Story Quilt: Poems of a Place; A Library's Social History Project Turns a Community's Stories into Homegrown Poetry

Beginning of article

Most days, you'll find John Mechanik, 81, outside his family homestead in Galway, a tiny village in upstate New York, tinkering with his tractor, splitting wood, or making cider in his homemade apple press. If you catch him in the right mood, he might stop what he's doing and tell a story about Galway in the old days, when it was 90% dairy farms. Where you wouldn't expect to find John is at a poetry reading--he hadn't read a poem since high school--but there he was on October 15, 2005, in the third row of the Galway High School auditorium, as poems from the Story Quilt were performed onstage. He even wore his brown corduroy sports jacket for the occasion.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mechanikwas among an audience of 150 of his neighbors that night who had come to hear a new brand of homegrown poetry, straight from the memories and experiences of the people of Galway them selves. Each poem in the collection represented a "patch" of the quilt that composes the story of Galway. In the audience were retired farmers, like Mechanik, schoolteachers, children, merchants, professionals, tradesmen, …