That's me, hopefully. This week, after a cripplingly short visit to Maine for "The Kings," I've been paralyzed with lack of motivation, lack of a social life in Martha's Vineyard, stress for the future, and a champion's penchant for napping (i.e. totally wasting my time). Some combination of these factors and others have led to a sour grapes between the Vineyard and I, so I'm hashing some of this out to enlighten you who might be wondering where the exciting travelogues and entries of discovery, self- and island-, have been.
I'm going to New York from Wednesday to Friday of next week. The only full day, Thursday, will serve the purpose of an interview at GQ for a full-time, unpaid fall internship. I'll also start scoping out Brooklyn apartments, even the cheapest of which may take a 90% bite of my meager summer savings. So be it -- an internship at a magazine as solid as GQ is an investment I'm prepared to go through hell (financial, personal, sleepwise) for. When you know there's one thing you can do (write) and you have a destination in mind (have since I was at least 15, reading a videogame magazine cover to cover every month on my bed), you don't have much of a choice but to go for it. Plus, being in New York will not be any kind of hell for me -- I've been wanting to try life there since I first visited at the young age of however old, and being with a few timeless friends from Maine will make all the difference after this lonely island summer, no matter how many hours I'm putting in or how few I'm sleeping. I have a dream, to be a self-respecting writer doing what I was born to do, and when I arrive, the view will be sweet.
I'm ready to be done with Martha's Vineyard. Something about living in a hotbed of summery people enjoying their leisure time and drinking on their boats while I scrape together money for rent, food, and Silas Marner-like saving to move to the apocalyptically expensive New York has not boded well with my system. See also: Swindler's Vineyard, the taste of which never faded from my mouth but rather worsened with the more people I met. See also: Not meeting anyone I'll leave this island considering more than an amiable co-worker, a far cry from the lifelong friends I made abroad and even in a short last year at college. A bonus "see also" would be increasing bitterness over not seeing any celebrities while my friends ring them up at general stores, pass them on the streets and wait on them in restaurants. (Steve Carell! Come on!)
On the up side, I'm focusing on what I need to do to knock 'em dead at GQ and working up the motivation to look at other internships and jobs, trying to write a novel (one handwritten legal pad complete, moving on to the next with gusto), finalizing a new piece of short fiction, continuing to write for my internship, the wedding magazine, and the Morning Sentinel. I also vow to make some fun, blog- and photo-worthy excursions like a trip to Aquinnah on a nice day or deep into Chilmark and West Tisbury on my bike. Maybe I'll see Obama, who'll be holing up in a Chilmark farm, according to the Vineyard Gazette. Lucky him -- the more he can enjoy himself and avoid the ruckus in Oak Bluffs, the better.
Last thing: Switched from my UMaine e-mail to zachdionne@gmail.com. I'll still receive your e-mails if you send 'em to my old address. Just filling you in. Thanks for reading.
Unrelated photo to leave you smiling or mildly amused: Cool rabbit who camps outside my bookstore.
Just finished my story on "The Kings" -- the Morning Sentinel was nice enough to let me do a first-person account of the filming. They're always great to work with. Also finished a cover letter to GQ in hopes of a possible internship in New York in the fall (also waiting to hear back from Entertainment Weekly). After this post I'll be working on some fiction and going to review a restaurant at 5. Pretty writerly day, eh?
Below is one of three articles I wrote for Martha's Vineyard Wedding magazine. It's the one I'm proudest of, the most readable and interesting, a feature on a Vineyard florist. This one goes out to Claire, the floweriest, plantiest person I know.
Flower girl on the Vineyard
By Zach Dionne
For Martha’s Vineyard Wedding magazine, July 2009
As a young girl, Louise Sweet didn’t like florists. At all.
“I never thought of becoming one. In those days, everything was very stiff and manufactured looking – nothing I would ever do with a flower,” says the woman behind Flowers on the Vineyard. It would end up being her own passion for flora, rather than the dull scenes in flower shop windows, from which her signature style and successful business would blossom in the years to come. “Growing up in Pennsylvania, I loved nature and flowers. I used to pick flowers and make things all the time.”
Then Louise Sweet came to Martha’s Vineyard for a summer in the early 1970s and ended up marooning herself on the island, learning to call it home.
