In June 2022, the Pulaski Users Group (PUG) and the Flourish Foundation embarked on a collaborative trip to the Garden Isle of Kaua’i. Five alumni from the Compassionate Leaders Program, along with a student from Oahu, and PUG and Flourish staff, spent two weeks exploring the island, deepening their understanding of and appreciation for the cultural practices and significance of the Hawaiian culture and engaging in regenerative tourism. 

What makes the Hawaiian Islands truly special is the stunning natural beauty, vibrant culture, and the deeply rooted practice of mālama. Mālama means to take care of, tend, attend, care for, preserve, protect, save, and maintain. The Hawaiian culture exemplifies this practice and the group was fortunate to experience this in a deep and profound way by giving back to the local trails.

Please join us to watch the premier of the video created by Flourish and PUG about mālama and their time on Kauai. After the short film, they will discuss how we can all engage in regenerative tourism and mindful environmental stewardship. 

The event will be livestreamed and available to watch later. Click here to watch online.

Hemingway’s Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway

Online only

Timothy Christian, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, discusses his new book Hemingway’s Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway with Jenny Emery Davidson, executive director of The Community Library.

This Kennedy Library Virtual Forum is hosted by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Click here to register. This is a Zoom-only program. There will not be a broadcast in the Library. The program will also be recorded for later viewing through the Kennedy Library.

Event URL: https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/forums/11-21-hemingways-widow

Timothy Christian graduated as a Commonwealth Scholar from King’s College, Cambridge. During a varied legal career, he served as a law professor and Dean at the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and a visiting professor in Japan and Taiwan. Christian read A Moveable Feast in the cafes of Aix-en-Provence when he was a young man studying French. Realizing that no one had written deeply about Mary Welsh Hemingway, Christian began researching her story–and discovered a woman vital to Hemingway’s art. Christian is married to a lawyer and abstract artist, Kathryn Dykstra, and lives in a Mediterranean microclimate on Vancouver Island’s beautiful Saanich Inlet.

About Hemingway’s Widow: A stunning portrait of the complicated woman who becomes Ernest Hemingway’s fourth wife, tracing her adventures before she meets Ernest, exploring the tumultuous years of their marriage, and evoking her merry widowhood as she shapes Hemingway’s literary legacy.

Mary Welsh, a celebrated wartime journalist during the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris, meets Ernest Hemingway in May 1944. He becomes so infatuated with Mary that he asks her to marry him the third time they meet—although they are married to other people.  Eventually, she succumbs to Ernest’s campaign, and in the last days of the war joined him at his estate in Cuba.

Through Mary’s eyes, we see Ernest Hemingway in a fresh light.  Their turbulent marriage survives his cruelty and abuse, perhaps because of their sexual compatibility and her essential contribution to his writing.  She reads and types his work each day—and makes plot suggestions.  She becomes crucial to his work and he depends upon her critical reading of his work to know if he has it right.

We watch the Hemingways as they travel to the ski country of the Dolomites, commute to Harry’s Bar in Venice; attend bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid; go on safari in Kenya in the thick of the Mau Mau Rebellion; and fish the blue waters of the gulf stream off Cuba in Ernest’s beloved boat Pilar.  We see Ernest fall in love with a teenaged Italian countess and wonder at Mary’s tolerance of the affair. 

We witness Ernest’s sad decline and Mary’s efforts to avoid the stigma of suicide by claiming his death was an accident.  In the years following Ernest’s death, Mary devotes herself to his literary legacy, negotiating with Castro to reclaim Ernest’s manuscripts from Cuba, publishing one-third of his work posthumously.  She supervises Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest, sues A. E. Hotchner to try and prevent him from telling the story of Ernest’s mental decline, and spends years writing her memoir in her penthouse overlooking the New York skyline.  

Her story is one of an opinionated woman who smokes Camels, drinks gin, swears like a man, sings like Edith Piaf, loves passionately, and experiments with gender fluidity in her extraordinary life with Ernest.  This true story reads like a novel—and the reader will be hard pressed not to fall for Mary.

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine 

The Community Library’s Together We Read book club is hosted the third Tuesday of every other month and led by a diverse range of library staff. Books cover all genres from new fiction to classics to nonfiction, young adult, graphic novels, and everything in between. Join us for one discussion or many!

February’s pick is the 2023 Winter Read, Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. This discussion of the entire collection of short stories will be led by the Library’s Teen Advisory Group (TAG) Interns. Registration is recommended to join us.

The Library has multiple copies of Sabrina & Corina circulating in our collection: as a paperback, Overdrive ebook, Overdrive eaudiobook, and on Nooks available for checkout. The book is also available in Spanish. Please come in or talk to our librarians about reserving a copy. 

More/register here.

Year Two of the Wood River Trails Coalition’s Trail Monitoring Program

In the summer and fall of 2021, the Wood River Trails Coalition (WRTC) completed a comprehensive trail use survey. In 2022, with support from the SPUR Foundation and the Valley’s trail community, WRTC was able to purchase additional trail counting devices and increase the scope of their trail monitoring program in 2022. An estimated 130,000+ trail user days were recorded across the Ketchum Ranger District in 2021.

Join WRTC Program Coordinator Emily Rodrigue to hear totals from 2022, along with exciting new ways land managers are putting this data to work. You will also get to see year-to-year comparisons from select locations, learn about the new Ground Truthing Volunteer Program, and where trail monitoring can go from here. A question and answer session will follow the presentation. 

Registration is recommended to attend in person. The program will also be livestreamed and available to watch later. Click here to watch online.

To view last year’s 2021 presentation that introduced the WRTC’s new trail use monitoring project, click here.

VOTE! at The Community Library In-Person

The Community Library John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall is a polling location for precincts 3 and 4. Polls open at 8 a.m.

To find your precinct and polling location, or for any other information, contact the Blaine County Elections Office by calling (208) 788-5510 emailing election@blainecounty.org, or visiting https://www.co.blaine.id.us/196/Elections.

with Julie Weston 

Join The Community Library for the launch of local author Julie Weston’s newest book, Moon Bones.

The death of a Chinese man leads photographer Nellie Burns and Sheriff Asteguitoiri to Vienna, a ghost town in the Stanley Basin in 1920’s Idaho. Sammy Ah Kee, who taught Nellie to drive, found the man’s body and is accused of killing him.

With the help of Nellie’s dog Moonshine, Nellie and the sheriff discover a conspiracy dedicated to enslaving Chinese immigrants. Days later, Sammy and Nellie explore the mine entrance and unearth a secret. Mayhem and murder follow all of their explorations. The conspirators capture and torture the sheriff, leaving him for dead. Moonie, Rosy Kipling, Sammy, and Alphonso, a sheepherder from Nellie’s time in the Basin, help Nellie follow the complex trails and motives in this western landscape lurking with greed and evil.

Julie Weston is the award-winning author of five Nellie Burns and Moonshine novels: Moonshadows, Basque Moon, Moonscape, Miners’ Moon, and Moon Bones, and of the nonfiction book, The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town. She is also the coauthor of The Magical Universe of the Ancients: A Desert Journal, a collaboration of writing and photography with her husband Gerry Morrison. Julie’s short stories and essays have been published in Idaho Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and The Saint Ann’s Review, among others.

A book signing with Iconoclast Books will follow. The program will also be livestreamed and available for later viewing.