Author: Taryn McBryde

nantucket's oldest house with white mulberry tree
Nantucket Essays

The Perfect Gray of Nantucket Island

People come to Nantucket looking for color.

They expect blue hydrangeas, white sailboats, red sunsets bleeding across the harbor, and the sharp green of beach grass moving in the wind. The postcards sell the island in bright tones. Summer magazines photograph it under impossible June sunlight with women in linen dresses carrying wicker bags down shell paths toward champagne dinners.

Nantucket Sunset
An Island Point of View, Insider Tips, Nantucket Voices

Why Nobody Rushes a Nantucket Sunset

For most of the day, Nantucket moves surprisingly fast. Contractors race between job sites, restaurant staff hustle through double shifts, and delivery trucks bounce down cobblestone streets. Cyclists pedal furiously toward beaches, brunch reservations, and ferry departures, while tourists clutch maps, trying to squeeze every possible experience into a single week they spent eleven months looking forward to. Summer arrives with a kind of beautiful urgency. Everybody is headed somewhere.

Richard Russo speaking at Nantucket Book Festival event
Nantucket Arts, Nantucket History & People

Drawn into the World He Tried to Escape

By all outward measures, Richard Russo has had the kind of literary career many writers only dream about — a Pulitzer Prize, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, beloved novels adapted for film and television, and a body of work spanning four decades that has made him one of the defining voices of working- class American fiction. But spend time with the author and you understand that none of it came easily, and none of it was guaranteed.