Join us at the Historic Ferndale Library for a reading with local author Mark Sommer. Mark will read a selection from his book Cherish: Love in a Season of Loss followed by questions, light refreshments and an opportunity to talk with the author.

CHERISH: LOVE IN A SEASON OF LOSS is a human-scale drama of breakdown, breakthrough, and rebirth from our roots, with all the emotional struggle and intimate openings such transformations entail. Thrust away from our cellphone and computer screens, we're thrown back on each other to make it through. We discover how much we need and yearn for connection with one another and learn to appreciate what each of us brings to our common effort.

Mark Sommer is a fifty-year resident of Humboldt County who, together with his wife, built and maintained a self-reliant backcountry homestead seven miles off the grid for thirty years. Raising much of their own food, raising dairy goats, ducks for eggs, and bees for honey, they generated the electricity to power their needs using first-generation solar panels and a self-designed micro-hydro water wheel. For the past thirty years, his family has lived in a home they built overlooking the sea in Westhaven. He founded and led a nonprofit media organization based in Arcata that placed hundreds of new voices on the airwaves on commercial, public and community radio. He also founded and hosted "A World of Possibilities," a nationally syndicated, hour-long weekly radio program featuring social innovators, which won six international awards, including from the United Nations. For two decades, he was the U.S. correspondent for InterPress Service in Rome, which distributed his columns worldwide in several languages. In retirement, he continues to write, and together with his daughter is publishing a series of memoirs under the imprint Hearts Broken Open.
We hope to see you there!