Teachers and students from Adult and Community Education of Martha’s Vineyard will share excerpts from their work with the public on Friday, November 13 at 6:30 p.m. at the high school library.

Author/activist David Swanson is coming to speak at the Tisbury Senior Center from 4 to 6 p.m. on Nov. 7.

Hosted by the Martha’s Vineyard Peace Council, Mr. Swanson will be introducing his latest book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, released Sept. 1 by Seven Stories Press. Copies will be available at this event.

It’s an age-old problem. An artist, writer, explorer or inventor has an idea for a project he feels confident will pay off in the long run, but no money to live while he completes it. Where does the artist turn for funds? And on the other side, how do patrons find new talents worthy of their support?

Reliving the Sixties

Vineyard author Tom Dresser will discuss his latest books, In My Life and It Was 40 Years Ago Today, Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 p.m. at the Chilmark Public Library.

A coming-of-age novel set in a small New England town in the 1960s, In My Life resonates with an atmosphere familiar to many baby-boomers.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today is a nonfiction review of the Beatles, recently published to coincide with the anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ album Abbey Road.

Six years ago, West Tisbury resident Paul Karasik traveled to Oxford, Md., to meet the son of Fletcher Hanks, a great undiscovered comic book cartoonist who first caught his attention 20 years earlier when he printed portions of Mr. Hanks’s work as the associate editor of Raw magazine, the international comics and graphics review. Mr. Hanks had spent three years in this quiet fishing town on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, during the advent of the comic book industry, from 1939 to 1941, scripting, drawing and inking 51 bizarre, edgy and masterful comic stories.

People who merely have heard about Slow Food — the “eco-gastronomic” movement aimed at counteracting the effects of fast food on American diet, farming and lifestyle — might associate it with the rarified, elite world of famous chefs, expensive foods and politically correct eating that tends to be too dear for regular folk.

IN MY LIFE. By Thomas Dresser. Red Lead Press. Spring 2009. $17, softcover.

Young love in the sixties. These five words summarize In My Life, the brief, quirky and charming novel by local author Thomas Dresser. Set against the backdrop of the turmoil of the bygone decade, In My Life tells the story of Rusty and Jodie, two teenagers in central Massachusetts whose blossoming love is colored by the sexual revolution, rock and roll, and the draft board.

It’s possible to put two and two together and come out with a number not exactly four. Ann Coleman Allen of West Tisbury bears the last name of one of our original settler families, and she teaches courses on Vineyard history. One could reckon, therefore, that her interest in the subject stems from the irresistible pull of family genealogy.

So you’re Kate Feiffer, and you think you’re set to have two new children’s books released, with all the attendant tours and book signings . . . when along comes another project with a yesterday-deadline attached to it, some super-sized hoopla stemming from its topicality, and the next thing you know USA Today’s Life section features it on the front page, Stephen Colbert is flashing a copy of your book on the air, and your Amazon.com sales perform a turn-around jump shot.

When authors die, some of their work lives after them. In or out of print, it’s bound and sitting on shelves. But another chunk of inventory survives the author, often to the chagrin of his or her heirs: unpublished or unfinished manuscripts. What to do with this material?

Writer, director and theatre maestro Jon Lipsky, of West Tisbury, was confronted with just such a dilemma when his father, author Eleazar Lipsky (1911-1993), left behind a stack of research books and a synopsis for a riveting historical saga.