Music and Poetry

Tomorrow’s 24th annual great chowder contest is about more than a good cup of steaming, milky soup brimming with clams and potatoes. The contest raises money for The Red Stocking Fund.

The event begins at noon tomorrow at the Edgartown Mini Park.

The committee that organizes the event is still deliberating about whether to raise the entry fee above last year’s $5. At press time there still had been no decision.

Winter Band Concert

More than 150 Vineyard musicians, all of them students in the Martha’s Vineyard All Island Band Program, will play in the annual winter concert this Wednesday, Dec. 17, at 7:30 p.m. at the regional high school’s Performing Arts Center.

The winter band concert features the fifth and sixth grade band, the seventh and eighth grade concert band and the seventh and eighth grade jazz band.

The show is free and all are welcome.

Memoir Workshop

Got the story of a lifetime? The fourth Spice of Life memoir organization and writing workshop led by Susan Klein will run Thursdays, Jan. 8 through Feb. 26 at the Tisbury Senior Center at 34 Pine Tree Road in Vineyard Haven. Hours for the sessions are 1:30 to 4 p.m.

Like Ireland in the past two hundred years, and Concord in the mid-19th century, the Vineyard is known for incubating writers. Some of them set their stories right here on the Island. The most illuminating to come down the pike in a long time — perhaps the most illuminating ever — is The Mud of the Place, by Susanna J. Sturgis, published by Speed-of-C Productions, $19.99.

In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. His staff includes Mott, the big-brotherly general manager, and Quincas, a cute Brazilian. Abe has a paranoid hatred of Richard Moby, the CEO of an off-island wholesale nursery, Broadway.