Books & Ideas
When Jan Pogue hands authors the first bound copy of their book, she watches their eyes as they gently take hold of it.
“It’s like getting a baby handed to them; here it is, here is this beautiful, amazing thing they did,” Ms. Pogue, the editor and publisher of Vineyard Stories, said one morning this week. “Every time I get to hand over a book I feel like I’ve been gifted.”
Today is the deadline for Island students, grades one through eight, to enter the Mom of the Year essay writing contest. The contest, in conjunction with the Edgartown Board of Trade and Pink and Green Weekend, will award three winning prizes—one each in grades one to three, four to six and seven to eight. The winning essays will be recognized and read at the Harbor View Hotel’s Mother’s Day brunch on Sunday, May 13, at 11 a.m.
No contest, Iago, the evil genius of William Shakespeare’s Othello, is the most brutal villain in any of the bard’s productions. The play was first presented in 1604 during what literary historians have deemed Shakespeare’s period of despair, when the struggle for good and evil in the human soul preoccupied him.
But what made Iago so ruthless yet so ostensibly above-reproach that he could win a loving and well-bred wife like Emilia and the trust and promotion of a great general such as Othello?
When people ask Arnold Carr why he chose to become an underwater explorer/marine biologist instead of taking over his family’s iconic store, Darlings, on Circuit avenue he says, “Because I grew up on Martha’s Vineyard. I was surrounded by water.”
“April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
So said T.S. Elliot at the beginning of his epic poem The Waste Land.
Here on the Vineyard, though, April is poetry month, nothing cruel about that, and to celebrate, the West Tisbury Library’s is holding its annual community poetry night on Sunday, April 22 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m.
Sparky and Rhonda Rucker are coming to the Vineyard Haven Library and they are doing some plain talking about the Civil War. In fact, their presentation is entitled, The Blue and Gray in Black and White.
Actually, they will be doing more than just speaking. They will bring the world of the Civil War to life via stories, personal insights from those who participated in the war, and songs including slave songs, Underground Railroad songs, finger-picking and bottleneck blues guitar, harmonica, old-time banjo, slide guitar, piano, spoons and bones.