When editor Judith Jones received the manuscript for Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it was exactly what she had been looking for in her own kitchen. “And if I felt that way, there must be others out there,” Mrs. Jones said from her summer home in Vermont. For her and many Americans, it wasn’t just another cookbook. It was a teaching book.
The Vineyard Haven public library will host a Sunday afternoon talk with poet and novelist, the Rev. Judy Campbell, on Feb. 21 at 2 p.m. Judy will talk about the writing process and getting your work published. There will be time for questions, and an opportunity to hear Judy read from her work as a writer. The event is sponsored by the friends of the library.
Longtime Aquinnah seasonal resident Frances Tenenbaum was lauded last week in the Boston Globe’s Gardening Column as “one of the 20th-century’s outstanding American garden book editors.” Columnist Carol Stocker described the former Houghton Mifflin garden book editor as one “who helped elevate garden writing by American authors instead of following the book industry’s long trend of simply reprinting British garden books.”
When Boston College Law School professor Ray Madoff set out to write a book about the legal rights of the dead in America, she only intended to include one chapter on the law itself, devoting the rest of the book to a philosophical, psychological, sociological and even religious interpretation. But as she began prying into the more remote and cobwebbed corners of the legal system, she stumbled upon a bizarre legal world of grave robbing, posthumous procreation and cryogenic preservation that was too rich a topic; in the end, she devoted the entire book to this world.
Prof. Herb Foster, author of the best selling book, Ribbin’, Jivin’, and Playin’ the Dozens: The Persistent Dilemma in Our Schools, will discuss his recently completed manuscript, Yiddish and Jive in American English, at the Vineyard Haven library at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 23.
The manuscript explores how Americans of Jewish and African descent have contributed more words, phrases and inflections to today’s American English usage than any other ethnic group.
Featherstone Center for the Arts, in conjunction with the Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency, presents a summer-long festival of poetry at Featherstone.
All readings will be held on the third Thurday of each month at 7 p.m.
This summer’s lineup includes both local and nationally known poets.
On Thursday, June 17, locals Jennifer Tseng and Clark Myers will be sharing recent and published work.
Best-selling author and Yale law professor Stephen Carter deplores those bumper stickers with which people advertise their views on political and social issues.
He’s sorry if that offends anyone, but he really can’t stand them, for a couple of reasons.
First, they are overwhelmingly stuck on the backs of cars; thus they convey the message “Here’s my opinion, I don’t have to look at yours.”
After a successul start this week — with eight writers, from the well-known Shirley Mayhew to charter school student and emerging novelist Hannah Vanderlaske, wowing the audience with their works in progress — Open Mic Night for Writers continues this Tuesday at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore on Main street in Vineyard Haven.
The evening’s emcee will be West Tisbury poet Laura D. Roosevelt.
Anyone currently working on a novel, short story, poetry or essay is invited to read for five minutes.
Landscape historian, author and Vineyard gardener Judith Tankard offers a look at the life and work of Beatrix Farrand, one of the foremost landscape designers of the early 1900s, at the Polly Hill Arboretum on Wednesday, June 30 at 7:30 p.m.
Born into a prominent New York family, Ms. Farrand eschewed the social life of the gilded age to pursue her passion for landscape and plants.
