Sorry, Mr. President

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

I’m not going to be out there on South Road waving when your motorcade goes by, and you won’t notice me craning for a glimpse of you when you visit the fair or hit the fairways or check out some chi-chi bistro for dinner. You won’t notice me, because I won’t be there.

I mean no disrespect, of course. On Martha’s Vineyard, August is the cruelest month. In August most of us are working two or three jobs and/or entertaining a continuous procession of guests from off-island. By the middle of August we’ve been doing it non-stop for two months at least and we’re getting a little stressed. Imagine, Mr. President, if you had total strangers traipsing through the Oval Office 24/7, looking at you, talking about you, and asking you for directions to the Lincoln bedroom. Your tolerance might, just might, get a little frayed.

Photo swiped from Tea Party website

You, like thousands upon thousands of other summer visitors, have come here for a break. The fact that here is Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t really matter. Summer people come here to schmooze with other summer people. Summer Martha’s Vineyard is rather like “official Washington” that way. Movers, shakers, and move-and-shake wannabes pour in from all 50 states and countries beyond to schmooze, glad-hand, back-stab, and generally carry on with other movers, shakers, and move-and-shake wannabes. Unofficial Washington is as far off their radar as year-round Martha’s Vineyard is for the thousands upon thousands of summer visitors now thronging our roads and beaches.

I know this: I lived in unofficial Washington for 11 years. “D.C.: Last Colony” and the Seasonally Occupied Territories have quite a lot in common, not least our invisibility to the occupying forces.

This summer, though, it’s not primarily work or crowds or overload that’s keeping me off the streets. It’s politics. Usually Vineyarders do our heavy politicking in the spring. For obvious reasons we don’t do much politicking in August. This August, however, we’ve got not one but two major issues on our summer table. One involves a roundabout that a few think is the bee’s knees but many, many of us think is unnecessary. The other involves a conservation organization using its financial clout to grab an island couple’s property.

In many ways the two struggles are different, but in one they’re very similar: they’re both about power overreaching itself. Not unlike the Republicans holding the federal budget (and by implication the whole country) hostage during the recent and deplorable battle over the debt ceiling, eh? As above, so below.

I’ve managed to get myself mixed up in both issues, and hence my time is even more limited than it usually is this time of year. And that’s why you won’t see me craning for a glimpse of you when you go out in public.

But if I should happen to run into you on one of the dirt roads near where I live, or out in the woods while I’m walking with my dog, I’d be glad to tell you more. Better still, what say you come back, perhaps incognito, in October? Then we’ll have plenty of time to talk.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, tourism | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Yesterday, From the Seasonally Occupied Territories was viewed 460 times. That’s more than four times the previous daily high. “Land Grab” got 412 views, making it by far the most read story published on this site. It’s attracted some thoughtful and informative comments too. I’m thrilled. I’m especially thrilled because both island weeklies have weighed in with sloppily researched, hastily written stories about Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation vs. Nisa Counter and Ben Ramsey, and my story is clearer and more accurate. Thanks to all for your support, and keep passing the word.

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis | 3 Comments

Land Grab

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

When I launched From the Seasonally Occupied Territories earlier this summer, I hoped that it might eventually become a vehicle for telling other people’s stories as well as my own. On Monday a story fell into my lap. It’s a story that deserves, and is beginning to get, wider telling. With no further ado . . .

Nisa Counter and Ben Ramsey are totally committed to the Vineyard, and to each other. Nisa moved here with her family at the age of three. For years she has run Nisafit, a popular fitness business. Ben, an independent contractor, is the nephew of Billie and the late Herbert Hancock. If you’ve lived on the Vineyard for any length of time, you’ll recognize Herb Hancock’s name. (If you don’t, click the link.) The Hancocks have owned land in Chilmark for at least 200 years. Ben’s “Uncle Herbie” worked hard to make it possible for the children of longtime town families to buy land in Chilmark after wealthy off-islanders had pushed market prices far beyond the reach of island working people.

