Away With Words

WRITTEN BY MARY BERGMAN

Remembering an island original, the late Tharon Dunn

Whether it was teaching English to Nantucket’s increasingly global population, helping to shape a festival that brings in world-class authors, or sourcing goods for her iconic shop, Tharon Dunn’s life and work connected the faraway island to the wider world. Tharon’s recent passing on May 17, at the age of seventy-two after a nearly three-decade-long battle with cancer, leaves the many who mourn her at a loss for words.

Tharon Dunn reached Nantucket during the heady decade of the 1970s. She was originally from North Carolina and studied literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she met her husband, Lee, on campus. The Dunns began married life on Nantucket in 1972. The late sixties and early seventies were a turning point for the island, as historic preservation and land conservation emerged as twin efforts needed to preserve Nantucket’s unique way of life for the future. This ethos is part of what drew the Dunns to these sandy shores. In turn, Tharon invested in the island community, giving of her time and talents to make Nantucket a better place.

Tharon could be found behind the counter at numerous jobs in those first years on the island, including the Camera Shop, the Emporium and the flower shop. Eventually, she became the manager of Upstairs, Downstairs, an Irish import store. After a decade working in Nantucket’s fine shops, Tharon opened her own in 1983, Bramhall & Dunn, showcasing handcrafted items from around the globe. A sister shop, also called Bramhall & Dunn, opened in Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard that same year. Décor and home goods handpicked by Tharon can still be found in many homes on- and off-island.

In the mid-1990s, Tharon combined her business acumen with her passion for land conservation, serving as secretary and treasurer of the Nantucket Green Fund, an effort by island businesses and the Chamber of Commerce to raise money for the purchase of open space. Understanding that the value of open space was key to what made Nantucket a unique place to live and visit, this coalition of island real estate professionals, merchants, guest houses owners, the Nantucket Atheneum (LVA) in December 2005. She taught English as a second language at the Community School for ten years. The demand for such a service in a diverse community like Nantucket, with thousands of J-1 exchange visa student workers arriving every summer, was huge. When the LVA celebrated its first fifteen years in 2020, students reflected on how their lives had been changed by the ability to learn conversational English in a free setting. local community was always front of mind in Tharon’s planning. This year’s Nantucket Book Festival, which she was working on when she died, was dedicated to her memory. From humble beginnings, the festival now attracts national attention.

Perhaps it is only fitting when remembering the life of a person so de- tradespeople, restaurateurs and other business owners contributed a portion of their profits to island conservation groups for acquiring property that would be accessible to the public.

After Tharon sold her business in the early 2000s, she committed her retirement to literacy and literature. Splitting time between Nantucket and Key West, Tharon volunteered for the Literacy Volunteers of the Keys and co-founded the Literacy Volunteers of

A longtime attendee of the Key West Literary Seminar, Tharon found herself on a crusade to create a similar event thirty miles out to sea. “It was a huge awakening to me, how much more you could get out of books,” she said in 2022. “Sitting in a literary seminar and hearing authors speak opened up an entirely different world.” She knew that Nantucket could benefit from the kind of alchemy that happens when readers and writers are brought together.

The first Nantucket Book Festival was held in 2011. Tharon’s work as chair of the Literary Committee, the group tasked with creating the roster of writers, pushed her to read an ever-changing variety of emerging and established writers.

What most excited Tharon were the authors who expressed a mission or a message she hadn’t heard before or didn’t know much about. Engagement with the voted to the power of language to turn to a book. When the Nantucket Book Festival asked for her favorite literary quote, Tharon pointed to this passage in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer:

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a cast away do? Why he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Words to live by.