To Feast, and Be Grateful

Thanksgiving is next week, and it’s time to prepare for the year’s biggest feast!  From classic turkey, stuffing, and green bean casserole to cranberry compote, Turkducken, and oyster stew, everybody does Thanksgiving a little bit different. Perhaps you’re cooking for the twentieth year and looking to mix things up, or maybe it’s your first time …

Vegging Out

As you’ve heard, the Macon County Public Library is continuing its gardening tradition this summer!  While our Youth Services Department has had and continues to have a garden for folks 12 and younger, Adult Services, with the help of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, has been gardening in two 500 sq. ft. plots at the …

NC Women: The Quakers

One of the most satisfying parts about studying history is the perspective that it often shades on today’s world. While researching and writing this blog project about North Carolina Women I have come to several realizations, but researching Quakers may have offered the most profound thus far. Without the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) there …

NC Women: Harriet Jacobs and slave women

Welcome back. Last month, in the inaugural blog of this series on women in North Carolina, NC Women: Edenton Tea Party, we learned about Penelope Barker and the women of Edenton during the Revolutionary War. The first recorded civil disobedience of women in the new world, right here in our backyard. We have seen that …

NC Women : Edenton Tea Party

This year marks a crucial anniversary in American history, the centennial of the 19th amendment and women’s enfranchisement. The amendment-passed congress on June 4th 1919, to be ratified with final passage by Tennessee on August 18th 1920. The 19th amendment handed the right to vote to more people than any other event in our history. …

Healthy Engagement 101: Theatre at the Library – A New Community Theatre Group in Franklin, NC

  Theatre is work.  No one knows that better than Roberta Pipitone, a retired drama teacher of 30 years, who has graciously volunteered her time to help the Macon County Public Library continue to build a theatre program.  Pipitone not only wrote this season’s suspenseful comedy: “Murder by the Book” – to take place at …

Libraries On Tap

Did you know that the brewing industry is the fastest growing industry in western North Carolina?  Well, of course it is!  That’s why Fontana Regional Library system is stepping out of the stacks to bring: “Libraries on Tap: Brewing Scavenger Hunt” to Jackson, Macon and Swain counties. “Libraries on Tap” is a collaboration between Fontana …

Guest Blog: Local author, Tyler Cook, reflects on Macon County Public Library’s Read Local Book Fair

As I reflect on the fifth annual Read Local Book Fair in Franklin, I can’t help but feel excitement, as if I’m attending it for the first time.  Each year brings a new experience, and a new group of customers gets to experience a new book, whether they buy mine or someone else’s.  For us …

National Parks and Recreation Month

Hi Shelf Life Readers! Happy National Parks and Recreation month! I am writing to you from the Jackson County Public Library but if you tried to find me during the summer months from 2012 to 2015, you would’ve had to look deep in the wilderness of either the Sumter or Chattahoochee National Forest, where I …

Movies that are like going to the dentist

I should probably start that by saying that for me, movies are entertainment, for the most part.  I’m not overly fond of “realistic, slice of life” movies.  As I sometimes say, I get LOTS of real life, all the time.  Movies where the father dies and leaves the young kid?  How about where the guy …