GREENFIELD — Nearly two decades ago, during her first weekend of college in Virginia, Maura MacDonald received a knock on her dorm room door.
“It was Crista and another girl from down the hall, asking if I wanted to come to the library and write flash fiction,” said the Ohio native, recalling her first interaction with her now-business partner, Crista DeRicco. “And I did. Like huge nerds, we went to the library the first Saturday night of college and wrote stories based on image prompts from an art book.”
As it turned out, that Saturday night marked the start of a friendship that would span four years at Roanoke College, followed by graduate school on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean and time spent living in different states before ultimately ending up Greenfield, where the two would find themselves in business together.
Imaginary Bookshop, which has existed primarily online since 2017, is expected to open in the physical realm by the end of the month, according to DeRicco, a former elementary school librarian from Tennessee. The shop will operate out of the space at 365 Main St., previously occupied by Nima’s Nails before the salon moved into the Arch Street Salon on Arch Street.
“It just felt like a really good time to do it,” DeRicco said of the decision to move the online business into a local storefront. “We always do really great at pop-ups, and it’s so nice to see people.”
The transition will allow the two women to expand their inventory tenfold.
“We were operating out of a quarter of a bedroom at my home, which is not a huge place to put books,” DeRicco said. “This will be a much nicer place for storage.”
The store will offer a selection of primarily children’s books, MacDonald said, with a small selection of adult books, too — and they won’t necessarily be all the books named on the New York Times bestseller list.
“There’s some amazing books out there that just because of how bigger bookshops work, you might not necessarily find (elsewhere),” MacDonald said.
DeRicco added that the shop will offer a “very curated” selection of “spooky or weird” materials.
“It’s … stuff you won’t find elsewhere,” she said. “We focus on women and minority writers, and small presses, and weird stuff. We think all those points of differentiation let us fit in this ecosystem.”
All books available via their online shop will be available for purchase in-store.
Opening the bookshop on Main Street will also allow MacDonald and DeRicco to grow the Storytellers Writing Center, which they launched in 2021. By collaborating with the Greenfield Public Library and Greenfield High School, the writing center has offered numerous pop-up workshops, offering young people a place to work on their writing.
DeRicco said down the road, they hope to offer longer workshop series, in addition to the evening or after-school workshops they plan to offer.
Asked whether the friends could have imagined they would be opening a bookstore together in Greenfield one day — 18 years and hundreds of miles away from where they first met at a small, liberal arts college in the south — both agreed that in retrospect, “it makes so much sense.”
“We literally met writing short stories … and we both initially had kind of gone down the publishing path,” MacDonald said. “Looking back, this was really obvious.”
“It was on brand,” DeRicco added.
A fundraising campaign to help with start-up costs can be found at bit.ly/3DM5wPb. For more information, including updated hours of operation, visit imaginarybookshop.com.
Reporter Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne