I teach a writing workshop here on the Vineyard and often I begin the class by saying: “We are alchemists. We can turn garbage into gold. We can take what happened to us, the trauma, the hurts, the tiny murders, and we can transform them into something beautiful. But the most important thing we have to do first is, we have to feel them. You can’t skip the pain part.”

Editor’s Note: Olive Tomlinson spoke with Linsey Lee, oral history curator for the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, about her recollections of Liz White’s Shearer Summer Theatre, one of the first summer theatre groups on the Island after World War II. An actress who felt stymied by the stereotyped African American roles available to her on Broadway, in the summers Liz returned to Oak Bluffs where her family owned and operated Shearer Cottage, a popular inn for vacationing African Americans.

E. Gale Huntington was a writer, folksinger and teacher who spent plenty of time on the waterfront. He was also the founding editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum’s publication the Intelligencer. In February of 1971, he published in it an article he had written in 1934 when he was in his early 30s about fishing in the waters of the Vineyard with members of the Tilton family. Mr. Huntington died at the age of 91 in December of 1993. The winter 2012 issue of the Intelligencer is a retrospective and reprints Mr.