Year-round rentals are hard to come by on seasonally occupied Martha’s Vineyard, and those of us who have them generally pay serious bucks for modest accommodations and feel lucky to have them. Ben and Nisa were no exception. But they wanted the stability of homeownership before they started to raise a family. They saved enough to buy a buildable lot from Ben’s Aunt Billie. As in many rural areas where European-style land ownership goes back centuries and many land transfers were informal or unrecorded, Chilmark titles can be a tad cloudy. They paid a lawyer to undertake a lengthy and expensive title search and established to their satisfaction that this parcel was indeed part of the Hancock lands. Billie then transferred her rights in the property to the couple with a quit-claim deed.

Building a wooden "tent"

Nisa and Ben didn’t have enough money yet to build a full-size house. Instead they obtained a town “tent permit” for a small, low-impact dwelling with solar panels and a composting toilet. They would live off the grid while saving money and preparing to build a real house. Construction started earlier this year.

Already the couple knew that the wealthy summer people up the road wanted them gone. They are Bob and Rona Kiley; Bob Kiley is a big name in public transit planning, though he washed out in his attempt to save London’s “Tube.” Nisa’s father, Thomas Counter, played a key role in the 1970s in the struggle to protect island land and affordable housing from run-amok development. In a letter to the Vineyard Gazette, he has described the couple’s attempt to make friends with their new neighbors:

“I went with my daughter to meet the neighboring landowners to explain that their driveway, which crosses Nisa and Ben’s lot, would not be threatened and that Nisa and Ben’s home would be planned so as to not interfere with their enjoyment of their property. It was a mistake. Instead of offering us a cup of tea, they immediately began a battle by canvassing the neighboring landowners to resist the ‘Youth Lot’ [a lot sold at lower-than-market price to make it possible for longtime renters and the children of town residents to buy property] and this has ended up with Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation bringing suit against Nisa and Ben and an order to not enter their land.”

That’s right: There is now a restraining order out that forbids Ben and Nisa to set foot on their own land. Later this week the couple must go to Boston to see if they can persuade a judge to lift the restraining order long enough for them to remove Ben’s tools, their building supplies, and their other belongings from the property.

What, you may ask, is the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation (SMF)? Good question. SMF, a private conservation organization, is an abutter to the Ramsey-Counter property. For more than 30 years, they said nothing while the Hancocks were assessed for and paid taxes on the land. As Ben wrote recently: “Sheriff’s Meadow allowed my family to think that they owned it, and to pay taxes on it, until we actually tried to get a building permit and put up a modest house. Then and only then was it worth ‘proving’ that they owned it.”

What makes this especially ironic is that SMF has long had a policy of accepting donated properties with dubious titles. Donors receive hefty writeoffs for land that might not survive the title search necessary for a legitimate sale. SMF resisted all of Ben and Nisa’s attempts to accommodate and negotiate, including formal mediation. Now they have sued Nisa and Ben, demanding that they prove ownership of the land in Land Court. The couple do not have anything like the money necessary to contest SMF’s claim, so it’s beginning to look as though SMF and the surly rich neighbors up the road will get their way.

Nisa says she has given up hope that she and her husband will ever be able to raise a family on the land once owned by Ben’s family. Knowing what she now knows about her prospective neighbors, she isn’t sure she even wants to live there. They’ve found a year-round rental in Vineyard Haven; they love their landlord, but the place is only 250 square feet. Nisa’s outraged at the behavior of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation. Do SMF’s well-meaning supporters know that the conservation group is using their contributions to hire expensive lawyers to bully two islanders off their land?

Feel free to express your opinion to SMF director Adam Moore at 508-693-5207 or moore@sheriffsmeadow.org. Watch the island newspapers for further developments. If you’re on Facebook, the community page Youth lots vs. tax breaks will bring you updates (almost) as soon as they happen.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard | Tagged , , , , , | 16 Comments

Traffic

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

People fall off their stools laughing when you say “traffic” and “Martha’s Vineyard” in the same sentence. Muwahahahaha, you think you’ve got traffic? You’re nuts.

Honey, I know traffic. I lived in D.C. for 11 years, commuting by bicycle for several of them. I’ve sucked the exhaust of rush-hour traffic creeping over Memorial Bridge. I’ve woven in and out of cars, trucks, and buses speeding downhill on 16th Street, N.W., trying to get to work on time. Helmet, me? Hah!

