Newly opened Folklore Bookshop encourages community in a small town

More than a decade ago, picturesque Midway, nestled in the Heber Valley, played home to a used book store, ReBook, which has since closed down. At another time, there was a Latter-day Saint bookstore nearby, also long closed.
But three local women — Alison Russell, Audrey Lind and Lindsey Leavitt Brown — sought to fill this bookstore-sized hole. After years of planning and organizing, they opened Folklore Bookshop just off of Midway’s Main Street.
The heart of the trio’s partnership is simple — friendship. Brown and Russell were already in each other’s orbits when the former met Lind at their kids’ basketball game. Brown, an author and book lover, spotted Lind reading a book (waiting for the game to start, she made sure to add), and their friendship was almost instantaneous. Soon, the idea of opening up a bookshop in the community came to fruition.
The road to opening day was long — initially their grand opening was slated for 2023 — and hit a few roadblocks, but they’re adamant on one thing: going into their store should feel like coming home.
The shop’s walls are covered in wallpaper that appears to have been ripped straight from the interior of a Swedish cottage, and are lined with pale green bookshelves. A stone fireplace surrounded by chairs and a plush leather couch welcomes customers looking to sit with their books. Along the store’s front wall is a laptop bar, where customers can bring their work for a tandem reading and work-from-home session. Sweetly-scented candles burn on the shop’s front counter and, if it’s cold enough outside, a fire warms the room. Either Brown, Lind, Russell or one of their booksellers greet walk-ins with genuine enthusiasm.
“We very much focused on creating that experience of the sensory detail, you know, the smells, eventually the taste,” Brown told the Deseret News, teasing the addition of a hot drink bar in the near future.
“When buying a book in this store, you’re buying that experience too.”
“We really see it as a community based space,” Russell said, “for people here and people who come back to the area.”
Folklore isn’t just any bookstore; it’s a third place, a community space that residents and out-of-towners alike can call their own.
At a time when people are spending less and less time together, third places are important remedies.
After all, where do you go after work? After school? A recent analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Time Use survey revealed the answer tends to be unexciting: home.
And the concerning trend is on the uptick, the Deseret News previously reported. Loneliness, itself, is an epidemic on the rise, one that won’t be solved with more alone time at home.
The analysis revealed that while COVID-19 distancing measures played a role in lessening in-person social time, the rise of the internet and social media culture had already kick-started that trend.
Kian Bakhtiari wrote for Forbes, “The internet, mobile phones and video games have opened a multiverse of new connections and opportunities. Yet digital interactions have failed to replace the need to connect on an emotional level in the physical world.”
Bakhtiari wrote that the unhealthiness of loneliness can be tantamount to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and that social isolation can lead to a 32% higher chance of early death.
This is where a third place comes in.
According to a 2019 study, third places play a major role in our social health as they “help buffer against loneliness, stress, and alienation.”
Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term, wrote that a third place hosts, “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”
Oldenburg deemed a place worthy of the designation if it meets these criteria:
He wrote that they “lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life,” and stem from the designation of home as a “first place” and work or school as a “second place.”
Amid the aforementioned decrease in social time and third-placeification of the internet, people are losing out on real, in-person connection. Brown, Lind and Russell are trying to reverse this trend, with the help of a conversely amplified “trend”— books.
As it becomes cool to read again, they’re leveraging this surge in popularity to reach their community.
“I think people think that reading is insular and it’s not. It’s actually a very social, shared experience,” Brown told the Deseret News. “Story itself is shared traditions, which is the definition of folklore itself. So that’s what I like about it. It’s not like we had this master plan to name it ‘Folklore’ from the beginning, but it’s been a happy coincidence that our mission in the store is to have that shared experience.”
Aside from getting to know their community, Brown, Lind and Russell enjoy the roles they play in getting books into the community.
Russell describes their roles as booksellers and getting to know their customers as achieving “those milestones of getting books into people’s hands” and “giving people the ability to read.”
“We’re not giving that, but we’re kind of a little bit part of that. And that’s what connects people, is understanding other people’s struggles and experiences.”
Beyond the books on offer, Folklore’s got a host of events and gatherings on the schedule that grant Utahns access to a literary world the state lacks, including elevated author events, book clubs (yes, multiple), release parties, writing workshops, children’s story time and a Santa meet-and-greet ahead of Christmas.
At Folklore, people can just be. On the day of the store grand opening, families came in to read with their children in front of the fireplace, much as they may do in their own living rooms.
“They came for story time to have something to do before, you know, before nap time,” Lind said, still in near astonishment that people had brought their routines out of the home and into Folklore.
Of the response to the store’s opening, Brown said, “We’ve had people come up to the counter and start crying. And they’re like, ‘I can’t believe this is here. Thank you so much for giving me this.’ And we’re giving it to them. They own it now which is like, even as an author, like I write a book and then I publish it. That story is not mine anymore.”
Customers have already begun to understand the “experience” they’re buying with their books.
Salt Lake City residents Layla Basic and Ximena Arango visited the shop after seeing it on TikTok. Brown’s personalized recommendations, they told the Deseret News, turned out to be massive hits.
Basic said that she could tell from her interactions with Brown that “she knew what she was talking about” and that she was “honest and not trying to sell” her and Arango on anything.
Despite being open for less than a couple of months, Folklore is rooted in its community. Local business owners have stepped up with advice and ideas for cross-promotion.
Brown, Lind and Russell’s peers have shown up in person to buy their next reads and gifts from the shop, with some sparing themselves a long journey in favor of placing orders online or signing up to Libro.fm (an audiobook subscription service) with Folklore.
Support from the literary community has also been overwhelmingly kind, Russell remarked. The owners of Utah book shops like King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Poppy Books and Gift in Spanish Fork and Lovebound Library in Salt Lake City have offered advice, contacts and information.
“Perhaps one of the coolest things about this whole process is how supportive independent bookstores are,” Russell said.
“I knew book people were great, as an author, but yeah booksellers are really, really great,” Brown echoed.
It’s a sentiment of service the three women want to spread far and wide, and they hope to do it through community engagement. They’ve established a nonprofit, Folklore Commons, with plans to help educate and involve underserved communities in the area.
Through this nonprofit, volunteers helped put together furniture and set up shop ahead of opening day, and more opportunities are in the works.
It’s to them — and to everyone who patronizes the shop — that Folklore really belongs to, Brown, Lind and Russell believe.