Old Town Hall lecture series in Salem

Via Bonnie Hurd Smith of HistorySmiths is news of a new lecture series in Salem sponsored by the Gordon College Institute for Public History. The lectures happen on the third Thursday of every month, November through May, at 7:30 at the Old Town Hall (where Cry Innocent is performed).

First up is author and historian Richard Francis discussing his 2005 book, Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience. Samuel Sewall's diary, which he kept for his own reasons and not with an eye to posterity, is one of the most well-rounded pictures we now have of life in Puritan New England and includes charming, light-hearted passages about his romantic courtships. But he is best known for his role as one of the nine judges during the witch trials of 1692, and was one of the only people to publicly apologize for his role in the hysteria. On his blog, Francis writes:

My biography of [Sewall] explores a complex and endearing human being, who participated in an injustice that reflected an essentially medieval view of the world, and who, by the time he embarked on an extraordinary series of courtships late in his life, had taught himself how to be a modern man.

Visit Old Town Hall Lectures for the complete schedule, which includes Smith speaking about Judith Sargent Murray on January 20.

New edition of The House of the Seven Gables

The recent Signet Classics edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables features a new introduction by Marblehead's Katherine Howe, friend of the NSLT and author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Not bad double-billing, Kate!

As she points out, one of Hawthorne's more notable, irascible comments is something he wrote to his publisher in 1855, "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash..." Sorry Nate, there's no stopping the scribblers.

Brenda Wineapple, author of Hawthorne: A Life, contributes a new afterward as well. (Her more recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, has been on my impossibly long to-read list for the last year.)

The Great Boston Poetry Marathon: Monday, October 11

Long time, no update—yikes! Life and work have veered away from the North Shore and away from the literary world over the past year (among other things, some travel writing and a return to school for Tufts University's museum studies program), but I'm still keeping my eyes open for events that north-of-Boston book lovers might be interested in.

Fortunately it's not too late to pass along news of the Great Boston Poetry Marathon, organized by Walter Skold of the Dead Poet's Society. The day-long event starts on Monday in Gloucester with readings of Vincent Ferrini and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, just to pick two poets who are featured in The North Shore Literary Trail. Check out the sunrise-to-sunset schedule here and join them for the long haul, or drop in anywhere along the path from Gloucester to Boston to Concord.

Here's a great post on National Geographic's Intelligent Traveler blog (nice!) about Dead Poets Remembrance Day (October 7) and some of the events organized around it, including the poetry marathon. The events planned at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire for Sunday, October 10, would be a great field trip from greater Boston.

William Lloyd Garrison, always getting people in trouble

This Sunday at 5 pm, Susan Lenoe and Lani Petersen from Andover perform "The Grimké Sisters, Turning the World Upside Down" at the Rocky Hill Meeting House on Portsmouth Street in Amesbury (map; a freewill offering to benefit local food pantries will be taken, according to the Newburyport Daily News).

The sisters, Angelina and Sarah, grew up in a wealthy South Carolina slave-owning family, but fought against it from an early age. Sarah often told the story that she was so upset at age five at seeing a family slave whipped that she tried to run away to a place where slavery didn't exist.

From the Newburyport Daily News:

Angelina herself was thrust into the spotlight of the abolitionist movement by William Lloyd Garrison who, as publisher of The Liberator in Newburyport, mistakenly published a letter from Angelina that was meant to be private correspondence.

In her letter, she urged the passionate newspaperman Garrison to continue his fight against slavery, stating, "The ground upon which you stand is holy ground. Never, never surrender it ... if you surrender it, the hope of the slave is extinguished."

While the letter resulted in the sisters' being driven from their communities, it also thrust them into the national spotlight, prompting their trip to the North and setting the course of their destinies.

The two ended up in Massachusetts, with Angelina being the first woman to address the state legislature and skillfully debating slavery supporters in Amesbury.

