Community

Work We Do: Mary Lee Gaylor, Riverhead Free Library

I’m Mary Lee Gaylor and I’m the adult programs coordinator at Riverhead Free Library.

One of the things I do is the newsletter. Right now I’m making it for May and June because we make it way ahead of time. And I book programs; I do my own programs and some of the staff at the adult reference also does programs. So we all participate. It’s a team effort.

I coordinate everything that goes within the newsletter and I make sure that the rooms and the presenters have what they need in order to present and help with the publicity. It’s almost like party planning, in a way. We have a lot of events in the Browsing Room, which overlooks the Peconic River.

But I also do a lot of the writing based around the different events and so forth.

I oversee what’s called the Writer’s Cove writers, and we have a writer’s resource group. We meet once a month, and it’s authors and aspiring authors. We network and we help each other.

Another thing I do that I really enjoy are fireside chats. I do it with another librarian and we talk about new books. People came and listened and it got them to take out different books. We want to get people to take out books from new authors, or something that they wouldn’t know about on a day-to-day basis.

I really like the programming because patrons are really grateful for the types of programs we put on and we get a lot of positive feedback.

I’m from here originally, but I’ve lived all over. I was a writer before I worked here. I lived in Hawaii and worked on “Magnum PI.” I moved to Hollywood, California. I worked for Warner Bros. for about eight or nine years and we did a lot of event planning and party planning. We also did a newsletter that I partially oversaw, and I did a lot of the publicity. It’s really just what I do. I did library work, too. There’s definitely a crossover between what I did before and what I do now.

“The Work We Do” is a Riverhead News-Review multimedia project profiling workers on the North Fork. It is made possible by Peconic Landing. See more photos on Instagram @riverheadnewsreview.