The quickest way into West Cemetery, the bone yard where Emily Dickinson lies buried in Amherst, Massachusetts, is to walk up a short driveway between Ren’s Mobil gas station and a snug row of shops.

Then you scramble onto a retaining wall and duck under a chain loosely strung across an unmarked entrance. Around the corner, on a busy bypass road, lies the cemetery’s main entry point but this one, close to the center of town, is the gate that Emily, as a girl, lived beside.

During Emily’s most impressionable years, from age 10 until she turned 25, the budding poet could, and did, look up from her front stoop to watch many a “Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!,” as she put it, wander past the front door.

Tutored early and often in the ways her neighbors mourned and toted loved ones to the tomb, Emily’s death obsession appears, in that light, quite natural. While other Amherst girls dreamed of walking the aisle in wedding white, Emily was concocting her own “Dark Parade.” By the time the famous poet “heard a fly buzz when she died” – 125 years ago this month – Emily Dickinson had her entire funeral planned.

She surprised everyone when this prominent, wealthy Protestant Yankee chose six immigrant men to be her pallbearers. There was a big backlash against immigrants at the time so giving them star billing, well, her family wasn’t exactly overjoyed. Cousin Eudocia Flynt expressed the root cause of everyone’s shock and dismay: “taken to the cemetery – by Irishmen, out of the back door, across the fields!!  Her request -.”

What may be most surprising about this is that three decades earlier Emily Dickinson sounded a lot like John Tanton and Roy Beck in their national crusade against immigrants. Emily claimed immigrants ought to be “scientifically” destroyed in order to leave “more room for the Americans.”

How did Emily Dickinson go from trumpeting ethnic cleansing to giving immigrants star billing in her funeral? Why did she change (and is there hope for the Tantons, Becks, and members of the Georgia, Utah, and Arizona Legislatures)?

Strangely enough, for someone who has become famous as a recluse, it was daily and sustained proximity at home with immigrant domestic workers that improved her attitudes.

Over the decades, the former “Belle of Amherst” became a home-centered writer who withdrew from interaction with her social peers. There, in her kitchen headquarters, Emily Dickinson sought a social environment more comfortable and accepting.

She found literary sustenance through gardening, baking, and close relationships with her family’s maids, stable hands, and gardeners (not as close as CA’s former governor though) . In the course of Emily’s flour sifting, blending ingredients, tying up plants, pinching back, she often conversed with family laborers – including future pallbearers, Dennis Cashman, Tom Moynihan, Dennis Scannell, Stephen Sullivan, and Pat Ward. (There’s something to be said here for the edifying effects of live-in domestic service.)

In the case of laborer Tom Kelley, honored as her chief pallbearer, Emily even allowed herself to cry on his shoulder one distraught afternoon. More often than not she could found “making a loaf cake with Maggie” – her long term immigrant maid whom Emily Dickinson described as “warm and wild and mighty.” Fans of the PBS series Downton Abbey, or the revived Upstairs, Downstairs, have seen many examples of such warmly enmeshed and dependent associations.

If the natural world of gardening and the daily life routines – elbow to elbow with immigrant servants – inhabited Emily Dickinson’s language like a live root system, perhaps these conditions also freed her to go against norms – of poetic form and prevailing attitudes. Given these formations, Emily Dickinson’s pallbearer choice was an enlightened and, perhaps, inevitable revision.

If you ever find yourself hopping over the links of chain behind the Amherst Mobil station and adjacent brick storefronts, you might search out, within 20 or 50 feet of Emily’s family plot, the graves of Dickinson family retainers: Horace Church, Wells and Amos Newport, Henry Jackson to name a few.

Imagining a small funeral held 125 years ago – for the poet who “selected her own society – then – shut the door” – be sure to populate it with a handful of Dickinsons, several family friends, and a good number of present and former maids and laborers accompanied by their immigrant families.

