ZOOM – Drop-In Lunchtime Writing Workshop

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Join us every other Tuesday, January 5 through May 25, for a drop-in virtual writing workshop, led by Martha Williams, the Library’s programs and education manager.

Each workshop begins with a warm-up prompt, then moves into a prompt that we will work with for the remainder of the hour and a half. These free-form writing exercises are designed for writers of all genres–poetry, fiction, short fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. Those who can only join for the first hour are welcome to join!

After each exercise we’ll share, discuss, and give each other feedback before moving onto another prompt or diving deeper into what we’ve created. We will also encourage a writing practice and share details of a writerly life together.

Register on Zoom for one or all workshops.

The Publishing Industry Unveiled

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Would you like to sit down with a published author and ask them all your burning questions about writing and getting published? The book publishing industry is competitive and can be a mystery to many.  Connecting with someone who has experienced the process and can support your journey is invaluable. Throughout September and October, Alli Frank, co-author of the new novel Tiny Imperfections, will be sitting down with local writers to answer all your questions.

These 45-minute, one-on-one meetings will be held outside the Library (with social distancing) on the following dates. There will be two sessions each afternoon from 1:00-1:45 p.m. and 1:45-2:30 p.m.:

Friday, September 11
Friday, September 18
Friday, September 25
Friday, October 2
Friday, October 9
Friday, October 16 – *NEW*
Friday, October 23 – *NEW*

Email mwilliams@comlib.org to sign up.

 

Alli Frank is an author dividing her time between Seattle and Sun Valley. A graduate of Cornell and Stanford Universities, she has been a teacher, curriculum leader, coach, college counselor, assistant head, and private school co-founder. Alli is the co-author with Asha Youmans of Tiny Imperfections, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House in May 2020 and optioned for television/film rights by a major streaming service. She and Asha are currently working on their second book.

An Evening with Hisham Matar

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Photo by Diana Matar ©

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Matar would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. His 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, is the story of what he found there.

The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as “a first-person elegy for home and father.” Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?

Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Hisham Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His first memoir, The Return, was one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

After finishing The Return, Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists whom he had admired throughout his life, such as Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he has had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in Matar’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with the city and its inhabitants.

 

“The Daughters of Yalta” A Conversation with Catherine Grace Katz

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October 8, 2020

Watch the Recording

Join us for a virtual conversation with author Catherine Grace Katz as she discussed her new book, The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans, A Story of Love and War. Katz will be in conversation with the Library’s programs and education manager, Martha Williams.

Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. In The Daughters of Yalta, Katz draws on newly accessible sources to bring to light the untold story of the three intelligent and glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin seventy-five years ago, and of the fateful reverberations in the waning days of World War II.

Kathleen Harriman was a champion skier, war correspondent, and daughter of US ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman. Sarah Churchill, an actress turned RAF officer, was devoted to her brilliant father, who depended on her astute political mind. Roosevelt’s only daughter, Anna, chosen instead of her mother Eleanor to accompany the president to Yalta, arrived there as keeper of her father’s most damaging secrets. Situated in the political maelstrom that marked the transition to a post war world,  The Daughters of Yalta is a remarkable story about complex personal relationships seen through the lens of a pivotal historic moment.

Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian from Chicago. She holds degrees in history from Harvard and Cambridge and is currently pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. The Daughters of Yalta is her first book.

VIRTUAL – Drop-In Poetry Discussion: “Censorship is a Dead End”

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Join us each month for this drop-in discussion group focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion through the lens of poetry. Each month we will gather to read a poem together and discuss its challenges and inspirations to how we understand our community, our world, and ourselves. Library staff and guests will lead each discussion, beginning with a reading of the selected work.

This month our discussion will celebrate Banned Books Week, which runs September 27 to October 3. 

Launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries, Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. The event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular. This year’s event theme is “Censorship is a dead end. Find your freedom to read!”

Register below to join the discussion. The selected poem will be shared the morning of September 29.

REGISTER HERE

2020 Audacious Read: ULYSSES by James Joyce

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October 20 | 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Email jdavidson@comlib.org to join this Zoom meeting.

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) may be more talked about than read. It occupies an intimidating position within the literary canon as a byword for experimental modernism. Joyce helped to forge its reputation, mischievously claiming, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” Even Virginia Woolf, reading shortly after publication, found Ulysses a struggle, dismissing it as “diffuse,” “brackish,” and “pretentious.” Prestige is evident in its perennial placing in lists of “Great Books,” and echoed in its value to collectors. In 2009, a first edition sold at auction for £275,000, the highest sum ever achieved for a 20th-century novel. Yet its reputation for difficulty masks the extent to which Ulysses is warm, welcoming and witty, granting a uniquely intimate perspective on what it is to be human.

– Dr. Katherine Mullin

Reading Schedule

January 21 – Introduction and Episode 1, “Telemachus” (roughly pages 1-23)

February 18 – Episodes 2-6,“Nestor” | “Proteus” | “Calypso” | “The Lotus-Eaters” | “Hades” (roughly pages 24-111)

March 17 – Episodes 7-8, “Aeolus” | “Lestrygonians” (roughly pages 112-175) – *CANCELLED*

April 21 – Episode 9, “Scylla & Charybdis” (roughly pages 176-209) 

May 19 – Episodes 10-11, “Wandering Rocks” | “Sirens” (roughly pages 210-279)

June 16 – BLOOMSDAY! Episode 12, “Cyclops” (roughly pages 280-330)

July 21 – Episode 13, “Nausicaa” (roughly pages 331-365)

August 18 – Episode 14, “Oxen of the Sun” (roughly pages 366-407)

September 15 – Episode 15, “Circe” (roughly pages 408-565)

October 20 – Episode 16, “Eumaeus” (roughly pages 569-618)

November 17 – Episode 17, “Ithaca” (roughly pages 619-689)

December 15 – Episode 18, “Penelope” (roughly pages 690-732)

 

Resources

Recorded presentation by literary scholar Dr. Enda Duffy at The Community Library Lecture Hall on 7 December 2019: https://livestream.com/comlib/duffy

Free digital copy of Ulysses through Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap15

British Library online introduction to Ulysses: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-ulysses

Online guide to Ulysses by Dr. Patrick Hastings: http://www.ulyssesguide.com/

 

The Community Library Contact

Jenny Emery Davidson

jdavidson@comlib.org

(208) 806-2620

                                    

Photo courtesy of LitHub.

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