Award-winning columnist to speak at library Feb. 24

STRATTON — The Carrabassett Valley Library will be hosting a book launch for “Maine Stories” from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24, in the Begin Family Community Room.

This is the third book by the author, award-winning columnist Lew-Ellyn Hughes, and is a collection of award-winning nonfiction short stories on the lifestyle, people and places of rural Maine.

Hughes is the author of the popular bimonthly newspaper column, “Away with Words,” which is a six-time winner in the Maine Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest. “Maine Stories” is a collection of those columns. Hughes writes about love, parenting, grandparenting, aging, friends and family (not only being why you are, but why you are the way you are).

Her love of words and her ability to pick out a single fleck of gold from the vast river of moments that flow through a day help her create humorous, often poignant or insightful stories about Maine and its people.

Hughes’ Maine ancestry dates to the pre-Revolutionary War era, but because her father’s military career took her family to everywhere but the state they loved the most, she spent only summers in Maine — on Moosehead Lake. Because of this, many of Hughes’ tales are from the perspective of a Mainer living in exile, such as how to deal with finding a South Carolina cockroach in your LL Bean boots (while your foot is in it!) or avoiding snake holes in Oklahoma or planning a mutiny with your four teenage siblings at the prospect of spending Christmas school vacation in the south, not on Maine’s ski slopes.

For more information on “Maine Stories” visit lewellynhughes.com.