There was a reward at the end of the arduous journey by freight elevator.

It was the world premiere of An Emily Dickinson Sense Surround which had a sublime audience of nearly 50 New Yorkers.

With LitCrawl NYC programs in hand, those game literature-seekers braved long white echoing corridors on the way to the 7th floor at 195 Chrystie Street, HQ for ArtStar Gallery arriving to:

A very different take on that literary super-star Emily Dickinson…

Figs and flowers to smell and touch,

Emily’s cake recipes – and poems that resembled recipes – to listen to,

Coconut cake – from Emily Dickinson’s family recipes – to taste,

While listening to the poet’s food-inspired and more guilt-trippy letters,

Downing of old fashioned apple cider as if pressed in Emily’s home kitchen (well, it was hard cider at Emily’s house),

And singing along with songs from her own playbook.

The crew providing the sensate materials to the lit-mad crowd: Marta McDowell, Cindy Dickinson, David Giovacchini, and Aífe Murray.

Thank you co-sponsor Emily Dickinson International Society; LitCrawl NYC volunteers including Suzanne Russo and Sinéad Cloughley; ArtStar.com’s Chrissy Crawford; Documentarians Tom Good and Nadja Good; and the kind support of Michael Radetsky and Lois Giovacchini.

Wow! LitCrawl NYC really popped tonight. Photo proof coming…

Next up NYC: Tenement Talk 9/18 this Tuesday when Emily D. shows up with her maid Margaret Maher. We think it will be Downton Abbey meets The Tenement Museum.

Two Manhattan events spotlight Emily Dickinson’s daily domestic life.

Saturday, Sept 15 at 8:15 p.m.  (ArtStar
195 Chrystie Street #700C) as part of the NYC Lit Crawl:

An Emily Dickinson Sense-Surround

Meet the Poet as Gardener, Baker & Musician on her Homestead Farm. What did Emily Dickinson see, smell, taste, touch, and hear in the act of creation? Experience the poet’s world by listening to music she played & poems she wrote — with aroma, touch & tastes from kitchen and garden.

With horticulturist Marta McDowell, historical musician David Giovacchini, the Emily Dickinson Museum director of interpretation Cindy Dickinson, and writer-baker Aífe Murray. Co-sponsored by the Emily Dickinson International Society.

Tuesday, September 18 at 6:30 p.m. (103 Orchard Street) for a  Tenement Talk where the Tenement Museum meets Downton Abbey.

A writer-to-writer investigation of the creative process and its interplay with domesticity and intimacy using Yankee poet Emily Dickinson and Irish immigrant maid, Margaret Maher, as signature figures.

We’ll meet these two women in the kitchen where together they cook, wash dishes, and write. In the rarely seen female zones, voices and culture press one upon the other to astonishing effect.

How does the figure of an immigrant maid in Emily Dickinson’s story alter our notion of the poet at work?

With award-winning novelist Kathleen Hill in conversation with writer-baker Aífe Murray. Co-sponsored by Glucksman Ireland House.

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“Can I come in costume?!!”asked Library Commission President Jewelle Gomez.

“Of course,” I said, “Some readers will probably wear white — or (fake) fur. You know, like Emily’s dog Carlo.”

We were talking about San Francisco’s first Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon to be held 12-1-12 at the SFPL – for the poet’s 182nd birthday!

If the president of the San Francisco Library Commission is planning to dress up for a chronological reading of Emily D’s opus, you can too.

Come for the all day read of ED’s poems on Saturday, December 1. Your sponsors – Litquake, the Emily Dickinson International Society, and the SFPL – will have copies of the complete poems on hand.

No experience necessary!

Join us in the Hispanic / Latino Rooms after 10 a.m. and all day on Saturday, 12-1-12.

Volunteers needed to spread the word & help on marathon day. Contact Aífe: marathon [at] aifemurray [dot] com.

Updates here, for now, and -soon- on FB, Twitter, and sponsors’ sites.

Good poetic karma!

Thanks Kevin Killian for the story – told at the Adrienne Rich memorial reading held in the SFPL Hormel Center last evening – about Kathy Acker and Adrienne Rich meeting for the first time.

It was at a fundraiser for Small Press Traffic in the 80s (see March 30, below).

“She hates me” Acker said of Rich when told they’d share the bill.

“She hates me” Rich said of Acker.

Face to face, meeting for the first time, prior to going on stage:

“I don’t bite–” said Rich.

I don’t bite,” said Acker.

“–Much, ” finished Rich.

And thanks to Ali Liebegott and Kevin for reminding us about the 1974 National Book Awards.

Prior to the ceremony, Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker prepared a joint statement. Should any one of them be chosen, they’d read it together. Rich won the award and they accepted it jointly.

After Kevin read us that joint statement, there was a collective sigh in the Hormel Center, murmurs about 1974, that golden era – even by people like Ali who had only turned three but knew a good thing even then.

I am often asked how I wrote this book. The why and how entwined, are difficult to prise apart. With that comes other thoughts. Did the moments of grace instigate the project or feed it? What excites us and how do we cultivate that and how are we changed by a project of intense interest, and possibly, duration?

I can’t answer all of that in this moment but I can describe some beginnings. Who I was then. Where I am now. Two different people, almost, linked by a project of long duration.

My task initially: to uncover the “unseen and invisible” people in Emily Dickinson’s life and our own.

The story of  Emily Dickinson’s maid, and really any and all of her servants, had been mostly overlooked in 100 years of Dickinson scholarship and nearly a dozen popular biographies. Many key records that would have helped uncover the servant story had been deemed unimportant and were, in the course of time, discarded.

The seed for Maid as Muse came about when I standing in my local library’s reading room. I had slipped into the library stacks for a quick visit. I was the mother of a young child, worked full time, and was enrolled as a student in a creative writing program. I was always on the go.

Everything in those days was done in slivers of time. So naturally, given Emily Dickinson’s large opus, I was curious about how she had time to write. I knew she was a prolific baker and cook. How did she get out of the kitchen to write?

I opened a popular biography and the first thing I saw was a photograph of Emily Dickinson’s immigrant maid. Because my Irish grandmother had been in domestic service, I instantly felt connected to this photograph of Irish immigrant maid Margaret Maher. I was hooked.

(It was only later, that I found out that Emily Dickinson didn’t entirely get out of the kitchen and that she actually wrote poems in between baking with her maid!)

At the begining, in the library that winter afternoon, I needed to know the servant story but I was not a trained researcher. And this was going to require creative and devoted sleuthing…

-To be continued-

Hundreds of women students crowded into Hampshire College’s back dining room, circa March 1974, to listen to Adrienne Rich articulate “urgent dispatches from the front.” My politics were grounded in Rich’s poetry. I listened avidly, riveted by the public reading on a wintry night in Amherst, Massachusetts.

A dozen years later I helped put on a fundraiser for Small Press Traffic at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Adrienne Rich shared the bill with Kathy Acker and Susan Faludi. Right before this stellar event, I had a few minutes with Adrienne Rich to stumble over how important her poetry has been to my life.

Two dozen years after that I asked Adrienne Rich if she would read my book, a labor of love and reclamation, and possibly endorse it. She wrote back, from Santa Cruz, that she didn’t usually endorse books but she was intrigued and said yes she would do it. She wrote a beautiful endorsement of Maid as Muse.

She also wrote me a letter describing in greater detail what my book meant to her.  I cried when I read it. I didn’t know until that moment that all along I had been writing the book to her. After years of re-reading her essays and poetry, I was, with Maid as Muse, at last holding up my part of the conversation and responding back.

It felt like a miracle, after the lonely hours and years, to receive such a response from Adrienne Rich. I thought that making the book was the soul satisfying part. But now I understood what it is to have readers and without knowing it at the time I was writing the book to her as my ideal reader.

In the past several days the text messages and e-mails have flown back and forth. Renata wrote: “It would be nice to do something. Perhaps we could have our poetry group get together and each read a Rich poem” and Suzanne texted “I am building an altar in my living room. Do you know she is the first poet whose work I memorized?”

I was in Santa Cruz for a family get-together two days after Adrienne Rich passed away. On Friday, March 30th, I made my way to her house to pay my respects to the place on the globe from which, for several decades, she sent out her “news in verse.” Because she was Jewish, I left some stones piled on the ground beside the mailbox which is nestled in a tall hedgerow fronting her small bungalow. Then I cried.

Any foreigner living and working in Hong Kong  is entitled, after seven years, to become a permanent resident which is the closest thing Hong Kong has to citizenship.

Unless that is you are a foreign maid according to a new ruling by Hong Kong’s Supreme Court.

The lower court had earlier ruled that discriminating against foreign maids was unconstitutional and that they should be entitled to the same rights as anyone else living and working in this administrative region of China.

This issue has been fraught and has divided Hong Kong where most maids, who live-in and earn about $450 per month, are from other countries in Southeast Asia.

The primary reason cited by Hong Kong’s Supreme Court, for discriminating against maids, is that Hong Kong is too densely populated and it’s social services and educational institutions are already straining.

The expectation is that once granted permanent residency, the maids’ families would emigrate to Hong Kong and overburden the system. This Potential problem apparently justifies withholding permanent residency from these maids.

For now,  Hong Kong’s discriminatory policy against maids remains in place.

“Thomas Jefferson’s very existence was shaped and enabled by slavery. Slaves placed newborn Thomas in his cradle, and slaves comforted the former president on his deathbed” writes NPR for their March 11, 2012 program: “Life at Monticello, as his slaves saw it.”

One of these men and women, pictured left, is Monticello Blacksmith Isaac Granger.

“Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” is a new exhibition, created by the Museum of African American History and Culture and housed at the Museum of American History in Washington D.C. on the National Mall.

Rex Ellis, an associate director with the Museum, says “We are looking at Jefferson, but, more importantly to me, we are somehow acknowledging the 600 men, women and children who also were a part of Jefferson’s life.”

“Men, women and children who, in fact, made Jefferson’s life possible — which, in turn, gave them a part in shaping early American history.”

At Dickinson Homestead, I’ve identified the names of five dozen men and women who, through their labor inside and outside of the house, enabled the life of one of the world’s foremost poets.

They included Henry Hawkins,pictured to the left with his granddaughter Helen Pettijohn, who labored for the Dickinson family.

The men and women who made Emily Dickinson’s life possible were not owned. They were not slaves but hired hands as I’ve described in  Maid as Muse.*

They were African-American, Native American, white Yankee, and Irish and English immigrant maids, seamstresses, gardeners, stable hands, and general laborers.

As Mr. Ellis and his colleagues have created in the new exhibit, we learn more about these renowned figures when we learn about the other people who were an intimate part of their lives — and in doing so we learn something about ourselves.

* Maid as Muse is now on sale at 35% off. Details.

This is a great time to order a deeply discounted copy of Maid as Muse!

This 35% off deal is available directly from publisher University Press of New England.

It’s easy as 1-2-3 to save $12.25!

1. Go to the UPNE Maid as Muse page

2. Click “Add hardcover to cart”

3. Provide Discount Code WW 34 & Click “Apply coupon”

Your cost: $22.75 (plus shipping)

Not only does your purchase aid me in working off my advance but it will help speed Maid as Muse to paperback!

Become a Maid as Muse Facebook friend to keep in touch about this and upcoming gigs -

Including details on the Emily Dickinson Poetry Reading Marathon

coming to San Francisco!

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.