Angelina and Sarah's connection to the NSLT extends beyond Garrison. Their nephew Francis Grimké eventually married Salem's Charlotte Forten, who was the first black woman to teach white children at the integrated Epps Grammar School in the 1860s and who wrote extensively about her experiences teaching the Gullah-speaking children of freed slaves on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

• See a video of Lenoe and Petersen performing at the State House in 2008
• Read about the Grimké sisters on Wikipedia
• Read Sarah Grimké's An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States
• Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders by Mark Perry
  
• Historian Gerda Lerner has two Kindle books about the Grimké sisters on Amazon The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition and The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimke
• Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimke, 1828-1835 edited by Charles Wilbanks
• Read John Greenleaf Whittier's "Pastoral Letter," writen in response to a letter issued by the General Association of Congressional Ministers disapproving of the Grimké's pursuit of "perplexed and agitating subjects." The Association urged member churches not to debate slavery and warned that such inflaming passions threatened "the female character with widespread and permanent injury."
  

NSLT links

• Bonnie Hurd Smith on Salem's many self-guided walking trails, including ones about Nathaniel Bowditch and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as women's history and African-American history. Many of these tours are available to download for free from places like the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.
• North Shore Art Throb posts a review of Ralph Maud’s new biography, Charles Olson at the Harbor.
• The Boston Globe on the symbiotic marketing of Brunonia Barry's The Lace Reader and Salem tourism. (This is from last summer, but just turned up in RSS feeds today and is still an interesting tidbit.)

The Pioneer in Women's Rights Who Was on the Wrong Side of History

George Mason University's History News Network has an article about Gloucester's Judith Sargent Murray by Sheila Skemp, author of a new biography of the early agitator for women's equality: First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence.

Skemp makes the case that Sargent Murray's class bias is a large part of why she remains less known than someone like Mary Wollstonecraft, whose essay "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" receives more credit as an early feminist text than Murray's own earlier essays in The Gleaner. From Skemp's article:

It is no wonder, then, that virtually every historian familiar with her work sees Murray as a modern woman whose failure to achieve the recognition she deserved can be explained by the “fact” that her view of women’s rights was so far ahead of its time. A careful analysis of Murray’s conception of gender and class, however, reveals that her attitudes rested on a distinctly old fashioned intellectual foundation, and were already becoming obsolete. In some ways, she was not a forward-looking character at all—she was someone whom history would soon pass by.

Related: Gloucester's Sargent House Museum

Whittier events at Amesbury Days

The 110th annual Amesbury Days celebrations begin tomorrow. The first event is a guided tour of the Whittier Home, where the poet lived with his mother, aunt, and sister for much of his adult life.

It starts at 2 pm, at 86 Friend Street, and the Amesbury Days kick-off block party starts just a little later at 5:30 at the Huntington Square gazebo (which no one seems to provide an address for, although I'm sure if you're from Amesbury you know it. I think it's on Main Street not far from the Whittier Home.)

Wicked Local Amesbury has the full schedule of events.

Later, on Saturday, June 27 from 2 to 3 pm, the Whittier home hosts one of their monthly teas in the garden. From the Whittier Home website:

Whittier’s love of nature was clearly exhibited in his garden. Today, the descendents of the purple gentian, monarda, and grapevines he wrote about still bloom. Enjoy an elegant tea in the beautiful historic gardens of the John Greenleaf Whittier Home in Amesbury, MA. 2p.m. in the garden. 86 Friend St. $15. Purchase tickets online by clicking our Gift Shop link above, or call 978-38-1337 for reservations.

Whittier sites

Some of Jeff's photos from our tour of Whittier sites last spring. Pantry and barn at the Whittier Homestead in Haverhill, the Whittier Home in Amesbury, and Whittier's gravesite in Amesbury.

Alan Pearsall book signing

Artist Alan Pearsall is signing his recent book American Town: The History of Ipswich, Massachusetts next weekend. It's the companion to his Ipswich history mural on the wall of Ebsco Publishing along the city's Riverwalk (which he graciously allowed me to reproduce photos of it in the NSLT) and is chock-full of illustrations and photographs.

