Image description: A toddler lies on the floor of a well-stocked but empty bookstore, sleeping face-up, head on a fuzzy turquoise pillow. (All photos are via @threeavenuesbookshop on Instagram.)

DANDELIONS SPOTLIGHT

Who: Jordan Felkey, co-owner of Three Avenues Bookshop in Chicago, IL.

Why: Jordan is a former speech therapist. Her husband Tim Wurman used to be a software engineer in corporate finance. They’ve made radical changes over the past three years: becoming parents, leaving their jobs, and opening their store. Julia talked with Jordan about how it started and how it’s going.

Let’s start with storytime! How do you approach it?

Storytime is the piece of the business that feels most connected to my Speech self. I try to read a variety of books that kids and parents don’t pick up on their own, to introduce them to other things. But then to empower little kids, sometimes I let them each pick a book and we do a marathon. I read everyone’s book. It’s really fun.

The ideal storytime isn’t kids sitting in a circle and listening to a book and like, answering my questions.

That’s OK, if that’s how it looks. But really just having kids here playing, moving in the space, having conversations with each other — literacy is so much more than just listening to books! Literacy is communication. Literacy is drawing pictures. Literacy is sharing ideas. Literacy is meeting other people. Just let kids be kids.

Your life is so different today from three years ago. How did this all happen?

In March 2020 I was working for a nonprofit that partnered with charter schools in the city to provide speech therapists. On Friday the 13th, I was at my school on the South Side, and news started to trickle in that schools were closing. I drove home that day, and I didn’t realize it was the last time I would make that commute.

[emotional] Oh, man. The whole transition there was totally stolen. Just the grief of leaving those kids and that job and being there in person.

I finished out the school year remotely. For some kids it was awesome. I got to connect with parents a lot more. It opened my eyes up to the access that remote education can offer. For others, it was awful and they had no access to remote learning. But I was able to adjust OK. My school situations have never been ideal. So the pandemic was just another thing.

The school year ended. As fall approached, I learned my employer was changing my schools. I was already feeling burned out because of COVID, and the change was too much. I was newly pregnant and I needed room to breathe. Otherwise, my mental health was not going to be OK. So I left that position, took some time off, and applied to Chicago Public Schools. Every educator in the Chicago Teachers Union is doing social justice work every single day, and I was excited to be a part of that.

I had my baby in March 2021 and was a full-time parent for the rest of the school year and summer. When school started again, I applied for a discretionary leave. It was denied. That was OK. I resigned. My manager there was really supportive.

Meanwhile, starting around the summer 2020 uprisings, Tim realized he wanted to make a permanent shift away from corporate America. That September, he told me he wanted to start a small family-run business. Part of me was like, What? You’re our income. But we entertained the idea. By January 2022 he had decided he was really going to leave his field, and opening a bookstore was the only thing he could imagine.

We literally Googled “how to open a bookstore” and found the American Booksellers Association.

That was the point where the idea and the reality came together. We started meeting other bookstore owners and putting together a business plan. Neither of us knows how to write a business plan. But I’ve always considered myself a strong writer, so I went for it.

Image: Jordan with Tim, Tessa, and nine other family members, all wearing Three Avenues shirts, posing for a portrait in the middle of store construction in early 2022.

What other aspects of your identities and privileges have shown up through this process?

Getting the funding we needed was very easy. We had — have — the financial privilege. That was also part of the motivation: we had money and wanted to do something meaningful with it.

We didn’t want to contribute to gentrification. We didn’t want to step on the feet of people who are doing the work but maybe not as fast as us because they don’t have the same privileges we have.

So we were like, OK, we’re opening the store where we’re already home. This is an expensive neighborhood, but we believe you should be able to work where you live, that we should be able to make enough money to live in the neighborhood we’re serving. We’ll see.

Tim is a white man. I am a Brown woman. So those things are relevant too. It’s been interesting, because [for certifications] Tim is like, “Is it a woman-owned business?” We’re co-owners! The store is part of both of our identities, but it’s harder for him to label the store woman-owned or BIPOC-owned because those identities don’t fit him. They fit me. And the store is both of us.

We were very intentional about making the store accessible. There’s still ways we can improve that, but with the openness of the floor plan, people of different mobility levels are able to move through here.

And the selection of books is really intentional. I joke that this is one giant TBR list.

For the kids’ section, I follow a lot of people on Instagram who have similar missions of highlighting minoritized voices, of showing more Black and Brown kids in literature, more disabled kids, the voices that don’t tend to get highlighted…and also the authors and illustrators.

Image: Store display highlighting the forthcoming picture book A Day With No Words. The book cover features a Black boy who is autistic and nonspeaking. A sign says, “For every copy you preorder, our store will donate a copy to Chicago Public Schools.”

Has anything surprised you about which books have sold? Or which haven’t?

Disappointed, yes. But surprised, no.

I set my Black History Month table up in January because I couldn’t wait. But the slowness of those books (sales) was kinda heartbreaking.

There was one book that I set out on that table and I was like, If someone buys this book they’re getting it for free. Because I really want somebody to buy this book.

Nobody bought the book.

What was the book?

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo.

Lots of people bought So You Want to Talk About Race. But nobody bought her second book. So maybe people are just reading her first one, but I was disappointed.

Why did that one feel so important to you?

Well, because it’s about being a white man. And there’s so many white men in this neighborhood! There are so many white families. This is our community and we love it. But also, segregation in Chicago is real.

It felt like an intimidating book, hardly anyone looked at it or touched it. I guess I was hoping to have a conversation with somebody about why they picked it: What does this mean to you, why did this talk to you? But it didn’t talk to anyone. Maybe someday it will.

But then people will come through and it’ll be people who aren’t white who are in the neighborhood and surrounded by seas of whiteness all the time. And they’ll say, “Thank you for these books.” Our friend Danni from Semicolon Bookstore came by and said, “This [Black History Month] table is fire.” And it reminds me that the people I’m setting these displays up for — even though they’re not in this neighborhood in high densities — when they are here, the work still matters and it’s still important.

Last question: What do you hope your daughter learns from your work here?

She’s still so young that she only knows us in this context. She doesn’t know what our jobs were before. She came with us the first time we viewed the store, and she was so filthy because it was a complete construction zone.

Image: Jordan and Tessa at the store when the walls were still under construction. Jordan holds a bag of Goldfish crackers and Tessa crouches to inspect the newly finished floors.

I feel like as parents we have to take care of ourselves. And really this whole store is that: it’s us taking care of ourselves and doing things we truly believe in. I just hope she sees that. It’s work, but it’s work that we care about. And it’s a privilege to be able to do work that we care about.

A fun fact is that Tessa doesn’t like coming to storytime. I wish she could be here, sitting on the floor and letting me read and engage with other kids…but she is not about that life!

I ask her every Saturday morning, Baby, wanna go to the bookstore and do storytime? And she says No! And I say, What do you wanna do today? and she says, Play toys! And that’s OK. We honor that.

People ask if the bookstore will be hers someday. We have no idea! She doesn’t even like storytime! She likes feeding the dogs that come in, she likes the stuffed animals. Any part of it that brings her joy is what I want for her.

Bigger picture, we’re her parents for life. I want her to see us doing things that make us happy and feel meaningful because that’s what I want for her too. That’s what I want for everybody, right?

Thank you, Jordan!

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For more of Jordan’s book recs, see Issue #88, and for some of her favorite small businesses and partners, don’t miss this Sunday’s issue of Dandelions. Subscribe here.