Martha's Vineyard Magazine

To most people, Jackson Pollock and Martha’s Vineyard don’t seem to have much in common. But, in fact, the seven summers that the notorious drip painter spent on the Vineyard – from 1931 to 1937 – left a lasting influence on his life and work. Why is this connection not more widely known?

On a rainy day in the summer of 2023, Alexandra Bullen Coutts was driving to Nomans restaurant in Oak Bluffs to attend a graduation ceremony. It was her first week as executive director of Adult & Community Education of Martha’s Vineyard (ACE MV), an adult education nonprofit, and the second-annual graduation for students who had completed a career training course was taking place there.

I grew up on Martha’s Vineyard and not once in those seventeen years did I ever consider visiting our island neighbor, which sits a mere thirteen miles away. It wasn’t that I didn’t think there was anything of value to find on Nantucket – it was more that I didn’t think of Nantucket at all.

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The Martha’s Vineyard Cook Book (Harper & Row, 1971), written by Louise Tate King and Jeanne Stewart Wexler, is a book I treasure. Focused mainly on dishes the writers and their friends made at home, the recipes reflect what is best about eating here – food made with local ingredients, carefully but straightforwardly prepared. But the book does more than catalogue bass and blueberry preparations. It sketches a beautiful portrait of this place and its people.

It doesn’t really matter how many years have passed since your final graduation ceremony – when the air cools and the Island quiets down, it always feels like we should be headed back to school. Maybe it is the excitement of seeing friends again, comparing notes from our summers, or settling into new projects that has us daydreaming about our school days. The good news is that all those things are still available to us in the fall.

Thirty-nine years ago, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (DFW) officials met with about a hundred Islanders at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury to discuss an increase in Martha’s Vineyard’s hunting season bag limit from one to two deer. The rule change was the best way to manage the worrisome growth of the Island’s deer herd, they said.

When Alley Moore was a boy, his summers were spent with his feet in the warm, shallow water of Tisbury Great Pond. His family has had a rustic duck-hunting camp on the pond for five generations and, throughout his childhood, family gatherings took place there each year.

Lily Hill, at 57 Hines Point Road in Vineyard Haven, has long been known for more than its views of the sunrise over Lagoon Pond. Named for tiger lilies that return each summer, the property is layered with hydrangeas, rhododendrons, and a towering maple. For years, the home belonged to master gardener/interior designer Sara Jane Sylvia, whose eye for beauty earned it a place on the cover of Martha’s Vineyard Gardens and Houses (Simon & Schuster, 1992). It recently changed hands for $5 million.

Author Richard North Patterson doesn’t give up. While practicing law full time, he wrote a novel, The Lasko Tangent (W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), about a young government lawyer who is thrown into an unfamiliar world of crime. Then he wrote another novel, about another lawyer thrust into a new environment. Patterson, too, stepped out into the unknown when he quit his law practice to write full time, but the income from writing wasn’t enough to provide for his children in the way that he had hoped.