The words and spirit of James Joyce will come alive again in Vineyard Haven as Arts and Society presents the 39th annual Bloomsday celebration.

More than 70 years after his death, James Joyce once again stole the show. For a single night, the Island brought back to life the man and his work.

Bloomsday comes to the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven on Monday, June 16 at 8 p.m. Organized by John Crelan, this 36th annual celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses features local talent.

The annual Bloomsday celebration on June 16 will feature all sorts of craic and carryings-on. John Crelan, founder and director of Arts and Society, is in his 35th year of organizing the celebration of music, drama and dance based on James Joyce’s classic, Ulysses, the plot of which takes place on June 16, 1904 from 8 a.m. that morning till the early hours of the next day.

Bloomsday

James Joyce didn’t name Bloomsday, a worldwide celebration of music and drama based on his work, but he did choose the date. It’s June 16, the day his most famous book, Ulysses, takes place, and the date of his first romantic liaison with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

James Joyce once declared that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be wholly reconstructed from the text of his famously impenetrable opus, Ulysses. On Wednesday night, or Bloomsday night rather, the Dublin of Joyce was thus faithfully restored in Vineyard Haven.