Thank you neighbors for your enthusiastic and inspiring response to our posting last week of a link to a short video featuring Guilford's Sylvia Morse in support of the Brattleboro Literary Festival, soon to happen (October 2-5). Guilford clearly supports its own! Over 100 of you, plus your friends it would seem, watched the video. A considerable number of you contacted us or Sylvia to comment positively on the video's content and on the importance of an emphasis on writing skills for our youth (especially in this age of tweeting and texting). I will repeat the link to the video in case you missed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyAss2fp12g

We were also gifted in this process with an opportunity to review the video with Dr. Tom Ragle, Guilford's own wonderful poet and professor. Tom is also, we are learning, a fabulous story teller. Dr. Ragle pointed out that the video's tribute to the role of the Brooks Memorial Library in our community perhaps constitutes an enduring aspect of the piece. We talked with Tom about the fact that writing ability comes from hours of writing and not from some magic gene our parents handed down to us. That fact makes the quality of our schools and libraries plus home-based attention to writing so very important to the future of our community and indeed to our nation.

Working on this video with Sylvia got all of us thinking about the power of the narrative in our lives. In that process we stumbled on a new Ted talk that we found amplified these ideas we were thinking about, and did it in an way that made us a little jealous. If you have a few minutes, I think you and the entire family would enjoy seeing this Ted talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/mac_barnett_why_a_good_book_is_a_secret_door

Thanks to every one of you for all of your support in this project!

Richard Griffith

Viewpoints: a Workshop Series with Eric Bass

Feb 1, 2025, 1 to 3 PM

Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem

Feb 1, 2025, 7:30 PM

Brattleboro's Charter Revision Commission Seeks Input

Feb 6, 2025, 6 to 8 PM