Arts & Entertainment
Earlier this year, the Gazette interviewed Geraldine Brooks as her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was about to be released:
We often want to know more about our favorite authors. After investing hundreds of pages of time in their created worlds, we feel entitled to know more about what they’re like in our shared world. It’s the root of our fascination with Hemingway’s boxing and Faulkner’s drinking, with Greene’s Catholicism and Salinger’s reclusiveness. We want to know more, but rarely do we get our wish. However, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who shares more than Andre Dubus 3rd.
Young poets have until Monday at 5 p.m. to enter their poems in the Elisa Brickner Poetry Contest, sponsored by The Elisa Brickner Fund of the Chilmark Free Public Library.
The contest was created to foster the love of poetry, and provides cash prizes of $200 and $100. To be eligible, poets must be entering grades 6 - 12 in the fall.
Winners will be asked to read their poems on Monday, August 15, at 5:30 p.m.
This year the Polly Hill Arboretum’s annual David H. Smith Memorial lecture features Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens plant curator Bill Cullina, who will discuss the environment via a long-term geological view. His talk is called The Web of Life: Taking the Long View.
Pan-Martha Bike Ride
The Pan-Martha Challenge, 50-mile bike-a-thon around Martha’s Vineyard on August 27, will benefit life-saving cancer research charities.
Beginning in Oak Bluffs, pedaling through Edgartown, out to Chilmark and Aquinnah, and back through Vineyard Haven, the Pan-Martha Challenge is not only a beautiful was to experience Martha’s Vineyard, 100 per cent of every rider-raised dollar is donated directly to local cancer research charities.
On the face of it, Suellen Lazarus might seem an odd person to have started a book festival. She was a banker, not a professional bibliophile or bookstore owner or writer.
But in a way, it was her other busy life which led her to start such an event on the Vineyard six years ago. For she associates reading with downtime.
She is one of those people who always packs five or six books when she goes on vacation. Even if she doesn’t get around to reading them all, their mere presence is a happy indicator of leisure, a calming thing.
