Many overlook Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season, when beaches no longer accommodate bikinis, business owners stow away their cash registers, and the Flying Horses cease to fly. But Phyllis Meras, author of In Every Season, recently released by Schiffer Publishing, has a great appreciation for this time of relative hibernation, for humans at least. For her, the off-season is when the familiar becomes mysterious, and the unrelenting cadence of nature’s course penetrates the human psyche.

As a little girl, Charlayne Hunter-Gault would sit on her grandmother’s knee while she read the news, picking out the comics, finding one in particular rather enchanting.

“I fell in love with Brenda Starr,” she said. “I thought, here’s the most exciting job for a woman — taking on the world as she reported for the newspaper. It never occurred to me that this was a white woman with red hair and blue eyes.”

Traeger di Pietro first started painting for love. He was 15; she was artsy and he was a jock, a baseball player. He knew her ex-boyfriend had painted her things and he wanted to impress her too. His first paintings were small still lifes of flowers and roses.

“I never stopped, I just kept going and going,” he said. Now he’s a full-fledged member of the Island arts scene, and has received acclaim from art collectors and artists alike.

It’s summer on the Vineyard, and they’re on the front lines, delivering lobster rolls to hungry hordes, serving up beers to thirsty tourists.

For wait staff at Vineyard restaurants and bars, the summer is the big show, the time of year where crowds make up for the slower off-season months. Summer days — and nights — are crazy, some say, but the benefits, like living on the Vineyard and being part of a tight-knit “industry” community, are big enough to keep them going, year after year.

Judith Hannan spent the first couple of decades of her working life floating from one job to another — a clerk, an office temp, a secretary, a fundraiser.

“I’m like a jellyfish. I just drift. I have drifted into everything I’ve ever done,” she said. “But once I became a mother, for the first time I felt so unbelievably engaged.”

The Screenwriter’s Daughter, the current Vineyard Playhouse production written and directed by Larry Mollin, is more than a performance — it’s a resurrection of history.