More recently I’ve done my time on Boston’s Southeast Distressway, looking down through the window on a Peter Pan bus, wondering if we’ll ever get to South Station. Wondering, too, what sitting in that kind of traffic day after day after day does to the human psyche, and glad that I live here and not there among those crazy people who don’t know they’re crazy. When someone on Martha’s Vineyard grouses about having to wait 15 minutes to get through an intersection, I snigger.

We don’t have traffic jams like that, but we do have traffic: motor and non-motor vehicles moving along roads of various sorts. City people don’t acknowledge that some of our roads are roads at all. Some of them are dirt, for one thing, and many of the tertiary roads are single lane. Until fairly recently, many roads didn’t have signs on them. Some of them didn’t even have names. Our directions to each other would go something like “Take the third dirt road on the right after the State Road intersection — there might still be a hubcap leaning against the tree. About half a mile in, take the right fork near the big boulder . . .” When we had to call 911, we had our map and lot numbers ready.

Yes, I can see how names and signs make it easier for emergency personnel to find their way to the home of someone having a heart attack — people in crisis tend to forget map and lot numbers, and many summer renters never knew them in the first place — but improved signage was a mixed blessing. Time was, if a newcomer wanted to know which was the upper end of Lambert’s Cove Road and which the lower, she had to either listen carefully or ask someone who’d been here longer. Now that anyone just off the boat can read it off a sign, there’s no reason to ask.

Aid to navigation

Off-islanders take certain aids to navigation for granted, like traffic lights. With no red lights and green lights telling us when to stop and go, we have to figure it out for ourselves. And we do. Island drivers are big on eye contact. Three drivers whose hoods are all pointing into the same intersection will negotiate and yield right-of-way with eye contact and a quick wave of the hand. If you’re waiting in a driveway or parking lot to get into a steady stream of traffic, you seek eye contact with passing motorists. Usually within a few seconds, someone will slow down and either wave or flash you in.

When two vehicles meet nose-to-nose on a single-lane road, someone’s got to give way. We’ve worked out rules of etiquette for that. Single-lane roads of any length have got lay-bys where one car can pull over to let another one pass. If you’re approaching a lay-by when you spot an oncoming car, you take it. When two vehicles meet between lay-bys, the one who’s closest to a lay-by backs up. One car yields to two, two to three: on some of the best-traveled dirt roads, in summer you do sometimes encounter two or three cars in a row. A car or truck with a trailer in tow shouldn’t have to back up. Ditto anyone with possibly impaired visibility, like four bicycles stacked against the rear window. If the lay-by is sandy or muddy, the vehicle with four-wheel drive yields to one without because it’s most likely to get safely back on the road.

This common-sense system works well most of the time, even in summer. For many years, though, I’ve been convinced that SUVs sold in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut aren’t equipped with reverse. These people almost never back up. Perhaps drivers in those states don’t have to demonstrate competence in reverse in order to get their licenses? They don’t understand eye contact either. On occasion I’ve been nose-to-nose with an off-island SUV. It’s got a lay-by about 15 feet behind it. The nearest one to me is almost a quarter mile down the road. I wait, making polite but expectant eye contact. He doesn’t budge.

At this point I have two choices. (1) I can back up that quarter mile and graciously spare Mr. SUV the anxiety of backing up. Or (2) I can stare at the other driver till he gets the message: Want to get to where you’re going? It’s all up to you, bud.

I’ve sometimes exercised option #1, usually when there are screaming kids in the other car. Usually, though, I go for #2. I smile graciously at the other driver as I drive by.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

He’s Coming

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Indeed, President Obama will be vacationing on MV later this month. We know this partly because a minor fire at Blue Heron Farm, where the Obamas stay, was covered in the Huffington Post. Trust me, this was not the news event of the week on Martha’s Vineyard. We also know it because my friend who lives not far from Blue Heron Farm reports that her cell phone service has improved — something that happened in the run-up to the last two presidential visits. QED: the president is coming back.

What this means is that Martha’s Vineyard is about to appear on the psychic maps of people who rarely think about the place otherwise. This includes the national and regional press corps. When President Clinton came to call in 1993, the Clintons spent most of their time at their hard-to-reach vacation compound near the island’s south shore. Thus the national and regional press corps had a lot of time to kill and (I’m guessing) editors at home pressing them to file stories. They swarmed around interviewing “locals” — loosely defined, because most of them didn’t realize that most year-round residents over the age of 14 or so do not spend their summer days at the beach. I vaguely recognized the place they were writing about, but it sure wasn’t the Martha’s Vineyard I live on.