On the day of Emily’s funeral, what struck the children of chief pallbearer, Tom Kelley, most strongly were the butterflies. Oblivious of what gulfs – of fiscal power or places of birth – divided the bearers from the borne, divided family grievers from servant mourners, the butterflies followed Emily Dickinson’s white coffin through barn, around gardens, and over meadows full of violets and innocents, notating drafts of air all the way to West Cemetery.

“The air was pinked with apple blossoms, long grass curved with dew when Stephen Sullivan and Dennis Cashman arrived with their shovels. Their pant legs and boots had turned wet-dark from the grassy approach. Shovels went in easy, up to the hilt. The deepest loam piled on top glistened with ruby worms. It had been 3 1/2 years since the last Dickinson was set down in this plot — the mother, an invalid. Had a stroke one year, almost to the day, after the Squire passed. Now the children — this the elder daughter no one saw much. Butterflies skittered among violets and plot markers by the time the two men squared out the grave, balanced shovels across their shoulder blades and headed from the cemetery. Then they went about the task of making openings in fences between the burial ground and Homestead.

“Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, would’ve pointed out where he wanted them to dig that Wednesday morning, May 19, 1886. Even if it was another task of many for his laborers, in the place whence Stephen and Dennis’s people came, it was an honor to dig a grave. Plus, Miss Emily had given them a grander role in that afternoon’s funeral as her bearers. How awkward might this have been for Austin? The Dickinson superiority held momentarily in check. She was gone now. After years of muffled laughter, of the gossip that flares in a village of which she had an inkling but pretended not to, her brother could set some things right. Here was the moment to make clear her standing and thereby silence the town. Austin added four of this highly placed friends as honorary pallbearers.”

- Opening of Chapter Five from Maid as Muse

It’s official. Ms. Margaret Maher – who, as maid, collaborated in the kitchen with Ms. Emily Dickinson – has entered the pages, so to speak, of Wikipedia.

Emily D. was drawn to the kitchen to write – when Margaret Maher was stationed there (hence, Maid as Muse).

That’s not all. This maid became the poet’s archivist and saved the poems.

Next entry?

Tom Kelley as Emily’s chosen chief pallbearer?

The list could grow of wikipedia entries on the poet’s Native American, white Yankee, English & Irish immigrant, and African American laborers, stablehands, maids, and gardeners:

Henry Hawkins, Rosina Mack, Dick Matthews, Eliza Thompson, Bettie Ann Brown Scott, Margaret O Brien, Dennis Scannell, Stephen Sullivan & many many more…

These unseen and undervalued people were vital to the making of Emily Dickinson’s art & the creation of our literary inheritance.

AF Wire: 4/1/11

The Northern California Book Awards chair, Joyce Jenkins, has just announced a new book award category: Nonfiction by Diminutive Writers (“Dim Writers” for short).

The NCBA was inspired to create these new sub-awards because of nominations this year for two books published by Dims: Aftershock, by Robert Reich, and Maid as Muse, by Aífe Murray.

This “exciting development,” noted Ms. Jenkins by email, recognizes that “smaller stature writers have challenges” that make writing and publishing a book a taller order.

For example, smaller writers have a harder time reaching the tops of their desks.

Due to leg aches (from dangling feet when seated), it is a surprising, but nonetheless wonderful, achievement that any Dim Writer is able to sit long enough to move beyond mastery of Flash Fiction or the Short Short Story.

This is to say nothing of Dims minding Ps and Qs given their location on the outer lands of a QWERTY keyboard.

NCBA Dim Writer nominee Aífe Murray pointed out that her book wouldn’t have qualified last year. “I was too tall” but now, measuring in at 5 foot, she is “grateful to gravity or aging” for making possible her book’s nomination.

One can imagine Tiger Mothers of the future holding back on hormone growth therapy or speeding the onset of menarche if their preschoolers show any literary promise.

In short, NCBA’s new award category has truly busted the mezzanine ceiling for all Dim Writers.

This week, representatives of NCBA and The New Yorker are hammering out an arrangement whereby excerpts from winning Dim works will appear in a series tentatively titled “Five Under Five” (a send down of their “40 Under 40” fiction series).

