I love what it means to be a New England indie filmmaker. I live in Vermont and, for 32 years, have spent time on Martha’s Vineyard to write my screenplays. I have also screened all my films on the Vineyard, starting at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury and the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven.

During this time when Netflix and the streamers are causing filmmakers to scratch their heads for what to do, I’m finding that I can still take to the road to connect with my live audience. It’s why I keep doing it.

Of my 10 feature films, I have substantially written eight of them on the Vineyard. For my first 1992 feature film, Where the Rivers Flow North, I spent time in Edgartown. For my latest picture, Jack London’s Martin Eden, I hunkered down in Chilmark. For others, I’ve settled into Menemsha, Vineyard Haven, Aquinnah, Lagoon Pond, Oak Bluffs and Seven Gates Farm.

I carry vivid sense memory from each Island experience and remember each place for the essential ways the Vineyard inspired my writing. I generally surround myself with 40 books and a hundred pages of research notes. I require nothing more than a desk and chair, and I start work as soon as I wake, usually around 6 a.m. I look forward to Mermaid Farm yogurt (the world’s best) at around 8 a.m. and I work until 2 p.m. Then I eat a light lunch, take a bike ride or swim in the ocean, and go back to read and/or work until around 8 p.m. Then I get dinner and relax with a film.

Sometimes my wife, Bess, joins me for a few days. Sometimes, not. I come to write here in September and October.

I have been visiting the Vineyard since 1968 when you could still camp in the dunes along South Beach. I find it to be more affecting than anywhere I’ve been in the world. I love the amber light in fall when the ocean water is still warm enough to swim. Being a Vermonter, I love how the rolling pastures, thick woods and stone walls combine with sandy paths through pine woods to the beach and the stunning red clay cliffs at Aquinnah’s western tip.

I chose to make my new film, Martin Eden, because Jack London has always interested me, for his powerful writing, social engagement, complex humanism and the textured emotions of his characters. I was also drawn to London’s own volatile life and his legendary status as America’s first “celebrity writer” whose work inspired Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag, among others.

I often don’t fully know a film I make until I’ve lived with it for a while so I’m enjoying being on tour with Jack London’s Martin Eden. After all, the final collaborators in this sprawling collaboration are audience members who interact with what appears on screen and share their own imagination of it.

Jay Craven’s film, Jack London’s Martin Eden, screens at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 2nd at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven.