On Sunday evenings for the last several years a group of writers has been gathering at the Cleaveland House in West Tisbury, the home of mystery writer Cynthia Riggs. The writers meet to share their work and help critique and inspire each other while traveling down that very solitary road of the creative process.
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 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.
On Thursday, July 19, at 7:30 p.m. the 2012 author lecture series begins. This year’s summer lineup includes Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Russo and Jennifer Egan, also Peter Beinart and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The series is designed to celebrate and support the authors and independent bookstores. The price of admission is free if you buy the author’s book. If you choose not to buy a book, the cost is $10.
It was a Chilmark showdown Sunday night: on one side was the noted civil liberties lawyer, law professor and author Alan Dershowitz. On the other was author Peter Beinart, an associate professor of journalism and an editor at the Daily Beast.
The debate centered on Mr. Beinart’s recent book, The Crisis of Zionism, and differing views about the future of Israel. A large crowd at the Chilmark Community Center watched the two spar, sometimes heatedly, in a debate moderated by author Richard North Patterson.
