Vineyard Stories’ authors and contributors are of varied background. Some are professional writers, some are newcomers hoping their book will be the one to take off – and some are those so passionate about their work they need to “speak up” about it. We love our authors, and provide them with a degree of care made possible by our status as niche publishers:




Allen Whiting is an artist, right down to the paint-stained fingers that are often raw and sore from painting outside in all weather. He is also passionate about his art – and a man who has a lot to say about art. When he decided to do a retrospective of his work of 30 years (the work he took up in between sheep farming, a plan to be a professional baseball player, and a lot of what he calls “wild times”), it was clear he would write some of his own words. As he proves in the book, he has a writer’s soul, as well as a painter’s.




Cynthia Riggs’ background is so adventurous it’s hard to believe she finally settled down to write – at age 70. Descended from a long line of whalers, she has been a ferryboat captain, a sailing instructor, and a boat rigger. She was one of the first women to set foot in Antarctica, has her own television show on the Vineyard, and names her books after unusual (and often very descriptive) plants. She has authored seven mysteries, published in hardback editions by St. Martin’s Press, and uses as inspiration some of the thinly disguised characters and goings-on of the Vineyard.




The late Philip Craig was the author of 19 mysteries, and the co-author of two more.  His long-time protagonist, J.W. Jackson, likes to fish, cook, raise his kids and solve murders. Shirley Craig is a native Vineyarder, the great granddaughter of Porte Verde immigrants who came here to fish and stayed to live – and cook great Portuguese and Island foods. Together, Phil and Shirley created a cookbook for Vineyard Stories.




Photographer Nina Bramhall has a mother who’s a strong Island conservationist and a father who’s a well-known painter. She has combined the love of the outdoors with the love of beautiful things, using her camera to capture gardens for magazines like Home and Garden and Vanity Fair. She and her husband, writer Paul Schneider, have a young son.




Dillon Bustin is a singer/folklorist who is well known in New England for his original ballads about the history of the area. He often performs in the schools, presenting his unique and fun take on historical events. In 1991 he compiled some of his stories about the history of Martha’s Vineyard into a musical play entitled Tidebook: An Island Rhapsody. The theatrical revue has been staged several times. Included in that play was the song Thirty Dirty Sailors, the story of a child in the 1800s who lived aboard her father’s whaling ship for three years. The words were used as the basis for the book of the same name.




Susan Convery Foltz, the illustrator for Thirty Dirty Sailors, is a Martha’s Vineyard native. She attended the first production of Tidebook: An Island Rhapsody in 1991; over the years, the words and music of Thirty Dirty Sailors echoed in her mind until she began to imagine the verses in pictures. She studied art at Syracuse University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and privately for the past ten years in Florida. She has a degree from Georgetown University in finance. Although Thirty Dirty Sailors is her first children’s book, she does custom portraits from her home in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida.