Join us for an uplifting movie in the HCC auditorium Saturday, October 18 at 3:00 PM. Free snack bar.

The New Mexico Poet Laureate Manuel Gonzalez has offered to visit Hillsboro to provide free writing workshops. We were thinking in March or April. If you are interested in attending one or more of the workshops below please pre-register at hbolib@gmail.com so we can ascertain interest. Please let us know which workshops interest you. We will have several workshops, most likely all on the same day.

1. Manuel will give a reading of his work followed by conversation with the audience. The reading can be broad or built around a particular theme, including New Mexico, place, identity, family, culture, Indigenous and Chicano experience, memory, language, belonging, recovery, grief, resilience, community, or poetry as medicine.

2. Poetry Is Medicine Workshop
A welcoming writing workshop centered on poetry as a way to remember, witness, heal, tell the truth, preserve stories, and make meaning from our lives. Participants do not need to identify as poets or have  any previous writing experience.
He will guide participants through accessible prompts and writing exercises and give them opportunities to share if they choose.

3. Writing Our Place: New Mexico, Home, Land, and Memory
A generative workshop asking participants to write from the places that made them. We can explore landscape, neighborhood, family history, migration, ancestral homelands, language, food, memory, community, and our relationship to the land.
This can be especially powerful as an intergenerational program.

4. Identity, Culture, and the Stories We Carry
A workshop about writing from identity without reducing ourselves to labels. Participants explore names, family stories, culture, language, traditions, contradictions, inherited stories, and the parts of themselves they want future generations to remember.

5. Spoken Word and Performance Poetry Workshop
An introduction to spoken word poetry and the relationship between the poem on the page and the poem in the body. We work with voice, pacing, breath, projection, emotion, gesture, stage presence, microphone technique, memorization, and connecting authentically with an audience.

6. From Memory to Poem
A simple, accessible workshop for people who may believe they are “not writers.” We begin with one memory, person, object, place, photograph, sound, smell, or family story and slowly turn it into a poem.

7.   Poetry for Recovery, Survival, and Resilience
A writing and conversation workshop centered on survival, recovery, grief, change, mental health, substance-use recovery, community support, and the ways language can help us tell difficult truths. This can be developed in partnership with local recovery organizations or community health programs when appropriate.

Library Bake Sale -The next Library bake sale will be Saturday, November 7, in front of the post office. A big thank you to all of the bakers, and Frances & Bruce for running the library bake sale. If you would like to make baked goods for the sale please contact Frances Chudy at chudy0126@aol.com