Crossroads Music, the shop at Amagansett Square offering instrument sales and repairs as well as lessons, has long been a nexus for the South Fork’s thriving community of musicians and singers. From coffeehouse-type performances and open jam sessions to the “On the Air” events, in which Cynthia Daniels, a Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer, recorded ensembles for later broadcast, the shop has proven an invaluable resource for musicians.

    On Sunday at 5 p.m., Crossroads will offer the first of a series of workshops featuring both local and internationally renowned players. Andy Aledort, who recently wrapped up a tour with Dickey Betts, the former Allman Brothers Band guitarist, will lead a guitar workshop. For the $60 admission price, guitarists can enjoy an intimate, hour-plus lesson in a small group setting.

    The workshops continue with Kerry Kearney, who will offer a blues and slide guitar workshop on Oct. 13. Corky Laing, who performed his one-man show “Heavy Metal Humor” at the Bay Street Theatre on Sept. 21 and was formerly drummer of the legendary rock ’n’ roll band Mountain, gives a drum workshop on Oct. 20. Mick Hargreaves will lead a class for bass guitarists on Oct. 27, and Mr. Aledort, with Peter (Bosco) Michne, will offer a guitar workshop on Nov. 3. All sessions start at 5 p.m.

    The idea for these small group sessions developed organically, said Michael Clark, Crossroads Music’s proprietor. “Most of the time it’s people just stopping into the shop or hearing about us,” he said of his store, which has been visited by musicians including Sir Paul McCartney. “Kerry actually called me when we were doing ‘On the Air’ and said, ‘I’ve heard about these things.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re Kerry Kearney!’ He said, ‘But I love doing these small venues — it keeps me in touch with what’s going on.’ ”

    Mr. Clark connected with Mr. Aledort and Mr. Laing in a similar fashion. When these top practitioners visit his store, “I’m not shy about saying, ‘Would you consider doing a workshop?’ Ninety-nine out of 100 times, they say yes.”

    Mr. Aledort, who lives in Sea Cliff, is a senior editor of Guitar World magazine. He has written more than 200 books of guitar transcriptions and a series of instructional books and videos. His talent has taken him far, as both a performer and educator. His book “Jimi Hendrix Signature Licks: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of His Guitar Styles and Techniques,” an instructional book with accompanying CD of audio recordings, led to recordings and performances with Double Trouble, the late Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rhythm section. That experience led to him perform and record with Billy Cox, Mitch Mitchell, and Buddy Miles, all members of Hendrix’s bands.

    From private lessons and, long ago, teaching at the Great Neck Music Center to more recent endeavors such as two and three-day clinics at the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, Mr. Aledort has ample experience in direct, hands-on education. “I’ve done a couple things closer to [the Crossroads workshop] — more intimate, where people will probably have their instruments,” he said. “It’s great.”

    Sunday’s workshop affords guitarists an opportunity to learn directly from someone who played with Stevie Ray Vaughan, the legendary blues-rock guitarist who died in a helicopter crash in 1990. “I got to play with Stevie the first time I went to interview him in 1986,” Mr. Aledort recalled. “It was an interview-lesson, so we played for 10 or 15 minutes, and then I stopped because I was supposed to interview him. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I have to interview you, that’s really what they sent me here for.’ He said, ‘Damn, I thought we were gonna have fun!’ ”

    “How cool is it to have the opportunity to learn, to sit and play and talk with these guys that have been doing it for such a long time?” Mr. Clark asked. “That’s really the cool part about the music community: Everybody’s willing to share. And we’re constantly trying to reach out and do something different. There are so many open mikes, which is awesome, but let’s try something a little bit different, just to keep the musical energy alive.”

    Seating at the Crossroads Music workshops is limited. Reservations can be made by calling the shop.

    “Witches of East End,” inspired by Melissa de la Cruz’s best-selling novel of the same name, will premiere on the Lifetime channel on Sunday at 10 p.m. The series centers on the Beauchamp family, Joanna and her daughters, Freya and Ingrid, who live in the secluded seaside town of North Hampton.

