Books & Ideas
Writers are everywhere, often hiding in plain sight. They’re under umbrellas in Oregon. They sit in the sweltering Georgia sun. They live across the ocean and in different continents. They are also on the Vineyard, and in greater number from July 15 to 20, thanks to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, which is about to begin its third year as a haven for developing writers.
Because I could not stop for death —
He kindly stopped for me —
from Emily Dickinson #712
Visionary academic Dr. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, needed a visionary architect to design the campus.
Vineyarders have come so far east that they’ve broken free of mainland America, but one West Tisbury resident is the man to go to for a conversation about Western United States history.
Excerpted from The Chappy Ferry Book: Back and Forth Between Two Worlds, 527 Feet Apart, by Tom Dunlop, with photographs by Alison Shaw and a short film on DVD by John Wilson (Vineyard Stories, 2012).
This excerpt is taken from chapter five which tells the story of James H. Yates of Edgartown, who owned the ferry from 1920 to 1929. He was the last man to run the Chappy ferry as a rowboat.
Folks on both sides of the harbor love Jimmy Yates. But folks on the Chappaquiddick side loathe the ferry Jimmy Yates runs.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s biography of Oak Bluffs writer Dorothy West might never have been launched but for a startling revelation that upended the researcher’s corner of the literary world.
Ms. Sherrard-Johnson, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described to an Island audience Thursday how Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color emerged from the ashes of her work on a 19th century female writer who was considered part of the black literary canon.