One New Yorker editor posited, sotto voce, that, if successful, this could lead to a sub sub set of the magazine’s humor writing competition — or a “Dim Wit Prize.” Ms. Jenkins could not be reached for comment.

The Northern California Book Awards will be held on Sunday, April 10, 1 p.m. in Koret Auditorium, in the San Francisco Public Library.The NCBA is handled Oscars style. May the best writer under five feet win. On second thought, at NCBA, all Dim Writers shine.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noted this posting’s date…

These five general non-fiction books (or General Verity Books as Richard Rhodes would have it)  have been nominated for the Northern California Book Awards – winning title to be announced Oscars style on April 10 at the San Francisco Public Library:

Winner-Take-All Politics:
How Washington Made the Rich Richer
—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Simon & Schuster

The Big Short:
Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis
W. W. Norton

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed
Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language
Aífe Murray
University Press of New England

Aftershock: The Next Economy
and America’s Future
Robert B. Reich
Alfred A. Knopf

The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges,
New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World
Without Nuclear Weapons
Richard Rhodes
Alfred A. Knopf

“I am delighted to tell you that Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language has been nominated for the Northern California Book Award in General Nonfiction as one of the best works by a northern California author published in 2010. Congratulations!” writes Joyce Jenkins, chair of the Northern California Book Reviewers.

This nomination puts a spotlight on Margaret Maher, Amos Newport, Eliza Thompson, Horace Church, Rosina Mack and their many fellow servants – & how unseen and undervalued people play vital roles in the making of culture.

Immediately following the awards, a public reception with book signing for all of the nominated books will begin in the Latino/Hispanic Room at the Library.

The event draws an enthusiastic audience, all focused on celebrating books and writers in northern California.

(As a nominee, I’ll be trotted onto the stage and if Maid as Muse wins I’ll read briefly.)

The awards are being held at the SFPL where the idea for Maid as Muse was first seeded & in the same room where the book received its San Francisco launch last April – sponsored by the Library and its African American Center (the audience of 55 wonderful people came out at 10:30 on a Saturday morning. Stalwarts!).

If you are reading this, consider it your invitation to attend!

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Plunge right through that lie!
Run the pickets to the statehouse,
A victory sure this time.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Fight for our families
Our Rights! People! – fight, fight, fight!
We’ll win this time

If it can happen in Tunis and Cairo, then let it happen in Madison

…and across the nation.

Democracy for America is a great idea. Let’s take back the country from the insurance companies and bankers – and their allies like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Hey Tea Party, move out of the way.

For too many years every day working Americans have contributed to the communal wealth of this country. We’ve given and what we gave has been hijacked.

If unions, pensions and health care — and what could be more precious than protecting our livelihoods, our elders, and the health of our families — are considered the culprit in runaway spending, let’s look at the banks and insurance companies that have their tight fists around our necks.

Let’s look at the billions that get sent overseas to nations that sit atop oil fields and exploitable markets.

Let’s open the books of the mortgage companies and the banks that have foreclosed families. Tell us what you owe us.

Meanwhile our schools are left to rot. What happened to critical thinking – better we have dulled minds so we won’t notice we are being robbed by the banks, the insurance companies, and the military propping up corporate interests abroad.

Scott Walker and Company want us to believe collective bargaining & unions are the problem? That’s our only line of defense.

Take a look at those budgets and make up your own mind. For my part, my heart is in Madison, Tunis, and Cairo.

Democracy abroad – yeah sure, good idea – but how sweet is the idea of the of democracy right here at home.

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Stand up, rebels, sing!
“Forward” is our driving spirit,
Rebel voices ring.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Raise her glowing flame
Stand, People, let us now
Salute her name!

PS

Paul Krugman on the Wisconsin power play

NPR on compromise

Latest Huffington Post on key union rights at stake

Friends Mikko & Emma with high school buds fighting on our behalf

Maid as Muse is one year old.

Remember how adorable one year olds are? Taking first steps on those sea legs, grinning with accomplishment. Proud to be upright.

It’s kind of like that for my book Maid as Muse.