    Although the author has visited the South Fork, lived on Shelter Island, and written a young-adult novel about au pairs here, the series, at least in its first episode, is not overtly tied to the Hamptons except in name. It was shot on location in Wilmington, N.C.

    The drama stars Julia Ormond, who won a prime-time Emmy for her role in the HBO film “Temple Grandin,” as Joanna; Jenna Dewan Tatum, best known as Teresa Morrison in “American Horror Story” as Freya, a sexy and fearless bartender, and Rachel Boston, who played Abigail Chaffee in “In Plain Sight,” as Ingrid, a more reserved librarian.

    Neither daughter is aware of her magical birthright until Freya becomes engaged to Dash Gardiner, a wealthy playboy portrayed by Eric Winter. When Freya finds herself drawn to Dash’s troubled, enigmatic brother Killian, played by Daniel DiTomasso, bizarre occurrences begin to disrupt her life, forcing Joanna to reveal to her daughters that they are immortal witches with untapped powers.

    The novel “Witches of East End,” published in 2011, was Ms. de la Cruz’s first entry in her Beauchamp Family series and her first adult novel. Among the author’s popular young-adult series is “Blue Bloods,” a story about wealthy New Yorkers who are members of an ancient group of vampires, and a companion four-part e-book series called “Wolf Pact.”   

    East End Arts has announced an open call for singers to participate in the 27th annual Harvest Gospel Choir this fall.

    Led by Maryanne McElroy, the choir brings more than 70 singers and guest soloists together in a nondenominational celebration of the joy of music. No auditions are required, but singers must be available for all four rehearsals and three performances. Participants can register at the first rehearsal, Oct. 19, 6 to 9 p.m., at the Friendship Baptist Church in Flanders. More information is available from eastendarts.org or by calling 727-0900.

    Anthony Molinaro, a first-prize winner of the Naumberg piano competition, will perform on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center as part of the Rising Stars piano series 10th anniversary celebration.

    The program will feature selections from the pianist’s new CD, “Here, There and Everywhere,” which explores the music of the Beatles. Included are the artist’s interpretations of such Beatle classics as “Blackbird,” “Yesterday,” and “The Long and Winding Road,” as well as his prelude and fugue based on “Norwegian Wood” and a theme from “In My Life.” Compositions by Debussy and Brahms and the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata, will round out the program.

    Mr. Molinaro is known to South Fork concertgoers as a Pianofest veteran. He performs as a jazz pianist and is a teacher at such institutions as Loyola University. For three summers he ran a music program at the Southampton Fresh Air Home for physically challenged children.

    The anniversary series will continue on Nov. 9, when Awadagin Pratt takes over the grand piano and on Dec. 14, with Qi Xu.  

    Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin,” which opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera, will launch the 2013-14 series of live HD performances at Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. Anna Netrebko and Mariusz Kwiecien star as the love-struck Tatiana and the imperious Onegin in Tchaikovsky’s fateful romance. Deborah Warner’s new production, set in the late 19th century, moves episodically from farmhouse to ballroom, with a powerful snowstorm providing the dramatic setting for the finale. The Russian maestro Valery Gergiev conducts.

    Future programs include Shosta­kovich’s “The Nose,” based on Gogol’s comic story (Oct. 26), Verdi’s “Falstaff,” in a new production set in mid-20th-century England (Dec. 18), Dvorak’s “Rusalka” (Feb. 8), Borodin’s “Prince Igor” (March 1), Massenet’s “Werther” (March 15), Puccini’s “La Boheme” (April 5), Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte” (April 26), and Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (May 10). Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

    LTV and the East Hampton Historical Society will host a free reception and screening of an archival film today from 5 to 7 p.m. at 75 Industrial Road in Wainscott.

