🤔 Where Sylvia Plath is a beach read | Down the Shore

The beach can feel like a breezy escape from the hard stuff, but sometimes, the heavy things hit you like a rogue wave.

On Sunday, it was a lovely beach day in Ventnor. By midafternoon, the most dramatic event was that I had given in and joined the masses with my own personal beach canopy (me! the one who the New York Times credits for coining the term “beach-spreading,” now with my personal cabana, which is, I have to admit, amazing).

Suddenly, as the waves started churning up, the beach was buzzing with breaking news. The usual crowd, with their Trump and “MAGA Country” flags were MIA, missing their moment of shock and awe. Quiet conversations buzzed about the Biden bombshell — some worried, some hopeful, most tentative. It had only just happened! What would it would mean? Who really knew at that point? At least the water had warmed up for a head-clearing dip.

There may be no better person to revel in all the contradictions of the beach than the wonderful author Emily Van Duyne, who grew up as part of one of the Jersey Shore’s most-storied families, the inventors of the iconic Van Duyne surfboats, all while nurturing a deep love for Sylvia Plath, the poet and author who died by suicide in 1963.

Van Duyne is fourth-generation Ventnor local: Her great-grandparents arrived in Ventnor in 1919 on a Harley with a sidecar. They built the house she grew up in from a Sears & Roebuck kit.

Emily, the oldest of three girls whose Uncle Tom Van Duyne still (for now) builds surfboats, looked way beyond her beach surroundings to became a scholar and adorer of Plath, with a critically well-received new book, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation.

I interviewed Emily about her rigorously researched and bracingly personal new book, and the dissonance of growing up at the Shore while brooding over Sylvia Plath.

(And, keep scrolling, for her slam book Shore recs. ⬇️)

Imagine young Emily sitting on the Ventnor beach day after day, grappling with the dark poetry, meaning and complicated life arc of Plath, whose abuse at the hands of husband Ted Hughes is at the core of Van Duyne’s new book.

It turns out that Sylvia Plath also loved the beach, ate chocolate cookies on the sand, and worked on her tan. Plath described the ocean landscape as “not land but the end of land.” And declared herself the “heroine of the peripheral,” a perspective easy to arrive at the edge of the Atlantic.

Read my story and Van Duyne’s take on Shore life here.

📮 Are mainland towns like Somers Point and Cape May Court House becoming the new Shore towns? Are you going down the Shore but staying across the causeways? Let me know by replying to this email.

☀️ A little rain this week should clear out for the weekend.

— Amy S. Rosenberg (Find me at @amysrosenberg. 📷 Follow me on Insta at @amysrosenberg. 📧 Email me here.)

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

🎡 RIP Jack Morey: Sad news out of Wildwood this week, as the creative force behind Morey’s Piers died at the age of 63. Read my obit here.

🗒️ Did the world’s oldest message in a bottle wash up in Ocean City?

🍗 The great BBQ food truck Smoke & Grub is fighting for permission to keep operating along the White Horse Pike in Hammonton.

🍻 Margatians are furious about all the noise coming from the outside bars like Roberts.

🐋 There was a whale breaching off the coast of LBI.

📰 The Wall Street Journal discovered Stone Harbor.

🏈 Eagles beat writer Olivia Reiner got great video of Night in Venice grand marshal Brandon Graham.

🥘 The Taco Shop in Cape May Court House is now battling it out with new neighbor Chipotle. But you’re not going to find Momma Jo’s coconut rice pudding at Chipotle.

🥘 Simpson’s, the hotly-anticipated Jamaican restaurant in Atlantic City, says it’s opening for real this weekend inside the Pier across from Caesars.

🌟 Also at the Pier, now the ACX1 Studios, is the Atlantic City Celebrity Convention.

🎸 Cape May Convention Hall’s music series features Richard Thompson this weekend, with John Oates and the Hooters later in the summer. Ticket info and schedule is here.

🌭 Dollar dog days live again, at Cardinal Bistro in Atlantic City, with the game broadcast in its garden. Next one up is July 31 against the Yankees.

🍕Pizza pop-up at the now-infamous Steve & Cookie’s parking lot, with wood-fired pizza on July 25 by Aaron Gordon of 13th Street Cocktails. Will Kylie Kelce make a triumphant return?

🫐 Blueberry season is going to be over before you know it. Try picking your own (not to mention kayaking) at DiMeo Blueberry Farms.

⚾ Be like Alec Bohm of the Phillies and put on a Fred’s Tavern shirt and head to the Wharf in Wildwood.

💚 brat, brat summer Surely, by this late in this fast-moving news week, you already know? But here you go, it’s brat summer for all, thanks to Charli XCX, whose brat vibe is that girl who’s “a little messy and likes to party … a little blunt, a little volatile.” Sounds Jersey Shore enough.

Read Emily Bloch for all the brat context.

Which dive bar on Long Beach Island featuring shuffleboard and $4 Yuenglings was named best bar in all of New Jersey?

A. Black-Eyed Susans

B. Bird & Betty’s

C. Maynard’s

D. Hudson House Bar (The Hud).

If you think you know the answer, click on this story to find out. Or take a chance and email us with your guess, and maybe a dive bar recommendation, we’ll compile a list. Email us here.

Favorite beach: My family goes to Derby Avenue in Ventnor, and I typically go there. My baby boy hangs with his cousins, sees my mom and dad. However I prefer the big beaches in Atlantic City: Jackson, Raleigh.

Favorite summer breakfast: Everything bagel from Hot Bagels, toasted with veggie cream cheese, sliced Jersey tomatoes from my garden.

Perfect beach day: More than anything, I love to be able to read on the beach. I also have a 3-year-old, so I don’t get a lot of reading done.

Perfect night at the Shore: Robert’s Place, eating crabs, drinking cold beer. Go sit on Uncle Tom and Aunt Bette’s dock and stare at the bay.

Best sandwich: Half a cheesesteak from Dino’s with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and raw onion, hot peppers on the side.

When summer approaches, I feel: Joyful. I love the summer.

It wouldn’t be the Jersey Shore without: the smell of salt water in the air.

Best thing for kids to do at the Shore: I love just taking them to the beach. They love the farmers’ market in Ventnor on Friday mornings. Bowie is obsessed with the many little tiny doughnuts, the little baby doughnuts.

Surfing or fishing? Fishing. I tried surfing one time in my 20s. My mom had picked up surfing. I got hit in the head with a board. Not my thing.

Sunrise or sunset? I mean both but as I’ve gotten older, I wake up really early and I watch the sunrise. My whole day feels right when I can do that. A lot of people who knew me as a disaffected teenager will feel amused by me growing my own tomatoes and watching the sunrise.

Pet peeve: Watching the market price out people of my generation, and younger people from even being able to rent a place is pretty appalling.

The Shore could be improved if: We devoted more time and funding to public schools, racial equity, and allowing for local people to have access to the things the wealthiest among us have.

From Jim Phillips: Spent my entire childhood summers from preschool through High School age at my grandparents’ bungalow just off the beach on 39th street in Sea Isle City. Precious memories of extended family time at the shore in Sea Isle in the 1950s. Have lived the second half of my life in Alabama where our Gulf Coast provides much warmer ocean water and stunning sugar white sand beaches. But at 80, I still cherish the memories of my youthful years “down the Shore.”

✍️ Send us your Shore memory in 200 words, and we will publish the best ones in this space.

Thanks for reading! Here’s a story I did a few years back exploring the mind of Jack Morey.

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