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The Writer’s Circle is free and open to the public and offers drop-in generative sessions with timed writing, speed writing, prompts and feedback.

Bring your current projects or start some new stories.

Register for the ZOOM link at reference@dobbsferrylibrary.org or with Sara Bramble at sbramble@dobbsferrylibrary.org.

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This month we’re reading Ethan Frome and Summer by Edith Wharton. Get the books at the Library!

Register with sbramble@dobbsferrylibrary.org to get the Zoom link — please indicate the title and date of the program you are registering for!

Thought Edith Wharton is best known for her cutting contemplation of fashionable New York, Ethan Frome and Summer are set in small New England towns, far from Manhattan’s beau monde. These thematically linked short novels display Wharton’s characteristic criticism of society’s hypocrisy and her daring exploration of the destructive consequences of sexual appetite. From the wintry setting of Ethan Frome, where a man hounded by community standards is destroyed by the very thing that might bring him happiness, to the florid town of Summer, where a young woman’s first romance projects her into a dizzying rite of passage, Wharton captures beautifully the urges and failures of human nature.

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The Library Board of Trustees meets on the third Wednesday of every month.

The beginning of each meeting is open to public comments.

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This month, we will be reading Between two kingdoms: a memoir of a life interrupted by Suleika Jaouad. Get the book at the Library!

Register with reference@dobbsferrylibrary.org — please indicate the title and date of the program you are registering for!

In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch–first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward–after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant–she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal–to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked–with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt–on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

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