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Rotary TalkMarch 03, 2010 Way back last October I was asked to speak to the local Rotary Club. Rotary meets for lunch every Wednesday at the Ocean View, which, just for the record, doesn't have an ocean view from any of the window I saw, though if you stand out front you can glimpse a bit of Oak Bluffs harbor on the far side of Our Market (my favorite liquor store). Way back last October, March 3 seemed a long, long, long way away. I did a little poking around in my head, looking for possible topics, ideally something that would touch on Mud of the Place without coming across as self-overpromotion. Rotary International is not something I'd ever consider joining, so not surprisingly I flipped through my mental address book and didn't find any Rotary members in it. It's a service organization, most of its members are business people, and I was pretty sure most of its members were men. Not, in other words, an audience that would be enthralled by literary esoterica or a portrait of Martha's Vineyard as a Seasonally Occupied Territory. March 3 kept seeming a long way away until about the middle of February. Way back in October my Rotary contact had told me I'd be contacted about two weeks before I was scheduled to speak. I wasn't. Since it had been rather a long time, and since day in, day out, I don't rub shoulders with Rotary people -- true, hardly anyone wears club insignia these days, and I wouldn't recognize it if they did -- I began to wonder if I was still on the schedule. My contact was in Florida for the winter. I left a message at her Vineyard home number but didn't hear back. An e-mail to my writers' group elicited both my contact's e-mail address and two reports that my talk had been mentioned in the Vineyard Gazette's Oak Bluffs town news column. I reached my contact, confirmed the engagement, and got the info I needed about the physical setup at the Ocean View dining room. I already knew what I was going to talk about: psychic maps. Earlier this winter I wrote a short To Be Rather Than to Seem piece about psychic maps and took it to my writers' group. They were intrigued by the whole idea: how the mental maps we navigate by day to day are very different from the street and road maps we buy in a store. I had several pretty good stories about my psychic map of Martha's Vineyard, and while walking with Travvy one morning it dawned on me that I wrote Mud of the Place in part to expand people's psychic maps of Martha's Vineyard. Surely I could make a talk out of that. I could and did, and it went pretty well. I even had a visual aid: a road map of Martha's Vineyard. I clipped it to the Rotary banner behind the podium and just to my left, then I illustrated my psychic map of the Vineyard by blocking off Chilmark and Gay Head with one piece of construction paper and Edgartown with another. More than one previous Rotary speaker had told me that the audience was dead or dull, but I found them attentive. Not only that, I sold all four of the Mud copies I brought with me. Given that the audience was about 30 people, that's damn good. Here's the written version. While speaking, I embellished, compressed, and digressed, but this is the gist.
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