Annie Finch debuts SPELLS

April 22nd, 2013 by Cathleen Miller

Posted on behalf of Catherine Fisher, MWWC Assistant

Annie Finch made her visit to the MWWC book discussion group on the fourth day of National Poetry Month, and on the “second day of life,” as she put it, of her new book, Spells: New and Selected Poems. With a pristine copy from which to read at this, their first outing together, Finch began with the spell, “A Blessing on the Poets.” When she finished reading, she paused and then told the audience, “It’s the poet in you that feels the poetry. Any time you feel moved by a poem you are being a poet. You’re increasing the power of poetry in the world. And that is a kind of magic to me. Poetry had its origin in magic, and that’s one of the reasons I call my book ‘Spells.’  The original poets were not just entertainers, not just word spinners. They were spinners of reality.”

Finch’s poetry is rather unique today in that it conforms to traditional poetic forms and celebrates meter. She comes to her work with a deep consciousness of the poetry and poets of earlier times. “They had access to truth that others in the community didn’t have. Going back to my own roots, to the ancient Celtic bards, there was no one allowed to criticize the king except for a poet.” Meter, rhyme and repetition, Finch says, bring us back to a time of spells, when the poem and poet enjoyed a position of influence. “As a poet, my job is to make language as powerful as possible, to adjust reality to make it more in line with our hearts.” Within the lines of the second poem Finch read, “Earth Day,” we heard the counsel, “All we need is to live with the memory of a future we want to imagine.”

In the formulation of her spells, Finch is careful to avoid getting into or dwelling on the negative. In poems that speak to the precarious existence of bee colonies, prairie grasses and other of the earth’s fragile inhabitants, she fashions spells to strengthen and protect her subjects, rather than devoting energy to indicting the negative forces that imperil them. In the case of threatened apiaric colonies, she explains, “I want to inhabit the spirit of the bee and to use the tools of the poetry and the repetition to move it forward into a very powerful place. That’s the kind of spell that I want to do with my poems.” The beneficiaries of her spells receive her passion for their triumph, not her anger or despair at their demise.

Finch finds that her poems and incantations happen to her, in a way. “Rather than have the attitude, ‘I can get a poem out of that,’” she says, “I want the poem to be walking around getting me.” “When my daughter Althea was in my womb, I was in a nature preserve with many species of butterflies. From this came the poem, ‘Butterfly Lullaby,’” which Finch then sang for us. Finch also draws much inspiration from the work of other women poets, and has two poems dedicated to Emily Dickinson in this collection. She read “Tribute for Emily Dickinson” twice, allowing the lines to unfurl and her voice to hang on the air. At the request of a guest (whose dog happens to be named for Dickinson!) Finch later gave us the other poem as well.

Next came Finch’s reading of a piece in the poetic form known as a “carol,” which was traditionally sung by people dancing in celebration, and was at one point outlawed by the Church. It was written for poet Carolyn Kaiser, in gratitude for Kaiser’s helpful response to Finch’s first book. “Carolyn said I was writing in form because I was mad, and it was a way for me to ‘contain the madness.’” Kaiser encouraged her to see the spells as poems and include them in her books.

After the reading, Finch engaged the group in conversation.

One member commented that when listening to poetry, often a particular phrase or two will stand out to her. From the reading she had just heard she cited the lines, “Now I am the one with eyes,” and “Did I have a face? And did it lie in shadow?” Finch was pleased and explained, “I think some poems have a mental glacier under the tip, and some have an emotional glacier under the tip.” “Now I am the one with eyes” has as its mental underpinnings in Finch’s study of feminist theory and women’s poetry. “Did I have a face? And did it lie in shadow?” from “A Dusk Song,” stems from the more emotional issues of seeing and being seen, and knowing how to exist in relationships. In creating the poem, she says, feelings must be transformed to thoughts, to ideas, and “little nuggets happen at the intersection between the feeling and the thought… and when they connect there is a spark.”

On the subject of giving poetry readings, Finch said that she loves reading her work. She agreed with poet Stanley Kunitz’s reflection that, for an author, enjoyment of reading is grounded in his/her own appreciation of the work. It was such a pleasure to see the joy Finch took in re-meeting and greeting her poems as she flipped through her new collection (it having been long “a long gestation,” she said), even affectionately cooing to one, “Hi, sweetie!”

Finch wants the reader to be able to have the same experience of the work as she does, and she finds that reading the poem aloud allows one to make it one’s own, as if one is playing a piece of music on the piano. Finch promises that it is not difficult to learn how to read her poems aloud; it simply takes developing the habit of checking in at the end of a line. “With free verse, you’re supposed to ignore the line breaks. With meter, you have to acknowledge the line break is there. The only knack to it is knowing when to end.”

