Needful Things
Letter from the Editor as published in the September 2024 issue
In a town an hour south of me, a little bookstore bulges with promise, packed with shelf after shelf of used books, smudging kits, crystals, and dragon statues. The air is spicy with incense and aisles are always busy with kindred treasure hunters, exploring titles and lovingly touching the leather binding of the special collection in the open armoire with the broken door.
When I enter a used bookstore, I almost always ask the same thing. “Do you have The Wings of a Falcon?” And the answer is always the same: never heard of it.
The hunt is one of my great joys. I’ve dedicated countless hours to scouring thrift stores and market stalls for Beatles records and John Travolta VHS tapes. To give purpose to the browsing and new life to the old thing lights a nerdy fire within me.
I have spent my entire adult life searching for this particular book. It’s one I signed out from the town library over and over as a young teenager. More than two decades removed from the story, I couldn’t have told you what it was about, I only knew it meant something to me at a time when I was figuring out who I was, and owning it would honour the 13-year-old version of myself.
So I was in this dark little bookstore and I’d already spent nearly an hour looking before I ask the owner the same question I’ve always asked.
“I don’t think so.” She typed at her computer. “Let me just see…” She darted to the fantasy section, but came back shaking her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought there was a chance.”
“Thanks anyway.” I turned away, disappointed but not surprised. I would go on to search another day.
I wandered back to the front display where row upon row of old books winked at me. I gazed at them longingly because I wanted them all. I ran my fingers along the spines like I was playing the piano. At the end of the second shelf, I froze. Propped against the classics, facing outward and leaning against Dickens, was the result of a 20+ year quest. 467 pages and a lifetime of longing. The hardcover edition, no less.
I took the book to the register and showed it to the owner. “I found it,” I said. “On a shelf I’d already looked at.”
Her eyes twinkled and I knew she believed in magic. “It’s like Needful Things,” she said. “The Stephen King book. The store reveals exactly what you need.”
I left that day with a keen feeling of satisfaction and a reminder that giving up is not in the cards if you really want something. When Cynthia Voigt wrote The Wings of a Falcon in the 90s it wasn’t so a woman could spend twenty years searching for it, but that is what it became for me: a symbol of perseverance and ultimate fulfillment.
One of the reasons a bookstore is such a powerful place is because you can stand among the legacies of thousands of artists who weren’t afraid to push until they had their voices heard. It’s an unpretentious gallery of witnesses to the possibility of story. The reason a used bookstore is so sacred is because story is evergreen. It is a reminder that our narrative can live forever if we decide we’re not going to give up.
The thing you create today has potential to inspire someone generations down the road. Art is legacy. Story is holy. If you’re called to share, don’t stop pushing until you are heard.
Cynthia will never know what her book meant to me, and what prayer it breathes into my house where I now have it propped face out on my own bookshelf as a constant reminder while I draft my own stories. Her joy was in the crafting, mine was in the lesson, and together we represent the ultimate purpose of art: connection.
When the time is right, the desires of your heart will be fulfilled. Don’t give up. That’s why I’ll never stop looking for the Duran Duran Wedding Album each time I enter a record store.
Alanna Rusnak
Editor in Chief, Blank Spaces
