Wilton Library Executive Director Elaine Tai-Lauria Bids Farewell: “The community made it gratifying.”

Elaine Tai-Lauria has been the executive director of the Wilton Library for 10 years. Today is her last day in the position, after announcing her retirement last September.

Below, we’ve published a Letter to the Editor from Elaine that extends a message to the community. In addition, we were also fortunate to sit down with Elaine and do a final Q&A with her before she retired. That appears below Elaine’s letter.

To the Editor:

Ten years ago, I was entrusted with the stewardship of Wilton Library Association and it has been my privilege to serve as Executive Director of this wonderful organization. As I reflect on my tenure, I believe the single most important benefit of the job was the opportunity to meet so many incredible individuals. I am truly grateful for all of the meaningful friendships and partnerships formed over the years, because it is this powerful and heart-warming sense of community that has made my experience and time at the library so very gratifying.

Wilton is indeed a unique and special place, so it is with much fondness and appreciation that I thank the entire community for its unwavering support and generosity. Many thanks to all of our loyal patrons, volunteers, sponsors, community partners, and the Town officials and departments that I have worked with over the years. Thank you also to the outstanding Boards of Trustees, current and former colleagues on the library staff, and friends for your steadfast commitment and dedication to fulfilling our mission – to inform, enrich, connect, and inspire our community. I truly believe Wilton Library’s next chapter will be vibrant, invigorating, and a successful one, so I look forward to enjoying this remarkable institution as a library patron.

I wish all of you a future full of health, hope, and much happiness. Thank you!

With warmest regards,
Elaine Tai-Lauria

An Interview with Elaine Tai Lauria

GOOD Morning Wilton: Ten years ago, you were very lucky that, with a degree in library science, and 35 years of experience in libraries around the country, a job like executive director of the library in the town you live in opened up when it did. And Wilton Library was lucky that the perfect executive director lived right here in town! What was that moment like when they said, ‘We want you to be the executive director of a fantastic library in the town where you live?’

Elaine Tai-Lauria: When I was in graduate school, getting my degree in library science, I really never considered public libraries. I ended up, um, studying special libraries, and academic libraries, and I got my certification as a medical librarian. And I loved cataloging, so I thought I wanted to be a cataloger!

[In 2012], I thought I was winding down my career, I worked at [the] Greenwich [Library]. And that job prepared me for this, but it’s a path I would never have selected.

I was on the Board here in Wilton while working at Greenwich and a few trustees mentioned it to me and Kathy Welling [the search committee chair] said, ‘Well, have you ever thought of it?’ I was so shocked! Me?

I wrestled with it because I had a perfect a job, and I wasn’t really looking to change. It was my son who said, “Mom, dad said you’re really wrestling with whether you should apply for this job. Well, you always told me, ‘Give me one reason why you shouldn’t do something.’  I’m turning it around and asking you, ‘Give me one reason why you shouldn’t put your name in the ring.”

I thought about, and I really didn’t have a good reason. And he said, ‘See? There, you have to do it.’ He was the one who really made me say, ‘Well, all this is lining up. Maybe I should.’

But the path that you take really prepares you for what you’re doing, every position I had I’ve utilized something from that here. My corporate days, my academic days. There’s a little bit of everything that comes together here.

This population is so incredibly educated. When you look at the statistics, Wilton ranks as one of the highest as far as education in Fairfield County. I thought, ‘These people just thirst for knowledge.’ That has kind of been a guiding principle and inspiration from the community, when you see the response you get, it encourages you to try something new and it’s been really a very, very gratifying experience.

GMW: I look around at the communities that surround us in Fairfield County and there’s really nothing that compares to Wilton Library. A town that’s our size you really wouldn’t think would have a library this prestigious, this respected, this active. There’s really something very unique about this library and this community and the magic that happens here. 

What you have done with this library in your 10 years is really to exponentially increase what this library is.

Tai-Lauria: You know, Heather, I so appreciate what you’ve said and what everyone has said, but I’ve just tried to do the best that I could. I struggle with people saying I did a lot, because I think I just did the best I could with what I had.

But that being said, I’ve had an incredible community to work with — not only our patrons, but the people that we work with.

Whatever we’ve accomplished, you realize, we work together. Yeah, I have had some unique ideas — the Makerspace was my idea, the Brubeck Collection. And I went out on a limb for some of those things, but it’s a team coming together to make it happen. The board support us, the town supports us, our wonderful donors and the volunteers, in many different ways. The Brubecks, they’ve done so much for recruiting wonderful artists here for us. It’s just such an inspiring and enriching community. You can’t help but respond to that stimulus.

GMW: As you’re talking, I see behind you the folded book art. For me, those books turned into art pieces are an analogy of all those special things coming together. Libraries are books, and books are two dimensional paper and words. Everything that has happened in the 10 years since you’ve been here has made Wilton Library so three dimensional, like what those books as art pieces are now. 

I can’t remember a time where I haven’t seen you radiate joy here. When you think about a stereotypical traditional library, you think of, “Shhh!” The librarian shushing people. But that’s not the spirit and the energy you have brought and that everybody here has. This is a place of expansion — not constriction, not, ‘Hush! Keep it down.’

Tai-Lauria: Our patrons are, yes, they’re customers, but they’re also guests coming into our literary home, in a sense. And you should treat every patron coming in as if you are welcoming someone to your home. So if I’ve had any guiding principle that I’ve tried to adhere to, it’s that I want everybody to feel welcome in this institution.

