The book shows a girl about 10 years old, standing in an orchard and looking at me while her classmates reach up to the tree branches around her. She tells a gentle story. She is trying to learn a new place and finding comfort in sun and trees and familiar sounds. A dog crunching windfall apples. Laughter.
She is smiling, an intelligent and rueful look with some hard-won optimism … a girl named Farah wearing a dupatta, a scarf, with her t-shirt and jeans, talking to her classmates in a new place that could be here.
I was wandering through North Adams on a quiet afternoon, when I walked into Installation Space and saw Eve Bunting’s One Green Apple on a shelf by the door. The shelf said ‘banned challenged books … take one — thank you.’
Thank you I thought back to them. I’d happened on a show by a local group of artists who have come together as the FeministFuturist Collective — Freedom Baird, Christina Balch, Majorie Kaye, Carolyn Wirth and guest filmmaker Homa Sarabi. And now that we’re heading into banned book week and apple season, I remember that day like a gift.
Fiber art gleamed in the window like a nest of dragon eggs. Geometric paintings opened bright colors. A film set sunlight dancing on the wall with one word sounding like a wave — nur, the word light in Farsi (and in Arabic). Sarabi drew the idea from a poem by contemporary Persian poet Forough Farokhzad.
‘My sky overflows with falling stars …
night melts like wax …
you breathe, and the sun will rise …
The Mount in Lenox holds many books from Edith Wharton's own library.
Banned Books Week
The American Library Association takes time on October 1 to 7 to talk about banned books — to honor writers and storytellers and talk about the vital stories they tell — and to talk about the challenges they have seen this year. And in the Berkshires, this year we’re joining in.
Members of the Williams College community gather for A Seat at the Table, a presentation at Claiming Williams in 2017. Press photo courtesy of Williams
Get Loud — Celebration of Banned Books
October 1 at 3 p.m.
The Milne Public Library presents Get Loud: A Celebration of Banned Books at Williams College — with readers including writers Susan Choi, Manuel Gonzales and Peggy Kern, awardwinning actor Jessica Hecht and acclaimed poet and professor Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
Shaker Mill Books gathers unique new and known tales in West Stockbridge.
For Shaker Mill Books’ banned book selves in West Stockbridge — talk with the Bear and Bee in North Adams and the Bookstore in Lenox — and check out Milne Library’s Right to Read …
Events coming up in books and writing …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
