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Library gives Homer manuscripts Top Drawer’ treatmentBy ROSANNE PAGANOThe Associated PressANCHORAGE—Read any good neighbors lately?It’s not impossible in the Kachemak Bay town of Homer, where the public library reserves space in its 26,000-volume collection for area authors whose memoirs and novels, science fiction and poetry have a shelf of their own.Since the “Top Drawer” collection was started a decade ago, local writerswith an unpublished manuscript have been invited to submit their work, which the library then binds for free and circulates along with its Hemingways andGrishams.“Some works are more popular than others,” library director Karen McRae says of the Top Drawer collection. “Word gets around.”And that, organizers say, is exactlythe point.“It’s a good sounding board,” said JoyGriffin, a free-lance writer and former schoolteacher who has lived in Homer since 1980. “People will tell you how they liked it.”Griffin, who helped found the collection with Homer’s Friends of the Library, said she’s had three books in Top Drawer. Only one—the children’s book “Percy the Pesky Bear”—still is on the shelf.Griffin’s other works—a memoir of her family’s homestead days near Fairbanks and her collection of Christian-based fiction—disappeared years ago, a compliment of some kind or other.The idea began when Griffin’s husband, Norman, was doing some editing work for local writers when he set down his papers, looked at his wife across the dining room table and declared the manuscripts good.“He said, ‘You know, people should be able to read this stuff,”’ Griffin recalls. Instead, she said, much of thewriting was getting shoved back in the desk drawer until Top Drawer came alone.As far as organizers can tell, Homer’s library is unique in Alaska when it comes to soliciting and publishing local work. Anchorage-based writer Sue Henry, who teachers a University of Alaska class on writing autobiography, says Top Drawer is an idea that deserves to be copied in larger towns—even atSee HOMER, Page A-7
Newspaper Details
Fairbanks Daily News Miner
Fairbanks, Alaska, US
Mon, Mar 11, 1996
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Ryan S.
USA 02 May 2018
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