What ends up as a bookstore begins with something else, even if the idea for one bookstore in Dorchester can be sparked by another.
Before moving ahead with plans for a bookstore opening later this year in Fields Corner, Bing Broderick and Porsha Olayiwola had worked together on poetry slams at the Haley House Bakery Café near Nubian Square in Roxbury, starting in 2014. Around that time, Broderick went from being the bakery café’s business and marketing manager to becoming the executive director of Haley House, a social enterprise founded in 1946, with roots in the Catholic Worker Movement.

Olayiwola, currently Boston’s poet laureate, was already a seasoned artist and performer in Cambridge who, along with fellow poet Janae Johnson, had approached Broderick about a new venue for slamming across the river.

“We tried it out over the summer, and it was a huge hit, and it brought down our age demographic by about 10 years,” said Broderick. “And we ended up starting the ‘House Slam’ as a regular event.”

That led to formation of a “House Slam” team and a GoFundMe campaign to help its members compete at the National Poetry Slam competition in Oakland, California, where it took the top prize in 2015. In the months before that, two of its members also won prizes: Johnson, in the Women of the World Competition, and Olayiwola, the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship.

Performing in a force field of spoken word and audience reaction, slam poets focus on topics such as social justice and racial division, channeling emotions that run the gamut from trauma and rage to affirmation of sexuality. The audience gets to judge, and the poets get instant feedback. It’s interactive, but that applies, as Olayiwola pointed out, even to getting ready for competition.

“We would read each other’s work all the time on stage, or once the team was formed,” Olayiwola recalled. “It would be five or six of us who would meet almost every single day and exchange feedback on the written work and say, ‘This is good, this isn’t good,’ and then do performance workshop. And then – I mean, me personally – I would always take every single team on a three-day retreat. And that’s almost like some of these writing residencies.”

Olayiwola traces her engagement with the spoken word to when she was a self-described nerd and bookworm growing up in Chicago’s South Side. While she was in the eighth grade and taking part in speech competition, a teacher signed her up to recite the words of Hillary Clinton. What Olayiwola remembers clearly was coming across the word “catalyst” and looking up the definition.

“I think something about speech competitions means that you have to take the language and you have to stare at it and have conversations back and forth with it. I think that’s true,” she said. “When I read a poem and then have to memorize the poem, this is why they make young people memorize the poem, so that we get closer to understanding the language. We get closer to understanding, not just the writer and not just the characters, but then ourselves, and then maybe, by extension, also other humans.”

At “justBook-ish,” the store that she and Broderick plan to open in September in Fields Corner, the same process could be multiplied, even with words on pages processed by one reader, then transformed by connection with other readers.

“And I think that’s what the bookstore will do in terms of gathering,” she said. “When we have these author talks, it’s enough when you go read a book. But then what happens when you have that writer come and you’re able to engage in a different kind of conversation? What happens when you and three other people who just happen to be your neighbors also engage with the text?”

After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign, majoring in African American studies and gender and women’s studies, Olayiwola went on to earn an MFA from Emerson College, along with founding the Roxbury Poetry Festival and being an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2021. She also served as artistic director at the literary youth organization MassLEAP.

Broderick grew up in New York, on the border of the Bronx and New Rochelle. After graduating as an English major from Haverford College near Philadelphia, he followed a different path than Olayiwola. In his work for Rounder Records, he focused on sales beyond conventional record stores – whether by mail order or through feminist bookstores. In addition to browsing his way through bookstores around Harvard Square, he also spent time working at transit-oriented venues near the Red Line—the Brattle Theatre and the Somerville Theatre.

When he went on to work for WGBH, plying his distribution skills with IMAX films produced by Nova, Broderick realized he was less interested in the dazzle of a supersized format than on content—and a more human scale. On the way back to the US from a theater conference in Glasgow, he stopped for a few days in Ireland, where he heard about an organic farm and cooking school. Once he got back to Boston, he took a leave of absence from his job, sublet his apartment, and returned to the cooking school for a 12-week course. That did not turn Broderick into a chef, but it did lead him to Haley House.

