Without A Map by Meredith Hall

Skidompha’s Chats with Champions Committee is privileged to announce a highly anticipated February “Chats.” Best selling author and Bowdoin college graduate, Meredith Hall will speak at the library on Thursday, February 4, at 10:00 am.

Meredith Hall’s magnificent memoir, Without a Map, is brutally honest, poignant, and beautifully written. It is her turbulent tale of trauma, loss, and betrayal that transforms into a story of acceptance, joy, reconnection, and survival.

In 1965, in a small New Hampshire town, 16-year-old Meredith Hall became pregnant and was exiled from both her school and her home, essentially from her whole life. She tells us what existence was like for a naive girl, abandoned by her mother, then coldly accepted into her father and stepmother’s home until the birth of her child. Forced to give up her baby for adoption, shamed by family and society’s censure, Hall loses her way for years. She manages to graduate high school, but afterward wanders aimlessly and poverty-stricken in Europe and the Middle East.

How she puts her life back together, moving to Maine, creating a home and family, becoming the first non-traditional student at Bowdoin College, forgiving her parents, reuniting with her lost son, and forging a career as a critically acclaimed writer is an absorbing and uplifting story.

Without a Map was included on the New York Times Extended Bestseller List and named to Oprah Winfrey’s Top Ten Memoirs list. Meredith Hall was awarded a Gift of Freedom Award from “A Room of Her Own” Foundation, which allowed her the resources to write Without a Map. She received a Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship and won the 2005 Pushcart Prize with her first essay, which was a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays 2005. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies.

The author’s book Without a Map will be offered for sale at the program. She will be available to autograph books.

“Chats with Champions” is a free community offering of Skidompha Library. Its Meredith Hall program is co-sponsored by Maine Coast Bookshop. “Chats…” programs are generally held the first Thursday of the month at 10:00 am in the Library’s Porter Meeting Hall. For more information call 563-5513.

Do you know that Skidompha provides passes to the Portland Museum of Art free of charge to all members of the community (you do not have to be a library patron)?

One pass is issued each day, which admits two adults and up to six children without charge. Passes can be reserved in advance by calling 563-5513. The museum passes are a gift to the community from the Pemaquid Group of Artists.

And do you know that The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens has given Skidompha two complimentary passes, a day, for Skidompha patrons to enjoy one of Maine’s hidden secrets?

The passes are free to residents of Damariscotta, Newcastle and Nobleboro, whose residents are Skidompha members by virtue of their town’s generous financial support of the Library. Also, all patron residents of surrounding towns who have purchased Skidompha member cards are eligible for the two free daily passes.

Passes are available at Skidompha’s Main Desk. Interested persons holding Skidompha Library cards can “check out” the passes as they would check out a book, or a CD. Those who take advantage of this offer are requested to return the passes to the Library at the end of their visit to the Botanical Garden, so others may use them. Passes can be reserved in advance by calling 563-5513.

Coastal Botanical Gardens has offered this complimentary pass program, available to their members, to all libraries in Maine.

Here’s a blog post to get things going. Tell us what books you’re reading right now–even if you haven’t finished. They don’t have to be something you checked out from Skidompha (although we hope so).

I am just finishing Chet Raymo’s When God is Gone Everything is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist. Raymo, a retired scientist has written extensively on the intersection of science and spirituality–and this book is a fine continuation of his earlier work.

“Raymo steps into the fray between science and religion and seeks to delineate a new perspective, forged from both the rigorous standards of the academy and the reverence for creation born of the Catholic sacramental tradition. As a scientist, Raymo holds to the skepticism that accepts only verifiable answers, and replies to life’s ultimate questions with the agnostic response, “I don’t know.” But as a “religious naturalist,” he never ceases his pursuit of “the beautiful and terrible mystery that soaks creation, diminished by any name we give it.” “Faith no longer matters to me,” he says, ’so much as attention, celebration, wonder, and praise.”" –from the author’s website.

Science Musings, is Raymo’s portal to blog on exciting things that are happening in science. Other on-site resources will appeal to visitors who value reliable empirical knowledge of the world, yet retain a sense of reverence and awe for the complexity, beauty, and sometimes terror of nature. If you like Loren Eiseley’s stuff, you’ll probably like Raymo, too.  –Mal

If turning the pages of a book just seems so…Back In The Day;  if your last experience with audionbooks was when you had to load a dozen cassette tapes just to get through Chapter One of Anna Karenina, you’re in for a surprise.

Do you know you can download audiobooks directly to your own computer (or even some titles to an iPod) for free?

With Maine InfoNet Download Library, you can enjoy library audios anywhere. Media will play for a loan period of seven days on your computer or WMA/MP3 player and some titles may be recorded (”burned”) onto a CD or play on an iPod.

There are never any overdue fees. At the end of the loan period, the item you selected is automatically “returned.”

Get your Skidompha Library card ready and click here (maine.lib.overdrive.com)  for more details.

Happy listening!

A generous grant to Skidompha Library from the Damariscotta-Newcastle Rotary Club will enable the creation of a new program designed for children ages 4 and 5, who are ready to graduate from the regular story hours to the next step in literacy skills.

With the guidance of Skidompha’s children’s librarians, Ready to Read will engage older preschoolers in phonics games and letter recognition skills that help to improve reading skills and better prepare children to enter kindergarten. Using songs and stories as well as tools such as sandpaper letters and a listening station, Ready to Read will be fun and upbeat while teaching basic literacy skills. According to children’s librarian Jen Betts, the program is designed for parents and children to participate in together, and will offer parents ideas for activities they can continue at home to help improve reading readiness. “It is also an ideal program for families who home school their children,” Jen added.

In presenting the Rotary Club’s check for the Ready to Read program, Damariscotta-Newcastle Rotary President Karen Filler said, “We are pleased to be able to make this new children’s literacy program available at Skidompha. Both children and parents will benefit from an increase in the amount of shared quality time they enjoy while learning new skills. All participants will have the opportunity to increase reading and language skills in a fun, stress-free environment.

In January, the Ready to Read program will be added to the Library’s “Skid Kids” literacy program that currently includes Book Babies and Toddler Time.