The Ridgefield Library now uses an online system for people to log and report their progress during the Summer Reading Program. To help children create accounts and track their books, hand out prizes and encourage more reading, the Library will be looking for approximately 50 middle and high school volunteers, each of whom can make a significant time commitment (at least 10 hours between late June and mid-August). 

Interested teens should print out an application here, sign it (and get a parent or guardian signature) and return to Teen Services Librarian Geri Diorio at the Library by June 3rd.

They call it The Norton Anthology of English Literature and yet many of the writers included were born in Ireland. The commonality of course is the English language but there are vast cultural differences which will be explored in this performance. A great deal of Irish writing deals with the land, the past, the church, and the changing political landscape. Yeats, Joyce, Heaney, McCourt, and other prominent writers are represented in this dramatic offering.

Stephen Collins grew up in Cambridge, and received a BA in Literature from UMass Boston. After twenty plus years in a sales career, he is back doing what he truly loves - performing and teaching. Recently he has been teaching seminars on Whitman, Hardy, Shakespeare, Frost, and Contemporary Poetry at various locations throughout the country.

This program is made possible thanks to the Friends of the Library in memory of Ann Jepson. Please register.

Writing Good Flash Fiction is Writing Good Fiction with Julia Strayer

This special meeting of the Writers Guild of Ridgefield is open to all! Flash fiction delivers big emotion in a small space. We'll read examples and talk about how the authors used techniques common to all good writing: language, structure, compression, image, extended metaphor and sensory description. Flash fiction can be a great way to break into prestigious literary journals and a surprising way to write longer work.

Julia Strayer's fiction and essays appear or are forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly and Glimmer Train. Her work has been selected for The Best Small Fictions 2015 anthology and she placed first in the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches creative writing at New York University.

No registration. Email Linda Merlino at lindamerlino@sbcglobal.net  or call 203-240-2243 for more information.

Memoir Writing Group 
Monthly session will include advice from other writers, a prompt with writing time, critique and sharing. No registration. Please contact Eileen O'Halloran,  eohalloran509@gmail.com or 914-441-8092 for more information.