To demonstrate, Finch invited a volunteer from the audience to read one of her poems to the group. The woman who came forward flipped through Spells to make her selection at random, and before beginning she grinned and shared she’d never done such a thing before! She did a lovely job and enjoyed the experience.

Bridget Healy, daughter-in-law of the founder of the Maine Women Writers Collection, asked Finch, “Is a poem a mini-drama?” “In a way it is,” Finch replied, “especially with lyric poetry. And if you’re reading it alone, it can be a dramatic performance for yourself.”

Another member of the group commented, “I write fiction and essays, and am woefully ignorant when it comes to poetry. I find your poetry very accessible…I find poems in the New Yorker so obscure, they infuriate me.” Finch’s fascinating response included both an historical context for the current trend toward the complex in poetry, and her own evolution from free verse to meter.

“My feeling is that poets like to have challenges; they like difficulty…Poets are partly puzzle-solvers…and partly what you want to do is to make something clear and beautiful out of conflict and paradox and difficulty… And my feeling is that, in every culture all over the world throughout human history, the difficulty and the challenge has been provided through form. Meter, rhyme.” To illustrate, Finch shared that an eight-line poem in Celtic form in Spells took her months to write. “It strikes me that poetry began to get so obscure at exactly the same time that poets stopped writing in meter. I feel that the difficulty of understanding it is a replacement for the difficulty of meter. I know that’s true because, when I started writing in meter, my poetry became much less difficult, much more accessible.”

Finch outlined her theory on why meter was abandoned, explaining that iambic pentameter had become so prevalent, so restrictive, so dominant, and the goal of poets such as Ezra Pound became to “break the pentameter!” In the process, Finch laments, they ended up breaking all the meters. Poets then turned to obscurity to make poems, to fill the vacuum. “People are in a bind right now and I think they are satisfying their difficulty jones by writing obscure language.”

From her own personal experience, she is certain that, “If it weren’t for form, I don’t think I would have survived. I physically need it, as a poet…Some poets need it. Not all poets, but some poets physically need it. It’s how we’re built…If you don’t have meter, you don’t have part of your pulse.”

To learn about opportunities to hear Finch read from Spells, and to explore Finch’s poetry, prose and collaborations, visit her website: anniefinch.com.

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March 21st, 2013 by Catherine Fisher


 

Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine, visited with us on Thursday, March 7, for a lively discussion of her recent memoir.

Before reading from the book, Wood wanted to talk a bit about her process of revising the text. “All writing is revision,” she explained. Having been a novelist up until now, trying her hand at memoir was a new challenge. Once she had finished her first draft, which she had felt pretty confident was complete, Wood asked her sister Cathy read it. Cathy’s feedback was that “the people of the story were not really in it,” and Wood realized that she had perhaps kept too much distance between herself and the figures in the story. Where it was a memoir and not a novel, she had been hesitant to include thoughts and dialogue that did not adhere strictly to what she knew or remembered to have happened. In revising the narrative she found that, once she gave herself permission to treat the real-life people as characters in a novel, they came alive. She based her imaginings of inner lives and spoken words on truth, on what she knew about the people, and with that awareness she took creative license.

“I didn’t know how much I didn’t know until I started to do this kind of writing,” Wood said of moving from fiction to memoir.

Once Wood had finished reading from the text, the room was filled with questions and comments for the author, and she generously responded with illuminating answers and entertaining anecdotes.

One guest asked, “Did you deliberately place the scene where the family uses the last sheet of paper (of the supply remaining from her late father’s work at the paper mill) where it is, about halfway through the book?”

“I’m sure it was very deliberate but can’t remember now why or how,” Wood replied. “I didn’t change the chronology to the story. Writing memoir is a lot about what to leave out.” Wood then shared a story from a recent reading that an audience member told about herself and her husband. They both planned to read the book, and it was the woman’s turn first. As she was reading in bed one night she began sobbing, and her husband asked her why she was crying. She replied, “They just ran out of paper!” Of course, being so out of context, the husband couldn’t understand why that would be so tragic. Wood added, “At the time, I didn’t even realize that you could actually go and buy paper!”

Another group member asked, “Why did you title the book, When We Were the Kennedys?”

“The book is not just about our family, but about when America was a certain way at a certain time,” Wood said. “It was a time of endings and beginnings. (The assassination of the president) was the end of a kind of innocence for the country…when things were suddenly this way and not that way.”

