Detective Victoria Turnbull is at it once again, sleuthing out the latest Vineyard mystery in The Bee Balm Murders. The fictional character created by writer, activist and innkeeper Cynthia Riggs may be 92 years old, but she isn’t slowing down in the least.
Chilmark resident Donald Nitchie and Oak Bluffs resident Barbara Peckham will read their poems in honor of Ms. Peckham’s new book A Jar of Summer and Other Poems. The reading will take place on Saturday, Feb. 26 at 4 p.m. at the West Tisbury Free Public Library.
Before settling permanently on Martha’s Vineyard, Barbara Peckham served as the Society and Women’s Page Editor of the Journal Courier in New Haven, Conn. She has written radio and television commercials and was an English teacher for many years.
Poet Rebecca Gayle Howell is a reader first and foremost. When she started to read in a serious way at the age of 11, Ms. Howell would sneak away with her older sister’s high school English textbook. That’s how she discovered T.S. Eliot.
“I read the Four Quartets, and for the first time I knew something had changed in me,” Ms. Howell said in a phone interview with the Gazette earlier this week. “I just kept reading from there.”
The Edgartown Library’s book group’s next meeting will be on March 29 at 4 p.m. The book under scrutiny will be The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten.
Reading a book that has already been published is so, well, regular Sunday driving. How about taking a peek behind the creative process and hearing work that is not yet ready for publication? In other words, work that is still evolving.
Many children are instantly enchanted by the Oak Bluffs institution known as the Flying Horses. But a recently published children’s book, When Horses Fly, gives new meaning to the horses’ flight.
One night as a young girl named Caroline struggles to fall asleep, the Flying Horses carousel appears to her outside her house. Suddenly, one of the painted horses magically flies off the carousel and lets Caroline ride her, giving her a chance to say a final goodbye to her pet horse Nutmeg, who had died months ago.
At the end of the dock in Menemsha Harbor sits a stately white yacht. At 75 feet, it can’t fit anywhere closer in the harbor. Inside the yacht, a woman often sits cross-legged in a bright sitting room, imagining far-off worlds full of romance and historical intrigue. She’s Kitty Pilgrim, CNN correspondent-turned-novelist, and she’s been hard at work writing her third book, while promoting, by boat, her latest release, The Stolen Chalice.
Many overlook Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season, when beaches no longer accommodate bikinis, business owners stow away their cash registers, and the Flying Horses cease to fly. But Phyllis Meras, author of In Every Season, recently released by Schiffer Publishing, has a great appreciation for this time of relative hibernation, for humans at least. For her, the off-season is when the familiar becomes mysterious, and the unrelenting cadence of nature’s course penetrates the human psyche.
Best-selling author and Chilmark resident Linda Fairstein has said that one of her greatest pleasures is the moment she holds in her hand a copy of her latest book. Fans will feel the same way on July 10 when Dutton publishes Night Watch, the latest of Ms. Fairstein’s engrossing crime fiction novels.