     “East Hampton in the 20s & 30s,” a portrait of life in East Hampton 86 years ago, will be followed by a debate on the topic of preservation by East Hampton Town Board candidates. A wine reception will precede the film and panel discussion.

    “How many times are you not going to see the Salinger movie?”

    “Every day and twice on Sunday, until it goes away.”

    That was my son’s question and his father’s response. The same can be said of the book called “Salinger,” produced by the same fellow who did the documentary, Shane Salerno. The title alone should dissuade and depress any self-respecting Salinger admirer, for whose biography deserves a snappier and more memorable title than J.D. Salinger’s? Did Mr. Salerno learn nothing from his subject and master? Can anyone see or say “For Esmé With Love and Squalor” without reliving that heartbreaking story? Who can read or hear the word “bananafish” without thinking of that short story, that suicide, that whole damn Glass menagerie? You want meaningful titles? Try “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” What about “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”? Imagine if “The Catcher in the Rye” were titled “Caulfield.” Not even “Holden Caulfield,” just “Caulfield.”

    In a generous mood, perhaps we should thank Mr. Salerno for producing tripe, tripe that debuted at number six on The New York Times best-seller list, which must have thrilled Mr. Salerno no end. Had he approached J.D. Salinger with intellectual integrity instead of desperate sensationalism, had he interviewed people who had something to say rather than some empty-headed actors, envious authors, and a star-struck photographer who once saw a woman who once knew a man who got his mail at the same small Cornish, N.H., post office as J.D. Salinger, well, there would be a genuine temptation to explore the dynamic between the art and the artist, an artist, in this case, who was, it turns out, a man of his word as well as his words.

    Holden Caulfield promised to save some kids, move to Vermont, and pretend to be deaf and dumb in order to avoid contact with all the phonies of the world. Holden Caulfield was put into a mental home; J.D. Salinger was put into a box called crazy because everyone around him was dying to be a celebrity as he ran headlong away from it, warned about it, and sued anyone who tried to bring it upon him. Vermont? New Hampshire? He was one state off.

    Perhaps we should thank Mr. Salerno for reminding us to read J.D. Salinger again, which we ought to do whenever the squalor of the world outweighs the love, when one needs a defibrillation, when one forgets the exhilaration of a precisely placed comma, or three. Salinger taught young writers that there was the perfect word hiding out there in plain sight and it was worth searching for because that one coquettish word could shape or color an entire sentence, paragraph, or story. Has any writer inspired more writers to write than J.D. Salinger? Has anyone made it look so simple and so unattainable at the same time?

    Sounds like Zen, you say? We won’t even get into Salinger’s early importation of Eastern thought; before Alan Watts, before Allen Ginsberg, before Robert Pirsig, before Baba Ram Dass, George Harrison, Thich Nhat Hanh, various rinpoches and sundry maharishis and your friendly neighborhood yoga teacher.

    Neither of the two big take-aways from “Salinger” — movie and book — is news to any genuine Salinger follower. 1) He was writing all along; as he said, he escaped the madness in order to write more and purer, not to avoid writing. And 2) he had some flirtations and flings with younger women, or girls, as Joyce Maynard keeps telling us, over and over again, year after year. (Is her experience the collateral damage of Jerome’s career, or the cottage industry of Joyce’s?)

    Serious readers of great writers know that writers expose enough of their psyches, their obsessions, their childhoods, their families, and their vulnerabilities without being hounded by Hollywood poseurs and exposed by ex-intimates, who, by the way, are among the least reliable of all human sources. Why would Mr. Salerno spend nine years (as in “Nine Stories”) rummaging through J.D. Salinger’s trash trying to turn up something salacious or scandalous if he, as Mr. Salerno swears, loves the man and his work? Why would he commit the single act that that loved one would least want him to commit?

    Apparently, Mr. Salerno has inspected his own inner life as shallowly as he has Salinger’s. But that will not stop him. When your movie and your doc make money and you are shuttled around NPR channels by day and the chat show circuit by night, you quickly sign a new deal with the Weinstein boys (again) to create a feature film based on the wrongheaded speculations of your twin exploitations. Thank God Jason Robards is not around to star in “Salinger, the Movie.”

