As part of my investigation of Emily Dickinson’s “downstairs” world, I invited into that process the men and women who today clean the Emily Dickinson Museum, tend its gardens, and do necessary repairs.

I “interviewed” – long distance and via mail – landscape gardeners Judith Sherman Atwood and John R. Bator; house cleaners Richard Beauregard and Robin Dagenais; and carpenter Henry Paul Hebert.

I queried them about the nature of their work and how it resembled poetry or art.

They sent their responses which I used as the text for the hand-sewn artists books.

I sewed these books by hand as homage to Emily Dickinson’s own hand-made books of her poetry, the fascicles.

Unlike Emily’s hand made poem books, written out in pencil with a dozen or two of her own verses, Art of Service was run, in a limited edition, on Dale Going’s Vandercook press.

I then traveled 3,000 miles to Amherst to lead a public walking tour of the the Dickinson servants’ Amherst and meet in person Robin, Richard, Judy, John, and Henry.

Like Robin’s page, left, they each signed their pages of my copy of the book.

There were about 170 people in attendance at the first tour in 1997. We stopped traffic when we crossed North Pleasant Street, in downtown Amherst, enroute from St. Brigid’s to Emily Dickinson’s grave.

Richard, Robin, Judy, and John were key narrators along with a Dickinson servant descendant joined by over 40 members of her family – all descended from Emily’s chief pallbearer.

Next up: history goes live.

The quest early in the new year was to discover “what would Emily eat” if she were to travel to the Modern Language Association meetings in Seattle.

The schedule was arduous and the quest declared a success.

A great walker, Emily would have ambled up from downtown Seattle, across the freeway sending up gusts of tailwind that slightly mussed her hair, to Melrose Avenue. Here she entered the amber glow of Terra Plata.

I’m fairly certain she would have taken along her sister Vinnie and sister-in-law Susan so they could sample the blistered shisito peppers, roasted brussel sprouts (shallots, maple, rosemary), scallops, two faced bleu cheese, and the plumpest mussels that tasted hours from the sea. Kombucha? No, the three would have washed it all down with the best from a nearby micro brewery, say, within a 50 mile radius.

After strolling the waterfront, with umbrellas in tow, and grabbing brother Austin and colleague Elbridge Bowdoin, I have on good authority that they’d have dungeness crab cakes (over almond romesco, greens, and pickled raisins) at Etta’s. With a table by the window, they could watch the rain in the flicker of streetlamp. Single malt scotch for the men. Seattle is that kind of town.

A good night sleep and the desire for a bracing cup of tea with something hearty would send our small party, Emily in the lead, to The Crumpet Shop. Careful. The butter tends to drip down the arms. Lemon curd anyone?

Emily might just order a savory crumpet like Green Eggs and Ham named for a book of children’s poetry that will be written many years after her own poems have become posthumously famous. Imagine Emily skipping the brick streets of the Pike Place Market singing out lines from Dr. Seuss. A happy belly can do that  which is what results from an interlude at The Crumpet Shop.

After roaming the market and stocking up on pears and apples, the best of Washington’s orchards, Emily might need to refuel. What better place to do that but at Matts in the Market. Gilled octupus on a bed of olives and chickpeas. She’s not a shy eater. It’s a good place for her to compare their malmsey wine, made from Washington grapes, with the one she concocts in Amherst. How lovely it tastes with the bread pudding and salted caramel ice cream. By this point Emily is glad that the seamstress left some give in her seams.

Why not take a trip to Paris via Le Pichet, that cafe offering the deal real onion soup and the freshest salade verte with mustard and hazelnut vinaigrette. And ooh la la style. Did that waiter really have a belt of twine tied in a bow and a compass peaking through the buttoned opening of his shirt? Yes, this is the place Emily would take Abby Wood who would pick at a plate of olives marinées (with pastis, orange and garlic) while Emily would indulge her love of amandes à l’espagnole (almonds sautéed in olive oil with coarse sea salt). Bowls of milky coffee, peering at each other through the steam.

Helen Hunt Jackson, that dear old friend from Amherst, now of Colorado. A perfect place for a reunion, Seattle, perhaps by the site of the future space needle. Then, because Helen too is of good appetite, they’d wander south to Capitol Hill and into the back room of Cafe Presse to each tuck into a soul-filling and belly-filling platter of ragout of green lentils with kale, winter squash and brown butter-garlic cream. Helen ordered hers with the crispy duck confit leg. Emily, thinking fondly of her own chickens in Amherst under the care of her maid Margaret Maher, had her ragout topped with a farm egg. The yolk as yellow as the Colorado sun Helen declared. Not Seattle’s laughed Emily.

If Ms. Dickinson were making a jaunt to Seattle, would she have lunch at Cafe Presse on Capitol Hill?

