CHESTER FIRST FRIDAY ART STROLL
October 6th, 2023 from 5 - 8 pm
Enjoy some of the oldest and newest paintings of my home and travels in the gallery.
Choose your favorite bottle at the Chester Package Store across the street, get a snack from any of Chester's fine restaurants and grab a growler from the Little House Brewing Company next door and enjoy yourself for a happy hour or two with live musical interludes.

Join us for a book talk and book-signing with local author
E.S. "Ned" Ruete
"Off Season"

E.S. “Ned” Ruete is a retired business analyst and a self-published author. His books include:
Off Season: A Novel of Healing
Seeking God: Finding God’s “Both/And” in an “Either/Or” World
Lead Your Group to Success: A Meeting Leader’s Primer
He is a musician, a group facilitator, and a poet who has been published in the Connecticut Bards annual poetry review the last 2 years.

Off Season
Dottie woke up wondering where she was and why she was so cold. The first thing she noticed was that she must be outside – she was lying on cold ground and snow was hitting her in unusual places. That’s when she noticed the second thing. Her skirt was pulled up past her waist and her panties were gone. Damn those bastards. It started to come back to her.
Dottie is now on an odyssey; a journey not of her choosing; a journey of healing, integration, and reconciliation that will involve her partner, her friends, her enemies, her church, her whole community. And her rapists. As she fights her way through social stereotypes about rape and rape victims, she also finds the strength to overcome society’s messages of who she should be and lays claim her true self. But the memories, the loss, the anger – and the fears – never go away.
No woman chooses to be raped. I asked Dottie why she chose to tell me a story of rape. She said that millions of women, hundreds every day, have stories of rape that never get told. She told her story because she could. Because she had to. Because maybe people would hear in a work of fiction a Truth that they could not hear in any other way.

Click for printable image