By Claire Pomer, Harwood correspondent
Local folks gathered via Zoom last week to talk about big things, smaller things, the mundane and the sublime at an event hosted by the libraries of the Mad River Valley. Last Thursday, January 16, the Mad River Valley Libraries presented their first Big Conversations in 10 Short Minutes event, hosted by Moretown Library director Cory Stephenson and Warren Public Library youth services librarian Amanda Gates. The premise of the event was to have three short, non-political conversations over the course of an hour with other people from the Mad River Valley.
“We’ll give you a couple of conversation prompts,” the Moretown Library’s blurb of the event states. “One is simple. One leans more toward the philosophical.” Participants are paired up for 10 minutes to discuss one or both prompts. Answers could be kept private or shared with the whole group. The only goal of the event is to spark conversation and connection, and the blurb calls it “a little pocket of meaning at the end of a long day.” One participant shared that she had used the same conversation style while visiting men’s prisons to get the prisoners to talk to and connect with each other. Credit for the program goes to the Scarborough Public Library and associated Maine libraries.
YOUR SUPERPOWER
The first conversation’s questions were: “What did you want to be when you were seven? Are you doing it now? Why or why not?” — which wasn’t shared with the whole group — and “What makes you feel better when you’re not feeling great?”, which inspired answers like dancing, cooking and baking, drinking espresso in a cafe, “four-legged ones,” and Agatha Christie books.
The second round featured more abstract questions. The first prompt was, “What is your everyday superpower?” which gave rise to answers like driving, cooking, listening to people, Buddhism, packing leftovers in the best size of containers, and humor. The second prompt was, “What is enough?” This question, as one participant pointed out, could be interpreted in different ways; some thought of it as satiation while others thought of greed and its end point. Some answers included food and “doing the things that I wanted to do in life [as an older person].”
POTATO SALAD
The final round included what Gates called “the most controversial question of the night”: What is the best way to prepare a potato? Despite the controversial nature of the question, there were limited responses: fried, boiled, and baked. The final prompt was, “Is variety really the spice of life? Why or why not?” One participant remarked that she didn’t use the saying very often, but as someone who had moved around a lot, she agreed with it.
The next Big Conversations in 10 Short Minutes event will be held via Zoom on Thursday, February 13, at 7 p.m. Registration is open on all Mad River Valley public library websites.
