I’ve been especially eager to visit Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor since I began writing my current novel, which has a focus on the slave trade in the northeast. The lands of Sylvester Manor were home for millennia to indigenous Manhansett People, then owned by an Anglo Dutch sugar consortium to run a “provisioning plantation” for the Barbadian sugar trade. It was worked by enslaved Africans as well as indentured or paid Native American and European laborers. The estate’s grounds are estimated to contain the unmarked graves of up to 200 enslaved servants and laborers. Since the 1600s it’s been owned by eleven generations of Sylvester descendants, at one time a food industrialist’s summer estate. Then, in 2014, it was gifted to a nonprofit organization for a completely different purpose.

Currently the site includes a 1737 Manor House, a restored 19th-century windmill, an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground, and a working farm. It offers educational, history & heritage, and cultural arts programs.

As I walked the grounds of the estate on a day when there were only a handful of other people, I tried to imagine the place alive with work and workers. Provisioning plantations were the means by which plantation owners ensured a steady supply of goods for their highly profitable sugar plantations in Barbados. These filled the gaps in the supply chain, providing resources that were not produced on the sugar islands.

At 236 acres, Sylvester Manor was one of the largest such provisioning plantations in the north, and it is the largest that is still intact. It’s remarkable that the young man who inherited this property in 2013, instead of keeping it for private use or selling to a developer, had a different vision for what it could be. You can read more about this very happy turn of affairs here: [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/garden/sylvester-manor-on-shelter-island-returns-to-its-roots.html]

It’s now a historical, educational, and archaeological treasure that in 2015 was designated a Historic District of national significance on the National Register of Historic Places.

It often has shows of nature based sculptures like the ones shown below.

The interior of the beautiful Carl Fisher House

Mia Certic, Executive Director of the Montauk Historical Society, introducing Tom and myself

Rhode Island launch – Thurs. Nov. 2, 6:30 pm. Hosted by Barrington Books, Barrington RI. Barrington Library, 281 County Rd, Barrington, RI. In conversation with author Tina Egnoski

With the staff of Barrington Books

New York City launch – Friday, Nov. 10, 6 pm. Shakespeare & Co., 2020 Broadway, New York, NY. In conversation with author Alice Elliott Dark

Virtual Book Launch – Tuesday, November 14^th, 7 pm; hosted by Project Write Now

New Jersey Launch – Friday, Dec. 8, 6:30, Asbury Park, hosted by the Asbury Book Cooperative and Project Write Now/bookinc.org. In conversation with author Suzanne Simonetti

The crew of bookinc.org

My new novel, THE STARK BEAUTY OF LAST THINGS, will be published in October 2023. It tells the story of four characters, each of whom is struggling to hold onto, protect, or find a home in a beautiful coastal town in the face of climate change and run-away development. The novel explores our connection to nature and what we stand to lose when that connection is severed. 

My research for this novel has been extensive, but in creating fiction I need to rely most on my imagination. I need to know enough for verisimilitude but not so much that the flow of creativity shuts down. I don’t want inaccuracies in my work, but I chafe at being overly bound to facts. For me, for the fiction to feel vital, my mind needs to simply wander into whatever avenues seem right for the story I’m making up. I don’t know if others work this way, especially those who write true historical fiction, but for me it’s a strange and peculiar balance.

In the novel I’m writing, a character, Cory, works at The East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery, located in Montauk on Fort Pond Bay. When researching for his job, I visited the hatchery and learned why it’s so important. Over the second half of the 20^th century, with increased population on Long Island, an unsustainable amount of nitrogen from septic and agricultural sources entered the waterways; the resulting drop in oxygen suffocated many fish and shellfish. Brown tides occurred and the eelgrass beds, which act as nurseries for the shellfish spawn to grow into healthy adults, were eviscerated. Shellfish stocks plummeted.

Ironically, one solution to the problem of damaged shellfish habitat is to bring in more shellfish. Bivalves (such as oysters, hard clams, and scallops) filter the water as they feed and can counter an overabundance of the nutrients that promote algal blooms. In fact, oystermen have been seeding oysters on bay bottoms and on floats for over a century. The East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery was opened 1989 for oysters, scallops, and clams. They are grown from spat and then “seeded” into harbor and bay areas that seem most promising, including Napeague Harbor. And new programs to grow and plant oysters are currently underway in more locations throughout the town of East Hampton.

The oysters on Long Island Sound and the bays and estuaries of the East End are Crassotrea virginica, or Eastern oysters. I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy oysters harvested by friends and taken directly from Lake Montauk. Oysters taste of the place where they are grown; this is called meroir (similar to terroir, for food whose flavor derives from the soil). Their flavor emerges from the water and the micro-organisms they filter. That’s why it’s said that when you eat an oyster, you are, quite literally, “eating the sea.”  

As the article describes, the sandplain gerardia has bubble-gum pink flowers that last just one day when they bloom in late summer. The plants are only 10 inches tall, the branches mere filaments, with flowers the size of a thumbnail. I have never been lucky enough to see one, but I love them like no other flower, because they were a major reason the nearly 100 acres of Montauk moorland became a state park in 2000. It took nearly 20 years of grassroots efforts to save the parcel from development, and I serve on the board of one of the organizations that spearheaded that effort, The Concerned Citizens of Montauk (https://www.preservemontauk.org/).

While these tiny plants are almost never seen, hoodoos, the other unique feature of Shadmoor, are impossible to miss. These formations are created from the wind and wave action of the ocean munching away at the cliffs. The cliffs are composed of soft and hard soils, and because the soft soils erode faster than the clay, these peculiar effects are the result.

I often walk the trails along the top of the cliff, which gives wonderful views west toward town and east to Ditch Plains, sometimes with surfers in the distance. In my novel, my character Clancy walks the trail after a snowfall – it’s especially thrilling then.