“One thing that I loved working at Haley House Bakery Cafe was food as an opportunity to build community,” he said. “And, whether that was with five customers in the cafe or with 400 people at outdoor community tables, there was always a connection that happened.”

What Broderick and Olayiwola also have in common is being Dorchester residents. After leaving his job with Haley House in 2022, Broderick was considering his next move. He talked that over with Olayiwola, and they both talked with another Dorchester resident, Meg Campbell, who mentioned that there had once been another bookstore in Fields Corner, one block away from Dorchester Avenue and Adams Street.

Along with being a writer and founder of Codman Academy Charter School, as well as a former member of the Boston School Committee, Campbell had also been co-owner of the Dorchester Reading Authority, a bookstore managed and co-owned by her ex-husband, Steve Holt. Located in the historic Fields Corner Municipal Building, the former site of a library and a police station, the bookstore opened in 1986.

As a retail pioneer in a bookstore desert, Holt got the attention of The Boston Globe. There were even brief mentions when he cheered on the Red Sox pennant drive by putting a discount on sports books, and when the governor at the time, Michael Dukakis, dropped by the store to sit with a group of children for a reading from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”

The period of the late 1980s and early 1990s was also a time when small bookstores were succumbing to the rise of megastores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble. Though chains would combine a large inventory of books with other products, such as CDs and DVDs, their dominance would soon be challenged by the rise of e-commerce, most notably by Amazon.com. Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble found a way to distribute its products not just as three-dimensional books, but as digital text that could instantaneously appear anywhere on a tablet or even a smart phone.

More recently, a new generation of small independent bookstores has tried to adapt with new kinds of specialization and ways of engaging the public.

Frugal Bookstore began as a book section of a furniture store in Roxbury. Currently at a storefront in Nubian Square, it specializes in works of Black authors, whether in stock or by special order. The interior’s a magnet for materials announcing community events from a jazz festival to a Juneteenth observance, or a chess tournament at District 7 Tavern. More critically, the store had enough social capital to scrape through the pandemic by mounting a GoFundMe campaign that brought in more than $25,000 in 24 hours.

Among the other independent stores opening locally were Papercuts in Jamaica Plain, the Rozzie Bound Co-op in Roslindale, and I AM Books in Boston’s North End. Instead of just retailing merchandise, the stores were curating selections, but also rethinking events, converting an appearance by an author from a formulaic sales pitch into something more like an exercise in community engagement.

That was the strategy at Papercuts, described in volume one of the store’s writing anthology by its events coordinator, Katie Eelman. “The goal from the beginning was to create an author event series that wasn’t the typical reading and signing,” she wrote. “We wanted to fully engage our audience, discuss the meat and bones of the fantastic books that were being published, and use our space to participate in a larger discourse about things that mattered in the world outside.”

Olayiwola extends the list of models, citing bookstores that combine inventory with space for mingling and having something to eat or drink: Uncle Bobbie’s in Philadelphia and Busboys and Poets, started in Washington D.C., with branches in seven other cities.

Just Bookish will be open from 2 p.m. into the evening, just steps away from the Fields Corner MBTA station along a busy block of Dorchester Avenue. “We want it to be a place where… people who might not otherwise connect, connect,” says co-founder Bing Broderick. Seth Daniel photo

In late 2020, the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) approved what would be the future home of justBook-ish, a new five-story mixed-use building with 29 workforce rental housing units at 1463-1469 Dorchester Avenue, known as “Dot Crossing.” Located next to the Red Line overpass near Fields Corner Station, the site is right across the avenue from a four-story mixed-use transit-oriented building developed in 2008 by the nonprofit VietAID. The group has also supported efforts to raise Fields Corner’s business and cultural profile by promoting events connected with the area’s designation as “Boston Little Saigon.”

