The Martha's Vineyard Book Festival featured three days of conversations and interviews with 27 authors across many genres. It began with a conversation between comedian and late night host Seth Meyers and top tech journalist Kara Swisher.
Martha's Vineyard Book Festival 2023
Paul Karasik
Some books require research, the writer visiting archives and interviewing all manner of people. Other books require travel to places of meaning that the characters — real or imagined — lived and worked and grew into who they would become.
But in the end, all books arrive at the same place for writers, a room alone where they carve out the story word by word by word.
And eventually this baton is passed from solitary writer to solitary reader, who whether lying in a hammock, settled into a rickety beach chair or squished thigh to sweaty thigh on a crowded subway train, is wholly alone while making the journey from cover to cover.
It is a gift the writer gives to the reader, a way of re-confirming one’s own existence by taking time apart from the increasing chaos of the world to visit with the mind and heart.
But occasionally this bond between reader and writer is allowed to enjoy another life, one in which an actual meeting takes place rather than just an emotional and intellectual one. Such is the case with the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, a biennial bonanza which this year features nearly 30 authors and thousands of readers all gathering once again on the grounds of the Chilmark Community Center.
In creating this special section, Gazette reporters spoke with many of the authors at the festival, learning about process and the seeds of inspiration. It was a chance to peek behind the curtain of creativity and begin the process of creating a community, where for one weekend in August all of these individual stories merge into one.
Because at its heart, the book festival is yet another gift, a uniting over words and ideas in order to learn from, rather than hide from, hard truths about the past and present.
Let the conversations begin.
— Bill Eville
The Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival kicked off Friday evening at the Chilmark Community Center with a conversation between comedian and late night host Seth Meyers and top tech journalist Kara Swisher.
Rebecca Makkai, whose breakout novel The Great Believers was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, returned with another novel early this year that aims to confront unreliable memories and the consequences of assumptions.
When journalist and author Andrew Meier set out to write a history of the Morgenthau family, he knew it would be no small undertaking.
Joan Biskupic’s Nine Black Robes presents a portrait of a United States Supreme Court ideologically divided and deeply affected by former President Donald Trump and his appointees.
When Nicole Chung began writing her book A Living Remedy: A Memoir, she did not imagine that her life — and her book — would completely transform.
When Elizabeth Alexander sat down to write her latest book, she drew upon a lifetime of material from her extensive career as a scholar, author and poet.
Richard North Patterson’s new novel, Trial, puts some of America’s most urgent issues concerning race and voting rights on the stand.
For Jeannette Walls, truth is at the heart of writing, from her journalism and wildly-successful debut memoir to her most recent novel, Hang the Moon.
Every spring, avian enthusiast Christian Cooper spends his early mornings searching the Ramble in Central Park for migratory birds that make New York City home for the season.
Some books require research, the writer visiting archives and interviewing all manner of people.
The biennial Martha's Vineyard Book Festival takes place August 5 and 6 on the Chilmark Community Center grounds, with an opening event on August 4 hosted by comedian Seth Meyers and journalist Kara Swisher.
After seven decades as a published poet, literary wife and mother, international human rights activist and famed Vineyard hostess, Rose Styron has a wealth of stories to tell.
Setting them down in writing, however, had never appealed to her.
When Tamara Weiss and Amanda Benchley set out to write a book about Vineyard artists, they were determined to not just capture the beauty of the Island and its people.
Crafted from 10 years of essays written for the Gazette, at its heart Bill Eville's new book is a memoir about fatherhood.
Book Festival 2021
For four days in two locations, 22 of the country’s leading authors and thinkers gathered for the biennial Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival.
A book festival audience turned out Friday evening for a panel discussion on the Martha’s Vineyard Museum lawn with three of the country’s leading journalists.
After nearly 20 years working in economic policy, Heather McGhee realized she needed a different approach to understand the fault lines of American division.
Walter Isaacson suggests that if one is searching for a summer read, a nail-biting mystery perhaps, his latest biography on the woman behind gene editing is the way to go.
When Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, attended the “DeploraBall” on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2016, he didn’t expect there to be good company.
It’s a rainy evening and you turn on the television to find your favorite sitcom. A small wave of comfort washes over you and you let that feeling settle you deeper into the couch.
In 1947, two years after the defeat of Germany, a relatively obscure, Wyoming-born artist set his canvas on the floor of his Long Island home, splattered thick beads of paint across the surface and radically changed the course of American art.
Following Robert F. Kennedy’s path through the civil rights movement, historian Patricia Sullivan said she couldn’t help but well up with emotion writing the last few pages of her new book, Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White.
Mark Bittman is the author of more than 30 books, including the familiar yellow-covered household staple How to Cook Everything. But that doesn’t mean his appetite for writing about food is waning. In fact, it’s getting bigger.
Cecilia Kang is a reporter for the New York Times, covering the technology field where short and informative sentences are often the norm. Co-writing An Ugly Truth gave the author the opportunity to explore a different kind of writing, one that she missed.
Elizabeth Kolbert won a Pulitzer Prize for her bestseller, The Sixth Extinction, and is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In her new book, Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future, she looks at man’s manipulation of the natural world as it relates to the climate crisis.
Sadeqa Johnson has always written stories about subjects she knows well, but the story of Yellow Wife called to her on a different level — one she was not familiar with.
Fiction readers can be glad that Deesha Philyaw’s oldest daughter had trouble napping.
Starting Thursday and running through Sunday, the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival 2021 Summer Series once again invites book lovers to unite to hear the story, or stories, behind the story of how a book gets written.
A panel of journalists from two of America’s most prominent media outlets will address a question that cuts to the heart of their profession and the health of democracy: how will journalism endure and flourish?
History buffs, fiction fanatics and those itching to learn the secret history of church ladies will get more than their fill this August when the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival Summer Series returns.
Plans for the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival were put on temporary hold Tuesday, after Chilmark selectmen delayed approval of the biannual summer event until later this spring.
The renowned actor and longtime Vineyard seasonal resident, who has been living with Parkinson’s disease for nearly half his life, spoke about his new book before overflow crowd at an online winter event hosted by the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival Thursday night.
Lying on his kitchen floor, alone and unable to get up, Michael J. Fox discovered that his characteristic optimism had reached its limit.
In its first winter event, the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival will present a virtual interview on Thursday, Feb. 25 featuring award-winning actor, author and advocate Michael J. Fox.