“Writing is a struggle against silence.” —Carlos Fuentes
Books heal hearts.
That’s the name of a special fund set up by Cyrenius H. Booth Library, the public library in Newtown, Connecticut, where officials know a community will long be perusing the stacks in search of some grain of wisdom or solace.
To meet that need, library officials are directing donations from across the country and beyond into ” a special fund for healing that will make materials available for use in our library, our schools, and throughout our community, wherever there is a need and whatever that need may be. This will be an ongoing effort by the library to meet the immediate and future needs of our community.”
You can donate online right here.
Or you can contribute by check to:
Cyrenius H. Booth Library
25 Main Street
Newtown, CT 06470
All donations are tax-deductible. But, more important than that, this is one charitable donation that you can be sure will serve a wounded community in profound ways for years to come.
Because books do, in fact, heal.
The proof of that can be found in the wake of any loss, whether one as grotesquely public as the Sandy Hook School tragedy or the private, personal losses each of us knows too well.
That’s when we turn to the written word for a measure of understanding of all that is beyond understanding.
I have seen that in my own life in–among other occasions–a series of readings I did from Beloved on the Earth, a remarkable poetry anthology I am privileged to have work in, along with scores of acclaimed writers, from Mary Oliver to Rumi to Lucille Clifton, Ted Kooser, and many more. At those events, the traditional audience-performer barrier never held, as each person in the room became a storyteller compelled to share their own experience of “grief and gratitude,” as the subtitle of the book has it.
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