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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
August 11 - 17, 2005 Edition
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So many books August 11, 2005 By Doug Cabral Cathy Thompson, the director of the Chilmark Library, looked across the browned off, heavily trodden lawn bounded by the library, the school, and the Community Center and pronounced the first ever Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival a success. She estimated that nine hundred to a thousand book lovers, including Representative Eric Turkington and Senator Rob O’Leary, notorious bookworms, participated in the course of a warm, sunny Sunday, meeting writers of fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, cookbooks, picture books, and all the genres in between. They listened to writers, snacked with authors, bought the writers’ books, and had them signed. For the people Cathy Thompson serves, namely anyone who doesn’t yet have a book to read, it was a terrific day. “I just think my job is to get books into people’s hands,” she told me as she did just that and oversaw the work of a fleet of blue T-shirted volunteers, tent managers, and expediters. It was, after all, a packed day of book talk, even for the politicians among us. There were three tents, one for fiction, one for non-fiction, and one for non-fiction and food, but not to eat. Expedition was required, because there was three-ring action all day long. Introducers had to do their jobs on time, writers had to do theirs within the time allotted, and that included answering questions from readers seated before them under the white tents. Naturally, there was some competition for the attention of an audience, whose members were free to migrate from talk to talk. For instance, late in the afternoon, in one tent, Alan Dershowitz — lawyer, Harvard Law School criminal law professor, author (this month of The Case for Peace : How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved), polemicist, television commentator, and man who never sleeps, I suppose — took on the Israelis, the Palestinians, politicians of all stripes and all nationalities, plus anyone in the audience brave enough to pose a question. In another, Russell Hoxsie spoke gently of his experience as a physician, a traveler, a walker, a newspaper columnist, and a keen observer of humankind and everything else. In the third, Lisa Grunwald, novelist, editor, non-fiction writer, and former Vineyard Gazette reporter intern, discussed and read excerpts from her latest fiction, Whatever Makes You Happy (Random House, New York, 2005). I was Lisa’s introducer. I had three minutes, but it wasn’t enough. One of the great pleasures of the small newspaper game — meaning community newspapers such as The Times and the Gazette — is that you meet some terrific secondary school and college kids who wander into journalism as summer interns. Some of them have school newspaper experience. Or they worked on the yearbook staff, or published a poem in the school lit mag. It’s fun, but for lots of these kids, the experience is unsuccessful. Journalism or writing for a living turns out not to be what they imagine. More than they bargained for, less than they hoped for. Occasionally, there are gems that require only the cultivation of time passing before they shine. That was Lisa. Now a thoroughly grown-up mother of two, Lisa came to the Gazette as a 14-year-old intern when I was managing editor there in the mid-1970s. Lisa had a DNA in journalism and writing. Beverly, Lisa’s wonderful mother who died in 1981, was a columnist at the Manhattan fashion newspaper W. Her extraordinary father, Henry Grunwald, who died this year, was Austrian by birth. With his family, he emigrated from Austria before the war, eventually reached the U.S., graduated from NYU and began his career as a reporter for a trade union paper. He became editor in chief of Time Inc., and in the late 1980s, United States Ambassador to Austria. “Home is the wallpaper above the bed,” Henry Grunwald wrote, perhaps with his two daughters and son in mind, a quote often anthologized, “the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one’s first universe.” Lisa, in her novel — though not a passage she read to her audience on Sunday — has her married, writer main character say, “My father taught me to drive. He also taught me how to check the oil, check the water, change a flat, and jump-start a battery. ‘I don’t want you to grow up to be one of those girls,’ he would say. “I always think of my father when I’m behind the wheel of a car, and this morning I let myself wonder what my life would have been like if he hadn’t died.” Lisa assured her audience Sunday that her protagonist Sally, who is investigating happiness and its possible manifestations in her own life, should not be confused with her creator. Which is certainly true because, after all, the recipe for fiction, as for life itself, includes observation, reflection, recombination, and imaginative reconstruction, plus the wallpaper, the church bells, the small fears, and all the rest. |
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