“I started selling flowers out of buckets. We wouldn’t arrange them, we would just put flowers out for sale,” Ms. Sweet says. “It became my life. I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Her business began on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven, dubbed Tellurian, Greek for “of, pertaining to, or inhabiting the earth.” The establishment evolved from a general flower store, selling by the stem, to its current multifaceted presence as Flowers on the Vineyard.
The drive to Ms. Sweet’s business and home winds down bumpy dirt roads, scenic rock walls and serene, bucolic estates. She speaks fondly of her formative days as a Vineyard flower seller, when large shipments would come on the ferry and boatloads – literally – of flowers would be unloaded on the dock.
Ms. Sweet’s home and headquarters for Flowers on the Vineyard is situated cozily atop a hill in West Tisbury, surrounded by gardens, a chunk of the house hidden in greenery and flowers. No vista around the property is without eye-catching landscaping – even the noisy, metal compressor box to her flower cooler’s compressor is adorned with attractive vegetation.
“This is my workshop, my studio,” Ms. Sweet says of a formerly unfinished basement, the third space she has designed and developed for her work. It’s also her favorite.
Inside, a wall of timeless-looking stoneware vases makes a right angle to shelves of distressed silver vessels. A chalkboard is littered with marker-written reminders, a sunflower postcard and magnetic letters, one batch spelling “crazy.” A weather-worn wooden flower cart Ms. Sweet has toted around the island through the years sits just outside the door. But no aspect is more noticeable than the immediately striking, fresh, well … flowery, fragrance.
“We have our own aromatherapy here,” Ms. Sweet says, laughing and dealing casually with a bride for the upcoming weekend. They interact like old friends. “I’m glad I found you,” the bride says, here to pick up her flowers – dazzling Massachusetts-grown peonies Ms. Sweet fawns over amorously.
“It’s not just about the flowers, it’s what you present them in and what that feeling evokes. There are subtle nuances,” Ms. Sweet says. She utilizes her time-amassed collection of vases, free of charge to clients, to “complete and put the little twist on the overall look.”
Different sections of Martha’s Vineyard call for diverse decorative approaches; silver or glass containers suit Edgartown, up-island “just begs” for stoneware and vintage pieces, Ms. Sweet says.
“It is truly a unique and beautiful place to be,” she says of the Vineyard, unsurprised at its destination wedding status. She calls weddings a central part of her business. “I love to work with each bride. Each job is a custom piece. I’ve never done the same wedding twice. I just sit down with them and get a really good sense of what it is they are trying to convey.”
From each meeting, a detailed proposal arises, full of options, suggestions and price ranges. “We fine-tune it until we get the budget the client is comfortable with. I’ve never done any proposal only once; they evolve and grow with time. It’s a collaboration,” she says.
Ms. Sweet assures that Flowers on the Vineyard doesn’t necessarily mean an armada of floral elegance. “I’m also happy to do just the bride and groom standing on the beach with one boutonniere and one bouquet,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a huge production.”
Speculating that she may have passed the 1,000 mark without knowing it, Ms. Sweet has worked with hundreds of events and weddings in her career – including her own. After a divorce and her two sons moving to college, Ms. Sweet married her high school sweetheart, James. She orchestrated the flowers for her remarriage – white tulips for a winter wedding in her hometown, near Philadelphia.
Flowers on the Vineyard goes beyond flora to offer staging and styling services for homes and events. Ms. Sweet’s repertoire includes various décor for weddings; she can supply antiques, pillows, tabletop items, any type of bric-a-brac to tie together an event, to paint the blank canvas of a wedding. “You create this entire physical space from nothing. We have a million ideas and we love to share them,” Ms. Sweet says. But flowers are the mainstay. “Everything started with the flowers. All the other pieces followed.”
In a long chat about Ms. Sweet’s business and her history, the conversation continually returns to flowers. She is irrefutably in love with her work.
“Our style is very unique. It’s not something you’re going to see in corporate U.S.A. at all. It’s a look I’ve developed over the years and really strived for. It’s seasonal, indigenous, and within that there’s so much flexibility for people’s individual tastes,” she says.
Ms. Sweet meets with clients and works on proposals year-round, occasionally working on winter weddings. She spends part of the colder months in California. She loves traveling, but flowers remain in the back of her mind no matter where she roams. “I love to get new ideas. I always bring them back here with what works here.”
She rattles off her favorite flowers instinctively: tulips, peonies, hydrangeas – “They drive me wild. I have to have them.” She quickly revises her favorites to include lilacs, and there’s a sense she could continue adding until the entire phylum of flowers comprised the list. Her favorite weddings aren’t as easy to cite. “I give each wedding, really, my full attention. So a favorite is really hard to say.”
Ms. Sweet is happy to report “almost nil” negative feedback; she cherishes baskets of handwritten thank-you notes. She’s worked with clients from all over the world – Italy, New Zealand, China, Switzerland, London come to mind.
“I’ve gotten to work with incredible people on the island – if you heard about a dignitary visiting here, I got to meet them and I got to do flowers for them. It’s another bonus to the business,” Ms. Sweet says. She prefers to go on the strength of her work and reputation than to namedrop celebrity clientele. A breeze through her shop, however, reveals two framed letters of appreciation from Bill Clinton and Martha Stewart nestled in bunches of flowers on a preparation table.
Working with weddings, it becomes easy to get jaded to the importance of the day – but it’s also easy to step back and remember how momentous the journey is for each couple. “You really come into their lives a little bit,” Ms. Sweet says.
Before I get to the point, I have to share that the bartender I bar-backed for last night said Jake Gyllenhaall used to bus tables for him in Edgartown before he went all Donnie Darko and got famous. The bartender, Greg, an islander born and raised, said JG was "a good kid." Greg was also was acquainted with Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was as unattractive in real life as onscreen.
Okay. The point. Um...um....oh, yeah. Another intern at This Week on MV, James Sanford, has been blogging profusely since he trekked from Michigan to the island for the summer. He is a former film writer from Michigan's Kalamazoo Gazette and had a column/blog called At The Movies. He's interviewed Stephen Spielberg, Leo DiCaprio, Chris Walken and, most recently, McG, director of "Terminator: Salvation" and a Kalamazoo native. Wow. [That last link is James's' McG profile]
James blogs at http://jamesislandlife.blogspot.com much more regularly and often longer than me, but the real clincher is that if you browse his blog, you'll be getting a totally different perspective from a guy who has a car, more money to spend, an insane passion for dining out -- he's tried a ton of lobster dishes already -- and an earnest approach to exploring the Vineyard. He also got a jumpstart on me with just-for-blog reporting with this awesome article about a Bulgarian bartender flippin' bottles around. Read him, follow him, enjoy. Just don't completely defect to his blog and forget to check back here.
Quick snapshot of my bookstore, the Book Den East, as I head in for a day of book organizing, selling and reading. I'll acquaint you with my store more thoroughly in a future post.
Leaving the island tonight to go to the mainland (Maineland? Anyone?) for the weekend. Boston tonight and home in Maine until Sunday. Here is one of my new articles for This Week on Martha's Vineyard. It's a restaurant profile. This issue will hit Vineyard streets tomorrow (Thursday). For next week, I've written an article about where to get ice cream on the island. Weee/yum!
Will update soon about newspapering on MV. I'm aware the font sizes and formatting in this post are loopy. No more time to try to fix them -- I to catch a ferry in 20 minutes to get off this rock for the first time in a month! Have a nice rest of the week.
Wining and dining with your toes in the sand Oak Bluffs restaurant offers great seafood and one-of-a-kind harbor atmosphere By Zach Dionne - 6/18/09
The harborside entrance to Sand Bar & Grille, the only on-island establishment with a sand floor.
Sand Bar & Grille is like being at the beach with a personal bar, chef and waitstaff at your service. It’s not only that it’s the one spot you can legally drink with your feet in the sand – the restaurant is the sole on-island establishment using grains of the beach as the dining room floor – but also the laid-back vibe and location. Sand Bar sits on OakBluffsHarbor, one of only a small handful of restaurants boasting such status. Dual surfboards hang coolly above the harbor-side entrance.
It’s the type of joint you can spend 30 minutes grabbing a quick Corona – or one of the other 10 draft brews or 10 bottled beers – or three hours with friends, indulging in several courses and soaking in the daily live music.
Appetizers like burger-sized snow crab cakes with Cajun aioli sauce and house-smoked salmon with crisp, herbed bread are delightful, well-presented and leave room for the main course – or for one appetizer truly worth a derivation from an evening of seafood: warm spinach and artichoke dip with an all-star addition of fresh, sweet red peppers, served in a soft bread bowl.
Sand Bar diversifies its menu by offering more than 75 selections of sushi in addition to seafood, prime steak and lobster, burgers and sandwiches. The restaurant has doubled for several years as a respectable sushi destination; Sand Bar’s new sushi chef has crafted delicious creations at his own off-island restaurant for 20 years.
Entrees of pan-seared scallops and grilled swordfish prove what gregarious and resourceful server Alex indicates; the fare is locally caught, never raised in hatcheries, and, most importantly, the chefs know exactly what to do with the finest seafood. The menu offers several methods of preparation for each fresh special and chef-inspired entree.
The scallops are tender and tasty; not surprisingly one of chef Dan Kelleher’s favorites.
“I like it just pan-seared with a nice medium cook on it so it’s still a little fleshy in the middle, with that flavor,” says Kelleher, a chef alongside manager-slash-chef Pete Bradford, a Vineyard native and culinary veteran.
The swordfish is also delicious and expertly prepared – fresh, juicy, hot; an explosion of rich taste in every bite. Smashed potatoes and a bright vegetable medley serve as perfect compliments, occasionally garnering their own attention away from the sensational swordfish.
“You can actually mix and match a little bit. If you want a pan-sear and you want the herb butter on it instead of the soy glaze, we can do that. I think it’s a little more customer friendly that telling them, ‘This is how it is and this is how it’s gonna be,’” Kelleher says.
An island-style bar juts out into the sandy patio, an area replete with guests whiling away sunny afternoons with ambient live acts like local strummer Mike Benjamin. The sandy outdoor seating – the largest portion of the seating area, which also includes an indoor bar and tables – is Kelleher’s favorite aspect of Sand Bar. “You’re out on the harbor. It’s a good atmosphere,” he says.
Indeed, Sand Bar has character. In a tourist Mecca where restaurants are a dime a dozen, it’s almost magic to dine at an unforgettable spot overlooking a serene harbor, your toes in the sand.
It's time for a slight downshift in my bloggery. While I want to update every day, the summer isn't even close to fully started and I'm getting into the swing of two jobs and freelance writing on top of that -- while trying to cultivate a social life here and stay sane. Today is my ninth straight day working out of at least 12, not including the insane interviewing and writing I've been pulling together for Martha's Vineyard Wedding magazine. While I thrive on stress and this blog is still one of my summer's highest priorities, I don't want it to become a burden where I'm contriving daily entries. There will still me multiple weekly, worthwhile posts, including the feature I was reporting for today.
So I'm taking from fifth gear back to third or fourth.
Happy Thursday. Treat yourself to seeing Pixar's "Up" -- I saw it last night and was unsurprisingly delighted by Pixar again. Terrific movie in the charming movie theater in Vineyard Haven. I'm prepping to freelance a feature on the cinema scene on Martha's Vineyard very soon and shop it to whoever will take it -- or I'll just post it here.
I know your eyes are starving for a visual, so here's what $2,200 will buy you for four months in Martha's Vineyard:
"When I think of the Vineyard, my ankles feel good -- bare, airy, lean. Full of bones. I go barefoot there in recollection, and the island as remembered becomes a medley of pedal sensations."
-John Updike, "Going Barefoot" essay, 1989
What a fitting quote for me to find in the bookstore yesterday, on a day when I was concerned with the well-being of mine own feets. (Faithful readers, no worries, my weird feet emerged unscathed from a day of no-sock boat shoe battle)
The first day working at Book Den East was marvelous. The owners, Ivo and Piret, are probably the coolest islanders I've met so far -- they're legitimately, as opposed to falsely, down-to-earth, easy to talk to, helpful, and, most importantly, book lovers.