What I have been thinking is that President Obama probably appears on the psychic map of every sentient U.S. resident who’s old enough to ingest news in any form, and that what we think we know about the man is probably as distorted, incomplete, or downright wrong as what most off-islanders think they know about Martha’s Vineyard.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, tourism | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Fear & Loathing in the Garden Patch

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Terrorist tomatoes

I hate fresh fruits and vegetables. What I hate most about fresh vegetables are the deadlines: use me now or I will turn to gelatinous goo in your refrigerator. I’m a freelance editor. I have enough deadlines in my life. I like stuff that keeps: grains, beans, cheese, nuts.

What I hate most about fresh fruits is biting into one that promised everything but turns out to be mealy and unsweet. Sure, you can pick from the designer bins where every apple, pear, and peach carries its own bar code, but that grates.

I hate fresh fruits and vegetables, so every morning when I brought another bowlful of cherry tomatoes into the apartment I would get anxious: What am I going to do with you little buggers? Last summer, I discovered that cherry tomatoes halved and baked in a 200 F oven for 2 hours or so are a culinary wonder. This summer I’ve learned that they’re even better with a dot of mozzarella. Don’t tell Travvy that I’m using his string cheese for the mozzarella.

Tomatoes go great with string cheese. Don't tell.

Using up cherry tomatoes is no longer an issue, but when the full-size tomatoes began to ripen in earnest a week ago, the anxiety returned: OMG, they’re big! How many of them can I eat before they turn to gelatinous goo?

I marshalled several other ingredients and made gazpacho. Awesome. For good measure I also made zucchini purée (think cream of zuke soup) with someone else’s zucchini. (I know Marge Piercy’s poem “Attack of the Squash People” so you will never, ever catch me planting zucchini in my garden.) It’s almost time to make another batch of pesto, my third of the season.

Now I have to worry about overabundance going bad in my refrigerator before I can get to it, but mold doesn’t gross me out like celery that’s morphosed into a multi-tentacled slug in my salad crisper. Besides, I don’t think it’ll be around long enough to mold.

Successfully meeting the challenge of the fecund tomatoes has noticeably reduced my anxiety. Now they’re — almost — just another deadline. I can do deadlines. I can even do deadlines when they involve cooking. Now it’s time for lunch.

Posted in home | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments

Labor Day is the solution.

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis | 3 Comments

Whose Blinker?

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

The other day I blogged about psychic maps, specifically my psychic map of Martha’s Vineyard. My psychic map features certain places that glow with color because of my experiences there and my feelings for them, but my psychic map isn’t strictly a personal thing. Psychic maps have political implications: because of our varied psychic maps, we see different things and have different priorities, and when we sit down at a meeting we may find ourselves with very different, even contradictory, perspectives on an issue. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to illustrate this.

Well, duh, a perfect example was staring me right in the face: the roundabout that has been proposed for the blinker intersection. You know the public hearing I wrote about all of two days ago? That roundabout. Some people love the idea; quite a few of us hate it. Some people think the intersection is working just fine as it is; other people don’t.

Our diverging, sometimes clashing opinions have a lot to do with our psychic maps. Let’s go back to my psychic map of Martha’s Vineyard — new map, new colors, but it’s got the same basic shape as the one in “My Martha’s Vineyard.”

My blinker intersection

The red dot sitting on the chartreuse line marks the famous intersection. Barnes is the road that goes through it north–south. The unmarked road approaching from the north is the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, which we think of as an east–west road (for reasons that will become clearer in the next map). The rose dot slightly left of center is where I have lived since March 1, 2007.  The chartreuse line marks one of the two routes that I usually take to Oak Bluffs, where I buy all of my liquor and most of my groceries. Notice that this route takes me through the intersection south to north or north to south.

Until 2003, the intersection had lights that blinked red in the north–south direction, the less heavily traveled route, and yellow in the east–west direction. People who customarily traveled east–west loved it: they could fly through without slowing down. People who traveled north–south had to wait and wait and wait, then risk pulling out into oncoming traffic. Understandably they tended to hate it.

