Private tour with Museum Executive Director Jane Wald
Space is limited — registration required.
Tickets TBA!
During this once-in-a-lifetime program, witness the discoveries emerging within the walls of Emily Dickinson’s 1813 home as the Museum enters the final phase of Homestead restoration. Executive Director Jane Wald leads a private tour of the architectural and forensic investigations illuminating the original condition of the Homestead’s service wing during the poet’s writing years, including the kitchen where she baked her famous gingerbread, the pantry where she composed and read poems, the family dining room and second floor bed chambers, and rooms that housed the Amherst residents who worked for the Dickinson family. . Now in the exploratory phase–a brief window when modern finishes have been removed and restoration work has not yet begun–this wing of the house has never been seen this way and will not remain in its current condition for long! From wear patterns on the original floor boards, to the “ghosts” of the poet’s pantry cupboards, you’ll see up close how new understandings of everyday life at the Homestead are shaping the final restoration plan.
Jane Wald is the Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum. She has worked in the public history and literary sites for more than thirty-five years and has been executive director of the Dickinson Museum for twenty years. Her interests in literary and cultural history, combined with her background in historical archaeology and material culture, have been a particular strength at the Emily Dickinson Museum in its first decades. In 2006, Wald helped to create a master plan for stabilization, preservation, and restoration of the two Dickinson family homes, grounds, and collections, and has systematically implemented each of its recommendations ever since. Critical projects have included restoration of Emily Dickinson’s bed chamber; reconstruction from original materials of the Dickinson’s cherished conservatory; restoration of the original 1813 Homestead; installation of fire detection and suppression systems; reduction of water intrusion in the historic houses; and new museum-grade mechanical systems.
Wald has presented numerous lectures, talks, and papers about Emily Dickinson, the Museum, and especially the material and cultural contexts of Dickinson’s environment. Of particular relevance to this “Behind the Restoration” program are publications including “A Short Biography of the Homestead and The Evergreens,” in The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, (2022); “’The Poet Hunters’; Transforming Emily Dickinson’s Home into Literary Destination” in the Emily Dickinson Journal (2017); “’Pretty Much Real Life’: the Material World of the Dickinson Family” for the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson (2014); and “’Better than Heaven’: Emily Dickinson’s Religious Texts” for the Emily Dickinson Archive. She received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, graduate degree in American History from Princeton University, and historical archaeology graduate work at the College of William and Mary.
Many literary house museums preserve the places where authors lived and worked. The Emily Dickinson Homestead does something more ambitious. Rather than treating the Homestead simply as the place where Emily Dickinson lived, the guide used the house as a framework for understanding the person behind the poet. Each room served as a setting for exploring a different aspect of her life. This was done not through dates and events alone, but through her own poetry, her education, her family relationships, her intellectual curiosity, and her creative choices. In doing so, the house became not simply the setting for Dickinson’s story but an essential part of telling it.
This panel of award-winning poets of color, queer poets, and disabled poets will explore the evolving intersections of ekphrastic and documentary poetics, challenging traditional boundaries between image, language, and evidence. In a time when truth is suppressed, redacted, and revised in real time, while art, research, and scholarship is defunded, this panel of poet-educators explores ekphrastic dialogue as community practice, a multi-voiced collaboration that resists erasure. Audiences will leave with generative strategies for their creative practice, classrooms and other community spaces, inspired by expanding possibilities for this collaborative practice and the ways it can be leveraged to nourish healthy communities.
Join us on Emily Dickinson’s lawn or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, Victoria Chang and Samyak Shertok will read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration. Q&A to follow.
Tell it and DRAW it in slant with this poetry comics workshop. Suitable for all ages and creative inclinations, come explore poetry through short comics. Comics combine words and images, and like slant poetry, gives us new and complex ways to narrate with the world around us. Participants will learn how to develop visual images to accompany short poems and arrange them in 4 or 6 panel comics.
Dickinson examined, studied, and utilized tiny items and tight envelope contours in the service of poem-making. This two-part workshop will discuss how the constraint of shape and size forces creativity: We will first meditate on a small, everyday object and honor it in the creation of a poem; we will then consider how restricted page space makes a poem even more expansive. Led by four apartment-dwelling Brooklynite poet-educators (including one urban planner and one visual designer), participants will make and share poems that reveal the “passing Universe” in minute ephemera and confines.
January, Enzo and Amy are award-winning poets and Massachusetts Book Award honorees, but their paths to success weren’t easy. All three writers are parents, wage earners, and in some cases, caregivers, with multiple community and professional connections and responsibilities. Like Dickinson, each of these poets has at times wished they could bolt the door to their room and simply be left alone with their words. This interactive panel, reading, and discussion will open the door to those conflicting demands and provide strategies — and, hopefully, inspiration—for those in a similar predicament, those who “could not stop.”
In this interactive, generative workshop, poets will explore the language and themes of Emily Dickinson – at a slant. To honor Dickinson’s breathtakingly odd and brilliant work, poets will create group poems in the voice of a collective ‘we’. Poets will create found poems by combining their own words with words found in poems by Emily Dickinson. Sound intimidating? It will not be, as two-time World Poetry Slam champion, Joaquín Zihuatanejo, will be there to guide us along the way.
In this poetry workshop, we shall visit a colorful mystery: a ten-foot shawl which belonged to a wren-size poet. Did Emily Dickinson wear this? Sitting at her window desk, looking out toward The Evergreens? Suddenly thrown about her as she wandered into the garden, visiting a robin? In bed, contemplating a wild night? After exploring some Dickinson poems which use patterns analogous to the shawl’s, participants will be invited to write lines which are inspired by the shawl’s patterns, inspired by imaginings of Dickinson wearing the shawl, or by both aspects. “Artists wrestled here!/Lo, a tint Cashmere!/Lo, a Rose!”—F11A