Book Den East is the only actual used book shop on the island; the only competition is thrift shops and yard sales. This didn't stop us from only getting five buying customers and a few pairs of lookie-loos on a dreary, gray day, but a big part of the job is organization and maintenance in the shop, so it was still a solid day's work. I'll save more description of the shop and what it's like to work there for a day when I've taken photos. For now, suffice to say it was humbling and inspiring to be surrounded by books all day, to take hours to soak in exactly how many writers and works have been published.
A writer can't treat work in a bookstore like any old job. It'd be like Picasso punching a timecard mindlessly for a janitorial shift at the Louvre -- if that didn't cross time periods and I couldn't think of a more robust metaphor, which I cannot. The fulfilling nature of working in a used bookstore also includes endless opportunities to meet authors through their words, with no access to my lightning quick Wikipedia instinct. I spent quite a bit of time sifting through Mr. Updike's material and can't wait to pick up a full novel as soon as possible. [For more about reading, I'll post my summer reading list in the comments. Don't want to inundate this post with any more blather than necessary.]
The point of this entry, the interesting factoid you're hunting for, is that I learned about two Vineyard-centric writers yesterday. One is Henry Beetle Hough, a now deceased fella who helped found the Vineyard Gazette newspaper and spent many of his days as editor and author, writing, from what I can gather, a hybrid of journalism, non-fiction essays and maybe some fiction. I thumbed through a copy of his autobiography, "Mostly on Martha's Vineyard: A Personal Record," and am looking forward to spending more time with it on a slow day. A People magazine article I found calls Hough "almost synonymous with the Vineyard." Sounds like required reading to me. Comparing the experiences I have with places and the experiences writers have chronicled between covers is a blast.
The other author I investigated is Philip R. Craig, also deceased, who wrote a string of 20 mystery novels all set on Martha's Vineyard. They've got stupendously cheesy titles like "A Deadly Vineyard Holiday," "Dead in Vineyard Sand," "A Case of Vineyard Poison" and, my favorite, "Murder at a Vineyard Mansion." Leave it to me, a Stephen King fanatic who honed my suspense chops on heaping helpings of R.L. Stine, but I think Craig's bread and butter was cheap thrill novels meant to be read under a beach umbrella. I'll still give him a shot as he was an unarguably prolific Vineyard author. Plus, he wrote a charming little autobiography on his website, and I made fun of his titles posthumously. I owe him a cruise through at least one measley paperback...
Forget the recession, I'm in full-force money saving mode just for living on Martha's Vineyard and moving somewhere (likely forecast: Brooklyn) in the fall. Here's what I've got so far:
1) Pick up a second regular job, third job counting the internship (which I don't, because it's writing, which is my thang) at a used bookstore in Oak Bluffs, the Book Den East. Starting tomorrow morning. I've been visiting most bookstores that cross my path and writing about some of them for ages -- can't wait to work in one!
Not the bookstore I'll be working at, but a cool staircase I saw this weekend at a bookstore in Edgartown.
2) Call the editor of a wedding magazine my internship editor referred me to. Find out she'll pay me a decent price to write feature stories on couples and other articles about wedding venues and foods. It's nothing I ever imagined, but it's writing, the deadlines are soon, it's hefty word length, and I'm psyched. Getting paid to do what you love is an immensely fulfilling feeling. 3) Compare prices at two closest grocery stores (closeness matters when you're going on foot or with a bike and a backpack). We're talking two-columns in a notebook, cent for cent comparisons. Stop & Shop in Vineyard Haven (2ish miles away) or Edgartown (5ish miles away) will be my new go-to spots for big grocery loads; I'll keep using Reliable across the street for my oh-crap-I-forgot-something needs.
Annnd Stop & Shop wins by a landslide over Reliable, the ShurFine grocery across the street from me.
4) Little things: No more juice. It's nice with breakfast, but expensive, easy to drink a lot of, and water's fine. Make own hummus instead of buying pricey ready-made stuff. Start buying yogurt in the huge containers instead of the single serving guys. Realize that while a tub of ice cream may seem like a luxury purchase, it will actually save me money from frequently buying cones at the bazillion places located around the island. Splurge sparingly on ludicrously priced microbrews. I'm sure this part of the list will extend rapidly. 5) For every dollar spent on alcohol, deposit one dollar into savings account. Ingenious method of turning the cornerstore of recreation for 20-somethings into a strong savings foundation, if I do say so meself. 6) Tell the manager at the restaurant I'll work as much as possible. Train for bar-backing on Friday and work bussing a function on Saturday morning. 7) Keep scouring the Web for freelance writing. Keep networking. Keep writing every day.