Wood also said that before the book was published she had a drink with a friend who asked what the title was going to be, and “I told her the bad title I had in mind!” Wood shared. The friend was less than enthused and encouraged Wood to list some of the chapter titles. When she mentioned “When We Were the Kennedys,” the friend picked up on it and suggested she use that for the book title, with a subhead that included Mexico, Maine, to create intrigue from a couple of angles.

 

One guest shared that he grew up in Madison, a similar Maine mill town, and that he was “old enough to be (Wood’s) father.” His personal history contains many elements parallel to Wood’s—his father died when he was nine, just as Wood’s did; he himself worked in the mill; and his high school team played against Mexico. He praised the accuracy of Wood’s depiction of the inner workings of the mill in her book, and asked, “How did you come to such a depth of knowledge?”

“Thanks, I did a lot of research,” Wood said. A friend who worked in the mill (and who, incidentally, was recently laid off) was very helpful in describing the ins and outs of the process. In addition, by an interesting chain of events she ended up meeting one of late father’s coworkers. While working on a history of Rumford, the small Mexico Historical Society invited her to come and speak to them. Once she had finished her talk, one of the group volunteered, “You have got to talk to Bunny Carver! He worked in the mill and knew your father, and took his place when he died.” Wood went to Harry “Bunny” Carver’s house, and on greeting her at the door he said, “Oh, one of Red’s little girls!” (Red being Wood’s father’s nickname.)

In addition to providing her with information as to the workings of the mill, Carver gave Wood something even more precious. In sharing with her the reaction in the wood yard to the news of her father’s death that morning, he offered her a view into the story that she hadn’t even considered until that moment. She’d only been able to recall that day from her own 9 year-old experience – being in the house, people coming and going, the home filling with food and flowers. She’d never considered what those same hours had been like at the mill. “When my father was two seconds late that day, they knew that something dreadful had happened. My father was never late.” Carver filled in such details. “It was very touching to me,” Wood reflected.

Later in the discussion MWWC curator Cathleen Miller shared that she found in When We Were the Kennedys many similarities with her own story, growing up in a part of western Pennsylvania dominated by the coal mining industry. Wood agreed, saying, “Everywhere I’ve read with this book someone says, “This is just like my town,” referring to the presence of all kinds of various manufacturing, not just the paper industry. Wood has seen that “people are not only attached to their towns, but also to their industries. The industry itself feels like a person with influence over you.”

One guest was curious as to the reaction to the book by the Woods’ landlord and landlady, whom the story describes in detail.

“Their grandson now lives in their apartment and says that people have been going by to take pictures of the house.” This elicited quite a reaction from our group, and Wood went on to say more about this fascination with her childhood home. On her way to Haystack one day she stopped at the bookstore in Blue Hill, where the book has been heavily promoted. As she was signing stock for the shop, a couple from England who were great fans of the story explained that they had just made a pilgrimage to Mexico to see the house and town for themselves. Wood seemed quite surprised!

As the gathering was winding down, a question came from a visitor from the San Francisco Bay area, who referred to himself and his wife as Wood’s “unofficial publicists.” In commenting that she had shared a bit about how her fiction writing influenced this experience of writing autobiographically, he wondered how her memoir writing might influence her writing of fiction going forward. Wood replied, “I don’t know right now. I’ll have to see…writing characters in a memoir is a thousand times easier than creating characters in a novel. It took me half the time to write this, and I’m so glad I waited until I was older to write it. This is my favorite book and I’m glad I waited until I had the skill to do it.”

Currently Wood is working on a play, explaining, “I wanted to do something collaborative. I’m tired of working by myself. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet.” When asked if she would write another memoir, Wood said that she might write more about her sister Betty, who has developmental challenges. She loves to write about her, and recently published pieces about Betty in Reader’s Digest and Yankee Magazine.

When We Were the Kennedys is now in its fourth printing, and Wood has just received the 2012 May Sarton Memoir Award for best memoir by a woman writer published in the US or Canada. Congratulations, Monica!

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Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter: Bringing the stars home

October 2nd, 2012 by Catherine Fisher

This summer two grandchildren of Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter, one of the authors whose work is included in our archives, came into the cool from their island summer home to explore the materials in their grandmother’s collection. As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, such visits give us the welcome chance to pull collections from the shelves and explore what’s inside in a bit more depth than we usually have occasion to do. It’s always illuminating and often very fascinating, and this time was no exception.