The institution of the four-way stop in 2003 was a huge improvement for the north–south travelers. For those going east–west — not so much. At peak traffic times in the summer, traffic on the Vineyard Haven side might back up as far as the electric company and it could take 10 to 15 minutes of crawling forward before you finally got through the intersection. Grumble grumble grumble.

Here’s a hypothetical someone else’s psychic map of the intersection:

Someone else's blinker intersection

This hypothetical someone else lives in Vineyard Haven and works in Edgartown, or the reverse (the blue dots). The heavy black line is the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, and once again the red dot is the intersection. Looks different from my map, doesn’t it? Barnes Road barely exists for this person. She rarely goes up-island, and she’s got better ways to get to Oak Bluffs from both Edgartown and Vineyard Haven.

Not hard to see, is it, how people with these two psychic maps might hold differing opinions on whether there’s a problem and what the solution should be?

Posted in Martha's Vineyard | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Roundabout

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

So last night I attended the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s public hearing on the discretionary referral of the roundabout project as a DRI (development of regional impact). Got that?

Let me chunk it down a bit. A roundabout has been proposed for what may be the island’s busiest intersection, where Barnes Road crosses the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road. Many, many Vineyarders pass through that intersection several times a week; for quite a few, it may be several times a day. Currently there’s a four-way stop at this intersection. It replaced a light that blinked yellow in the most traveled (east–west) direction and red in the less-traveled (north–south) direction. This was terrible at peak traffic hours: east–west traffic cruised through at 40 mph and north–south traffic had to wait and wait and wait for a break. Most of us think the four-way stop is working great.

The Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) is a regional agency. Martha’s Vineyard comprises six towns, and this is one mechanism for dealing with matters that affect more than one town. Nine members are elected at large, one member is appointed by each town’s board of selectmen, and five (I think) are appointed by the governor.

When a proposed project is likely to affect more than one town, it can be considered a DRI (development of regional impact). The proposed roundabout affects pretty much the whole island. DRI for sure, right? No. The MVC cannot review any project unless the project is referred to it by the county (Martha’s Vineyard makes up most of the County of Dukes County) or a town government. Several of us did not realize this until last night. The applicant in this case was the town of Oak Bluffs, within whose borders the key intersection lies. Oak Bluffs did not refer the project. Why? That Oak Bluffs has arguably the most dysfunctional town government on the island may have had something to do with it.

This project has been flying under the radar for several years now. Many of us thought it had gone away for good. This past spring it woke from hibernation and we were bombarded with roundabout simulations and other cute graphics. The board of selectmen in my town, West Tisbury, were astonished that the project hadn’t been reviewed as a DRI, so they made a discretionary referral to the MVC, asking the MVC to consider the project as a DRI. This is what last night’s hearing was about. All caught up now?

So I get to the meeting room and take a seat. The commissioners are sitting at tables that make up three sides of a square. To my eye they look gray, not gray in the sense of old but gray in the sense of cobweb-and-dusty. We are sternly admonished by D. Sederholm, vice chairman, that this hearing is about the DRI referral, it is emphatically not about the merits of the roundabout. He then yields the floor to a nice fellow from the contractor, who proceeds to give a one-sided presentation on the merits of the project that goes on for about half an hour. This is followed by maybe 15 minutes of discussion among the commissioners, also about the merits of the project. I get the distinct impression that we are doomed.

Finally Richard Knabel and Cindy Mitchell, of the West Tisbury board of selectmen, take their places in the “hot seats,” on the fourth side of the square, facing the commissioners, directly across from the MVC executive director, Mark London, whose pet project the roundabout is said to be. They present the case for the discretionary referral.

Several of us from the audience speak, starting with Sandra Lippens, who runs Tilton Rentall, at one of the four corners that will be wrecked by the roundabout. Among other things, she has a front-row seat at the intersection and probably knows more about what goes on there than anyone. Her perception is that accidents have been greatly reduced since the institution of the four-way stop, and that those that do happen are minor fender-benders. Trip Barnes, who runs a trucking company (and for whose family Barnes Road is named), speaks; and Madeline Fisher, who along with Sandra and Trip have been trying to follow the project from its first emergence around 2004. This has not been easy. I speak as one of the faces the commissioners haven’t seen before. My last line is something like “I’d like to remind everyone that if the four-way stop remains just the way it is, the world will not come to an end.”

