Located off the southwest coast of Mount Desert Island in Maine, Gotts Island, a mile across and three miles round, is ringed with bright granite--a "rock bound belt" that suggests concreteness, independence, and separation from the sea around it. But no island, no place, ever stands alone and unchanging. The small, close-knit community established on Gotts Island in the late eighteenth century disappeared in the twentieth, leaving behind mere traces, names on the cemetery stones. In its wake came the summer people, returning year after year, with "bags, bundles, and memory."

Having purchased the house of poet and writer Ruth Moore in 1965, Christina Gillis has been a summer resident of Gotts Island for more than forty years. Each summer she and her husband, John, arrive with their books, projects, and lives. On the island they watched their young sons, Chris and Ben, turn from "two small blond boys in high-top overalls" to "shirtless adolescents" and finally to young men.

But the place that was a constant center in their lives, that nourished them and their friendships with visitors and neighbors, assumed a more profound significance for the Gillis family in 1992 when they buried the ashes of their son Ben in the island cemetery. Ben had been killed seven months earlier while flying a small plane in Kenya. In the cemetery overlooking the sea, once the heart of the village and still central to the community, he joined generations of earlier islanders to become a "name in stone."

In this elegant and gentle memoir of place and experience, the author takes the reader on a tour of the island, making connections between its stark physical beauty, its known and unknown places, and the decades of memories and myths it encompasses. Gillis describes the social role of the dock, the portal for arrivals and departures that are so important to island life; she traverses the pathways that cross the Island, offering up its topographical intricacies and secrets; and she revisits the cemetery that, though bounded by its fence, shares a field with the annual Fourth of July softball game. A location of loss is also a place of life.
About the Author: Trained in eighteenth-century English literature, CHRISTINA MARSDEN GILLIS became for sixteen years Associate Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she organized programs on humanities advocacy, social suffering, and intersections between the humanities and medicine.