When Broderick and Olayiwola learned that Dot Crossing’s owner, TLee Development, had a process for filling its street-level commercial space, they applied and got approval. Asked for comment about the store, TLee’s founder and owner, Travis Lee, wrote in an email, “I’m thrilled about the bookshop.  I’m hopeful that a thoughtfully curated book selection and youth spoken word programming will foster meaningful community building among the cultural diversity of Fields Corner. Tall order, yes, but I’m up for it.”

The bookstore is organized as a for-profit retailer of merchandise but owned by a non-profit entity devoted to programming. VietAID also has a role, as the nonprofit’s fiscal agent, with VietAID’s executive director George Huynh as one of its board members. In an email response, Huynh hailed the bookstore as a “creative space” serving people in Dorchester and the rest of the city.

“It will give our community members an invaluable place to gather, share ideas, and boost our collective energy, especially in the evening,” Huynh wrote. “While the Fields Corner library is excellent [and with it likely undergoing renovation this year], the bookstore would promote more lively activity through poetry, performances, and conversation – perfect for dropping in and out. I’m excited to see the rich diversity of art and literature from the Vietnamese community and beyond.”

As Olayiwola put it, the location felt like home, meaning the South Side of Chicago, but also the parts of Boston – Dorchester and Roxbury – where she had built a base through arts organizing.

“For me,” she said, “having in that moment recently relocated right back to Dorchester, I was thinking, and being a freelance artist, ‘Oh man, I want to meet with so many different people. I have so many folks I’m like building and connecting with, but I don’t necessarily have a space close to my house in which I can walk to and have that meeting or have that gathering.’”

The plan is for justBook-ish to be open from 2 p.m. into the evening, a time when potential customers or participants might get off a bus or a train and catch sight of the shop, maybe even notice some activity. Olayiwola calls it a gathering place or a “third space.”

Says Broderick: “We want it to be a place where folks talk to one another, and part of it is kind of the spirit of Haley House Bakery Café, too, where people who might not otherwise connect, connect,” said Broderick. “And that could happen through chance encounter. It could happen through programming.”

Despite the continuing increase in e-commerce that spiked during the pandemic, and the growth in mobile commerce such as food deliveries, Broderick and Olayiwola are putting their hopes in the appeal of location on a corridor with more “walkable” development that could attract people to multiple destinations, whether for shopping, human connection, or both.

“Our goal is not to compete with the restaurants in our neighborhood,” said Broderick. “We really want to complement them, so we will offer light snacks, but we want people to come to an event and eat at the Thai place a few doors down, or the Vietnamese place up the road, or Irie across the road. That’s really our goal, and to be a catalyst for business in the community, if possible.”

The executive director of Fields Corner Main Street, Jackey West Devine, hailed the store as magnet drawing people to the whole neighborhood.

“We are thrilled to have the addition of Just Bookish in Fields Corner because of the way it slows people down, and engages them,” she wrote. “Bookstores encourage browsing and deep conversation. You linger in a bookstore. People know to come to Fields Corner for our vibrant restaurant selection. Having a bookstore extends their stay, creates a bridge that might lead next to ice cream at Chill on Park, dancing at Blend, or cultural programming with Boston Little Saigon.” 

Broderick reported that as of May 8, more than $1 million had been raised for the bookstore’s nonprofit entity, with about $130,000 for inventory, and more fundraising planned. Build-out of the space was expected by the end of this month, to be followed by more work putting inventory in order.

Olayiwola also detailed investments in lighting and audio, so the bookstore could serve as a stage for local artists and authors. That’s a carryover from the bakery café, but Olayiwola perceived other relations: between the picture of Roxbury under the “el” in the Nubian Square mural inspired by Spike Lee’s biopic on the life of Malcom X, her own memories of Chicago’s South Side, and the everyday sight of trains rumbling over Dorchester Avenue that she calls “iconic.”

“I think about it in terms of accessibility, like people being able to access the space,” she reflected. “But I think about accessibility almost like as a human right. I think about that. I think about the fact that it’s in Dorchester, the fact that it’s right off of a T [station] and what that means in terms of people outside of the space, being able to also access the space. I think about who takes the T. It’s like working people, working class. It’s meant to be affordable.”