Small Talk by Joe Keenan, illustrations by Barney Zeitz; $25 at Mermaid Farm or by email from [email protected].

In mid-August of 1987, Joe Keenan was invited by a friend and fellow musician to play at a benefit concert for a young Vineyarder who had been injured in a car accident but lacked the insurance to pay medical bills. Mr. Keenan is a Connecticut-born resident of Irish-Catholic heritage and a guitarist, and this was his first visit to the Vineyard. It would change the trajectory of his life forever.

The concert was held in Vineyard Haven at the Katharine Cornell Theatre. He met people he liked, who took him to a campsite where, among other things, he talked of how he had worked on draggers in Provincetown, sometimes as a deck hand, sometimes cooking for the crew. His campsite friends mentioned they would soon be looking for a cook on the Shenandoah. She was the finest sailing vessel in Vineyard Haven harbor, they said. He applied for and got the job, and continued with it for a number of seasons.

During winters he would work as side wall and roof shingler. But fond as he had become of the Vineyard, he still liked seeing other places, and found cooking jobs on other tall ships that took him to many faraway places such as Bali, Fiji, South Africa, St. Helena and more.

Finally, it became time to settle full-time on the Vineyard, and to eventually write about it. His new book, Small Talk, gathers together his many essays and stories published over the years in the Vineyard Gazette, the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and other publications. Illustrations by Barney Zeitz accompany each essay.

In Small Talk, Mr. Keenan writes of the early morning storytellers at coffee clatches at Conroy’s Apothecary in North Tisbury and the former Linda Jean’s in Oak Bluffs. He checks in with workers at the Seaview Hotel, his fellow roofers and his interactions while hitchhiking.

“Stories connect us with each other,” Mr. Keenan writes. “They weave us together....As you go about your day, remember you are living your story, equal to Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce. You are the Bard and the King cannot insult you or stop your story. You can tell it or keep it to yourself, choose fiction or nonfiction. Your story is never ending.”

Mr. Keenan opens his book with a chapter about meeting “A Good Christian” and going on a walk together. He is led from beautiful building to beautiful building, and to a meadow of flowers and wild creatures. The creatures tell him that they pray in the meadow and invite him to join them. Later, he comes across a book titled the Rosicrucian Guide to Home and Business, a practical guide written in the 1920s about the best way to get a job. He follows the book’s advice and gets a job. Usually, it’s as a roof shingler, which turns out to be an occupation full of good stories.

When he loses his driver’s license due to an accident, he becomes a frequent hitchhiker and writes about the people he meets.

One essay chronicles a bale of hashish that washed onto a Vineyard shore. Those who found it grew rich on the sale of it, similar to the days of Prohibition when cases of whiskey washed onto Vineyard shores, and beachcombers who found them profited, he writes.

He tells stories of housing issues and his search to find a comfortable year-round place to rent.

“As a renter on the Island, you are much like an air plant, rootless and nurtured more by the air than the ground, drifting from habitat to habitat, a rock here, a tree there, totally at the whim of the wind,” he writes.

He goes to see a potential landlord who takes him around to the back of her house.

“Well, here it is,” she says, pointing to a run-down shack. “We rent it for it for $400 a month offseason and $800 for the summer months — June to September, plus utilities.”

Looking around, he sees the toaster oven, the single light hanging from the ceiling, the small sink and the electric hot plate, and figures if he can get coal, it won’t cost that much for utilities.

“Well, if you’ll have me, I’ll take it.... What about the bathroom facilities?”

“You can use the facilities in the house between 6 and 7 a.m. and 6 and 7 p.m.,” she says. “I’ll show you the way.”

“You exit the building, finally able to stand erect and make a deal with the landlord. And, as you walk away, you fee lucky that you found a place to land, and think that it isn’t a shack, and that you can remain on the Island and continue to be part of the community. After all, home is where the heart is, even if it is sitting near a tiny coal stove in a renovated chicken coop.”

And home is also where the stories are, which Mr. Keenan proves again and again with each essay in his delightful new book.