As we lifted the lids from the boxes that day, we were swept into the glamorous worlds of the 1920s and 1930s stage and screen. Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter of Portland was a classically trained actor who performed on Broadway and in regional theaters in Maine from the 1920s-1940s. A highlight of her career was her 1923 role as “Elvira” in Booth Tarkington’s then new play, “Magnolia.” The comedy opened in Atlantic City at the Apollo Theatre and then ran on Broadway at the Liberty. Her large scrapbook contains mementos from the entire course of her involvement, from being recommended for an audition through to the final bows and reviews, and by all accounts she and the play were a great success. “Phyllis Schuyler played the part of an older and worldly sister with clever coquetry,” and, “Miss Schuyler is excellent in the role of coquette,” and “an excellent Southern flirt.”



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thaxter had married Maine Supreme Court Justice Sidney St. Felix Thaxter, and in the early thirties she shifted her acting focus to the greater Portland area and became involved in the promotion of regional theater as well, serving as president of the Portland Players, whose South Portland theater now bears her name.

From 1933:


And from 1949, showing Thaxter as both actor and also president of the Portland Players:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to her stage career Thaxter was also a journalist, writing two columns for the Portland Press Herald and contributing to the entertainment section of the New York Times. Her Press Herald column “Through the Stage Door with Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter” gave readers glimpses behind the scenes of the theatrical world and the latest news from the stage. The clippings show her engaging style — easy and conversational, speaking directly to the readers about what she’s going to discuss, what she experienced in gathering the material and what she hopes they will get out of it. One of her columns opens with, “Well, in seven days, I have seen 12 plays. I am rapidly approaching the saturation point. My mind is a kaleidoscopic mass of impressions and ideas. From the welter of these experiences, I hope to untangle something to present to you, the readers of this column.” As each piece unfolds, one really gets the sense of sneaking “through the stage door.”

Her large collection of playbills from 1930s-1960s productions in Portland, Boston and New York dazzle with great graphics and images of the popular actors of the day debuting plays and musicals that since have become classics: Polly Rowles in “Auntie Mame” (1957) and later, Angela Landsbury in the same role in “Mame” (1966); Tom Bosley in “Fiorello!” (1957); Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert in “West Side Story” (1958); Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn in “The Man in the Dog Suit” (1958): Walter Matthau and Art Carney in “The Odd Couple” (1965), and Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight!” (1966), among many others. (The ads in these programs — for girdles and cigarettes, automobiles and laundry detergents — are also historically interesting and graphically fun.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to her coverage of the theater, Thaxter also interviewed Hollywood’s greatest film stars for her Press Herald column, “Adventures in Cinemaland.” In early 1937, the newspaper invited readers to vote for their favorite movie stars and, once the votes were tallied, Thaxter was dispatched via jet plane to the Hollywood lot of Paramount Pictures for a whirlwind interviewing tour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The scrapbooks in her collection overflow with interview clippings and glossy on-location photos of Thaxter with the likes of Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, John Ford, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Montgomery…the list goes on. In all instances Thaxter looks relaxed and at home, unassuming yet confident, enjoying her time with the actors in her mission to bring the magic back home to her readers. And judging by their smiles and comments in the clippings, the luminaries of MGM seem tickled to be with Thaxter, too.

With Gary Cooper, on the set of “Souls at Sea,” 1937:

 

 

With Big Crosby, on the set of “Waikiki Wedding,” 1937:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Myrna Loy on the set of “Parnell,” 1937

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Shirley Temple and John Ford on the set of “Wee Willie Winkie,” 1937:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In her article on Bette Davis, Thaxter reports: “Would you like to know what Bette, who weighs all of ninety pounds, ate for lunch that day? Well — I’ll tell you. Five frankfurters. She said she was hungry.” On the set of “Kid Galahad,” 1937:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Joan Crawford (whom Thaxter liked, despite what others said of her,) on the set of “The Last of Mrs. Cheney,” 1937:

On Clark Gable, who was filming “Parnell” with Myrna Loy, Thaxter writes:

“I watched Clark getting a manicure through the window of a barber shop and finally caught him. “Well,” I exclaimed, “I’ve been trailing you like a bloodhound all over the lot and I’m exhausted.” Gable laughed and led me to his dressing room…I told him that the votes in Portland called for me to interview him and I was going to do it or die in the attempt…”

She liked Randolph Scott, who was on the lot shooting “High, Wide and Handsome,” saying, “Scott is a gentleman, very delightful — a little shy but very courteous and sweet.”

