West Tisbury Library’s Speakeasy Series Opens with Pulitzer Prize Winning Author

It was dim lights, good food and good conversation last night at in West Tisbury – and it was October. The ’s fundraising began with Pulitzer Prize winning author and West Tisbury resident Geraldine Brooks. The library renovation and expansion project is hoping to use the series to push towards raising the final matching funds necessary to qualify for a $3 million towards the expansion project grant awarded to the library in July. The construction will nearly double the size of the small library, and is contingent on the library raising the remainder of the $6 million estimated cost of construction.

At the same time, the series intends to celebrate the literary talent of the Island. “Tonight is typical of what we’ve been experiencing all along,” said Dan Waters, of the West Tisbury Library's Board of Trustees. “Talent has just been coming out from every discipline in support of the library. We had a summer long music series and an art show where the artists donated works and now writers are coming out to support us.”

Like many other Island business owners, Mary and Jackson Kenworth, co-owners of State Road Restaurant, choose two Island causes each year to support. This year the library expansion is one of them and the restaurant will serve as the location for the entire Speakeasy Series. According to Mary Kenworth, “we love the town of West Tisbury and we thought there is not a better way to show it then to support the library. It is really the heart and soul of the town and supporting its growth seemed an obvious choice as a way to show our commitment to the town.”

The evening began with an intimate crowd enjoying such State Road hors d’ouvers as beef tenderloin on crostini and codfish cakes. The group then gathered in the main dining room with a roaring fire in its stone fireplace to listen to Ms. Brooks speak. She chose not to read excerpts of her most recent book “Caleb’s Crossing” published earlier this year about an Island Wampanoag man who was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard in 1665. Instead, she talked about her transition from being an Australian journalist reporting on the horse races to writing historical novels. She shared her love of the English language, her growing aspirations toward discovering eternal truths and how her experience as a journalist has shaped the writer she is today. She talked openly about how her early days of covering international tragedies has helped her understand how to draw on emotional truths and how having to meet deadlines forced her not to believe there is any such thing as writer’s block.

Her talk was followed by a Q&A session and then the crowd mingled for more conversation and delectable eats. For Brooks, choosing to support the library was not hard. “I grew up in a family where going to the library on Saturday was as much a tradition as church on Sunday,” Brooks told the crowd.

Next up in the series is Brook’s husband author/journalist Tony Horwitz on November 29, followed by poets, Fanny Howe and Jennifer Tseng, on January 4^th. Tickets must be purchased for the entire series and are $125/per event or $300 for the entire series.