This year’s abbreviated season (by snow and more snow) of Story Hour for Grownups at the Woods Hole Public Library will culminate with readings by Shelby Allen and Alan Steinbach. The event will take place on Sunday, March 22, at 3 pm, in the Library’s downstairs Community Room.
Shelby Allen—a poet, essayist, actress, and Boston Library tour guide—splits her time between Boston and Falmouth. She has been a prison poetry teacher, and her writings have been published in poetry journals as well as in the New York Times and Boston Globe. She is the author of Crack Willow: Poems of Transformation (from Cherry Grove.) A new Story Hour reader, she will open the session with a few selections of her own poetry.
Alan Steinbach, familiar to many in the audience as a local physician, blogger, and also as a previous Story Hour reader, will present his own “Two Fish and One Story.” This piece will transport the audience from our recent bleak and intransigent winter to Woods Hole at its finest. It is an evocative tale, summoning the golden, if breezy, days of autumn after the crowds have departed. Join Alan for a bicycle ride down Gardiner Road and a fishing expedition with his dog, Fuji, as they depart from Eel Pond for nearby waters and a “reel” fishing adventure.
Shelby will close with Muriel Spark’s short story, “The Dark Glasses.” Two women lecturers at a summer school conference take a walk around a lake together. One, the narrator, dons a pair of sunglasses to avoid recognition by the other, a pompous psychologist. The narrator recalls the psychologist from her early teen years, when the older woman was still in general medical practice. Back then the teen was fitted for reading glasses by an oculist with pedophilic tendencies. He and his sister, who held a dispenser’s certificate, ran their shop together and had a bizarre relationship, which ended badly for both of them. Sparks’ stories often seem to have been written with a barb rather than a pen, and this story (featuring a hat pin) is no exception!
The event, on Sunday, March 22 at 3 pm, is free and open to the public. All are welcome. Doors will open at 2:30 pm.