How about that special elixir Seattle thinks it invented?

Would she drink espresso strong enough to “feel physically as if the top of her head were taken off?”

What do they put in that stuff she’s drinking?

How about those buttery dripping crumpets at the Crumpet Shop? Locavore tendencies? Terra Plata?

Emphatically yes.

My plan is to tour Seattle eateries and drinkeries where a poet would find inspiration of one kind or another.

My excuse is a talk I’m giving. So if you find yourself in Seattle on Friday, January 6, come hear me talk about the invisible but not the inaudible.

My illustrated presentation – “Warm in her Hand these accents lie” – is about the impact of her servants’ speech on Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

I’ll be in Room 303 of the Washington State Convention Center at noon describing how this poet was an auditory sponge who freely admitted to having a “vice for voices.”

As an artist she pulled language from every available palette including the speech of family, neighbors, friends, and servants.

We know she listened deeply because she seized the inner workings of other varieties of English heard in the intimacy of her own gardens and kitchen where she spent much of her time.

Emily Dickinson appears to have been strongly influenced by the Hiberno-English of Irish immigrant maids and laborers and the African American Vernacular English spoken by gardeners and stablemen who were descended from slaves.

Like all great artists, Emily Dickinson synthesized and improvised with the varieties of English which were her fortune. From her deep reading and listening, this home-centered writer forged a decidedly American poetic idiom.

Even when a maid freed her to run upstairs to write, though, she still gravitated back to the kitchen.

The good conversation, no doubt, and that’s where the food is.

Emily would definitely maximize a trip to Seattle by getting caffeine intoxicated and tucking into some great food. I plan to with or without her.

WWEE? And what will we eat? Le Pichet anyone? Matt’s in the Market?

Blair puts Emily Dickinson to music at Detroit’s Institute of Arts for The Big Read -

Tie the Strings to my Life,

My Lord,

Then, I am ready to go!

Just a look at the Horses -

Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest

side -

So I shall never fall -

For we must ride to the

Judgment -

And it’s partly, down Hill –

But never I mind the steepest -

And never I mind the Sea -

Held fast in Everlasting Race -

By my own Choice, and Thee –

Goodbye to the Life I used to live -

And the World I used to know -

And kiss the Hills, for me,

just once -

Now – I am ready to go!

-Emily Dickinson, written about summer 1862

poem appears with ED’s original line breaks

Printed here on the poet’s 181st birthday

I set out many years ago to find Margaret Maher

- to have this housekeeper’s life and longings come into focus.

- to see Margaret Maher in as sharp a focus as that of her employer Emily Dickinson.

Using mixed media installation I sought

to create a social moment

a place and time for two women – maid and mistress – to inhabit.

At first I couldn’t “see” Margaret.

What came first was the work environment

the tasks of everyday life

that Margaret and Emily were engaged in

- together and side by side .

It turns out I needed Emily

– to help jiggle the developer tray:

- run fingers over the imaging paper

until out of that murky fluid emerged the persons I was seeking.

When Margaret’s co-workers as well as Emily and her peers came forward:

Margaret, Betty, Dennis, Amos, Stephen, Henry, Tom, Charles, Delia . . .

I was able to pick them out as individuals – and find the story

And of course in doing so I found a part of myself.

How did I do this?

Through book-making and inviting into the investigation the men and women who today clean the Emily Dickinson Museum, tend its gardens, and do the minor repairs.

In the 1990s they included Judith Sherman Atwood, John R. Bator, Richard Beauregard, Robin Dagenais, and Henry Paul Hebert.

I conducted a long distance “interview” from California to their Massachusetts workplace with questions such as:

“what is the nature of your work?”

“how long have you done it?”

“what is the poetry or art of your work?”

Their responses became the hand-sewn books - Art of Service (covers pictured).

These books resembled Emily’s own hand-stitched poem books.

After Emily Dickinson’s household came under the capable hands of their first long term maid, Emily began grouping her poems and copying them into small booklets.

Emily bound these with thread that was hand-tied.

Or as maid Margaret Maher remembered years later:

They were done up in small booklets,

probably 12 or 14 tied up with a string

On a March afternoon in 1997 Art of Service came off the Vandercook press at  Dale Going’s Em Press in Mill Valley, California.

I took needle and thread to bind the pages of the first copy.

I cried when I held the first sewn book.

Margaret Maher and the many “unseen” Dickinson workers

came closer when Judy, John, Robin, Richard and Herbert signed my copy of Art of Service.

Come soon: Art of Service – part II …

Wow -

New endorsement of Maid as Muse by Peter Quinn – novelist, political historian, and foremost chronicler of New York City:

“Maid as Muse is a landmark work of historical revelation that unearths truths so glaringly significant it seems improbable they could have been ignored — yet ignored they were.

