The Campaign for America's Libraries

In this video interview, Lynda Rutledge, author of Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale, explains how libraries nurtured her love of reading, introducing her to everything from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to To Kill a Mockingbird. She describes her experiences at her hometown Carnegie library and school library.

Today, she says, libraries are as valuable to her as ever, offering unlimited opportunities to do research - including research that helped provide material for her fiction.

According to her website, Rutledge is a "fifth generation Texan" who "has hopped across literary and geographic boundaries in her writing career. She's been a freelance journalist, travel writer, ghostwriter, restaurant and film reviewer, copywriter, college professor, book collaborator, and nonfiction author while living/​writing/​studying in Chicago, San Diego, New Orleans, Madrid, and lots of other heres and theres around the globe.

"As a freelance journalist, she's petted baby rhinos, snorkeled with endangered sea turtles, hang-glided off a small Swiss mountain, dodged hurricanes, and interviewed the famous and not-so-famous to write dozens of articles for national and international magazines, newspapers and travel guides, her travel photographs often appearing with her work. She's also crafted collaborative nonfiction with people from all walks of life as well as organizations such as the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park for which she's shown below doing an interview."

Her specialty, however, is creative writing. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and has won awards and residencies from the Illinois Arts Council, Writers League of Texas, Ragdale Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers, as well as juried attendance to Sewanee Writers Conference.