Martha's Vineyard Holly Nadler

A Room of Their Own, Vineyard Retreats Helps Writers Develop

Holly Nadler | Thursday, May 9 2013 - 2:21pm

They come from all over the country, staying for one or two weeks or up to a full month. They explore Edgartown from their home base at the former Point Way Inn. Some of them work in their rooms, others find a nesting spot in one of the many elegant downstairs parlors. For dinner they might bring home scallops from the Net Result, ingredients for a pasta Siciliana, and share the meal pot-luck style in the formal dining room, which is two stories high and lit up like a stage set.

Noepe Center for Literary Arts

Seeds of American Revolution Literally Planted in the Ground

Holly Nadler

FOUNDING GARDENERS: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. By Andrea Wulf. Knopf, March 29, 2011. 352 pages. $30, hardcover.

At first glance this book, with its lovely old-style sketches of such flowers as Rhododendron maximum and Kalmia angustifolia, gives you the notion it would make the ideal gift for someone who knows her forsythia from Scotch broom. But the moment you start reading Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, $30), you realize something groundbreaking is going on — pun intended.

Children’s Book Subject a Dear One for Baseball Fan Carly Simon

Holly Nadler

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME. By Carly Simon (performer, author), Jack Norworth (author) and Amiko Hirao (illustrator). Imagine, a Charlesbridge Imprint. April 2011. 26 pages, hardcover. $17.95.

Imagine a 1908 Tin Pan Alley ditty that continues to be heard by tens of millions of Americans on a daily basis — at least during baseball season. Yes, the incredibly catchy Take Me Out to the Ballgame (by Jack Norworth), is the unofficial baseball anthem, and it gets the crowds roaring to the immortal lyrics:

Hey, Sports Fans! Meet Your Artist

Holly Nadler

We often equate artists with one distinct style. But John Holladay, originally from the Midwest and for many years now a resident of Vineyard Haven, paints and illustrates with so much versatility, he’s impossible to pigeon- hole.

And yet one of his hugely successful, largely unknown artistic endeavors is now being celebrated at the Louisa Gould Gallery on Main street, Vineyard Haven. From 1980 to 2000 he was licensed to paint the official artwork for NBA, NFL and college sports teams, work that later appeared on posters, shirts and jigsaw puzzles.

Rejecting Violence Takes Constant Vigilance

Holly Nadler

I have no answers to the world’s big problems. I’m no guru,” wrote artist, teacher and peace-promoter Winslow Myers in a recent e-mail. Although he lives high up in Vermont in Stowe, he’ll be speaking here this weekend. He’s the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide (Orbis Books, $16) and director of a group, Beyond War, that for the past 25 years has worked to change the world’s thinking about military aggression and nuclear armament.

Both Darkness and Light Visible In Alexandra Styron’s Memoir

Holly Nadler

READING MY FATHER : A Memoir. By Alexandra Styron. Scribner, New York, N.Y. April 2011. 285 pages, photographs. $25 hardcover.

Could Tolstoy have been wrong? Not about all unhappy families being unhappy in different ways — we’re basically in agreement about that — but where are the happy families to which he alluded? Did he know any? Do we? Families without financial woes? No hurt feelings, no sensitivities clashing with another’s neuroses, no addictions, no dysfunctions of any kind?

Minnesingers Maximize Broad Appeal

Holly Nadler

Fresh from their triumphal concert tours of Paris and Prague, you might almost expect the Minnesingers back on Island to be busy calling their agents from moviestudio trailers. But no, they’re still the great, glowing, unprepossessing kids they’ve always been, and they put all their talent, all their joy into this past weekend’s performances on their home stage at the performing arts center at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.