LOVELL/CENTER OSSIPEE, N.H. — In recent months, the ancient face-to-face art of storytelling has blossomed in Lovell and in Center Ossipee. Lovell’s Charlotte Hobbs Library and the Sap House Meadery in Ossipee are now sponsoring two very different adult storytelling events on the third Friday of every month.
The Liars’ Club will meet in the community room of the Charlotte Hobbs Library, 227 Main St., Lovell, from noon to 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 19, for a brown-bag lunch and story swap that is free and open to all story-lovers, whether they tell or just plan to listen. Jo Radner offers a few prompts to stimulate informal memory-sharing in small groups, and then draws names of tellers who have volunteered to tell a five-minute story on the day’s theme. “Come and tell a story from your life that has something to do with love,” she invites. “Found love, hoped-for love, astonishing love? Love of children, partners, lawn mowers, woodstoves, chocolate, snow, beagles? Anything goes.”
For more information, call 207-925-3177 or go to www.hobbslibrary.org.
That same day, the Sap House Meadery, 6 Folsom Road, Center Ossipee, will be hosting Radner at 6 p.m. for a program of love stories, accompanied by mead, mead cocktails and light fare. At the Sap House, Radner will prompt the audience for a few of their own memories, but she will mainly be telling love stories from her own repertoire. Some very odd couples will appear, in tales from Bhutan, from Egypt, from ancient Wales, and even (drawing on one of her own memories) from America in the 1950s. A love-struck hippopotamus yearns for a young princess; a king gets his comeuppance in pursuit of a goddess; a pumpkin proposes marriage to a king’s daughter. And then there’s middle school in middle America — not exotic, perhaps, but a place riddled with odd couples — where Radner experienced her own first “date.”
Tickets are $7 and are available at saphousestories.bpt.me.
For more information, call 603-539-1672.
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