Manzanita Connections – July 15, 2025
Community Member Spotlight: Connecting with newcomer Tara Shepersky: librarian, poet, and local conservation enthusiast. (Plus some bookish news.)
It’s time for another community member spotlight. This week I’m chatting with Tara Shepersky who is not only our local librarian but also organizes events at Cloud & Leaf Bookstore and volunteers at the Lower Nehalem Community Trust. Over the last few months, I had seen Tara at both the bookstore and the library. It took me a minute to put the pieces together and realize she was the same person in two different book spaces. But before I get to her story, here’s a little book-related local update.
Cloud & Leaf Bookstore events:
Chocolate After Hours, Saturday July 19 at 5:30 pm – Chocolatier Chocoalt-e hosts a special chocolate tasing and workshop. Email cloudandleaf@gmail.com to book a seat ($10) and get ready for delicious samples!
Books After Hours, Saturday, July 26 at 5:30 pm – Join Liz Cole for a “Happy Half-Hour” when Liz will read funny poems for a half hour. We could all use a laugh.
Drop-in book signing with Cat Bohannon, New York Times bestselling author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Cat will be at signing books at the bookstore on Sunday, July 20 at 12 pm, following her conversation with the Manzanita Writers Program at the Hoffman Center on Saturday from 7-9 pm. If you’re interested in the Hoffman Center event, pre-registration is strongly recommended. Walk-ins only if space allows.
Local pop-up, Saturday, July 26 from 2-4 pm – Author Peggy Lotz shares her children’s book Catching Memories, set in Arch Cape, on the deck at the bookstore.
Library Daily Book Sales
A new sign just went up at the library, out by the street, to remind everyone that the library has used books for sale. Stock up on your summer beach reading.
Pour-Over Pop-up
(Book-related in that it’s behind the bookstore and you need the perfect pour-over to go with your morning read.)
Come join Base Camp Manzanita and Dine Wabi Sabi for a Pour-Over Pop-Up on the porch, Saturday, July 26 from 10 am – 1 pm. Kelsey will be demonstrating coffee pour-over techniques using Snow Peak gear that you can find for purchase at Base Camp. Learn how to pour the perfect cup every time, with coffee samples from Wolfmoon Bakery and toast tastings on their bread. Base Camp is at 447 Laneda (behind the bookstore).
Meet Tara Shepersky
For Tara Shepersky, the Pacific Ocean has always been her touchstone. Over a period of about 15 years while living in Portland, Tara would come to the beach in the summer to get out of the heat. Much to her delight on one of these trips she was walking down the street early one morning and realized that there was a tiny bookstore in Manzanita. Turns out that little bookstore became her initial tether to Manzanita. She kept returning to the beach and to the bookstore. She could feel that there was something special about this area. On one visit she boldly asked then owner, Deborah Reid, if she was willing to work with an independent publisher. Her answer was “absolutely.” And Cloud & Leaf became the first bookstore to carry her book, Tell the Turning, in 2021. To Tara it felt like Deborah was taking a huge leap of faith, believing in her and her book without knowing her beyond being a customer.
Her journey to Nehalem Bay
Tara met her husband Jeremiah Shepersky in college and fell in love with him on her 19th birthday. She says, “I remember the moment.” In 2004, they were married and living in Southern California and were discouraged by the high cost of living. They literally flipped a coin to determine where to move, and the winner was Portland. Maybe it was karma since Portland was close to the Pacific. (The other – I had to ask -- was Flagstaff, Ariz.) Living in Portland, she worked in the wine industry running tasting rooms for a couple wineries and then in tech for 11 years as a UX (user experience) researcher, taxonomist, and search analyst. However, it didn’t take long for Tara to realize that she was unhappy living in the wrong place. In August 2023 she hit a breaking point. Portland had become insanely expensive, and she and her husband decided “we need to live where we want to live.”
At that point, she says she “had no idea what I wanted to do except move out of Portland. I wanted to change my life.” She was working remotely in Morro Bay, Calif., and trying to figure out where she needed to be, and she turned 40. “It totally changed my center of gravity,” she says. She found herself heavily reevaluating why she was doing what she did and what she needed out of life.
Fate or not, she was a victim of the tech industry’s downsizing, and in August 2024 she ended up in Pacific City. She couldn’t find work for eight months but realized that this was an opportunity to figure out what she wanted to do in life. What emerged was that she wanted to serve. She says how to do that was the harder part.
For a long time, part of how she has defined herself is being a contemplative walker. What better place than the beach to contemplate.
“The first thing I want to do in the morning most days is go to the beach,” Tara tells me. She likes doing this before the sun is full, when it’s quiet. She believes walking is one of the best places to listen, to compose. To her, the Pacific Ocean is a comforting presence. She never feels quite alone, even if no humans are around. “I’m the most unguardedly myself by the sea,” says Tara who describes the sea as a very good composing companion.