And, despite Thaxter’s physical assessment of her in the headline of her installment on Ginger Rogers, Thaxter reports that, “As to her love life, of course, a girl as thrilling as Ginger has had love affairs aplenty. At the moment I would say that her heart interest was that handsome charmer Cary Grant. He appeared at the set that afternoon to visit. I also saw them together at Ed Horton’s party. They looked and acted infatuated…I can only say that to your reporter it smelled of orange blossoms.”

In addition to getting the inside scoop from the actors on her list, she also covered for her readers the transcontinental flight itself, and the behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts of makeup, camera work and direction. As a keen observer of the details Thaxter gained an appreciation for the filmmaking process: “Metro Goldwyn Mayer has 24 sound stages where inside scenes are made. Three thousand people, exclusive of the actors, are employed on this lot alone. Everything is worked out very carefully before a picture starts and the production is made with the minimum of confusion. When you have seen a picture being photographed and watch the care with which the scenes are taken and retaken – you look with new respect at the finished product which represents much imagination, so much care, precision and ingenuity. What seems like magic is in reality the result of the perfect functioning of many brilliant minds.”

“If you look closely you will see me, very small, giving my pass to a big policeman. This is the way I felt when I first went through the studio gates.”

Again, in all cases, her style of speaking directly to her readers is so effective, using phrases such as, “I wanted to get you some pictures, so…” and “I’ve tried to make you see…” that you know she never loses sight of her audience or her mission as their eyes and ears in taking them on the set in Cinemaland. And as to how this exciting career fed her as well as her readership, she writes in an article on Katharine Cornell that,

“One of my reasons for not minding the fact that I grow a year older each year is that as the years roll on I am able to watch the progress of the gifted people of my generation.”

Thaxter also was able to watch the progress of her daughter, Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter, as she became a successful film actress (working with a number of the stars whom Thaxter had interviewed,) who is especially remembered for her role as the mother of Christopher Reeve’s “Superman.” She also acted in episodes of “Twilight Zone,” “Medical Center” and “Barnaby Jones.” She died this past August at the age of 92. And her daughter (and Thaxter’s granddaughter), Skye Aubrey, has had a long and successful acting career in television.

It may seem as though, by the length of this post, that the entire collection has been covered here, but this is just a smattering! We invite you to come in and see if your favorite stars of the stage and screen might be found within this collection that gives such a rich and broad view of the productions of the time — the themes and subjects, the romance and glamor, the creativity and hard work — both in the theater and on the screen.

Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter. Through the stage door and the Paramount gates. Bringing the stars home.

 

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Just the Thing: Recent Acquisitions at the MWWC

August 8th, 2012 by Catherine Fisher

“I am a Thing-finder, and when you’re a Thing-finder

you don’t have a minute to spare.”

Pippi Longstocking, in Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

 

Might you be, like Pippi, an avid collector? Is there a certain breed of stuff that you treasure, and thrill to whenever a fresh one of its kind falls into your grasp? A pristine addition to the classic stamp collection, maybe? A rare bit of Elvis memorabilia? How about fine art at an auction, or fridge magnets on vacation? Or maybe you’re one who likes to bag hurricanes, volcano eruptions, or 4,000-footers. Or maybe you just like BOOKS.

Even if you’re not one to stockpile anything in particular and your home looks more like a Zen temple than the thing-finder pad of Pippi Longstocking, still I’ll bet you can muster an imagining of what the collector’s thrill feels like. To capture and cherish something really special, and then share it with others who are equally (or even more) jazzed by it…it’s a happy pursuit that can be as much about the communion of the likewise-interested as it is about the treasured objects themselves.

Here at the Collection, collecting (and protecting) is, of course, a large part of what we do. And even though that’s the case, and has been so for over fifty years, adding new gems to it never gets old. It’s still delicious to slit the packing tape on a plain, cardboard shipping box, lift out a brown paper bundle, peel away its wrapper and release a beautiful book we’ve been expecting. Sometimes it’s old and rare, sometimes it’s fresh and new, and always it’s the one we’ve been waiting for.

And what could be even better? Picture this, if you will: It’s afternoon in our lovely, sunny space, and an author (or an author’s descendent, or agent) comes in and says, “I’ve got a bunch of boxes in the back of my car. Where should I park to bring them in?” Or, “It’s finally here! The book I was researching here last year finally came out this month. Here’s a copy for the Collection.” Or, someone arrives and announces, “We found these papers and notebooks in our barn. Would you be interested?” These are great moments. And equally as enjoyable is the visit to an author’s home to collect her papers, where we get to listen to her talk about her writing life, her home life, and her plans for her next chapter. Just yesterday we traveled to York where Rose Safran generously passed on to us the archive of her art-related journalism, unpublished book manuscripts, commercial work and teaching materials. What a stimulating morning!

