In the dim, warm setting of a meal at the Sweet Life Cafe this weekend, dinner was paired with a book.
Readers gathered at the restaurant Saturday night for a dinner with Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth. The book recounts Ms. Rush’s journey on a 2019 scientific expedition to study Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, the “doomsday glacier” whose breakup of ice is expected to raise sea levels globally by at least two feet.
The book, published in 2023, also recounts Ms. Rush’s journey to motherhood.
“It is organized around a much more intimate journey, the choice to have a child in the climate crisis,” said Ms. Rush, who teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University, at Saturday’s dinner.
Ms. Rush’s visit to Sweet Life Cafe is part of an author series that began there in fall 2024. The series is partially a way to boost business in the off season, said Erin Ryerson, co-owner of Sweet Life.
“Fine dining can’t sustain 12 months of the year on Martha’s Vineyard, it just doesn’t work,” she said. “But this wasn’t just a business decision. It was pairing something that I love with the Sweet Life.”
A voracious reader, Ms. Ryerson said she wants her restaurant, open year-round, to be a “gathering place” — a place for life and excitement, even in winter. Since the series began, Ms. Ryerson has hosted 12 authors including Jayne Anne Philips, Joseph Finder, filmmaker Dawn Porter and James W. Jennings.
After a Q&A, authors move about, sitting with the different tables for conversations over dinner and dessert. That’s quite different from a normal author event, said Molly Coogan, owner of Bunch of Grapes. The bookstore partners with the restaurant to make authors’ books available before and after the event.
“You’re really getting a chance to interact with the authors….It’s just sort of this warm, intimate event,” said Ms. Coogan.
Entire book clubs will attend the dinners, including Bunch of Grape’s in-store book group, she added.
Ms. Ryerson said The Quickening’s colorful cover caught her eye in 2023 at a bookstore, during a trip to Providence with her daughter for a dance competition. Ms. Ryerson’s daughter is now 10 years old.
“I started reading it out loud to her,” said Ms. Ryerson. “We were in a hotel, just the two of us for a weekend, and I did read most of the book out loud to her over the next couple weeks.”
On Saturday, guests commented on the structure of Ms. Rush’s book. While written in the first person, parts the book are constructed around hundreds of interviews Ms. Rush did with crew members on the ship, discussing everything from their day-to-day on the ship to their thoughts on child rearing in the 21st century.
The polyphonic narrative aims to break from traditional Antarctic narratives mostly featuring male protagonists, Ms. Rush said.
“So many of the Antarctic books that I had read were about the adventurer sallying forth and conquering the South Pole…and I was feeling pretty allergic to those singular narratives,” she said.
Much of the conversation on Saturday centered around sea level rise impacts on the Vineyard. While it’s not difficult for long-time Islanders to point out how the Vineyard’s cliffs and shores have changed, the impacts of climate change demand an attention “in place, over time, that so few of us have anymore,” Ms. Rush said.
She recalled, during the expedition, being stationed next to Thwaites as it experienced a major calving event — the impact of which she didn’t notice until seeing satellite images from before and after the breakup of ice.
“It looked like God had taken a sledgehammer to the ice and broken it apart,” said Ms. Rush. “It just taught me something about how difficult it is to see the climate as it changes.”
Guests also asked Ms. Rush about raising children during the climate crisis. Her kids, now two and five years old, attend a bilingual charter school and speak Spanish at home with Ms. Rush’s Colombian husband.
“I’m trying to lean into the idea that I have to prepare them for like, multiple worlds,” said Ms. Rush, who is currently working on a novel set in Colombia during a drought. “If I can give them two languages, all the better.”
This was Ms. Rush’s first visit to the Island. At individual tables, guests discussed local writers’ groups, summer literary festivals and the specific ecological conditions of the place they call home.
“Our conversations were deeply informed by residents’ attunement and engagement with their environment, and the knowledge that it is changing and not always in ways that people find desirable,” Ms. Rush wrote later to the Gazette.
In April, Annie Hartnett will visit the Sweet Life Cafe to discuss her 2025 book, The Road to Tender Hearts. The author series continues in May with journalist and author Juliet Izon, and in June with repeat guest Emily Franklin. The series picks up again in September with Jayne Anne Philips’ second visit.
This article appears in March 27, 2026.