Meet Your Neighbor
Dick Burns
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

Date of birth March 8, 1940

Likes best about Nantucket The sense of community. He said he felt he was home soon after moving here.

Likes least about Nantucket Development, though he knows it is an economic inevitability.

Favorite TV show "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, news on CNN, MSNBC and Fox, and the History and Discovery channels. When people fall in love with Nantucket, many find it is a hard place to leave, or to leave for very long. That is what happened with Dick Burns, who moved to the island in 1972, then lived on the mainland off and on but always returned here. He came back the last time five years ago and now says he is "here for the duration."

Sitting in his apartment among tall shelves filled with books and more stacked in corners and on tables (Burns admits books are his passion), he chronicled his life beginning in Framingham, Mass. After high school, Burns went to UMass-Amherst, first majoring in sciences because he aspired to be an oceanographer, then switching to zoology. "But all this time I was being seduced by literature," he said.

Burns decided to spend an extra year in college to earn a degree in literature with a minor in zoology, then returned the next year for graduate studies to obtain a master's degree in English. Once out of graduate school, Burns taught English at Dean Junior College in Franklin, Mass. for three years, being hired there a mere three weeks before he was to be drafted into the Army.

When he completed his tenure at Dean, he spent a few months in Europe, returned to spend another year and a-half teaching English at a mainland high school, went back to Europe again and then was offered a job in construction working with a mainland friend. He bartended nights to supplement his income.

About a year into that venture, friends of Burns' told him they wanted to invest in summer home real estate on Nantucket and invited him along to assist with decision making. Burns said the group stopped their search at the first house they looked at in Madaket, and in the spring of 1972 he came here to help another friend work on the property.

"I was hooked," Burns said of his initiation to the island. "I went back, gathered my things and moved out here."

That year Burns became employed by Richard Evans, who ran The Relaxed Lobster on Steamboat Wharf. Burns helped repair the building's ship-shaped deck and tended bar summer evenings. The Brotherhood opened in the summer of 1972 and Burns tended that bar in the off-season until the end of 1975, when he spent the winter with a friend in Georgia.

Next came Boston. In Beantown, Burns capitalized on his bartending skills and taught part-time at Framingham State College and UMass Boston. Gathering no moss, at the close of 1980 Burns came back to Nantucket, spending winters doing carpentry and house painting and tending bar in the season at The Straight Wharf Restaurant. As an enjoyable aside, from 1974 to 1987, Burns and Richard Cumbie edited Nantucket Review, a literary magazine. And, in the late '80s, Burns worked for Rob Mitchell at The Gaslight Theater. In 1989, he quit banging nails and pouring drinks and went to work full time for Patty Claflin, who had opened Bookworks.

In the fall of 1991, Burns decided he wanted to spend more time teaching and writing and enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned his master's degree in fiction writing. It was another brief excursion away from Nantucket. Burns came back in 1993, but learned that Claflin had launched a new bookstore in Brattleboro, Vt., and traveled there to assist in its management. He only intended to stay a couple of years to get the business off the ground; while visiting Nantucket as often as possible, Burns remained with the shop until Claflin sold it in 2003.

Back on the steamship, Burns headed once again to his familiar island and returned to work at The Gaslight and Bookworks. "I was picking up where I left off," he said. "I love Bookworks. It's really a home for me and I love working there. I'm here for the duration as long as I can afford it. Bookworks is my home and otherwise I pretty much live in my head. I don't need things to attach me to the world. Just having the island is enough."

In his free time, Burns, who does not own a car, likes to bike and walk. He considers himself an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading sciencerelated books. He also looks forward to visiting friends in Ireland, England and France when he can get away in the spring, and attends the Brattleboro, Vt. Literary Festival, which he founded, in the fall.

He has one major dream.

"I'm always trying to get back into writing," Burns said. "That's always in the back of my mind. That's something

I want to do." I