used bookstore. This gave her the idea to open The Rosewater, aptly named after her favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, which she envisions as a comforting living room for everybody. Clare is the executive director of South Louisville Community Ministries, a nonprofit that provides emergency assistance for residents of South Louisville facing crisis, and she was looking for a visible way to do outreach in the neighborhood. The bookstore serves several purposes; to create a warm community space, to bring life to parts of the neighborhood that have seen hard times, to provide transitional employment for residents in crisis, and to offer a service that the neighbors want.

Clare grew up in a house filled with hundreds of books with a mother who worked for a publisher but her favorites were those that explored other worlds. After Clare left college, she literally went around the world working in international development and as a Peace Corps volunteer. When she settled in Louisville, she chose to land in the most diverse part of the city which is filled with a wide variety of different ethnicities and income levels; Clare works to bring people together in her adopted hometown.

Clare tells us how The Rosewater is pivoting from traditional retail sales to creative services like mystery book boxes delivered to your door due to Covid, why creating a comforting community space for the neighborhood is important to her, and how learning to deal with failure is a skill she learned abroad that helps her create new projects today.

Books Discussed in this Episode:

1- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
2- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
4- Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5- Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
7- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
8- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
9- The Lost Queen by Signe Pike
10- The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
11- Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown
12- This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
13- My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris
14- New Kid by Jerry Craft
15- The Watchman by Alan Moore
16- Saga by Brian K. Vaughan
17- American Gods by Neil Gaiman