Do you use photos to help you with your writing? I took photo classes in high school, mainly because the teacher was so cool and it was an hour I could spend in a darkroom listening to The Doors and Led Zeppelin (yes, I am a throwback through-and-through). Now that DSLRs are so ubiquitous, everyone can be a good photographer with little effort, I like taking pictures here and there but would not call myself a photographer in the way I know in my bones I am a writer.

I write about very real places–virtually everything I write is either set on the Outer Cape or Nantucket. I have a map of Provincetown in my head from my 20+ years living there, and the last 7 of visiting as much as I can. But sometimes I still have to look things up in Google maps, or on Building Provincetown, one of my favorite resources.

If I’m lucky, looking at these pictures can help me feel exactly what it was like to be standing where I was when I took the photo.

 

I realize, too, that so much of my writing is influenced by the natural world. My pieces for A Cape Cod Notebook, of course, are all about snippets of life here in strange sandy places.

My most recent manuscript, about people living in the Long Point settlement in the 1850s and in Provincetown in 2018, considers the natural world quite a bit. In the 1850s, the Long Point settlement was abandoned because it stopped being lucrative to live so close to the fishing grounds, then exhausted. There’s a line where a character wishes there was some sort of market for sand–as sand is the only natural resource there is on Long Point. In the present day, the novel opens with a storm and a giant summer home sliding into the sea. The bluff edge it had been sitting on had eroded. Now there is a very real market for sand, a dwindling resource in some places, and out here on Nantucket it’s trucked in to protect the bluff.

My characters walk long distances over the sand, as they are lifesavers–people who rescue shipwrecked sailors. There is a physicality to walking through the sand that cannot be gained from looking at a picture of a sandy trail. I walk in the sand a lot, and try to use these muscle memories to influence my writing.

Have you listened to A Cape Cod Notebook yet this week? Click on over to WCAI (http://www.capeandislands.org/post/last-swim) to hear and read my newest essay, “Last Swim.” I think the long title would be “Last Swim, or: The End of Something.”

Two truths: 1) I never care about my lawn to begin with. 2) I still haven’t taken my bathing suit out of my car. (I did run out of oil last week, but that’s another story.)

You can also read about the origins of A Cape Cod Notebook and learn more about me and the gents I share the airwaves with over on WGBH’s website this month. Or you can read it excerpted here…I took that picture on the first afternoon I stayed at the Fowler Shack in the dunes, just over a year ago.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a piece that was on WCAI last week I wrote and recorded about my week on Beach Point.

http://www.capeandislands.org/post/october-days-and-slowing-down

If you are a WGBH or WCAI member, you’ll see me in the November Explore guide that should already be in your mailboxes. I’ll post it here when it goes online.

Is anyone else already planning their 2019 vacations? I am.

 

 

 

Here in Truro until Saturday. Losing my mind over Beach Point. More photos to come.

In the mean time, be sure to click over to WCAI to listen to my newest Cape Cod Notebook: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/golden-hour-madaket.

I’m late in posting my essay for A Cape Cod Notebook than ran on 11 September 18, but if you missed it, click over to listen. I’m particularly fond of this one, and it was this trip to Long Point that inspired the project I’m working on now.

Listen/read here: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/all-washes-ashore.

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day, so what better day to read my article from this summer’s Provincetown Arts Magazine about pirates, puritans, and what they have to do with Provincetown. (Everything!)

 

Click here to read!

Hi Pals! There’s another one of my essays over on WCAI this week. If you missed A Cape Cod Notebook on-air (8:45 AM & 5:45 PM, Tuesdays), you can always subscribe the podcast, or listen online here: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/slowing-down-blackberries.

I’m having a lot of fun writing and recording these pieces, and hope you like listening to them!

 

Today on A Cape Cod Notebook, you can hear from me! Click over to WCAI to read or better yet, to listen: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/rare-moment-weightlessness

 

 

Recently, I got it into my head that what I needed to do was hike out to Great Point from the Wauwinet gatehouse out here on Nantucket. Great Point is the northernmost tip of the island and I’ve never been there. The closest I’ve gotten to the lighthouse is seeing it from the boat on winter days when the seas are particularly choppy and the HyLine captain travels in close, sheltered by the curve of sand.

I spent the last week getting ready for my walk out to Great Point, thinking how lovely it would be to escape the summer crowds and find some peace and solitude. On Sunday, I set off early around 7:00 AM, after waiting a few hours for the fog to burn off. It didn’t.

Armed with water, sunscreen, a notebook, and good shoes, I was feeling great. Everyone else in the world was still sleeping, and I was going to hike the 8-mile round trip trek. No phone, no music, just me and the waves.

Well, that was the plan. But you know what they say about plans.

After about thirty minutes of walking, almost out to the last house, I could not ignore the fact that I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes. I turned my head to look back and see just how many were biting me. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. What had to be thirty mosquitoes were feasting on my legs, arms, back…they were probably in my hair, too. I ran down the path to the harborside, where there were very few bugs.

I had bug spray in the car. I could do this. All I needed to do was get back to the car, get the spray, and I could set out on my walk again. By the time I did all this, an hour had passed. The fog had not burned off yet. Did I mention it rained for the last three days?

Completely saturated in DEET, I figured I would be fine. But the mosquitoes did not subside. I got up as far as where the Jeep trail begins in the soft sand, and still the bugs came after me. I started running, and ran to the oceanside, thinking that there must not be any bugs near the ocean. If I could make it to the eastern coast, I could walk up along to Great Point.

But the bugs, dear reader, were worse on the ocean side. I felt like i was riding a motorcycle headlong into a cloud of mosquitoes. I swallowed at least two. I ran from the ocean side to the bay side, up the face of a dune, with a towel over my head in an attempt to keep the bugs away like some crazed Lawrence of Arabia.

I learned I cannot outrun a mosquito, let alone a whole swarm of them. Maybe I was asking too much of nature, to provide me with quiet and solace on such a busy August day, when I had nothing to give in return.

At least now I have given quite a bit of blood to the Wauwinet mosquitoes.

Hi !

I’m Mary Bergman, a writer and historian living on Nantucket. I’m also the literary chair of the Nantucket Book Festival, held annually on the third weekend in June.

I am fascinated by the people, places, and landscapes that make up Cape Cod and the Islands. I have dedicated my work to helping to document the unique people and places here at the edge of the world.

You can hear me the third Tuesday of the month on A Cape Cod Notebook, a weekly nature/natural world radio essay program on WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR Station. My work has also appeared in Literary Hub, The Common, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Provincetown Arts, and other places.

I’m working on a novel or two.