Editor’s Note: Islander Phil Clapham’s “Desert Island Bookworm” series interviews notable islanders about the books they’d take to a desert island, named after the BBC program “Desert Island Discs.”

Because The Beachcomber’s reporter Liz Shepherd was the one who originally co-opted me to write for this publication, it’s high time to enquire about her own choices of books to take to a desert island.

Shepherd was born in Kansas but eventually moved to Oklahoma, where she studied theater at university. She went to New York City in 1979 and began working for a Broadway producer there. Later, she moved to Chicago, where she wrote and edited a monthly publication about local artists, and then became the director of the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival — a role she would repeat when she moved to Vashon with her husband Tom in 1997.

Why the move? “We were madly in love,” she said, “and we wanted a new adventure.”

First, she became the director of Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art, and then she became pregnant — “It was a surprise” — giving birth to twins in 1999 at the age of forty. When the twins were old enough to go to school, she returned to work in Seattle — this time for Northwest Film Forum, as the director of its youth programs including Children’s Film Festival Seattle.

She was still working at the Forum in 2008 when she took on the role as part-time arts editor for The Beachcomber. “It was my happy little Vashon side project,” she said.

She left the newspaper in 2013, but returned five years later to take on a bigger role. “So I became a more serious journalist at the age of 50.”

Most of Shepherd’s book choices are related to the theater world in which she has been immersed for so long. Shakespeare is there on her island, of course, as is the Bible. She’s not religious, but she was “steeped in the Bible” growing up. “I love the mythic stories of the Old Testament, the outrageous edicts of Leviticus, the poetry of the Psalms, the parables of Jesus, the ravings of the prophets, the admonitions of St. Paul, all of it.”

Shepherd retrieves a battered and obviously well-thumbed college textbook from a bookshelf: “Treasury of the Theater,” originally published in 1935 (hers is the 1970 edition). It’s a compendium of plays from Ibsen to Lowell, and contains some of her favorites, including her most-loved play, Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

“It reminds me of Vashon,” she says, “and how our lives have shrunk with it.”

Shepherd tearfully reads some lines from the play’s third act (set in a graveyard); she’s still affected by them after so many readings. This is Emily, a character who has died in childbirth and returns to earth to revisit “an unimportant day” in her life — her 12th birthday. But after only a few minutes back among the living, Emily is overcome by emotion, and delivers a moving farewell speech:

“Wait! One more look. Good-bye, good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking….and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

Her other choices are also theatrical in nature. One is Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever” — a 60-page monologue that is a rumination on privilege, economics and systems of government, it was meant to be read or performed anywhere, “including people’s living rooms.”

Shepherd explained her fascination with the play: “A person like me grew up with a certain degree of comfort and ease, and I thought that this was how life was meant to be. I knew nothing of class struggle, and didn’t realize that my privilege was not the norm, and was in fact often taken from someone else.”

“It sounds very heavy,” she adds, “but in places it’s actually very funny. Wallace Shawn — as we know from his role in The Princess Bride — can be so darkly funny.”

Another Shawn play, “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” also makes her list. “It’s another dark tale of how hate grows,” she explains, “of how love can be twisted into hate.”

In January, she participated in Vashon’s 14/48 festival, co-writing two 10-minute plays in 48 hours with islander Jonathan Kuzma. “Let’s write about witches,” she suggested, and then found herself running into trouble: “My vocabulary for spells and witchy things was lacking.”

After the experience, she picked up two books to bone up on the lexicon of magic, herbalism and the like: “Living Wands of the Druids” and “Mountain Conjure and Southern Root Work.” Now, she says she’d take them along to the island.

“Stuck there, you’d need a lot of magic to survive,” she explains, “and you’d want to develop a spiritual home.”

Shepherd would also take some poetry, notably T.S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Why? “Because it’s beautiful, aching language,” she says simply.

Others: “Something I own but have yet to read: like “What The Eye Hears,” a history of tap dance. I’d like to think about tap dancers on the island — or maybe I’d like to bring along my collection of biographies of country music legends of the 1950s to 1970s. I’d like to think about their songs and wild lives.”

She makes clear that she’s really not much of a reader of novels (though she loved “A Thousand Acres,” Jane Smiley’s modern take on the King Lear theme). But isolated on a desert island forever, she concedes she might give fiction a try.

“Maybe I’d finally get round to reading some of the big Russian novels my husband loves,” she says. Then smiles and adds, “Maybe. But why would I do that if I could read a Chekhov play instead?”

Phil Clapham is a retired whale biologist who lives on Maury Island. His comic romance novel “Jack” (under his nom-de-plume Phillip Boleyn) is available on Amazon.