The only thing more beautiful than Massachusetts’s Berkshire Hills is the work produced by the many artists who have flocked there for nearly two centuries.
IT has been a banner year for playwright Juliane Hiam. In the past 12 months alone, she has had two plays in production -- one about nineteenth- century
Paris and the other a children’s play based on Norman Rockwell’s illustrations. In addition, she was the writer-in-residence at the
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she also taught playwriting to elementary-school students. Currently, she’s teaching playwriting to adults through an organization called Inkberry. Some might consider her level of output unusually high. But that kind of prolific creativity is commonplace where Hiam resides, in the bucolic setting of northwest Massachusetts’s Berkshire Hills.
Berkshire County, a district that encompasses the westernmost portion of the state of Massachusetts, from its north border all the way to its south one, contains the foothills of Vermont’s
Green Mountains, which are known as the Berkshires. This scenic region is known for its rich natural resources but more notably for its reputation as a magnet for poets, composers, authors, artists, inventors, singers, and other creatively spirited people. This phenomenon can be traced back to the 1850s, when the area became inundated with great literary minds such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in a cottage near the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a year and a half during a particularly productive period in which he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and parts of The Blithedale Romance.
Herman Melville, a noted author who had visited the Berkshires since his boyhood, moved his family to the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1850. He is said to have drawn inspiration for his most famous work, Moby Dick, from the looming shadow of Mount Greylock. And
Henry David Thoreau, a frequent visitor to the region, wrote a lyrical homage to the same peak, which is the highest point in the state of Massachusetts, in his “A Night on Mount Greylock.”