Pitchapalooza is coming to Martha’s Vineyard, so time to dust off your pitching chops. But here’s the catch. You will have but just one minute to talk.

The pitch, so to speak, is as follows. Twenty writers will be selected at random from the audience. Each person picked gets sixty seconds to convince the judges of the worthiness of his book idea. At the end of the pitching a winner will be announced. The prize? An introduction to an agent or publisher appropriate for his or her book.

There have been a lot of big name poets reading on our shores this summer. And we applaud this embarrassment of riches. But next Wednesday, August 24, beginning at 5:30 p.m., we have the chance to stand a bit taller and clap even louder as some of our very own Vineyard poets take the stage at the West Tisbury library. Readers include Justen Ahren, Samantha Barrow, Ellie Bates, Maureen Hall and Jill Jupen.

This event is free and includes refreshments too. A guaranteed sating of both mind and body.

Author Bill Sargent will discuss his new book, The Well from Hell: The BP Oil Spill and the Endurance of Big Oil, at the Chilmark Public Library on Wednesday, August 17, at 5:30 p.m.

Change Is Coming

West Tisbury summer resident Jill Shaw Ruddock’s new best-selling book The Second Half of Your Life is part self-help book, part scientific treatise. It takes readers into the world of menopause and afterwards and argues successfully, in case anyone actually wondered, that there is indeed life after “the change.” But see for yourself.

Chris Adrian is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology. He is also a recent graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. So he’s well-versed in tragic loss and grief, as well as the more abstract issues of immortality and the meaning of life. In his newest novel, The Great Night, he mixes all of these ingredients together and bakes them in an oven fueled by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The result is an exquisitely heart-breaking novel, sprinkled with dark comedy, whimsy and sex.

The number 56, representing baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941, is the most resonant numeral in sports. Nothing approaches it — not in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, darts or kick the can. To deliver hits every day, amid constant inspection and increasing pressure, leaves athletes in all sports slack-jawed.

In the early 1970s, when the tide of summer residents would go out in September, there were always young people who didn’t want to leave the Vineyard — and they didn’t have to, because there was no particular place they planned to go. Land was still relatively affordable, or their families had land, and they built themselves homes back in the woods, had kids, a few animals and a garden, and patched together a living with the usual Vineyard hodgepodge of work or self-employment.

“I really did spend my entire childhood watching television,” says Alexandra Styron, a claim that stands in stark contrast to her endlessly expansive vocabulary and carefully crafted storytelling.

We often want to know more about our favorite authors. After investing hundreds of pages of time in their created worlds, we feel entitled to know more about what they’re like in our shared world. It’s the root of our fascination with Hemingway’s boxing and Faulkner’s drinking, with Greene’s Catholicism and Salinger’s reclusiveness. We want to know more, but rarely do we get our wish. However, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who shares more than Andre Dubus 3rd.

Earlier this year, the Gazette interviewed Geraldine Brooks as her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was about to be released: