At The Sparkle Bookstore, There’s Room for Your Next Story

The Sparkle Bookstore’s story includes a set of book carts with a previous life. As Donna Miele prepared to open the Sparkill shop with her son Armand, West Nyack Library supplied carts it was giving away. Shelves, tables and displays came from a closing Shakespeare & Co. location in Manhattan, according to Tina Traster’s June 2025 reporting.

It is a fitting beginning for a bookstore interested in what can pass from one person to another. The furniture would hold books again. The space would give readers—and people working on stories of their own—a place to meet.

At 642 Main Street, The Sparkle describes itself as a family-owned independent bookstore carrying fiction, nonfiction and poetry. But its calendar offers another way to understand the business: it makes room for writing before it becomes a finished book.

Take the Prose Writing Circle listed for September 23, 2026. Hosts Rebecca Watkins and Donna Miele invite fiction and nonfiction writers to bring roughly 1,000 words for discussion. The session begins with time to write, then makes space for participants to share work and offer feedback. That is a specific, practical invitation: bring something you are making, not just something you have already mastered.

The same September calendar includes a character-building workshop with novelist Jeff Bens, with time to try the technique on a work in progress or a prompt. And Mike Seliger’s Story Circle explicitly welcomes listeners as well as storytellers. There are different ways into the room; having a manuscript is not the only one.

That combination is what makes The Sparkle worth knowing about. Buying a book supports the work already on the page. A circle or workshop offers a chance to develop the work that comes next, in conversation with other people nearby.

Browse the shelves, look through the current events schedule, or consider bringing a few pages of your own. Check individual event listings for dates, registration and fees. This Main Street bookstore gives Rockland readers a reason to turn toward one another as well as toward the next chapter.