Whether it’s books, notebooks, manuscripts or letters; photographs, memorabilia or all of the above; whether it’s by an author who’s well- or little-known, living or deceased; whether it’s a gift or a purchase acquired in person or by mail…new additions to the Collection always feel to me like the addition of fresh cells to the body, key pieces in assembling the whole of what we can and want to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On display right now at the Collection are some of the items we’ve recently acquired, both manuscript material and books. Here is a brief synopsis, with hopes that you’ll visit and enjoy them for yourself.

Manuscript material and artist’s books

Theodora Kalikow

This new collection of professional papers of the recently-retired University of Maine, Farmington president, spanning 1974-2012, includes her scholarly articles, presentation papers and organization materials; published reviews and newspaper articles; correspondence; awards; interviews with Kalikow and a bound student thesis on her. Kalikow is taking over as the next president of the University of Southern Maine, just a day or two after her retirement from Farmington!

Rachel Carson

These additions to our Rachel Carson collection, dated 1951, 1962-1963, include correspondence between Carson and literary agent Joan Daves; a photograph of Carson by Erich Hartmann; 2 Carson postage stamps; a copy of her commencement address to Scripps College; and an exhibition catalogue.

Grace M. Calvert

A 1915 daily diary of Grace M. Calvert of Park Street in Portland has been added to our Manuscript Volumes collection, which includes diaries, ledgers and daybooks, copy books, scrapbooks, albums and other personal volumes of unpublished women writers of Maine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lael Morgan

Adding to the wealth of books and periodicals previously given by this journalist/photojournalist who has covered Alaska since the early 1960s, this extensive new acquisition contains over fifty years worth of clippings, notebooks, correspondence, sailing logs, book manuscripts, photographs, videos, slides and memorabilia, including her gold pan!

 

Sissy Buck

We acquired this beautiful artist’s book, She Tells Me, from Cumberland Foreside artist Buck along with another of hers entitled Scarlet Strawberry Runners (Angus). These join a third already in our collection, In Her Memory Garden.

 

Barbara Goodbody

We received Salutation to the Dawn as the generous gift of this Cumberland Foreside artist. The accordion fold book contains original text and eight vibrant photographs of the sunrise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katy Perry

A large amount of new material has been added to the collection of this Hallowell columnist and spans the years 1966-2012. Included are manuscripts and clippings of her articles in the Capital Weekly, Hallowell Register, Portland Press Herald and other publications.

 

Rose Marasco

Two framed photographs from Marasco’s “Domestic Objects” series have joined the sizable collection of her work already gracing our walls. We hope to follow the acquisition of Egg Diary and Sink Diary with more pieces from the series in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books

 

The earliest volume on display at the moment is the 1921 Journal of the Thirty-seventh Annual Convention of the Department of Maine Woman’s Relief Corps, Auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic at Portland, Maine, June 15 and 16. This slim book in a soft red paper cover records the general proceedings of the convention as well as the detailed reports given by various office holders, with a photograph of each woman accompanying her account.

 

 

Annette Vance Dorey’s Maine Mothers Who Murdered 1875-1925: Doing Time in State Prison explores the incarceration of 3 dozen female murderers in the Thomaston prison. Dorey, of the Androscoggin Historical Society and University of New Brunswick, presented on this topic at our Spring Academic Conference in March.

 

 

Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasures on and Off the Ice, by Erica Rand, Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College, is Rand’s depiction of her experience as a queer femme participating in the sport of ice skating, “a sport with heterosexual story lines and rigid standards for gender-appropriate costumes and moves.”

 

 

Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland 1900-1940, is a beautiful book by Libby Bischof, assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Maine, and Susan Danly, curator of graphics, photography and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art. This companion piece to their show at the museum last September explains how forsaking New York pressures for summers on the coast of Maine influenced personally and artistically modern artists such as photographers Paul Strand and Gertrude Kasebier, painters Marsden Hartley and John Marin, sculptor Gaston Lachaise, and others.

 

Pionierin der Arktis: Josephine Pearys Reisen ins ewige Eis might not be destined for repeated use by visitors to the Collection given that it is in German, but it was very exciting for us to receive it in the mail one day, as its very personable author Cornelia Gerlach traveled from Germany to explore the Josephine Peary Collection at the MWWC for her research. We had such a great time with her.

 

 

Three books of poetry are included in the display, just a fraction of those we have added in the last six months. The language of Alicia Fuller’s Tenants is gritty and real as it comes up against and embraces daily life in all its raw imperfection; Drift: A Poem by Kirstin Hotelling Zona is a meeting of the pulsations of the earth body and the body human; and When No One is Looking, by Red Hawk pipik-w-ass (Carol Dana) paints the Indian Island experience of this Penobscot teacher, historian and conservator with both personal and universal strokes.

 

The three food-related books in the display add to the deliciousness factor of collecting in a more literal way. Baker’s Notes, published by the Scratch Baking Company in South Portland, discloses a few of their recipes and brings the reader into the warm, yeasty atmosphere of the bakery in the wee hours of the morning. Wilma Redman’s Neal Street Cookbook achieves a near-complete compilation of her old New England recipes that have stood the test of time and make one proud to be from around here. And Notes from a Maine Kitchen: Seasonally Inspired Recipes by Kathy Gunst is a literary cookbook that combines personal essays, recipes, cooking tips and foraging information. And in addition to some fun food activities, The Rhythm of Family: Discovering a Sense of Wonder Through the Seasons by Amanda Blake Soule and Stephen Soule offers fresh, creative activities families can enjoy in harmony and connection with nature.

 

Of course, a display case and side table only allow us to exhibit a small sampling of the treasures that have been gathered into the Collection in recent months, but we’re always more than happy to pull out other precious gems from the archives and let them shine. Because after all, show and tell is definitely one of the best parts of thing-finding, don’t you think?

 

 

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New Rachel Carson Acquisitions

May 16th, 2012 by Catherine Fisher

This month Curator Cathleen Miller purchased five items to add to the small (but growing!) Rachel Carson manuscript collection at the MWWC. Three of the acquisitions originate around the time of the September, 1962, publication of Carson’s Silent Spring, her groundbreaking book that documented in detail for the first time the effects of pesticides and insecticides on the natural world. As 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this work, which is widely credited with giving birth to the environmental movement in this country and around the world, we are particularly excited to make these items available for research here at the collection.

Already in our collection…

In adding to the professional portrait of Carson in our holdings, these new acquisitions lend balance to the more personal items of correspondence from that period that we already have, dating from 1963 to 1964 and contained in the Elizabeth Coatsworth collection. These intimate letters and notes from Carson to Maine poet and novelist Coatsworth and Coatsworth’s husband Henry Beston have given insight into the last months of Carson’s life (she died on April 14, 1964), showing her determination to keep moving despite being treated for the bone cancer that made her joints ache and walking difficult:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then, shortly after Carson’s death her longtime friend Dorothy Freeman wrote to Coatsworth and Beston:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now, adding the professional to the personal…

It was just about a year before the earliest of these letters that Carson’s Silent Spring had been published and she was caught in an infamous media storm and chemical industry backlash. In June of 1962, before the September release of Silent Spring, Carson delivered the commencement address at Scripps College in Claremont, California. The date coincided with the publication in the New Yorker of the first of three articles excerpted from the forthcoming book and her speech, entitled “Of Man and the Stream of Time,” emphasized many of the same issues and ideas put forth in Silent Spring. Our newly acquired copy of this address, published by the Scripps College Bulletin, is accompanied by a signed note signed from Carson to one of her literary agents, Joan Daves, on Carson’s personal West Southport, Maine, stationery, indicating she was sending it along for copyright registration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the speech, Carson says to the young graduates of that women’s college:

“Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature…now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune–it may well be our final tragedy–that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself.”

A page from each the foreword by Frederick Hard, Scripps College President, and the speech itself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second item from that period that we have added to the collection is a photographer’s print of the iconic photograph of Carson taken by Erich Hartmann in Southport, Maine, in the spring of 1962. Posing for the jacket portrait that would accompany her serious warning to humankind, Carson leans against a dead tree, wearing binoculars, with her hands in her pockets, looking at the camera with what seems a confident gravity. Together with this photograph we acquired two 17 cent Rachel Carson postage stamps, bearing an illustrated version of the same Hartmann image and issued in 1981 as part of the Great Americans series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The same Hartmann image shown above also is used on the cover of our third acquisition from that period, a pamphlet for an exhibition that took place at the Patten Free Library in Bath, Maine, the following year, August 19 to September 20, 1963. The inner two pages reprint “The Enduring Sea” from Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (published in 1955), and the rear cover has a full page of biographical notes. Our copy of this pamphlet is especially interesting as it has two handwritten corrections made in ink to Carson’s list of honors, possibly made by Carson herself and passed along to her longtime friend and agent, Joan Daves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But a decade earlier…

As exciting as these new acquisitions from 1962-1963 are, perhaps even more intriguing are the earlier items Cathleen purchased: two pieces of 1950-51 correspondence from Carson to the aforementioned literary agent Joan Daves, who was the professional partner of Carson’s primary agent, Marie Rodell. Exciting on the face of it, these additions turn out to be even more interesting than one might gather at first glance because of the bit of professional drama at which they hint.