    In a world filled with phonies, one man rose above the crazy fray. Damaged by war, hurt by young love, at the height of his popularity, he locked himself in a New England cabin with a typewriter and a teenage girl . . .

    Speaking of movies, when you watch Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, do you fixate on the 16-year-old Mexican girl he impregnated when he was 35? Do you ruminate about his marriage to an 18-year-old girl when he was 53? Or do you just enjoy his genius?

    When you read “Henderson the Rain King,” are you constantly aware of Saul Bellow’s five wives, the last of which he met when he was a 64-year-old professor and she was his 21-year-old student? Do you think the members of the committees of the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, and National Medal of Arts were focused on his personal peccadilloes?

    What about John Cheever — the Chekhov of the Suburbs, the Ovid of Ossining? Does his alcoholism or repressed homosexuality or bitter depression or problematic fatherhood (take your pick) prevent you from appreciating the profundities of “The Swimmer” or “The Wapshot Chronicle”?

    I have read that, at some point in both the doc and the book, Salinger apologizes to a pilgrim for not being a seer, just a person. We have to take his word for it, but it is apparent that he knew long ago where the world was headed and what it wanted from him. He knew about all the Shane Salernos who were on his trail and bound to catch him at some point.

    So it’s only fitting that we give Salinger the last word here; equally fitting, I hope, is to let him speak through his alter ego, Buddy Glass, when talking about the work of his talented and dead brother in “Seymour: An Introduction.”

    “It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art, have something garishly wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction — extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards.”

    Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

    The book “Salinger” was co-written by David Shields.

    Trailers and cranes, generators and boom lights, miles of cable and legions of production assistants are a common sight on the streets of Manhattan. While the South Fork has seen its share of one or two-trailer photo shoots, full-scale film production is less common, especially in such relatively unspoiled locations as the narrow lanes that crisscross the dunes of Amagansett.

    It was a surprise, therefore, for some of the residents of Dune Lane, Marine Boulevard, and Jacqueline Drive when a convoy of trucks camped in their neighborhood last week for three nights of filming at an oceanfront house.

    The crew from the pilot of “The Affair,” a new Showtime series, is expected to complete almost two weeks of filming in the area tomorrow, after having deployed at such sites as the Lobster Roll on the Napeague Stretch, Cedar Lawn Cemetery on Cooper Lane in East Hampton, and a Wainscott soundstage.

    “The Affair” explores two marriages, the infidelity that disrupts them, and the fallout that ensues. Joshua Jackson (“Fringe,” “Dawson’s Creek”) plays Cole, a hard-bitten cowboy who manages a ranch on the eastern tip of Long Island that has been in his family for generations. Cole’s wife, Allison (the Golden Globe nominee Ruth Wilson), who works in a pancake house, is trying to reconstruct her life in the wake of a tragedy.

    Cole and Allison’s emotionally charg­ed marriage becomes even more complicated when Allison begins an affair with Noah (Dominic West, also a Golden Globe nominee), a New York City high school teacher spending the summer on Long Island with his wife and four children. Maura Tierney, an Emmy nominee who starred in “E.R.,” plays Helen, Noah’s college sweetheart and wife of 17 years, whose world is shaken by Noah’s infidelity and who, over time, teeters between understanding and anger, forgiveness and vengeance. The story is told from both the male and female perspectives.

    Sarah Treem, the producer and writer of the Netflix series “House of Cards,” starring Kevin Spacey, and Hagai Levi, the executive producer of “In Treatment,” are co-creators of the series. According to the production company’s New York office, a release date has not been set for the pilot.

Addams in Southampton

    “Charles Addams: Family and Friends,” an exhibition celebrating the artwork of the creator of the Addams Family, has opened at the Southampton Center, where it will remain on view through Nov. 3. The show features almost 100 drawings and cartoons from a 60-year period.

