as always, you can hear my essays on WCAI on the 3rd Tuesday of the month (hey, that’s next week) on anytime online.

exceedingly excited to say that I was named the US winner of the World of Interiors inaugural writing competition. please click over to read my work and the essays of the UK winner & US & UK runners up

gratefuly,

mary

can you believe it?

i measure my life in book festivals. i’ve been part of the Nantucket Book Festival for eight years. tomorrow, i’ll kick off the festival by interviewing Tara Karr Roberts, author of Wild and Distant Seas (Norton, 2024). i met Tara online–on zoom!–in the early days of the pandemic. She was writing her novel and supposed to travel to Nantucket from Idaho. the world was derailed, and then some. Tara pressed on, writing a beautiful debut about four generations of women, all starting out from our sandy soil.

i have been thinking a lot about pressing on. last year, three dear friends died. there are so many things I’d like to tell them. i’ve been writing instead, and telling the rest of you.

as usual, you can hear me over on WCAI the third Tuesday of every month, or anytime you please on their website.

i’ve been writing for Nantucket Today magazine, a great local publication that explores island history, local issues, and people who are working hard to make a go of it here in the middle of the sea.

for the spring issue, I wrote a story about how the past informs how a neighborhood close to the sea prepare for the future.

excited to say I’ll be part of an anthology called Campfire Stories: Cape Cod forthcoming from Mountaineer Books. Watch this space!

You can catch my radio dispatches the third Tuesday of the month on WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, or right here: https://www.capeandislands.org/people/mary-bergman

Love from radio island

last gasp of summer at Captain Jack’s Wharf

Last week’s essay on WCAI was about waiting. Waiting and longing and pining. Yearning, even. I am good at all those things except for waiting. I am in a waiting stage of life, it seems. Waiting is more of an advent kind of thing, and it feels weird to be suspended in my waiting during the summer. But, I guess summer is over now (three full days into fall and already we are cold here on the island). There’s always something new to wait for.

Ah, and, if you are a history buff you can catch my latest article on the development of Surf-Side–and the ill-fated, four-story Surfside Hotel!–in the fall issue Nantucket Today.

I’ve got a story on the 99s women pilots on Nantucket coming out in the winter issue of Nantucket Today, so you’ll just have to wait…ha ha…for that!

Every year the same thing happens–I’ll be walking to work or down to the shore or some other route I have walked countless times before, and realize that is it summer again. The air is thick and smells like honeysuckle and wild roses. And I’ll think, wasn’t I just dressed in three layers, the cold coming in at the seams, the wind slicing through me? Summer sneaks up on you.

Here are some recent essays that you can listen to on CAI, The Cape and Islands NPR station

June 2023–Strange Season

May 2023–Town Meeting Time

in June, we also held a great Nantucket Book Festival, dedicated to Tharon Dunn, our longtime festival literary chair who died in May. Tharon was a great influence on my reading, and without her I wouldn’t have read as much or as widely.

I interviewed Jessie Greengrass, Betsy Tyler and Julie Gerstenblatt, and facilitated a panel of writers engaging with the climate crisis. Once those videos are online, I’ll post them here!

Howdy,

It’s been a busy winter, but I am so thrilled that spring is on the horizon. Here are a few essays of mine that are out in the world you may have missed.

In January, The Common published an essay on–of all things–sewer systems in sandy places. It’s called Effluent of the Affluent . I wanted to give you a little background into how this came to be, and how long publishing can sometimes take. I’d written another piece called Waste/Water that was a short three-part essay about my various experiences with, well, wastewater. A strange thing to write or think about, perhaps, but as someone who is interested in infrastructure and life at the end/edge of the world, it made sense.

I revised that story and it became another longer piece, also called Waste/Water. I submitted that in winter/spring 2022. I work on non fiction essays between longer manuscripts. I heard in October 2022 that the piece was accepted. A lot had happened between spring and fall last year, including the failure of one of the sewer systems I’d written about. I then did two short rounds of revisions with the editor, who was lovely. The resulting piece is one you read today.

At the time, when it was accepted, I felt like it was too weird to publish. I almost wanted to withdraw it. But acceptances are so hard-fought in this game that I did the hard thing of sitting with the piece and figuring out what I wanted to do to make it better. That is a lot of work for 1,000 words. It is a long time from submission to publication, and hopefully we are always improving as writers, so it can be strange to read something you wrote just ten months ago and think, “I know I can say that better.”

Strangely, after the piece was in its final form, but before it was published, a shipwreck was revealed at the south shore on Nantucket, right in front of the sewer treatment plant. That is the image that accompanies the essay.

You can still hear me the third Tuesday of each month on WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station on “A Cape Cod Notebook.”

The most bittersweet time of the year. You can hear me next week (9/20) on WCAI (or on capeandislands.org or point your podcatchers to A Cape Cod Notebook) with a timely essay on the surprise of being able to hang on in a strange, fragile place like this.

I also have a longer piece up on Literary Hub about escapist novels and the fantasy vs. reality of Nantucket Island.

I don’t know when it got to be late July either, but it is, and here we are.

It’s been busy–first, we had the Nantucket Book Festival in mid-June, where I interviewed Tiya Miles about her National Book Award winning book, All That She Carried. If you haven’t read this exceptional, stirring history–you must. I cried while interviewing Tiya, and then other people cried, and it was a Whole Thing. Tiya is one of our national treasurers.

Then, as always, on the third Tuesday on the month, you can hear me on WCAI. The fine radio folks who do the website have organized things over the last few years, and you can click here to be brought to a link that has most of my essays (not all of them, the first two years are not filed this way).

It’s crazy, but next month marks four years of essays for “A Cape Cod Notebook.”

This essay from July, about living more in memory than in the present, really speaks to how I feel these days. I have heard from some listeners that it resonated with them, so I’m particularly happy to share it here.

I’m constantly working on one project or another. This winter, I was asked to contribute a few short essays about growing up in Provincetown for a new art book a few folks are putting together.

It’s been a busy winter on Nantucket. The days are getting longer, and it looks like maybe we’ll end up on Atlantic Time after all. I’ve been hearing from more of you in the coffee shop, at the post office, or on the street that you’re listening to my essays on CAI, and I’m pleased as punch that you’re not only listening, but letting me know!

Here are a few essays you may have missed since the last update.

December’s recounting of a week in Truro where cold-stunned sea turtles made me feel adrift.

In January, the wind blew hard and there was nowhere to go.

In February, we went down some secret roads.

In March, we peeked in windows.

I’m happy to report the 10th annual Nantucket Book Festival will be back in person and features some heavy hitters, emerging voices, movie stars (??!), and local favorites. It’s going to be a weird and wild time, as it always is. Would love to see you there.

And the other thing that’s tangentially related to writing is that my sister and I have started making some hyper-local bumper stickers, so if you’re from the Cape and Islands and appreciate a certain seabird sense of humor, click over to our shop, Shoulder Season, to be part of a mobile public art project.

Hello, pals. I have been finishing a grad certificate program and working on some longer nonfiction works, and a queer (in every sense) climate change novel. You can catch my essays on WCAI on the 3rd Thursday of the month, or at capeandislands.org or in your podcatchers.

I’ll make it easier, you can click right here to read/listen to my November essay for CAI, which is all about how I can’t grow anything in my sandy garden, and more about trying to figure who I am supposed to be. the things you can write about if you write about nature!