Generations of Emily Dickinson scholars and devoted admirers (myself included)  reveled in every facet of her life, studied every nuance, and savored every detail. But somehow the web of domestic relationships that sustained the Dickinson household and was so integral to the poet’s achievement was barely noticed and rarely remarked on.

Aífe Murray’s book changes all that. More than a breathtakingly original investigation that alters our perception of Dickinson’s everyday existence, Maid as Muse restores to the historical record the lives of those most often forgotten or passed over”—immigrants, women, the working class.

Murray opens our eyes (and our hearts and minds) to the complex interaction of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in the Dickinson home in Amherst as well as in the wider context of 19th-century New England.

She gives voice to the voiceless, and enriches and deepens our understanding of Emily Dickinson and the world of which she was part.

Maid as Muse is a rare, wonderful, and stunningly original book.

I am in awe of what Aífe Murray has done.”

Thank you Peter!

Peter is the author of Looking for Jimmy, Banished Children of Eve, Hour of the Cat, and the newly released The Man Who Never Returned.

Read his essay review – published in  Commonweal - of Maid as Muse, Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat, and Kim Nielsen’s Beyond the Miracle Worker.

We paused before a

House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground -

The Roof was scarcely

visible -

The Cornice – in the Ground -

Since then – ’tis Centuries -

and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the

Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity -

-Emily Dickinson, about late 1862 (with her original line breaks); last stanzas of “Because I could not / stop for death”

When I couldn’t find photographs or letters of the Dickinson servants – or other evidences of their having lived or breathed in the high ceiling interior of the Dickinson Homestead – I headed to the cemetery.

No more than fifty feet from the fenced plot, pictured below, where Emily is buried with her parents and sister in West Cemetery, I found the graves of housekeepers, stablemen, gardeners, and others who in some way worked for Emily’s family.

It was a February evening in 2008 and the sun was setting in Amherst when I found the grave of Betty Ann Brown Scott, an African American woman who had cooked for Emily’s famly in the early 1850s.

Not far away were the graves of the Jackson family. Patriarch Henry Jackson, a teamster by trade, made himself indispensable to three generations of Dickinson men.

And Charles Thompson who worked for the Dickinson men, college treasurers, keeping Amherst College boilers stoked and in any number of ways at the Homestead. His wife, also African American, served at Homestead parties.

Others, like laborer Tom Kelley, are buried not far away in a Catholic cemetery in Plainville (Hadley, Massachusetts) established by St. Brigid’s Church of Amherst.

Others still are buried in the Catholic cemetery in Northampton (St. Mary’s Cemetery) like gardener Horace Church’s family and maid-of-all-work Margaret Maher.

Somewhere on the grounds of St. Mary’s are the remains of Irish immigrant Margaret O Brien Lawler, the first long term Dickinson housekeeper.

Margaret O Brien arrived by 1856 when the newly renovated and expanded Homestead – or the Dickinson family’s rise in the world – necessitated help.

She stayed until she married her way out of service, to Stephen Lawler, in October 1865 – to the dismay of one extremely active poet:

Besides wiping the dishes for Margaret, I wash them now, while she becomes Mrs. Lawler, vicarious papa to four previous babes. Must she not be an adequate bride? I winced at her loss, because I was in the habit of her, and even a new rolling pin has an embarrassing element, but to all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts

It took three years but the motivated – and frustrated – writer found a replacement for Margaret O Brien.

Her name was Margaret Maher but Emily Dickinson called her “Maggie.

In fact once Margaret Maher was a fixture of the poet’s household, Emily professed wanting to change her own name, taking her maid’s:

“‘Maggie’ is a warm name. I shall like to take it.”

The Lamp burns sure – within -

‘Tho’ Serfs – supply the Oil -

It matters not the busy

Wick -

At her phosphoric toil!

The Slave – forgets – to fill -

The Lamp – burns golden – on -

Unconscious that the oil

is out -

As that the Slave – is gone.

-Emily Dickinson, written in about the latter half of 1861

The 2010 book about Emily Dickinson’s housekeepers, stablemen, gardeners, and laborers – Maid as Muse -  is part of my larger mixed form project – Kitchen Table Poetics – realized as installation, performance, maps, poetry, essay, artists’ books & book.

My silkscreened Japanese baseball shirt, shown here, with text and clothespin is one piece from Kitchen Table Poetics.

In this “book” the segments of a baseball shirt become pages.

(Nomura, see below, is the name of one of the world’s largest stock brokerages – appropriate for a family, the Dickinsons, who made money through shrewd investments and whose house smelled of rice straw. Tatami, used to wrap their imported goods, became Homestead floor coverings.)

Silkscreened on one page is of the Dickinson poem – above – “The Lamp burns sure – within -”

On the other side of the silkscreened shirt – or book cover - is an 1891 letter written by Dickinson maid-of-all-work Margaret Maher to Emily Dickinson’s cousin, Clara Newman Turner.

I once gave all my talks wearing this text-clothespin-baseball shirt – especially to talk about how the words “slave” and “serf” are elided in the above Dickinson poem.

Servant and serf had a sting in the 19th century for those who were domestic  or household workers.

It was akin to being a slave.

The poem’s narrator-writer, dependent on the invisible slave and serf, depicts the lamp as representing the creative force, that inner-driven spark which burns no matter what.

It’s not affected by ministrations of serf, the fuel itself, or the wick.

It is unaffected by a forgetful slave who in the end turns out to be not forgetful but escaped.

Toward the end of her life Margaret Maher, after over 40 years as a maid, no longer signed letters with her family name.

She identified herself by her employment and possession by her employer.

In the upper corner of the shirt you may be able to make out the words Margaret Maher used to close her 1891 letter:

Miss. Emily.s and

Vinnia.s

Maggie

Embedded in the sidewalk of New York City -

A plaque of this 1862 Emily Dickinson poem:

A word is dead, when it is said
Some say -
I say it just begins to live
That day

Where the word is scrubbed -

by Maid as Muse author Aífe Murray -

It just begins to live that way -

(Happy Labor Day)

I’ll never forget watching the news the day that fire hoses were turned on school children in Birmingham, Alabama.

Children my age were using non-violence to desegregate that city and in turn our country.

100 pounds of pressure. Children swept down the street. Knocked to the ground trying to withstand the force. Some hiding behind trees.

Then the police turned the attack dogs on them.

I suppose that’s why I’m disappointed – like Nelson George of the NYT - that the film version of Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help gives a “rosy glow” to the conditions and struggles of Jim Crow Jackson.

The aspirations of the main African American characters Aibileen and Minny aren’t central to the screen. Nor their context.

Okay something has to get sacrificed when adapting a book. But isn’t all of that key to these characters? Aibileen – the budding writer herself. The threats to life.

Underplaying the era’s violence soft peddles the courage it took for these two women to participate in Skeeter Phelan’s book. That was a big miss.

But what Mr. George doesn’t address in his fine NYT piece is the film’s clumsy handling of class – which Stockett addresses head on. Again, the movie misstepped.

The book scene I’m referring to is where, much to the shock of Minny, a white woman literally goes to bat for her. Celia lays out cold a man coming after Minny in a moment of class solidarity not bounded by the binaries of race.

The film cuts that scene – losing the complexity of their relationship – which creates a pivotal turn for Minny and leaves Celia to languish in full buffoonery.

Instead, the film version of Celia – of Sugar Ditch who can’t find her “place” in Jackson (Mississippi) society due to class – shows her gratitude by making a meal for her cooking-tutor Minny. A puff pastry piece. Too bad.

Here’s where it gets personal.

Full disclosure: One of my grandfathers was a socialist and the other was a Republican. One man worshiped Eugene Victor Debs and the other was disappointed when FDR became president.

Yet neither of these Irish American men were blind to the commonality they shared with others – whether they were new immigrants just off the boat, not yet speakers of English, or long time Americans of Native or African slave descent.

In fact both of my grandfathers fought politically on behalf of those common workingman interests. My grandfathers – socialist and republican – knew that their economic interests lie with their immigrant, Native, and African American neighbors.

My father was son of the socialist. As a teenager he witnessed accelerating KKK attacks on his family because his widowed mother dared to build a Catholic church in their New Jersey town.

My grandmother was not intimidated – even when the Klan attempted to burn her house to the ground.

The church she was intent on seeing built, that stoked KKK ire, still thrives in Bergen County, New Jersey. (My current writing project is about this story; my grandmother pictured right and below.)

As a result of his father’s socialism and his mother’s defiance of Klan racism, my father’s long life was animated by civil rights. He became another white working class civil rights activist. (My grandmother, uncle, and father L-R pictured below.)

That’s why I have a personal stake in not losing the scene where Celia downs the intruder about to attack Minny.

We need to see that – we white people need reminding – while the racist right wing normalizes itself in US and European politics.

I don’t want to forget the civil rights struggle – extreme acts of courage – or the context to The Help.

Thanks to my thoughtful son, who culled them for me, I’m making my way through the 14 episode PBS documentary Their Eyes on the Prize.

That’s my antidote for the film’s oversights and the existence of Marine Le Pen, John Tanton, racist Norwegian massacres, and groups like American Coalition for Immigration Reform.

Like a tree that’s standing by the water . . .

Stood Up to be Counted against the Klan