    Addams was first published in The New Yorker in 1933, at the age of 21, and continued to be one of the magazine’s most famous contributors until his death, in 1988. Though inevitably associated with the Addams Family, he produced only 50 original Addams Family drawings. Hundreds of other characters appear in the majority of his works. More than 15 books of his drawings have been published, and his work is in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Library of Congress.

    After living in Westhampton Beach for many years, in 1985 Addams and his wife, Tee, moved to the Swamp, the name they gave their property in Sagaponack, where they lived for the rest of their lives. It is now the home of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, which was formed in 2000, two years before Tee’s death.

    The Southampton Center, which is in the former Parrish Art Museum at 25 Job’s Lane, is open Fridays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.

Much at Monika Olko

    Monika Olko Gallery in Sag Harbor is presenting work by three contemporary artists in a show running from today through Oct. 31.

    Christine Mattai, a German-born photographer who has lived on Shelter Island since 1992, is exhibiting photographs from her “Sagaponack Light & Sea” series. Alex Kveton, whose long career as a sculptor began in his native Czechoslovakia and continued in Austria and the United States, will show metal sculptures. Abstract paintings by Philippe Heurtaux, a French artist whose work is inspired by his extensive travels, including a long stay in Polynesia, round out the exhibition.

    An opening reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

“Kingdom Animalia” Tour

    Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Kathy Zeiger will lead an art tour and discussion of the exhibition “Kingdom Animalia,” which she organized at Dodds and Eder in Sag Harbor. Participants have been invited for light refreshments and drinks in the Dodds and Eder Twilight Lounge from 6 to 8 p.m. The show features works by Colin Goldberg, Dan Welden, David Bonagurio, Llewelynn Fletcher, Marc Dimov, Mark Wilson, Rachel Meuler, Randy Willier, Roz Dimon, Scott Bluedorn, Steve Miller, Vito DeVito, and Will Ryan.

Busy Week at 4 North Main

    Anne Raymond, an East Hampton artist, will show 20 recent abstract paintings at the 4 Main Street Gallery in Southampton. The works in “Water/ Wind,” which opens Saturday with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. and will remain on view through Monday, invoke the beauty and movement in nature while avoiding narrative landscape elements. The artist has exhibited extensively in this country and abroad and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.

    The Wednesday Group, which consists of painters who meet every week — guess which day — to paint “en plein air” at various East End locations, will exhibit at the gallery from Wednesday through Oct. 22, with a reception set for Oct. 19 from 4 to 7 p.m. Participating artists are David Bollinger, Anna Franklin, Peter Gumpel, Jean Mahoney, Deb Palmer, Alyce Peifer, Gene Samuelson, Joyce Silver, Christine Chew Smith, Cynthia Sobel, Pam Vossen, and Dan Weidmann.

The Figure at Ashawagh

    Body of Work, a fluid group of artists formed to put together exhibition opportunities for painters of the figure, will open its 10th show at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday. “Body of Ten X,” for which a reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., will remain on view through Monday. Exhibiting artists are Mary Antczak, Rosalind Brenner, Linda Capello, Michael Cardacino, Ellen Dooley, Anthony Lombardo, Setha Low, Phil Marco, Douglas Reina, and Margaret Weissbach.

Visit to Gagosian

    Temple Adas Israel of Sag Harbor is sponsoring a visit to Gagosian Gallery, at 980 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, on Wednesday. Participants have been invited to meet at the first-floor gallery at 1:30 p.m. for a tour of “Atemwende,” a show of ceramics by Edmund de Waal. Mr. de Waal, who lives and works in London and has exhibited at museums worldwide, will be represented by a series of vitrines containing thrown porcelain vessels, arranged in groupings varying in size and configuration.

    There is no charge for the tour, but no transportation will be provided. Additional information is available from the temple office.

