We had an excellent Big Read event at the beautiful Patterson Library in Westfield New York. Prior to the event we had created a poster for the library to display and our library partner, Erin, even set up her own Gatsby display to help promote the event.
In addition to displaying primary sources we found through the American Memory Foundation archive online, we also displayed part of the library's impressive collection of World War I poster advertisements to get our attendees in the mindset of the time period to elicit discussion.
We had an excellent event. While few people from the college showed up, we had several community members who came out and really enjoyed our event. Overall we had about 12 people who attended, and most of them participated in discussion. Even before beginning some of the ladies from the community along with the library staff investigated some of the roots found from the words in our brochures.
Our topic about gender and focus on the portrayal of women in the '20s media in relation of the book brought new depth of understanding to our audience about the struggles faced by both the characters in the book and by women in general. We spent a great amount of time then comparing what was similar or different since then to our modern society and if we saw similar characters from the book in our daily lives. The investigation led into talks about Fitzgerald's purposes for writing, current politics, gender presentation in and out of the book, and proactive discussion about what thinking can be changed for the future. We had a great time working with our library partner and the community members at our event, and our discussion about the book met the NEA Big Read goals of bringing "literature back into the center of American culture". In the end our event filled the entire time and went over by half an hour.
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