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Book Talk!February 20, 2009 This afternoon Ann Bassett interviewed me for her Vineyard View show on MVTV, the community-access cable station. It'll air in about a month. What a blast! I was supposed to be at the studio at 3 p.m. At 2:35 I was rummaging through my closet and assorted drawers in search of the brown and black sweater vest I'd decided to wear. Couldn't find it, couldn't find it -- and when it finally turned up (nestled among the boots on a corner of the closet) a quick inspection in the light of day revealed too many white dog hairs for TV. So I settled for a brocade-pattern mock turtleneck and a thrift shop blazer, from which I removed the "Graduate of the Thelma and Louise Finishing School" button. By 2:40 I'd decided to bring Travvy along; ever since he chewed up the head rest and chewed most of the way through the shoulder harness, I've been a little jumpy about leaving him alone in the truck. At 2:55 we rolled into the parking lot outside MVTV's studio-office. The building is modest, but the parking lot is vast because it lies between the regional high school and its football field. Ann hadn't arrived so I got to check out the studio. About a third of the floor space was devoted a small stage set up for The Jim Powell Report (the sign on the black curtain said so), with a business-like triangular table at the center and an armchair on either side. Cameras, cables, two computers (these turned out to be part of the editing station), and numerous boxes and shelves occupied the other two thirds. Being essentially clueless about TV production, I was fascinated. A few minutes later Ann appeared and reset the stage while she was taking off her coat. She and a camera guy removed and stowed the big table (the legs were detachable), then set up a multi-panel screen, light oatmeal in color behind the two chairs and a smaller table. Immediately the stage lightened up. Ann then arranged her copy of Mud with the two I'd brought into a display, with an 8x10 copy of Rhodry and Susanna in the middle. Very cool. Ann repeated what she'd told me on the phone: we had an hour, but if we ran out of things to say we could end earlier. I grinned and said I didn't think that would be a problem. It wasn't! Not only is Ann a careful and intelligent reader, she's also a lifelong islander with family roots that go way back; she's had a variety of careers on- and off-island and she's a keen observer of how communities work, this one in particular. In other words, she was a dream interviewer for the author of The Mud of the Place. We spent a lot of time using Mud's main characters as lenses that reveal various facets of Vineyard life -- exactly what I've been wanting the opportunity to do. Time flew. There were whole areas we didn't get to at all: we did talk about how my experiences in island theater had influenced the writing of Mud of the Place, but it wasn't till after the cameras were off that I mentioned science fiction as another big influence. Turns out Ann is a major Anne McCaffrey fan! Strange but true, we'd never actually met before, but as usual in the great Vineyard web we're linked by several tendrils -- among other things, I bought Uhura Mazda from her husband, Jim Alley, and have met both her daughters through horse circles. The Martha's Vineyard Times ran a profile of Ann in December 2007; check it out if you get a chance. So this turned out to be the second straight good week for Mud -- my reading at the Chilmark library was sparsely attended, to put it mildly, but I read the same scenes I'd read at Oak Bluffs (Wayne shows up at the high school, then goes over to Island Social Services to have a heart-to-heart with his counselor) and the four of us had a great talk about writing (Ebba Hierta, the librarian, has long journalism experience), heroes and villains, the Vineyard, and all the people we knew in common. I'm getting the feeling that Mud is making its way around and maybe one of these days we'll start seeing more shoots above the ground.
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