Tag Archives: community
Yes to the Housing Bank
Spring is town meeting season in New England, and that includes Martha’s Vineyard. Four of the six island towns — Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, Tisbury, and my town of West Tisbury — hold their annual town meetings (ATMs) next Tuesday, April … Continue reading
Singing in “Messiah”
I happily wish “Merry Christmas” to everyone I know who celebrates it, and “Season’s Greetings” to those who may not, or who celebrate more than one of the season’s holidays, of which there are quite a few. The common denominators … Continue reading
Finding Light in the Darkness
Originally posted on hecatedemeter:
If it feels like the dissolution of much of what we hold dear about the United States is accelerating, that’s because it is. This has been a particularly dire week: SCOTUS has decided that racial gerrymandering,…
X is for Xenophobia #AtoZChallenge
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “xenophobia” as “fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.” The American Heritage Dictionary agrees but adds the emphasis on “different countries or cultures”: “Fear of, hatred of, mistrust of, … Continue reading
S is for Single #AtoZChallenge
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
L is for Lesbian #AtoZChallenge
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
F is for Family #AtoZChallenge
In my D.C. days, most of us came from somewhere else. Many of us had left — maybe “fled” would be a better word — small cities, smaller towns, and rural areas that were incongenial at best to lesbians, feminists, … Continue reading
Gossip
Gossip is widely assumed to be, by definition, frivolous, erroneous, and/or malicious. Call it “orally transmitted information” and it gets more respect. My first few years on Martha’s Vineyard I didn’t believe people who said they rarely read the local … Continue reading
Tolerant, Up to a Point
At the end of April, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center held its first Spectrum Film Festival, featuring films with an L, G, B, T, and/or Q connection. Like the LGBTQ coalition itself, the films had an uneasy relationship with each … Continue reading
Into the Mud
The title of my first novel, The Mud of the Place, came from its epigraph, a quote from a 1994 interview with the late poet-writer-activist Grace Paley: “If your feet aren’t in the mud of a place, you’d better watch where your … Continue reading