June 14, 2–4 pm
Ipswich Historical Society

June 19, 3–7 pm
First National Bank of Ipswich

Physick Book out today!

The much hyped, eagerly awaited debut novel by Marblehead's Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, came out today and shot directly to the top of Barnes & Noble's best-seller list. (Seriously, reviews aplenty. One calls it a cross between Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code, which sounds like a recipe for summer book list domination.)

It's known as The Lost Book of Salem overseas... Anyone want to put bets on what the movie will be called, because if the rights aren't sold already they will be by next week.

Recent mentions in the Boston Globe, cover of Indie Bound's Next List for this month, and Kate will be on Good Morning America tomorrow morning.

Catch her first local reading tomorrow at Marblehead's Abbott Library at 6:30 pm.

Goooooo Kate! Congratulations!

Today at the North Shore Barnes & Noble

Yikes! Glad I called ahead to confirm... apparently today's event at Barnes & Noble is a talk and then a signing, not just a signing. So get there at 1 pm for some stories about folks like John Greenleaf Whittier, Jones Very, and Lucy Larcom.

Barnes & Noble (map)
North Shore Mall at the junction of Highways 114 and 128 and adjacent to Shaws Supermarket
Saturday, June 6, 1–3 pm

Uncle Tom's Cabin

A nice overview at the always interesting Mass Moments blog.

Catching up with my RSS feeds

• Forgot to add this to my recent post about literary-themed movies: Kill Your Darlings is about the 1944 murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, which this article says "helped spawn the Beat generation." Chris Evans will star as Lowell native Jack Kerouac. It's set to come out next year.
  
  
• Maine senator Olympia Snowe is promoting legislation that could lead to the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick becoming part of the National Parks system. The house, where Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin just before moving to Andover, is currently on the National Register of Historic Places, but it's owned by Bowdoin College and was a dormitory at least as recently as 2003. (Andover's Stowe house is also a dorm for Phillips Academy.)
  
  
• This article traces the origins of the North Shore Children's Hospital. Lydia Pinkham's daughter Aroline Gove was a supporter of what was then called the North Shore Babies' Hospital, as was the Salem journalist Kate Tannant Woods. Gove also founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic, still in operation as a women's clinic at 250 Derby Street in Salem.
  
  
• Happened across D. H. Lawrence's description of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a romanticist, in Studies in Classic American Literature: "And what’s a romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time… Hawthorne obviously isn’t this kind of romanticist." (via Bookslut)
  
  
• A sonnet by mystical, Shakespeare-obsessed, "divinely inspired" poet Jones Very: "To the Canary Bird"
  
  
• A brief round-up of excerpts from sailor's journals, including Salem's Nathaniel Bowditch, whose book The American Practical Navigator was written in 1802 and is still standard issue aboard all Naval vessels.
  
  
• In his blog about Lowell culture and politics, Richard Howe points to a NYT review of Elinor Lipman's novel The Family Man and mentions that Lipman is a member of the Lowell High School Alumni Hall of Fame.

poetry tour of Gloucester

Looking for a nearby day-trip itinerary? If you have a web-enabled phone, Carl Carlsen's Poetry of Places in Essex County has a mini tour of some Gloucester sites that have inspired poets past and present. Driving directions here.

Poetry of Places in Essex County focuses on the Lynn poets and Gloucester right now, but an update about Nahant—where Longfellow spent many summers with his family—is coming soon.

Prof. Carlsen also recommends contemporary Lynn poet Diane Kendig's latest chapbook, The Places We Find Ourselves, to be published by Finishing Line in July. Kendig was the North Shore Community College's poet in residence in 2007, and her current volume includes Lynn's Egg Rock as one of its many settings.

(Photo of Gloucester's Hammond Castle from herzogbr on Flickr)

Andre Dubus speaking in Lexington

According to Wicked Local Lexington, Andre Dubus III will speak about The Garden of Last Days at Cary Memorial Library on Friday, June 5 from 7 to 9 p.m. Call 781-862-6288 Ext. 324 or e-mail cmlfoundation@carylibrary.org to reserve a seat.

