Our small Island has produced an outsize and truly extraordinary legacy of celebrated writers through the years.
A question for us to ponder is, How do we inspire a new generation of Island writers to pick up the torch and carry it forward? How do we keep this tradition alive with a fresh new pipeline of talent? Keep reading, as I am going to try to provide our answer to that.
Let’s start by considering this legacy. A recent count of books by authors connected to the Island is more than 200, according to our friends at Edgartown Books. There are Pulitzer prizewinning authors like Geraldine Brooks and the late, great historian David McCullough. There are popular novelists like the late Philip Craig, with his murder mysteries, and literary legends like the late William Styron, who is survived by his widow Rose Styron, a poet and human rights activist still going strong at 96 and living in Vineyard Haven, where she wrote her recent memoir titled “Beyond the Harbor.” Then there are lyrical chroniclers of the Island like Skip Finley, whose book “Whaling Captains of Color” reveals a fascinating and for-too-long submerged part of our Island heritage. And there are treasured locals like Linsey Lee, our oral historian in residence over at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. It is such a long and distinguished list of writers that it is just impossible to share them all.
And we at The Martha’s Vineyard Times have been proud to celebrate this tradition every summer for the past decade at our Islanders Write gathering, which is always free to the public.
We hope to see you there in August, and this year, to honor the 10th anniversary, we have dedicated ourselves to expanding our Islanders Write program in several ways. First, as you have probably seen in the promotion we’ve been doing, we are hosting our first ever midwinter version of Islanders Write this weekend at Featherstone Center for the Arts, with writing workshops and authors who will be signing their books. Don’t miss it!
We also have our brand-new Islanders Write newsletter, from the founding director of Islanders Write, Kate Feiffer, herself a gifted writer who appears regularly right here in The MV Times and who has a new novel, “Morning Pages,” that has been well-received. Please subscribe to the newsletter so you can stay up to speed on our vital tradition of Island writing.
And this Saturday, Kate and I will be announcing an expanded mission for Islanders Write, with a new initiative that will seek to cultivate the talents of the next generation of writers on our Island. We are very excited about this, and look forward to sharing the details. Consider this column a drumroll, if you will, and please join us if you can –– come to Featherstone, and watch for our full coverage of the event next week.
There is some intriguing background to this effort. As we shared with our readers over the holidays, we were offered a gift to fund this initiative by a generous couple, who provided $50,000 as part of a challenge to us, to see if we could get the community to match that number. So we set out to do that through our “sustainer” campaign for community donations to help us carry out the service of local journalism.
And thanks to so many of you who stepped up to give support to our mission, we did it! And we are now able to weave the two strands of goodwill from our community of readers and the generosity of an Island couple who value nonfiction writing and want to support the next generation to carry on narrative journalism.
That means we now have a total pool of funding that is just under $100,000, and that will help us launch a kind of apprentice program for young Vineyard writers to join our staff. The gift from the donor will go directly to the reporter’s salary, benefits, and mentorship. On Saturday, we will announce who this writer is, and also who the so-far-anonymous donors are. So do not miss it. The donors will join us and share their reasons for supporting us in this initiative.
You are invited to join us this Saturday, March 15, at 5 pm for a reception at Featherstone, where the Islanders Write workshops will also take place.
To provide a bit more detail on how this works: The MV Times organizes and runs the Islanders Write event as a nonprofit arm through a longstanding partnership with the Martha’s Vineyard Community Foundation, which has served as our fiscal sponsor for tax-deductible gifts that help us to sustain Islanders Write. Our “sustainer” program is more about smaller gifts that we rely on to help sustain our overall operations and the journalism we create. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions for us in building this program. In short, it is a hybrid approach to revenue we are taking, one that other news organizations are also increasingly using as all local newspapers struggle to stay afloat. We want to be transparent and good stewards as we do this, and so we would love to hear from you if you have questions. We would be honored if you want to consider a donation.
We believe this community-supported model is the future of local news –– which, as you have heard me say before, is in a deep crisis in our country. More than two local newspapers have been shutting down every week in America for most of the past 20 years. That is largely due to shifting business models on the internet, and a dramatic downturn in print advertising. We are left with a ravaged landscape in the nation’s news ecosystem. We believe the demise of local news has everything to do with the polarization we see in America, and with the genuine crisis we are seeing in our democracy. Local news provides a binding agent that holds our nation together, and without it we are fractured.
One way we want to be part of avoiding fracture and changing that pattern of decline is by making sure that here on our Island we train the next generation of journalists, and inspire them to serve their local community. We have actually been doing this informally for quite some time through our work with the high school newspaper and through our robust internship program, which has brought us amazing talent through the years.
I’ve been publisher of The MV Times for only a year, but I have been working on supporting a new generation of journalists and addressing the crisis in local news for more than a decade. As some of you know, I am the founder of the GroundTruth Project, which is the home of Report for America, a service program that places next-generation journalists in newsrooms to cover distressed and undercovered communities. Now, as I am stepping away from my leadership role at the GroundTruth Project, I have been leaning in locally as publisher of The MV Times. And I am excited to share all I’ve learned in supporting the next generation right here on our Island, and this new initiative lies at the heart of it. I can’t wait to introduce you to two dear friends on the Island who are helping us get this done through their generosity and to an amazing and the talented young journalist whom we will be recognizing as our first in what we hope will be a long line of local reporters, whom we will be giving the title on our masthead of “Island Writer.”
The drumroll continues.
Charles M. Sennott is publisher of The MV Times.
