The late Mary Payne (1932–1996), founder and longtime director of Island Theatre Workshop (ITW), was utterly shameless about drafting people into theater (or theatre — you choose). I was one of them. She needed help with PR. She knew I … Continue reading
OK, this one’s gonna be short because I need Sunday morning to get back to Wolfie so I won’t keep the Sunday Writers in suspense about What Happens Next. “Short?” chortles the Internal Skeptic. “We’ll see about that.” Here goes. In … Continue reading
Recovery is all over The Mud of the Place. Protagonist Shannon is an alcoholic with a pretty well established recovery — she’d be the first to say “recovering,” not “recovered,” and to emphasize that she’s gotten this far one day … Continue reading
With Q drawing closer, not swiftly exactly but steadily, I was drawing — not quite a blank, but I wasn’t inspired. I solicited suggestions from Facebook friends. Quirky, quixotic, query, question, quahaug (aka quahog) . . . All worthy, but still not … Continue reading
“I came to work on my novel.” It was a total cliché at the time — everyone, it seemed, came to Martha’s Vineyard to work on a novel. A few years later it was a screenplay they were working on, but … Continue reading
When the retina in my right eye detached in early August 2004, I’d been off-island at most twice since 9/11. In the following months, I made numerous eye-related trips to Boston: ferry to Woods Hole, bus to South Station, subway … Continue reading
I started reading a daily newspaper — the news section, not just the funnies — relatively early in life, when I was around 10. As a preteen and then teenage Arabist I clipped stories about the Middle East, taped or … Continue reading
Mud season generally comes round in early spring, when thawing earth and April showers turn fields, dirt roads, and back yards into quagmires. (Hmm. Maybe Q is for Quagmire? I won’t know till I get there.) Except this year, when … Continue reading
WARNING: The first several paragraphs of this post rely heavily on “Gay on MV,” a personal history that I posted here in June 2015. This post, in keeping with my theme for the A to Z Challenge, focuses more on … Continue reading
When I moved here in 1985, maybe the most startling difference between Martha’s Vineyard and the city I’d just left was that on the Vineyard hardly anybody locked anything. If you peered into the cars parked on Main Street or … Continue reading
