Past Events
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Tuesday, January 9, 2018 - 10:00 AM | The Writing Life | For members only | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredMargo Taft Stever and Jennifer Franklin, poets and co-editors of Slapering Hol Press, talk about how to establish and maintain a small press. They will also discuss the general procedures for publishing poems in literary magazines and how to put together a book of poetry.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - 10:00 AM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredThe right words in the right order in the right place can build a world, but laying the bricks right is never easy. A seasoned editor discusses how to tell when the words are right and when they're wrong, how to put them in order, and how to create the spaces for new dimensions by assembling words into sentences, paragraphs, and stories.
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Thursday, December 7, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredFind joy and insight with two authors in enthusiastic conversation about children’s literature, human nature, and their new books: Bruce Handy’s Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult and Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too).
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Saturday, November 18, 2017 - 3:00 PM | Children | For Members and Guests | For ages 2 and older | Whitridge Room | $10 per child, payable at the door | Advance registration required
Storyteller Getchie Argetsinger will share interactive stories and games during an enchanting afternoon at the Library.
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Thursday, November 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredYoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time, core teachings of yoga in their original form, translated and edited by two of the world’s foremost scholars of the subject. Sir James Mallinson is a lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical and Indian Studies at SOAS, University of London; Mark Singleton is a long-term research fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies. They are joined in conversation by Daniel Simpson.
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Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - 5:30 PM | Children | For Members and Guests | For grades 3-8 | Whitridge Room | $15 per person, payable at the door | Advance registration requiredIn this ongoing series young writers are invited to join notable authors in exploring different genres. Novelist Jane Kelley will share how empathy helps authors create realistic characters, whether they’re a frightened kid, a soldier, an astronaut, or even an animal. Participants will learn how “walking in someone else’s shoes” can improve their writing and strengthen their connection to others.
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Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - 10:00 AM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredWe’ve all been told to write what you know. Children’s Lit authors Ann E. Burg (Unbound: A Novel in Verse) and Christine Kendall (Riding Chance) will discuss how inspiration, perspiration, and no small amount of magic have led them to places and experiences they never would have imagined. They’ll share their thoughts on historical fiction, novels in verse, and, most importantly, writing across and deeper than our differences.
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Sunday, November 12, 2017 - 3:00 PM | Performance | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $25 per person | Advance registration required
Experience Willa Cather’s world in a whole new way through the music of Library member and acclaimed jazz composer Nancy Harrow, accompanied by Alphonso Horne, trumpet; Dave Linard, keyboard; and John Snow, bass.
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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Children | Open to the Public | For grades 6 and older | Members' Room | $10 per person, payable at the door | Advance registration requiredSpeed of Life is the heartbreaking, heartwarming story of a girl who thinks her life is over, when really it’s just beginning. The New York Times Book Review calls it “perceptive, funny, and moving.”
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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredAfter meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America’s greatest novels. Rich in evocative detail from Paris cafés to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West, The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent literary friendship and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.
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Thursday, November 2, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $20 per person | Advance registration requiredProfessional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn’t know much about wine—until she discovered an alternate universe where taste reigns surpreme, a world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavor. Astounded by their fervor and seemingly superhuman sensory powers, she set out to discover what drove their obsession, and whether she, too, could become a “cork dork.” In this event, Ms. Bosker will introduce her book Cork Dork and three of the specific wines discussed, which will then be served following the presentation.
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Monday, October 30, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredTo lovers of theater, David Ives’ name says intelligence, humor, and excitement, from All in the Timing to Venus in Fur. In this one-time-only event, Mr. Ives will chat with Tony Award-winner John Rando, a frequent director of his plays, about his own work, the theater world, and the craft of playwriting.
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Sunday, October 29, 2017 - 3:00 PM | Performance | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $25 per person | Advance registration requiredAMP is inspired by the writings of Mary Shelley, Luigi Galvani’s discovery of “animal electricity,” the birth of modern feminism, the history of electro-shock therapy, and the monsters society creates. Written and performed by Jody Christopherson with sound and projection design by Martha Goode, AMP is a 60-minute multi-media solo horror piece for the theater.
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Thursday, October 26, 2017 - 6:00 PM | The Writing Life | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
Library members read from their own short stories, novels, poetry, criticism, memoir, and plays. Refreshments and wine will be served.
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Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - 11:00 AM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $25 for both sessions (recommended); $15 per sessionSamuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh is a full-bodied social novel as well as an excoriating attack on the Victorian consensus. Butler chronicles the collapse of the nineteenth century’s certainties and the arising of new, modern questions with psychological dpth and satiric verve. Join in this two-part discussion of a book long regarded as a modern classic.
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Monday, October 23, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Reception | For Members and Guests | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration required
Library members and guests are cordially invited to the opening reception for this exhibition devoted to Library member Willa Cather, an icon of twentieth-century American literature.
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Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThe favored granddaughter of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson reveals a life of glamour, depressive battles, hard-won joy, and peace. It’s My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman’s deep effort to understand herself.
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Monday, October 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.”
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Sunday, October 15, 2017 - 2:30 PM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | By donation; advance registration required
Educator Blanche Siegal leads informal discussions of the works of the beloved Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope and selected contemporaries. This popular group is now in its seventh season. Tea and light refreshments are served.
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Thursday, October 12, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredJames Fenimore Cooper has been credited with inventing genre fiction from the Western and the spy novel to the high seas adventure tale and the Revolutionary War romance. America’s first crusading novelist, Cooper reminds us that literature is not a cloistered art; rather, it ought to be intimately engaged with the world. Dr. Wayne Franklin offers readers the most comprehensive portrait to date of this underappreciated literary icon. This event is the first annual Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. Lecture on Early American History & Literature.
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Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - 10:00 AM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredIf there’s one guarantee about becoming a writer, it’s that the journey will involve great doses of failure. How can you use criticism, rejection, and failure as sustenance for your journey rather than roadblocks? And how can you read Gooderads reviews of your precious debut novel without pulling your hair out? We’ll explore together with Jonathan F. Putnam, author of the Lincoln & Speed historical mystery series.
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Wednesday, October 4, 2017 - 11:00 AM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $60 for all sessions (recommended); $15 per session | Advance registration requiredPopular seminar leader Dr. James Kraft discusses canonical and lesser-known works by a formidable figure in American literature whose many excellent novels explore complex, controversial places and ideas.
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Tuesday, October 3, 2017 - 6:00 PM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $60 for the series | Advance registration required
A workshop in the art of reading between the lines—for nuances and implications, as well as subtext—in which attention will be paid to the author’s prose style and point-of-view as well as to the larger cultural context.
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Monday, October 2, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Performance | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $25 per person | Advance registration requiredThis full-cast staged reading tells the true story of a deeply contentious investigation into the treatment of American soldiers in the First World War. Are we ever allowed to say that a soldier died in vain?
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThis unique event brings together two cutting-edge historians on the era of women’s suffrage. Angela P. Dodson’s Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box documents the fight for women’s right to vote, drawing on historic research, biographies of leaders, and primary sources from books to buttons. Brooke Kroeger’s The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote is the untold story of thousands of men who involved themselves with the suffrage campaign.
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