Deb Hoadley is the new branch manager of the Sebastopol Library

This New Hampshire native is enjoying the California sun and the Sebastopol vibe

Deborah Hoadley in front of the Sebastopol Regional Library. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

Although Deborah Hoadley loves being a librarian, it’s a second career for the former elementary school teacher, who decided to become a librarian after joining the local library board in her small New Hampshire town.

Hoadley always enjoyed working with children, and when she had her own daughter, a friend suggested taking her to the local library storytime.

“I’m one of those that, growing up, my library experience wasn’t so great,” Hoadley said. “So I showed up kind of dreading it, but I had a wonderful experience with story time. We didn’t have any of that when we were growing up. No story times. It was just a library full of books and librarians who were gatekeepers. I was a ferocious reader and so always wanted to go into more of the adult collection, and I wasn’t supposed to go over there. So that was kind of my experience growing up.”

She got involved with the group of moms who were volunteering with the library in Plaisdow, New Hampshire, the town where she grew up.

“I went to a Friends of the Library meeting, and I like to say, I don’t know if it was a dream or a nightmare, but I woke up as president of the Friends group and had a wonderful experience. It was truly a dream, and I got to meet so many new people in town and really became very close to the same librarians that were there when I grew up. They had had grandchildren by then and had softened a little bit with children.”

She ended up as the part-time assistant director of the library, then the full-time children’s librarian, a job she held while she went back to school to get her Master’s in Library Science from Simmons University in Boston. She worked full time, went to Boston two nights a week and on weekends, and finished her degree in two years in 2008.

She went on to become a library director in Massachusetts and then a library consultant for the state, helping libraries statewide to develop strategic plans. She also became president of the New England Library Association, a volunteer position. After working for the state for a few years, she went back to working in small-town libraries in New Hampshire.

Hoadley might have stayed in New England. Her mother died in 2018, and after that, she took care of her aging father. Over the years, she grew close to her aunt—her father’s sister—who lived in Novato in Marin County. After her father died, she made several trips to Novato to visit her aunt, and California began to work its well-known magic on her. With her daughter grown and flown, she began to dream of making the leap to California.

“It took a few years to find the right job,” Hoadley said. “I had been kind of poking around. Even though I had just moved up to Freedom [New Hampshire] and had just taken the job as a director, I knew that every time I took the Airporter over the Golden Gate Bridge, I just always felt like I was coming back to where I should be…And so when the branch manager position came open, I thought, ‘This is the time.’”

Hoadley says that in New England, libraries are funded by the towns where they’re located and not by a regional county-wide library system, like Sonoma County Library. In New Hampshire, the library director (which is similar to the branch manager position here) reports to an elected library board.

Hoadley took over as the Sebastopol Branch Manager on March 10. She spent the first two weeks at central administration, learning how Sonoma County’s Library system works.

“That training was crucial, and then I could come in here and really focus on being here and supporting all levels of staff,” she said, noting that there are about 20 employees, five full-time and the rest part-time.

“The county library system supports all operations of the branches, like marketing, programs and community events,” she said.

Speaking of the Sonoma County Library’s regional approach, she said, “I think that is such a wonderful opportunity for equity among all of the cities and towns in Sonoma County.” In New Hampshire, she said, poorer towns often had poorer libraries.

At the same time, she said each Sonoma County Library is its own entity with its own regional identity. In some ways, the Sebastopol Library reminds her of the independent, small-town libraries she used to run back in New England.

What does Hoadley do when she’s not running the library?

“I do love the outdoors,” she said. “I love walking on nature trails and kayaking and paddle boarding. I also play piano and flute. I was in the community band at one point. Playing the flute and piano is more recreational for me now, but that really is something that helps to ground me. My flute music is always classical, and my piano ranges from popular to a good classical piece that I can really delve into.”

As for her own reading habits, she said they’re varied. “I am very attracted to leadership books and different kinds of things that are happening in the business world, like AI, things that are happening trend-wise. Leadership is a huge passion of mine,” she said, noting that she still runs her own nonprofit for library leaders in New England.

“I really don’t have one particular genre that I like,” she said of her reading habits. “I’m really all over the place. A lot of my recommendations come from the book club selections that are being offered at the library.”

Hoadley said she had started Mystery Book Clubs in each of the libraries she’s been part of, but she never got into reading them herself.

“I am not a series reader,” she said. “I have never gotten into reading all of James Patterson or all of Nora Roberts. What I love about reading is finding a new author. I tend to read the one-off, the new author. That’s my reading style.”

As for the town of Sebastopol, where she now lives, she said she’s loving it.

“Something that I didn't realize about California, especially Sebastopol, is this kind of 70s hippie vibe—the happy vibe. And that is exactly what I was looking for coming from New England, which can be very staid, very proper. You know, I really love that essence [the hippie vibe]…it’s kind of a throwback and yet progressive at the same time.”

When she let it be known that she was looking for a place to live in Sebastopol, she said numerous people dropped by the library to make sure she’d gotten settled somewhere.

“Folks have come in and said, ‘You must be the new branch manager. I still have a room if you haven’t found one.’ There are very, very kind people here. Again, not a surprise, but after the fourth time somebody said that to me, I was like ‘Wow, people really care about each other here.’”