Birdhouses Return

    The Ninth Annual Artist Birdhouse Auction benefiting the Coalition for Women’s Cancers at Southampton Hospital will take place Oct. 19, from 5:30 to 8 p.m., at the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton. More than 80 artists have made one-of-a-kind birdhouses for what has become an important fund-raising event for the coalition and its various cancer support programs.

    The auction was conceived by Karyn Mannix, an East Hampton artist and breast cancer survivor, and is held each year in October, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Tickets cost $25, $30 at the door, and can be ordered by calling 726-8715.

Carpentier Extended

    The Ralph Carpentier exhibition at the Wallace Gallery in East Hampton has been extended through Monday. Mr. Carpentier, who was born in New York City in 1929, moved to East Hampton in 1955, when he began his longstanding commitment to landscape painting. According to Robert Long, the late poet and East Hampton Star editor and critic, his “genius is in the evocation of mood, in which the familiar world is seen in new and stirring ways. That singularity, his ability to clearly and powerfully take the specific and make it universal, is what makes Mr. Carpentier a master of landscape painting.”

    Mr. Carpentier’s work is represented in many private and public collections, and he has taught at New York University, Southampton College, and the Art Barge in Amagansett. His last solo show in East Hampton was held in 2000.

“Collectors Choice”

    “Collectors Choice,” a show of paintings by modern and contemporary artists accompanied by continuous screenings of Modernist and Surrealist films from the 1920s and 1930s, opens today at Vered Gallery in East Hampton. On view through Dec. 1, it includes work by Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, and Charles Burchfield, among other noted Modernists, and such contemporary artists as Hunt Slonem, Ray Caesar, Adam Handler, and Bert Stern.

   On Memorial Day 2011, Fran Castan wrote searingly in this newspaper of the death of her first husband, the Look magazine war correspondent Sam Castan, killed by enemy fire in the highlands of Vietnam, just an hour’s plane ride away from their apartment in Hong Kong. Traumatized, she fled the British colony, where they had happily settled short months before, and returned to the United States, carrying their 13-month-old toddler and a weight of buried memories that would surface many years later in her award-winning poetry. Last month, in recognition of ongoing achievement, Ms. Castan was named 2013 Long Island Poet of the Year by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, an honor she will receive on Sunday afternoon at the association’s headquarters in Huntington.

   Back in New York with no idea how she would live after Mr. Castan died, but with a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College and experience gained from working together with him before the war (“a life like Cinderella, only then the ball was over”) to interview such cover-story subjects as Bob Dylan and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Ms. Castan took herself to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.

    “I made a list of magazines and started walking north.” The first one she came to, a block away on 43rd, was at the top of the list, The New Yorker.

    The magazine “opened the door” to her, she said last week at the house in Barnes Landing, Springs, where she and the painter Lew Zacks, who were married in 1972, have lived year round for 22 years. Never mind that she was hired as an “editorial assistant,” “Mad Men”-era doublespeak for the little fish in the typing pool, where, she remembered ruefully, “every woman had a master’s.” What mattered was the money, and the springboard, and the poetry and fiction editors, “who were grooming me to be a reader.”

   Three years at The New Yorker, though, were enough. “I got impatient,” Ms. Castan said. “My life had been a different life, and it was taking too long. I wanted more responsibility and more money, and I’d met Lew.” She quit to become a writer and editor at Scholastic magazine.

   Not until she was 40, with a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony behind her and a job as a popular teacher of literature and creative writing at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, did she think of writing poetry.

   “It was a language I spoke early on,” she said. “It was part of me, like breathing, but the poets I read were dead white men. I didn’t know any women poets. I thought, ‘I will love this all my life, but it’s not what I will do.’ It wasn’t something I ever thought a woman could or would do. But was I reading it? Was I loving it? Yes!”

   “Then these things came to me. I started writing them down. They weren’t prose.”

