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An Open Letter to Suellen LazarusAugust 04, 2009 Note: Ms. Lazarus, a Vineyard summer resident, is the organizer of the biennial Martha's Vineyard Book Festival. The 2009 edition was held this past Sunday in Chilmark. Sorry, I didn't make it down to the festival on Sunday. I'm sure you didn't notice my absence. I hope it went well. Back in mid-spring I e-mailed a query to the book festival's website, introducing myself and my novel, The Mud of the Place. I'm a longtime year-round resident, and Mud is almost entirely set on off-season Martha's Vineyard. At that late date, I didn't expect an invitation to speak at the festival, but I did expect a reply. When after several weeks I still hadn't received one, I snail-mailed you a copy of the book, along with a related op-ed of mine that had just been published in the Vineyard Gazette. As a veteran book reviewer and former bookseller, I know as well as anyone that there are plenty of poorly written and poorly designed books out there. I wanted to assure you that mine was worthy of your consideration. You might not know my name, or that of Mud's small-press publisher, but surely you would recognize those whose advance praise appears on the book, such as Karen Joy Fowler, Cynthia Riggs, and Susan Klein. Recognizing that you'd not have time to read a 400-page novel with summer and the book festival fast approaching, I enclosed a copy of Holly Nadler's perceptive and enthusiastic review from the Gazette. Once again -- no acknowledgment, no reply, nothing. My e-mail didn't bounce back as undeliverable, and the post office didn't return my parcel. I think they both reached their destination. So I'm curious: Why was the Martha's Vineyard author of a pretty good Martha's Vineyard novel of so little interest to the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival? Silence is hard to interpret, and it may be folly to even try, but over the years I've learned a fair amount about silence, and about invisibility, so here goes anyway. Most of us see what we expect to see. Someone goes haywire and commits a dastardly crime and everyone's amazed. Or your kid sister or the nerd down the street grows up to win a Nobel Prize -- who would have thought . . . ? For most of summer people, Martha's Vineyard only exists when you're in residence. We don't literally disappear when you leave, of course; we're more like a room that goes dark when you turn the lights off. Likewise, for the summer people, most of the island's year-round working people exist only in relationship to them. What we do and what we are when we're not serving hors d'oeuvres at your party, cleaning your house, fixing your car, or ringing up your purchases is not of compelling interest. This is fine with us. We're (usually) cordial and competent, and (often) willing to go out of our way to do our jobs well, but these are our jobs. They aren't our whole lives. Our off-season lives are as opaque to you as that dark room is when you're standing in the doorway. My Mud of the Place has two protagonists. One is a gay man, the other a lesbian. I knew from the get-go that this would be a problem. In our society the lives of affluent white heterosexual men, in real life or in fiction, are presumed to have universal relevance, while the lives of women, gay people, people of color, and working people are seen as parochial, exotic, and of limited appeal. What I didn't anticipate was that a focus on year-round Martha's Vineyard would turn out to be a similar, and perhaps even greater, liability. Beyond stocking the book, neither Bunch of Grapes nor Edgartown Books has shown any interest in either the book or its author, and apart from that Gazette review, neither have the two island newspapers. What to make of this? The Mud of the Place is no masterpiece; as a longtime reviewer and editor, I can point out its flaws as well as anybody. But readers like it, and often want to talk about it, and remember details from it months after they finish it. It's pretty good if you'll pardon my saying so. And it's one of the very few books to take Martha's Vineyard as its subject since Dr. Milton Mazer's (nonfiction) People and Predicaments, which was published in 1975. To me this is a selling point. To you, and the island bookstores, and the island newspapers, it seems to be a liability. The Mud of the Place, it seems, takes place in that dark room that you leave behind at the end of the summer, and you aren't interested enough to turn on the lights. I expect more curiosity, and more courage, from anyone who claims to love books. Sincerely yours, Susanna J. Sturgis
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