I decided today if I'm going to keep up with my daily post quota, a lot of these entries will be blurbs rather than all-out blogs (I'd classify this entry as a blurb). As I've said, bear with me, because real, insightful writing and occasional actual reporting are destined for this page as the summer wears on.
“No matter how much rejection I faced, I kept writing and recording because I had some unspeakable need to do it. I just kept doing it, even if no one was ever going to hear it, I loved doing it.” -Mark Oliver Everett, aka E of Eels, “Things the Grandchildren Should Know”
I might not be facing the same adversity ol' E did for quite a while trying to become a noteworthy musician in L.A., but I feel his unspeakable need to write, his love for it. I'm planning to write and read every day for the four months I live on this island. With the all-consuming stress of simultaneously being a senior in college and an editor at a twice-weekly newspaper behind me, I've got renewed energy to read for fun and write anything I want. Doing something you love for an education or a living -- whether it's enjoying literature, making art or music, or writing -- can sap your creative juice so by the time you're done your work, you have no energy to write or read what you'd really like to.
Part of the great thing about being a journalist is that you don't need any kind of license, certification, or really any education. You could be a Russian major and write for the New York Times doing standard news stories or a first-year journalism student learning more at a newspaper than in your classes. Still, with a degree and an internship at a newspaper, I feel more like a professional writer than ever, and it's great -- and I still have a ton of ambition to write for pleasure. I love it -- this is what I was made to do. Here's a scribble from my notebook that may illustrate this all better than I have up to this point. I wrote this at a cafe yesterday.
Write write write. Write something -- or think or something, write nothing. Crack knuckles, click pen, close eyes, open eyes. Is this writing or a sketch, a doodle, a scribble? Something about writing by hand I forgot somewhere along the way. Good to have remembered. Longhand just works. Whether this scrawl is worthwhile or a waste, it's fun. Pen on paper reminds me why I love this, why I was made to do this. News, a short story, an e-mail, a song, a note, a letter, a blog, a text message, a nothing-scribble filling a page in one of many notebooks -- it's all writing, and it's all energizing. Can't wait to do this for the rest of my life.
Not sure if it's living in this new place, my new post-college circumstances, the new love I'm reveling in (Mary's at home, in Orono, but we Skyped last night and saw each other's faces and are doing well) or a swirling combination of things, but I en't arguin'. I'm going to ride this muse while it lasts and keep on scrawlin' on.
In keeping with my promise of staying brief, I'm wrapping this up here. I'll post another notebook scribble in the comments section if you're down for more. It's what I wrote on my first time on a beach in MV.
My new pad is at 37 Circuit Avenue -- a main street in the island's most hoppin' town, Oak Bluffs. I live above a Black Dog store, the LL Bean of Martha's Vineyard, where all the schwag with the black pooch is sold. Incidentally, I've seen a bunch of real-life, tongue-waggin' dags that resemble the MV icon already.
I'm living with -- wait for it -- 9 girls and two guys. My friend Kiwi asked if Hillary Duff will be my roommate and Steve Martin will be my dad. Ha. Ha. Ha. Here's hoping it's more like my living situation in Wales than a sorority -- or a homeless shelter. Regardless, I don't plan to waste much time stagnating indoors, although I do have a desk in a little corner nook of my bedroom (like, ahem, my main man Stephen King) that I'm looking forward to writing at.
I'll keep this blog as fast, furious and as far as possible from my everything-I-write-has-to-be-epic-length tendencies, so as to stay encouraged and motivated to update many times a week. I'm titling it Chapter One since this summer on MV is my first step in the REAL real world, after college. I'm not sure what Chapter Two will be yet, but no worries -- I'm just going to chronicle my life, exploration, and writing experiences on this island as thoroughly as possible in this blog. Stick around -- it's going to be fun.
Unrelated photo to leave you smiling or mildly amused: Cool rabbit who camps outside my bookstore.
Posts