   Most of her early poems, which have been collected under the title “A Widow’s Quilt,” were about Sam and Vietnam. “We have never seen the Vietnam tragedy through such eyes, with such grief, rage, clarity,” the political theorist and editor Robin Morgan, who published some of her work in Ms. magazine, said of the book. But when a visitor asked the poet whether the death of her first husband had been the most important event of her life, she protested, “Do not define a life by a death.” The most “challenging” event, the most “difficult,” the “saddest,” perhaps. The most important, no.

   On the 75th anniversary of the Poetry Society of America, Ms. Castan’s poem “Operation Crazy Horse” won the society’s prestigious Lucille Medwick Award:

    A grand Kowloon hotel. A hedge

    of red hibiscus. A tiled pool.

    A masseuse who pressed fragrant

    oil of almond into my body

    in the full heat of the sun.

    Elsewhere, northwest of Saigon,

    a man beheld you, and fired.

    . . . .

   “The Lucille Medwick Award was the highlight for us” in the selection of Ms. Castan as Long Island Poet of the Year, said Cynthia Shor, director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. “The qualifications are threefold: outstanding poetry, teaching of poetry, and general support of poetry on Long Island,” she said, citing the poet’s “five Pushcart Prize nominations and an extended teaching career.” Ms. Castan, the producer of Poetry Pairs, an annual Guild Hall event showcasing one local poet of repute and one with national renown, mentors several younger poets here and often gives readings at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum and elsewhere on the Island.

   When he heard about the award, Ms. Castan’s stepson in California, Dan Zacks, sent his congratulations and a rare 1900 edition of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The book has occupied a lot of her time, often midnight to 2 a.m., since.

   “I set myself a task to read the whole thing cover to cover before Award Day,” she said. “Reading poetry is not like reading a novel, not simple syntax. I have to read very slowly. There’s so much richness, if it’s good — allusion to other works, music to absorb. It requires attention to detail.”

   Reading Whitman in connection with Sunday’s ceremony has brought her back, she said, to her own work, which has a number of themes in common with his; she mentioned war, water, Long Island, relationships, family, and nature among them. Whitman, who, she noted, “was gay when it wasn’t okay,” saw the world as his family; Ms. Castan sees the world in hers, balancing, as her mentor William Matthews wrote in his introduction to “A Widow’s Quilt,” “the private and political with extraordinary dexterity.”

To Hannah VoDinh,

a Young Poet:

. . . .

I will not rest

in this or any other life

until the Vietnamese names

rise on the giant V in Washington

until they are formed

in the same stone of honor as the American names

as you are formed, dear

Lotus, of a single, human moment of transcendence.

    “One of my favorite things to do when I write from nature is to go with Lew when he paints and I write, side by side,” Ms. Castan said. Plein-air poetry, she calls it. It can happen anywhere, often at Louse Point in Springs, not far from where they live. In 2010, after the couple spent two summers in Italy, they collaborated on “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” published to acclaim both in paperback and a stylish coffee-table edition.

   Getting ready for Sunday’s ceremony, where she will be expected to read from her work, “has kind of got me back to my center,” Ms. Castan said. “Okay, there’s an award, but what does it really mean? It gives you all these opportunities. I am going over old work, unpublished pieces, new work — to see what I’ll be reading that day, to see what’s connected, not just random poems. I want to expose some new work, as well as what some people expect — and then to send things out.”

   What with one thing and another — life — she has fallen behind, she acknowledged, in submitting her work for publication.

   “In my going through enormous files, I am arranging things into groups, and there are several manuscripts that are due to be looked at, revised, reworked. I write them in white-hot heat and revise for years, and if they don’t reach a certain level I just keep moving along. Unlike other poets I know, I can’t switch readily back and forth. I don’t take the time away from rewriting and revising to send things along.”

“So, this is a good gift from the award.”

The induction ceremony, poetry reading, and meet-the-poet reception honoring Fran Castan will take place on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. at 246 Old Walt Whitman Road, Huntington Station.