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 …

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 …

Calling all Nerds! – Healthy Escapism 101

I am a proud, card-carrying nerd.  While I am not a stereotype, I enjoy and appreciate all things geek (I do, after all, work in a library).  Over the years, my inner geek has taken a back seat to jobs, school, moves, and financial constraints, however, the geek is and will always be around, waiting …

Hike with Pride this month!

June is LGBTQIA+ Pride Month as well as Great Outdoors Month and so this blog will be about both! LGBTQIA+ is an acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and the plus is for gender fluid people - people whose gender identity changes over time or per situation. Queer is a …

Let’s clear the air: a Vulture is not a Buzzard

  Today’s blog focuses on the Turkey Vulture, another one of the most commonly seen birds here in the Southeast. Before we talk about identifying characteristics though, I thought we could dive into the semantics of the terms vulture and buzzard, because it can be pretty confusing. Before researching this topic, whenever I heard the …

The Rise of the Verse Novel: Celebrating National Poetry Month

I loved poetry as a child. I read a lot of it, memorized some favorite poems, and tried to write my own (very badly, I must say). As I grew up, I wandered away from poetry for the most part, with a few notable exceptions -- John Donne and W. B. Yeats in particular. In …

Libraries Lead

This past week, April 8th to 14th, was National Library Week! Hooray! We hope everyone celebrated appropriately with books and movies borrowed from your library. If not, don’t worry, Governor Cooper has declared this month as Library Appreciation Month!  National Library Week was first officially sponsored in 1958, making this the 60th anniversary! This week …

Summer Music Memories

If you have ever been a listener to popular music, you’ve probably had the experience of “summer” music – when a song or an album becomes identified with the summer season. It might be even be a particular summer – the summer just after high school graduation, or the summer you got your first full-time …

Celebrating Audiobook Month

      June is Audiobook Month! When I was a kid (back in the dark ages when recordings were 12-inch LP records), my brothers and I loved sick days. Not because we wanted to miss school, but because being home in bed was a chance to listen to our recordings of Alice in Wonderland or …

How Malala Yousafzai Changed the World

Education. It's a word and an institution that has been tugged back and forth between different ideologies, time periods, political parties, and religious groups to name a few, and, depending on what area of the world it is cherished or challenged, can depend on a matter of life and death. For Malala Yousafzai, a young …