We have people who are avid readers. We have people who are not, who’ve told me they don’t go to the library to read but we have wonderful programs. And we all learn differently. Some of us are auditory, some are visual, whatever. So we need to offer things for everyone so that everyone feels welcome.

If you’re not a reader, you may enjoy music — come to our concerts. You may enjoy art, come to that. I always want people to feel welcome and not excluded or feel that they’re not intellectual so they can’t come. I’ve had some who say, ‘I’m more a science person. And so I’ve tried to bring some science programs. We’ve had a program on math. I’ve been talking to one person to do a program on Leonardo Da Vinci. There’s our innovation station with the robotics team.

Our mission is not just a statement. We need to eat, sleep, breathe what it is. We inform as a library. We connect, and we enrich and inspire. And I think you have to live that in everything we do, every program we do, every book we select — it should do, hopefully all four of them, but certainly at least one thing. That mission should permeate everything we do.

GMW: In your 10 years here, what do you count as your biggest achievement?

Tai-Lauria: Wow. That’s a tough question. Because everything, no matter how small, it is special to you in some way. But if I had to say something, I never envisioned — and I feel so gratified in having accomplished this — I would say bringing the Brubeck Collection here, because it’s defined us as more than a library.

I would say that because I hope people will come to the collection — not only to learn and appreciate Dave [Brubeck], who was a Wiltonian and the family that means so much to us — but come and discover Wilton. As you said, it’s such an incredible community. And maybe this will help to bring more people here and bring more people to the library. So if I had to select one thing, I’m just grateful to all of the people who made it possible.

GMW: There’s something I think deserves to be remarked upon. You as a very prominent woman, in terms of visibility and also in terms of being a visible woman of color, the topics around race and diversity have been part of your tenure here. And you’ve made sure that Wilton doesn’t shy away from it, whether it’s in Wilton Reads or in making the library a place to have conversations. Have you ever thought in terms of personally how important it was for you to be in this position at this time in this town, in this library? 

Tai-Lauria: When you asked me earlier for one single thing that I’m most proud of, and I said it’s a hard question, because there’s so many things that I think of. And today being Holocaust Memorial Day, I remember reading an article about a swastika being on a park bench. And I said that we need to educate people, to help them understand that’s just not a symbol — it means a whole lot underneath it.

And so you’re right. You want people to heighten their sensitivity and appreciation of this. We tackled race and racism last year in Wilton Reads. I got some flack — there were some people who really thought, ‘Why were we stirring up a problem? We don’t have this problem in Wilton.’

And I thought, we’re not stirring up anything; if anything, we’re stirring up the brain to think and appreciate what’s there.

But the bottom line is that we need to get past seeing people as different. If you go beneath the skin, you’re going to reach the same muscles, the same blood vessels, you’re going to ooze the same red blood. You’ve got to get past that. So if I’ve been able to contribute to that and say, look at us as human beings, look at us as sharing and breathing the same air and ultimately surviving as species, get past all of this nonsense, you know?

This year our Wilton Reads book, as you know, is Wilton. And I credit [Assistant Director] Lauren [McLaughlin] for really coming up with the idea. What really made it appealing to me so much is that we’re in a period of so much controversy and toxicity, sadly to say. We need to celebrate who we are as a community, and be proud of who we are. There are probably periods where it wasn’t great stuff, but we’ve emerged from it.

And I think for new people coming to the community, they need to appreciate what this community is. This is a beautiful community.

[She becomes emotional.] You know, we lost our son [in 2018], and the outpouring of support that we got … it’s unbelievable. So there’s so much richness here and people need to appreciate that.

GMW: You mentioned all the new people who have moved to town. For people who are just getting to know Wilton, what do you want them to know about Wilton library?

Tai-Lauria: First we want them to know they’re welcome here, no matter what their interests are, we welcome them, to inform whatever curiosity exists. We want to encourage their children. We want to be a means for lifelong learning, and that may come in many different ways. Enjoying concerts, enjoying arts, reading, book discussions, lectures. There’s so much here.

We say that we are the cultural and intellectual center [of Wilton], and we really believe that we can inform culturally and intellectually. So we want them to come and be a part of our Wilton Library family.

And also be mindful of the fact that we have a very long, rich history, to be not dismissive of it. We’re an association, we’re a private library and thanks to the town, we do have that wonderful public/private partnership where they give us an annual grant, which helps to keep the facility going.

We have to do a lot of fundraising, but we’re very proud of the monies that we get from sponsors and donations and fundraising. It all goes to building the collection, every penny.

So we want them to feel that this is their library and they should use it and enjoy it, and come and discover all of these different things and connect with the community.

GMW: So what are you going to do Tuesday, and beyond?

Tai-Lauria: Well, I’m going to wake up and make myself a nice pot of tea. And I’ll probably have some scones from the Village Market [laughs].

There’s so many things that I love that I have had to just put on the back burner for a while. But one of the things that I really feel committed to doing is, after Philip’s passing, one of the things Philip wanted was that we really have to try to help find a cure for that particular kind of cancer. We know we probably won’t find a cure, but how can we help [further] that?

We are working with the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation in Boston and they fund researchers who are working specifically in that area. So we’ve established a fund. And we have a couple scholarships, one at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Academy and one at Fairfield Prep. While we leave the selection of the recipients to the schools, we do like to meet with the family and so on. I’ll spend a little bit more time on doing things like that. There’s an event at Yale, a bike ride that they do every year for cancer — Phillip was at Yale, and they were tremendous. Not that we have a lot to give, but we do what we can to support these things.

That and get back to really reading for pleasure. I’m really looking forward to that and actually enjoying some of the programs here.