When I come to the Library, I see our town. I see young mothers with adorable toddlers struggling to carry an over-sized book. I see teenagers painting murals for Christmas on our windows, and grandmothers who read more books in a week than I will all year. I see aspiring gardeners and knitters and home-improvers. I see people working hard and people relaxing; laboring over math problems and chuckling over Youtube videos.
Every now and then, I get a snippet of someone’s story. The more snippets I get, the more I realize our town is full of remarkable people with an incredible range of experiences, opinions and ambitions. Together, we make up a community─and a pretty great one at that! Sure, we have our problems, but generally, we like living here (and I’m not just being Pollyanna, you can read for yourself in the 2017 Resident Survey).
If you’re like me though, you miss out on much of our community’s perspectives 
because you tend to travel in the same “circuit” around town. For me, it looks something like, work, church, the grocery store and the houses of my friends who generally go to the same church, work, or grocery store as I do. Routines aren’t bad─they’re very helpful. But sometimes I get so absorbed in my rhythm that I miss the voices of people outside of it. It’s kind of like muting the treble and only listening to the baseline of a song: It’s still nice, but it’s missing a lot of the beauty that makes the song a song.
In the interest of hearing more voices and celebrating community, we’d like to invite everyone to write a book together. We’re calling it: The Community Book Project. You can lend your voice with words or with pictures, in Spanish or in English. Every piece will have something to do with community: what makes it work, why it’s important, how you’ve experienced it personally, etc.
Would you tell us about a friendship that has meant the world to you? Write a poem about what it means to listen to someone different from yourself? Compose a photograph to make us ponder why relationships are worth the risk?
We want to hear your perspective about community. E-mail your masterpiece to us 
at Library@siloamsprings.com. Complete details for submission are found when you click HERE.
We can’t wait to show you the final copy. The book will be kept at our Library and at the Siloam school libraries. Since the book is all about community, The Friends of the Library Bookstore will also have the book for sale and they will invest all profits back into projects that benefit the community.
Speaking of the Friends of the Library, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to them and to Generations Bank, for providing funding for this exciting endeavor. And thank YOU in advance for investing your time and talent into the Community Book Project.
Till next time,
Kendra
Siloam Springs Public Library 