Weathering the fickleness of the market place but still holding firmly to five stars on Amazon.

Beaming from the recent highly quote-able review: “lyricist of the material world” and so on…

Once a couple hundred more books slide past the register

it’s on to paperback -

Yes, turning 1 is grand

Spanking new review for the Emily Dickinson Journal by award winning poet and professor Daneen Wardrop with these highlights:

• She finds an Emily Dickinson we have never seen before. Murray does this by mixing modes of discourse, offering traditional archival research and interviews of descendents of Homestead workers, interspersed with occasional scenes of Murray’s imagining. These created scenes, noted and italicized, present an intuitive interpretation of the information she amasses.

• Servants affected the community’s social structure as a whole, as she demonstrates when she gives a dishy account of a town’s power play between two prominent families, the Boltwoods and the Dickinsons, both of whom fought to keep Margaret Maher as their employee.

• One of the most surprising discoveries of the book arises from Murray’s correlation of Dickinson’s pattern of poetic output not to waxing and waning periods of inspiration, but to the waxing and waning pattern of servants hired at the Homestead.
  

The review wraps with a comparison to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson:

“Perhaps not since Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson has there emerged a book concerning Dickinson that so successfully presents a unique form of literary history, creative and discursive.

Aficionados will want to read every appendix and footnote of this book that argues for the poet as a “home-centered” writer, her life shown in material, visceral moments.

A lyricist of the material world, Murray allows us new access to nineteenth-century Amherst, and in so doing prompts an original and valuable way of thinking about Emily Dickinson.”

Read the whole review

Thank you Daneen for bringing your poet’s ear and eye to Maid as Muse!

I’m washing sand from kale and blousy leaves of spinach for a winter greens soup when a notion comes into my head for a new writing project.

It drops like a gift and I’m reminded of how I compose best when my hands are busy doing something else.

Like the poem that must have been written when Emily Dickinson made coconut cake from a recipe passed on by Mrs. Carmichael.

I can see ED standing at the pastry board in the butter yellow pantry with a hammer and nail spilled off to the side, pieces of hard coconut, a tin grater, and snowy piles, hard shells swaying on the pastry board as her hand pushes coconut meat hard into ragged teeth.

The coconut cake recipe that ED copied onto lined stationary calls for

1 pound sugar

1/2 pound of butter

1/2 pound flour

6 eggs

1 grated coconut.

Absently grating when the words arrive in her head: “The Things that never  can come back” and she scrambles to turn over the recipe, Mrs. Carmichael’s recipe for coconut cake, to jot down:

The Things that never
can come back, are
several -
Childhood – some
forms of Hope – the Dead -

Back and forth, grating and writing, the words pile up:

Though Joys – like Men – may sometimes make a
Journey -
And still abide -

We do not mourn
for Traveler, or Sailor,
Their Routes are fair -
But think enlarged
of all that they will
tell us
Returning here -

“Here”! There are
typic “Heres” -
Foretold Locations -
The Spirit does
not stand -
Himself – at what -
soever Fathom
His Native Land -

The recipe, as copied down on the reverse side of this poem (with its original line breaks), calls for no leavening. Was it understood to put in a teaspoon of baking powder or soda? Or perhaps she knew to separate the eggs, beating the whites til they formed stiff peaks for folding into the batter?

I made them as cupcakes (leavening is less of an issue) with butter cream icing and dusted with flakes of toasted coconut. Lucky patrons of Copperfield’s and Diesel Bookstores ate them when I read from Maid As Muse last spring.

The modernized version of Mrs. Carmichael’s / Emily Dickinson’s recipe that I used to sustain the bookstores masses included

2 cups of sugar

1 cup of butter

2 cups of flour

6 eggs

1 to 2 cups of grated coconut

1 cup coconut milk.

Because I’m now excited by the new writing project, I’ll try the coconut cake recipe again with either separated eggs or baking powder or soda.

Keep cooking, I tell myself, and you’ll keep writing.

This must be why ED never gave over all the kitchen tasks to her maid (just the hardest ones) keeping some of the cooking to stir up the next poem.