State money for the project is in place, and this spring the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, specifically the state Department of Transportation, took over management of the project. The commissioners seem to view the DRI referral as a big pothole that has suddenly appeared in a heretofore smooth road. They wish it would go away. Maybe they can drive over it? They do ask the state people what effect a possible delay might have on the funding. The answer seems to be that the project would be delayed, but the funding wouldn’t disappear.

I walked into the meeting thinking that the DRI was a no-brainer. I walk out sure that they’re going to weasel out of it somehow. The questions about delay, however, seem to have been a good sign. When I talk to Richard in the morning, he tells me that the MVC has accepted the project as a DRI.

We won this round.

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Bookstores Are Not Sacred Cows

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

I was a bookseller before I moved to Martha’s Vineyard: book and magazine buyer for Lammas, D.C.’s feminist bookstore. One of the best jobs I ever had. Books are the only thing I can imagine selling in good conscience. Like many independent bookstores, Lammas was a hub of its community, the place where you could find out what was going on around town. In between ordering, shelving, and talking about books, we referred women to female doctors, therapists, carpenters, printers, and mechanics (etc.). New arrivals called us to find out where the women’s bars and gay-friendly restaurants were.

At this time of year, we held our annual anniversary sale: a major event on the community calendar. Lammas Bookstore was founded at Lammastide in 1973. In the pagan calendar, Lammas is the cross-quarter day that falls between the summer solstice and the fall equinox, on or about August 1.

Like many feminist bookstores, Lammas was founded on a shoestring (the figure $300 sticks in my mind; even in 1973, this was not much) and was seriously undercapitalized. Thanks to excruciatingly tight inventory control, we managed to pay our bills, though almost never on time. Despite the financial pressures, we tracked down and special-ordered books for customers. I read trade journals; feminist, gay, and progressive publications of all sorts; and every flyer we got in the mail, always on the lookout for underpublicized, overlooked titles that belonged on our shelves. To me this was, and still is, what a good independent bookstore does.

Like so many indy stores, Lammas didn’t survive the rise of the big chains. It died around Y2K. Too late many readers realized that the deep discounts that made the chains so attractive came at a price. Buying decisions for most chain stores were made at corporate HQ and based mostly on statistics, not on the interests of the local book-buying market. Special-order a book? Deal with a publisher that only puts out three or four books a year? Forget it. It’s not cost-effective.

For years I carried a torch for independent bookstores on general principle.

Then my novel, The Mud of the Place, came out in the fall of 2008. A pretty good novel about Martha’s Vineyard by a longtime island resident, with enthusiastic blurbs by the likes of Karen Joy Fowler, Susan Klein, and Cynthia Riggs — island bookstores would be all over it, right? Wrong. Bog Books (not its real name but you can figure it out) didn’t want to carry it at all but finally did stock a few copies. The other bookstore carried it because I wholesaled it to them, buying books from the printer at the publisher’s discount. Neither bookstore ever showed any interest in hosting a signing or a reading. When either held an event featuring “island authors,” I was never — I mean never — invited.

I’m still flabbergasted. Why the lack of interest? Bog Books treated Cynthia Riggs and the late Phil Craig like real authors, but they write mysteries (I don’t) and all their main characters are straight (mine aren’t). Both Phil and Cynthia had New York trade publishers; Mud‘s publisher, Speed-of-C Productions, is a small press in Maryland that specializes in science fiction. But Mud is easy to order through a major book distributor. I still don’t get it.

Lately, however, a Vineyard writer I know has had a hard time getting the time of day from Bog Books. His book, a biography, is due out soon from a prestigious university press. He’s offered to wholesale it to Bog (something he should not have had to do), and last I heard, they were still dragging their feet. Another friend just told me of an author she knows, an Oak Bluffs summer resident, who’s got a book just out from another university press: Bog isn’t interested in him either.

I hope Bog Books wakes up and starts paying attention to island authors whose books are well worth stocking and celebrating. If they choose to do otherwise, they might consider amending their recent ad along these lines:

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, writing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments