Hoagland’s Writing, and Friendship, Was a Gift

I first met Edward Hoagland on the page, as a reader so smitten I had to get up from my seat, leave the house and take a walk around the block.

 I was a graduate student in creative writing at the time, deep in my 30s, traveling down a hard pivot on my previous career ­— a solid one with a nice paycheck — for the unknown land of wanting to write. What I would write, how I would write it and whether anyone would ever care enough to read what I wrote, were still far off in the future. I was word drunk and that was enough at the time, especially with Edward Hoagland leading the way. Feeling such a rush when I read his sentences told me I was headed in the right direction even if I didn’t know where it would lead.

I devoured his work and pressed it upon others, including my father, gifting him Compass Points one Christmas, a memoir of Hoagland’s told in a series of essays. My father fell under a similar spell as me. My mother told me he wouldn’t stop reading aloud Hoagland sentences to her, and worse he read them aloud in public to anyone who was within listening range. I told her this made complete sense to me.

All this came back to me on Monday when I learned that Ted (as he was known) had died on Feb. 17 at the age of 93.

As a reader and wanna-be writer, most of your teachers you will never meet, those writers who you marvel at from afar, while studying their sentences, word choices, the architecture of their narratives, hoping some of it will rub off on you. Then I discovered Ted lived just two blocks away from the Vineyard Gazette newsroom.

This was in 2011, three years after I moved to the Vineyard and one year after I had started working for the Gazette. I had been away on vacation and came back to see that my colleague Remy Tumin had written a profile for the Gazette on Ted and his latest book. I was shocked. Ted Hoagland was a Vineyarder? I had no idea, and was bereft that I had missed the chance to write about him and in the process meet him. Thankfully, Ted published another book the following year and this time I was ready. I walked out of the Gazette, turned left and headed the two blocks to his home, stopping a few times to wipe the sweat off my forehead and remind myself to breathe.

In addition to being nervous, I was also worried. Meeting your heroes can often be the worst thing you can do. Thankfully, meeting Ted only made me admire him more. He greeted me with warmth and a quiet charm, inviting me into his small writing nook where I took a seat and began our interview. Sometimes, when thinking about a question I had posed, he would close his eyes and let his mind wander off into the distance to get a better view of what he wanted to say. When the interview ended he seemed as sad I was that we were parting ways.

After my piece came out, Ted walked over to the Gazette to tell me how much he enjoyed it. Once again, I had to walk around the block, this time shaking my head in disbelief at how magical life can sometimes be.

Ted liked to visit the winter community suppers around the Island and I began to accompany him on some of these meals. We often ate together at the Anchors, the senior center in Edgartown, and I marveled at how he knew everyone, a master at both listening and moving a conversation forward. He also hardly ever missed a Wednesday off-season supper at my wife’s church, the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury. One night, over a meal there, I asked if he would ever consider writing a piece for the Gazette. Usually his essays appeared in national magazines — Harper’s and the New Yorker — and traveled distances of 20,000 words or more. I offered him space for 1,000 words. He said he didn’t think so. But not long afterwards he sent me a piece and soon it became a regular occurrence for me to get a phone call from his partner, Trudy Carter, telling me that Ted had a piece for me and that I should come by and pick it up.

The editing process was frightening — not only because I was editing a literary hero of mine, but because Ted had such bad eyesight he asked me to come to the house and read him my edited version. I never did much, a tweak here or there or offer a minor suggestion, and so thankfully my reading aloud to him usually went smoothly.

One day, a friend of mine, a professor of literature who was teaching a class on the personal essay, asked if I thought Ted would talk to his students about one of his essays they were studying, and about the writing life in general. I mentioned this to Ted and he said he would be happy to take part and we set up a call in the conference room of the Gazette. For an hour Ted regaled the students with tales of traveling the world in search of stories, of the beauty of nature and its creatures and the horrors that humanity inflicts upon them. He also told them about his time working in a circus, taking care of the big cats, which included an odd and touching moment he had with a female mountain lion in heat.

I choked on my glass of water, perhaps my friend the teacher did too, but the students all laughed along with Ted, a master raconteur despite his life-long stutter.

As the years added up and Ted’s blindness worsened, I would often stop by his house and take him for a walk around Edgartown. He walked with a white cane in one hand and clutched my arm with the other. Sometimes we would stop and sit on the rocking chairs at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

Ted and Trudy moved off-Island in 2019 to enter an assisted living center as Ted’s mind was failing him. Saying goodbye was the last time I spoke to him. Thankfully, as we hugged and parted ways, I was able to tell him how much his work and his friendship meant to me, marveling then, as I am now, at this incredible gift the writing life had given me.

This article appears in February 27, 2026.