McElroy’s debut novel, “The Atmospherians,” told the clever but slightly insiderly and overfreighted tale of a wellness cult designed to cleanse men of their toxicity. “People Collide” is a more agile, universal book, with its title alluding to the randomness of human connection. It’s a variety of rom-com, really, that somewhat lost art. “Circumstances pinball people together,” the narrator declares. “This is called fate because chance is too scary a word.”

Perhaps no situation is more pinballish than that of in-laws, and McElroy’s unexpected digression into the psyche of Elizabeth’s mother, a frustrated writer herself who unknowingly condemns Eli for abandoning her daughter, is one of the novel’s great gifts.

McElroy, who lives in Brooklyn, seems to aspire as much to flight as to eavesdropping. “People Collide” has some bumpy, odd spots — what body doesn’t? — but its naturalness and ease with the most fundamental questions of existence make it a big project knocking around in a small package, portending even bigger projects ahead.

Join 2021 Twenty Summers Fellow Jeffrey Mansfield and director Michael Cestaro for a conversation following the preview of Signs from the Mainland, a documentary short that explores the extraordinary history of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf community.

Starting as far back as the early 1700s, genetic deafness took a foothold on Martha's Vineyard where as many as one in four residents were deaf and a majority of hearing residents also were able to communicate in what is considered one of the precursors to modern American Sign Language. The film explores the deeper meaning and lessons to be learned from this unique enclave where deaf and hearing individuals coexisted seamlessly.

Through interviews with historians and community members, the documentary asks, “why did this happen?”, “what was it like?”, and also “where did it go?” The story of the MV deaf community’s eventual conclusion shows us the first steps of the ASL movement, the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford CT, and bigger lessons about connection over time.

Signs from the Mainland reflects on the legacy of the MV Deaf community, the implications for the broader society, and its relevance to contemporary conversations about inclusivity and diversity.

Take a look at Synchronous Creative in an evening of site-specific movement and exploration surrounding the idea of “safe spaces” at the Hawthorne Barn. The evening is an inside look at their creative process, where they led audience members through a few prompts and exercises utilized through their process at Twenty Summers.

Join Rebecca Orchant & Bill Hough for a conversation celebrating Rebecca’s new book Simmering, A Kitchen Memoir .

“There are somethings that you just can’t do in front of other people. You can’t look at magazines with boobs in them; you can’t eat condoms on your mom’s nightstand; and you most certainly can’t stick your finger into the Duncan-Hines vanilla frosting tub. And so I waited.”

A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon.

Jake Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason - because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future.

Journalism informs. It investigates. It holds the powerful accountable. But can it also be art? Adam Moss makes that case in his new book, The Work of Art, featuring visual artists, novelists, poets, musicians, and journalists like Gay Talese, Ira Glass, and the front-page editors of the New York Times. Join Moss and Provincetown Independent editor Ed Miller, along with journalist and historian Dan Okrent, journalist and podcaster Andrew Sullivan, and journalist and artist Tessera C. Knowles, as they discuss the creative side of journalism — as it is practiced now, as it has flourished historically, and as it takes ever-new forms on the way to an indefinite future.

This event benefited the Local Journalism Project — the nonprofit organization that supports next-generation journalists at the Provincetown Independent.

This sonically-innovative harpist is revolutionizing her instrument for the digital era. Over the past 15 years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists. In 2022, she made history by becoming the first black woman to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. That same year, she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

“No harpist thus far has been more capable of combining all of the modern harp traditions—from Salzedo, through Dorothy Ashby, through Alice Coltrane—with such strength, grace and commitment.”

—saxophonist Ravi Coltrane

Over the past six or seven years I have focused on cutting away certain areas of maps, creating lace-like pages of roads, rivers, and other geographical features. These are then protected between sheets of acrylic, in boxes, or safely mounted on panels.

For my site-specific installation at Twenty Summers, I embraced the fragility of the pages, leaving them unprotected and open to whatever might happen when people also enter the space. I envisioned hundreds of cut maps hanging from the beams, perhaps randomly, perhaps in a specific layout.

I have a sense of the installation being somewhat representative of the world, in particular the fragility of the planet and how we are failing to take care of it. But I also like the idea that it spreads through the community and parts of it live on wherever people put the pieces that they take. I see the whole as ephemeral and removing some of the individual elements does not diminish it. And maybe, during future iterations of the installation, more will be added, and it will continually evolve; perhaps becoming a permanent part of my art practice.

All life once rose from the ocean, and all life still depends on it today. From melting glaciers and rising sea levels to plastic pollution and overfishing, our common origin is in danger. This group of marine biologists, ocean advocates, and researchers of the local coastal ecosystem venture into a discussion about how the ocean connects us—and what we can do to protect it.

Fabiola Méndez is a Puerto Rican cuatrista, singer, Emmy-nominated composer, and educator that has taken part in a musical and cultural movement, crossing over the lines of genres such as folk, jazz & Afro-Caribbean and taking the listener on a journey through identities, cultures, and roots.