Holly Nadler

A Room of Their Own, Vineyard Retreats Helps Writers Develop

Holly Nadler |

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
 

 

 
Barry M. Press and Bonnie Black

Old Love Runs Like Water Over Levees

Holly Nadler

The lights go out and the theatre is dark for a preternaturally long time. The sound of gushing water engulfs us, and we’re savvy enough about the events of August 30, 2005, in New Orleans to know that this is the 18-foot wall of water funneling down the streets of all the neighborhoods fanning out from the levees of Lake Ponchatrain.

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Erika Strasburg and Peter Moses

New Love Meets Old in the Middle

Holly Nadler

Einstein alluded to it, and the quantum physicist and 1-800 medium alike declare it openly: linear time is way less real than we think it is. In Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown’s song-cycle musical, The Last Five Years, chronological time goes by the board as, in a clever device that turns the love story on its head, time moves forward from the man’s perspective, backwards from the woman’s.

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Book Notes for Smaller Readers to Plug Into, Cuddle Up With

Holly Nadler

WIRED. By Anastasia Suen, illustrated by Paul Carrick. Charlesbridge, $6.95. This book, now out in paperback, is an excellent insight into how electricity works, particularly as it pertains to the energy dancing beneath our fingertips as they tap along a computer keyboard, and as it flows or, just as importantly, pauses, at the outlet under our desk. Ostensibly Wired is a learning tool for the elementary school student, but anyone of any age could benefit from it, for who among us outside of M.I.T.

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book

Whodunnit? Philip Craig, in Last Book

Holly Nadler

VINEYARD CHILL. By Philip R. Craig. Scribner. New York, N.Y. 2008. 256 pages. $24, hardcover.

A popular young Island barmaid has gone missing. An old buddy turns up who invariably brings trouble like a perverse hostess gift. It’s winter on Martha’s Vineyard and all’s well with J.W. Jackson, wife Zee, and their two small children — if you overlook a murder or two, and a couple of thugs rolling off the ferry in a yellow Mercedes convertible in search of ill-gotten loot.

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actors

Land of Lost Imaginary Friends Animated on Playhouse Stage

Holly Nadler

No artistic medium asks us, the audience, to bring our imagination to the table as much as a staged theatre reading. So when a work such as Kim and Delia is presented by Vineyard playwright and filmmaker Brian Ditchfield — on Saturday night, May 31, under the aegis of the popular Island Interludes program of New Works by Island Writers — and when the play itself is a homage to imagination and its infinite possibilities, well, the audience shares in the creation.

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