The Vineyard Haven Public Library is pleased to welcome Lesley Mahoney O’Connell for a discussion of her newly released story collection, “Ripple Effects and Other Stories.” O’Connell will be in conversation with local writer, researcher, and editor Brenda Horrigan. This event will be held at 6:00 PM on Tuesday, November 17th, at the Vineyard Haven Public Library, located at 200 Main Street in Vineyard Haven. Free and open to the public, no registration required.
In eleven carefully crafted stories, Lesley Mahoney O’Connell’s landscapes and seascapes help readers to recognize and to feel the strengths, flaws, and compromises her characters are developing as they navigate their life choices. Most of the stories are set in New England coastal villages. All are sensitive and thought-provoking, the characters relatable and real.
“Ripple Effects” features mostly quiet but intelligent characters who see themselves as outsiders in their own worlds. O’Connell lets readers listen as they work their way toward decisions they can somehow live with. Some swim through currents of parental self-centeredness; others, lacking ordinary filters, dream impossible dreams as they ignore career crises and marital ennui. O’Connell is especially good at exploring their interior lives, the caves and cliffs carved by deep losses, creating empathy and often a sense of peace in readers.
In the first story, a young teacher grapples with the strain of being permanent guardian for her neurodivergent younger brother. In the second, a teenage girl trying to escape heavy pressures at home is drawn to shoplifting, and to risky quarry jumping. Another follows a new mother struggling to bond with her baby in an isolated seaside home with a mostly-absent husband. Deception and self-deception blend and ripple when a grieving widower relives moments from his childhood and wonders what sort of future is possible. Memories clash with present moments when a young wife travels from California to sell her family’s New England home, the one she’d persuaded her parents to leave behind.
O’Connell’s stories are connected by nuanced water motifs, and explore the dynamics of both ripples and riptides. Several feature empowered women, or women on the road to empowerment. At their core, these stories hint at the strength and hope which can arise in disheartening circumstances.
Lesley Mahoney O'Connell lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts with her husband and son. Her fiction has appeared in Post Road, Psychopomp, and Solstice. She co-ran a reading series in Jamaica Plain, MA, and regularly takes classes at Boston’s GrubStreet and Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. She works with health care in communications, marketing, and digital strategy. O’Connell will be in conversation with local writer, researcher, and editor Brenda Horrigan.
Brenda Horrigan was guest curator for the Martha’s Vineyard Museum’s 2025 show “The Lost History of Innisfail” and will guest-curate its 2027 Katharine Cornell exhibit. Brenda was first runner-up in the 2023 Faulkner-Wisdom International Writing Competition’s Novel-in-Progress category and has recently received grants from the New York Public Library and the Community Preservation Committee of Tisbury, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Vineyard Gazette, ANMLY, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and Summer Brennan’s Book Supplement. She is co-author with Allison Shaw of the essay collection “To the Harbor Light: Lighthouses of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod.” She lives in Vineyard Haven.
For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or (508) 696-4211.
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