She was specifically interested in the area from Neskowin to Cannon Beach and spent time up and down this section of the north-central coast. She ended up doing a lot of volunteering in conservation and that’s how she met the Lower Nehalem Community Trust folks. “I was coming up from Pacific City to volunteer, and one day they took us to Alder Creek Farm,” says Tara. And she thought, “What is this magical place?” She immediately knew she wanted to be part of this. Tara started helping both with programming stuff with the Trust and volunteering in the garden. She loved it. However, she still needed a job.
The power of connection and pull of a bookstore
She continued calling people, introducing herself and asking how she could help. She also volunteered with the North Coast Land Conservancy and met a bunch of really cool people, learned a ton about community science and how it works in our area. She invited herself to meetings and called people whose jobs she thought were neat, trying to discern what interested her and to just learn about people.
Meanwhile, she had kept in touch with Holly Lorincz, the current owner of Cloud & Leaf. Tara really wanted to contribute to the bookstore’s move and be at the book brigade last fall, but the timing didn’t work. But then somewhere in that conversation, Holly told her about how they host author readings and invited her to come read from her poetry collections. Tara jumped on the chance and in February of this year, she did a reading at the bookstore.
Turns out Holly was looking for someone to help run events at the store and coordinate logistics. Basically, project management, which was the skill that took Tara from job to job. Holly also needed someone to fill in one day a week book selling. Tara said, “Yes, please,” and started at the bookstore in March.
Library Love
Tara says, “My life is full of random things that have unfolded.” But in talking with her, I think she set her own path. Her time genuinely being interested in people, learning, volunteering, and listening to herself, all have led her here where she now lives in Nehalem and works at the Manzanita library.
I think it’s safe to say she loves books. Tara started as the librarian at the Manzanita branch of the Tillamook County library system a couple months ago. Again, it was her interest in people and making connections that led Tara to the library. In her ongoing conversations with people in the community about their jobs (what she likened to data modeling), she talked to David at the Pacific City library about his work and how the Tillamook library system operated. He told her there was a position open, which she interviewed for but didn’t get. But then right after that, she received a call offering her the librarian position in Manzanita that had just opened.
“I had a lot of library love,” she said. Libraries are all over her professional history, having volunteered, shelved books, even started a library newsletter, but she’d never worked in one as a librarian.
When I asked her how it’s going, she said, “It’s been a crash course in meeting everybody. I know so many people that I did not know two months ago, which is really cool. And we have such a beautiful tiny library. I loved it as a patron before I worked here.”
Tara likes that the job is chill and part of what she loves is those touchpoints, how many people she sees every day. “I love that about this town. people tell you about their friends and family, and I’m like, oh I know them!”
This job lets her serve. She laughs about people coming in and saying things like, “Im sorry to bother you, but can I ….” She wants to tell people, “Please ask me all the questions!” She can help with much more than books, including small things like printing, scanning, and faxing, or loaning out Wi-Fi hotspots. She says, “Libraries are democracy in action,” and she loves being a servant for that system. “I think libraries are one of our most truly democratic institutions and also one of the most used and loved by diverse communities.”
She gets the most amazing requests from children who ask wonderful, specific things. She enjoys taking the time to go down rabbit holes and help them research. “That’s part of the fun,” she says. She listens to their stories and asks lots of questions. “It’s like being a UX researcher.”
Doing the work of her life
For now, Tara seems to be taking a breather … and says that this is not a common feeling for her. “I’ve experienced such an overflow of synchronicity and generosity in my life for the last couple years,” she says. The library, the farm, the beach, the community all seem to be part of the “work of her life.”
She says living here is not the same as visiting. To her, it’s much deeper. People come here on purpose. She has met some wildly interesting people and feels like part of the community. “I’ve been really lucky and met a lot of lovely, really generous humans,” she says. She wasn’t necessarily looking to settle down in the Manzanita area, but she feels lucky, and says it just happened, it just worked out.
“When I left Portland, I had a bunch of friends who said wait so you’re trying to find a small-town situation. Is that what you really want? Small towns are kinda back-biting, everyone is in everyone’s business.”
She told her friends, “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I want community and connection, and the landscape element is incredibly important to me. I’m going to try to find it, and I’ll hopefully know it when I feel it. And here I am.”
Hoffman Tiny Galleries Exhibition and Fundraiser
On Tara’s beach-bucket list was to get involved with the Hoffman Center. And she did just that. Tara authored an original poem that is on display on the Yarrow Gallery, one of the Tiny Galleries in this month’s exhibit in the Wonder Garden.
There are six miniature exhibitions filled with original art from local artists displayed at the Hoffman Center for the Arts, the Wonder Garden, and the Manzanita Library through July 31. You can buy raffle tickets for $20 in the Hoffman Gallery, using the QR code on the gallery, or purchase your tickets by scrolling to the bottom of this page. All proceeds from the raffle will go towards supporting Hoffman Center for the Arts.
