No Wayne County Reads 2017
By Becky Barclay
Published in News on January 18, 2017 10:14 AM
Wayne County Reads is taking the year off.
The annual program has for several years running chosen one book a year for the community to read, and then planned programs around that book.
But this year, for a number of reasons, the Wayne County Public Library and other community partners which head up the program decided to leave the books on the shelf and attend to a little housekeeping.
"This year the library and its community partners decided to take a year off programming so that we could rebuild our committee, No. one," said Donna Phillips, library director and Wayne County Reads committee member. "Several of the committee members had retired from their jobs, and we needed to have an opportunity to have their replacements hired and in place first. And secondly, to hopefully bring them on board to the Wayne County Reads committee and give them some background and history about the event."
Ms. Phillips said that taking a year off would also give the committee the opportunity to find some other funding sources for Wayne County Reads.
Although the programs for Wayne County Reads are always free to the public, it still costs the committee to do the programming and to bring authors to the community.
It was suggested that the committee look into a grant from The Big Read, the national effort to bring community reads to the public.
"But that grant process is involved, and you have to project programming a year in advance to get into the grant cycle," Ms. Phillips said. "For this year, we would not be able to meet the deadline for that grant application because we are still putting our committee together."
In past years, sometimes the committee has come up with a selection of book titles and let the public vote on which one it wanted that particular year. In other years, the public has been able to nominate a book.
"The difficulty with that is it's not just reading a book, but it's all the related programming that has to be planned to go along with it," Ms. Phillips said. "Sometimes the public may or may not understand the depth of content that has to be in the book so that programming can be planned around it."
Wayne County Reads originally started as a way to give the entire community an opportunity to share the joy of reading, Ms. Phillips said.
"In addition to that, it's an opportunity to have conversations about the book throughout the year," she said.
"I recall being in the grocery store shopping one year and hearing a couple of ladies ahead of me in line at the register talking about the book we were reading that year. And that's exactly the kind of thing we want to happen.
"A few years ago we read 'The Pleasure was Mine,' and it dealt with aging parents and a parent who had Alzheimer's and the struggle for the child who is now, in a sense, in the parenting role. That's relevant to what is happening in a lot of families now."
Then there was the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle."
"We chose that one because in our community and other communities around the United States, there's this whole farm-to-fork movement -- rediscovering where our food comes from and the importance of your food not traveling very far," Ms. Phillips said.
"Because Wayne County is rich with community gardens and the wonderful partnership with the Center for Environmental Farming System, the University of Mount Olive and Wayne Community College having the agricultural programs, we felt like there'd be a lot of interest in that. And there was."
Skipping a year will allow the committee to plan more comprehensive programming for future Wayne County Reads events.
And this year, the committee is planning to do a public survey about what kinds of books people are interested in reading and what kinds of programs they would like to go along with the books.