Newsweek has an excerpt from the book.

Whittier's "In School Days" reading

From the Eagle-Tribune:

HAVERHILL — The most romantic poem by John Greenleaf Whittier will be recited by a complete school class tomorrow at 10 a.m. in a cemetery over a grave.

The poem, "In School Days," tells of a spelling bee in which a girl outspells the boy she loves and tells him about her feelings at the end of the day.

The fifth-grade class of teacher Renee Murphy of Bradford Elementary School has memorized the poem and will recite it in unison in the Walnut Cemetery at the grave of Lydia Ayer, the neighbor girl accepted as the heroine of the poem, with Whittier as the boy.

In previous years the poem was recited at the grave on Valentine's Day, usually in cold weather. Augustus Reusch, who retired as a teacher at the Bradford school and is now curator at the birthplace, was instrumental in promoting the poem and assisting with the trip to the grave.

The public will be welcome at the recitation of the poem.

New England literary road trip

The blog North American Travel Examiner has mapped out an itinerary that connects major literary sites from Twain's Hartford to Frost's farm in Derry, NH. It hits only the highlights and biggest literary names, but looks like a great place to start planning a literary road trip on a long weekend.


View Literary New England road trip in a larger map

North Shore writers on film, sort of

I posted a while ago that ABC is adapting John Updike's Witches of Eastwick as a TV series.

Earlier this spring news was released that Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is being adapted into a teen comedy called Easy A starring Emma Stone as a

high school student who pretends to be the school slut, hoping to benefit from the publicity. Which is sort of, but actually not really at all, like the ordeal endured by Hawthorne’s heroine, Nester Prynne. (Empire Movie News; Nester is their typo, or maybe the artistic license of the screenwriters?)

Sounds terrible, but other literary classics have inspired a few good movies in that genre, if you're the kind of person who thinks any teen movie could be good. Clueless drew on Austen's Emma, Ten Things I Hate about You was a re-working of Taming of the Shrew, and She's All That was based on Pygmalion. So who knows? Easy A is shooting now.

This morning I caught a story about summer movies, and one called Fireflies in the Garden starring Julia Roberts and Willem Dafoe, named after the Robert Frost poem. Some articles describe the movie, about a dysfunctional family dealing with unexpected tragedy, as being based on or an adaptation of the poem. The Internet Movie Database even gives Frost a writing credit. Here's the 1928 poem in its entirety.

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,

And here on earth come emulating flies,

That though they never equal stars in size,

(And they were never really stars at heart)

Achieve at times a very star-like start.

Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Hard to hang a 2-hour film on that, but it's an evocative jumping-off point. Fireflies in the Garden is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on June 26.

Andover Bookstore tonight and a review in the Gloucester Daily Times

Last night's talk at Cornerstone in Salem went well—thanks to everyone who came out. Lots of good questions and ideas to add to my "updates for the next edition" list.

Tonight I'll be at the Andover Bookstore at 7 pm. I'm brushing up on my dates and timeline for Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Elizabeth Stuart Phelpses, all of whom lived within walking distance of where the bookshop is now.

And, there's also a review in today's Gloucester Daily Times. It points out that I overlooked T. S. Eliot, who spent summers in Gloucester and wrote about it in his Four Quartets. I've been meaning to write a post about Eliot and a few other "missed" authors here. He, like Sylvia Plath, spent time on the North Shore and included some landmarks in their work. (In The Bell Jar, Esther swims out to Lynn's Egg Rock in one scene.)

I have no bulletproof logic for why someone like Lydia Pinkham—a patent medicine marketer—made it into the book and some of our country's most prominent poets didn't; just that I was looking for more of the lesser known, people who deserve to be rediscovered, people for whom buildings and streets are named but whose contributions are forgotten, and quite simply, stories that piqued my interest.

There's a lot that can be added to my literary trail, and the more I dig into the each of these authors and their towns the more little tidbits I uncover. If only books didn't have drop-dead printing dates!

Tomorrow: Cornerstone Books in Salem

See you in Salem tomorrow? Details here.