BTW Berkshires 
James Warhola remembers his Uncle Andy in his uncle’s first New York apartment, sketching high-heeled shoes for an advertisement in the New York Times. He would ink the drawing and blot it, a technique he would use later in his artwork. When his uncle first painted a Campbell’s soup can, Warhola says, he thought it…
Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith goes looking for butterflies and their food plants. This early August afternoon, before a heavy rain drove me home, I watched two monarchs apparently mating and another acting as if it would soon be laying eggs. I found them on milkweed plants. Flower and weed guides list Asclepiads syriaca as…
The Japanese silk is woven through with a golden thread and dyed with a light scent of fruit. It is 1905 in New York City, and a seamstress makes makes corsets to fit smoothly against the skin. But closeness and sensuality are complicated, and what is life-giving when it is real can be dangerous when it…
I was sitting on a cliff edge in a rocking chair. Bees were moving in the meadow flowers, even in a light rain, and Don Quixote with rivets in his shoulders held a daisy in his fingers. He was looking at it round-eyed. The new Turn Park Art Space in West Stockbridge is a quizzical kind of…
On a summer night, children are playing in the dusk. Their families can tell the games from the words they hear — Red light, Green light. Marco Polo. Three girls are jumping rope on the sidewalk. Their friends are calling out rhymes like the clapping games they teach each other on the school bus — Miss…
Adam Ezra calls two friends in the audience up to the stage. They are musicians from Boston, like him. Got your ax? he says, and the woman beside him tunes her fiddle. He strums the opening bars, and the musicians around him casually pick up the beat. They hand off solos and choruses, and he…
Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s historic house in Pittsfield, will lead a marathon reading of Moby-Dick through this Sunday, and the annual hike up Monument Mountain in Great Barrington — to commemorate Herman Melville’s meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne — will set out on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. I have walked the loop on the mountain on…