In 1950, Carson was working as a marine biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Woods Hole, MA, getting ready to publish her second book, The Sea Around Us. In her biography entitled, Rachel Carson: The Life of the Author of Silent Spring (available at the Maine Women Writers Collection), Linda Lear describes the story of a project idea hatched by Carson but never brought to fruition. Fascinated by a collection of illustration plates housed in the Fish and Wildlife Service Library created in Mexico by American ornithologist, illustrator and artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Carson had the idea to create a catalog of the images and write an extended introduction to the book. Carson described the project to Daves’ professional partner, agent Marie Rodell, who agreed it was a good idea. She then solicited and received support from the Fish and Wildlife Service, but soon discovered that permissions from the Fuertes estate to reproduce the illustrations and payment for the rights were required. Carson contacted Fuertes’ daughter, Mary Fuertes Boynton, and all seemed good at first until, as Linda Lear explains,

“By winter of 1950, Mary Fuertes Boynton, the painter’s daughter and heir, had made it clear she intended to play a larger part in the project than Carson had anticipated. Carson’s efforts to clarify ownership of the paintings and her use of Fuertes’s correspondence to describe the context of each one had apparently alarmed Boynton, who now planned a biography of her father.”

This brings us to the first piece of correspondence from Rachel Carson to Joan Daves that we acquired from this time, a handwritten 1950 Christmas greeting card in which Carson refers to this shift, saying, “It seems there are many difficulties to be straightened out in the Fuertes matter, but perhaps something will come of it, after all.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But hopes for this project were to unravel even further for Carson, as Lear explains:

“At the end of March (1951), Rachel had written Mary Boynton that Harper had agreed to publish the Fuertes bird paintings in the fall of 1952. Boynton unexpectedly replied that she had decided to edit the book herself since she no longer considered Carson the best choice of author or editor because she had not known Fuertes…

“Boynton not only fired Carson from a project she had initiated but had the audacity to write Carson’s boss, Fish and Wildlife Director Dr. Albert Day, informing him of her decision to remove Carson. Boynton gave no other reason for her change of heart except to quote the opinion of one of her father’s ornithologist friends, George Sutton, who had asked, ‘What does Carson know either about Fuertes or about birds?’

“Rachel was furious. On April 3 she responded to Boynton.

‘It is too bad you have waited until now to make your true position known. The choice of an author for any such book is seldom determined by the desires or willingness of prospective writers to undertake it, and in this instance the decision is in the hands of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the publishers. I do not feel that further discussion of this subject between you and me will serve any useful purpose.’

This brings us to our second piece of newly acquired correspondence from Carson to Daves, a typewritten, signed letter dated July 30, 1951. In it Carson describes her early discussion of the plates with Boynton and refers to what has become now an ongoing conflict, saying, “If Mrs. Boynton does publish her book, she will undoubtedly use some illustrations from her father’s work, but that doesn’t seem to be anything to be concerned about.”

In this letter Carson sounds unworried, but the way Lear describes it, as the controversy wore on Carson was loath to let the matter rest:

“…Rachel was stunned by Boynton’s inexplicable change of mind. She despised personal confrontations, but she was angry, too, and stood her ground, refusing to abandon the book…Considering all the pressures on Carson with the imminent publication of The Sea Around Us, her pending leave of absence [for a Guggenheim fellowship], and the need to begin work on the shore guide, it would have been simpler if she had walked away from the Fuertes project. But Boynton’s insinuations insulted Carson’s reputation as a naturalist and a professional writer…The controversy with Boynton and the Fuertes estate dragged on until February 1953, at which point Carson bowed out. The Fish and Wildlife Service continued adjudicating its interest in the paintings, but by then Carson was committed to other more important literary efforts. In the end, the primary reason Rachel dropped the Fuertes book was her personal distaste for any further dealings with Mary Boynton.”

 The references made to the Fuertes project in these two new additions to our Rachel Carson collection hint intriguingly enough at the matter to prompt one to dig a bit for the more complex story behind them. Illumination of this professional conflict sheds important light on the character of Carson at this early stage in her literary and ecology career, showing a strength and determination that would serve her in her personal health battles and see her through conflict on a much larger professional scale, with the eventual publication of Silent Spring.

 

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