“The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –-“:
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.
Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.
You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.
View the full educator workshop lineup.
For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –
And back it slid – and I alone –
A speck upon a Ball –
Went out upon Circumference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell –
(Fr 633)
Join Renée Bergland, historian of science and author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles, Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science for an interactive educator’s workshop.
During Emily Dickinson’s lifetime, the universe expanded in every direction. Developments in astronomy, geology, and biology enlarged the scales of space and time. To many, the realization that humans were a tiny part of Earth’s geological past was profoundly disturbing. Byron concluded that the planet Earth was doomed, and that the universe would end in “Darkness.” Others, including Dickinson, were more ambivalent. “I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched – ” expresses a mix of despair at the loss of the old model of the universe and excitement about the possibilities of the new sciences. Dickinson’s poems insistently pressed different frames of reference together, inviting readers to find the relationship between different ways of thinking about the universe.
In this moment of planetary environmental emergency, Dickinson’s poetry gives us a way to talk about planetary grief and ecological anxiety, while also allowing us to imagine more hopeful frames of reference. This workshop will begin with a presentation of Dickinson’s planetary poems in the context of 19th-century science, followed by a discussion of how they invite us to expand our “Circumference” today. The workshop will conclude with a discussion of classroom activities and resources.
Renée Bergland is a literary critic and a historian of science who teaches in the Department of Humanities at Simmons University where she is Program Director of Literature and Writing. Her most recent publication is Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton University Press, 2024). She contributed an essay, “Dickinson Emergent: Natural Philosophy and the Postdisciplinary Manifold”, to the Oxford Handbook to Emily Dickinson (2022). Bergland is writing a forthcoming general audience book examining Dickinson’s poetry as interpreted through the lens of difference sciences, including astronomy, geology, and ecology. She is a member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society.
Introduced to the European market in the seventeenth-century, trade in tea – and subsequently in coffee and chocolate – became a means of establishing empires and generating the almost frantic consumerism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West. Emily Dickinson and her family delighted in these exotic imported beverages and, like the rest of New England, acquired the requisite material goods to make and serve tea, coffee, and chocolate in their own family circle and for their guests. This talk will explore the meanings, settings, and equipment for “taking tea” in Emily Dickinson’s world, including original family objects now in the Museum’s collection.
Beginner and experienced poets of all ages are invited to come and use children’s book covers as diving boards into memory and imagination. Children’s books will be on hand to browse, and participants will also be encouraged to search online for their own current or past favorite children’s books. Using one or more of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell & taste), participants will generate drafts of new poems as the vivid literary landscape of rhymes, illustration, and stories of childhood spark memories and new ideas. 
In a time of ecological crisis and increased disconnection from nature, poets create vital space to honor and reflect upon the natural world, with its joys and its losses. In this generative workshop led by The WildStory Podcast host Ann E. Wallace and featured guest Elizabeth Sylvia, poetry and nature enthusiasts of all ages and experience levels are invited to slow down and open their senses to the natural world—the memories it holds, the meanings it carries, and the feelings it inspires. Participants will engage in writing exercises, learn new strategies, and compose a poem draft during the session.
Join us for a generative workshop that pairs the visual art form of collage with poetry! Participants will be guided through a process of discovery with different collaging materials and text to create their own hand-crafted collage. You will walk away with seeds of poems, deeper knowledge and experience with a visual art form, and a found poetry technique to help you — in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson — “tell all the truth but tell it slant “! All levels of experience with poetry and visual art are welcome.
Where do we find home, belonging and comfort in a time of crisis? What might Emily Dickinson tell us about how to find comfort and strength when it sometimes feels like nothing we do can change things for the better? Head editor and chair Zoë Brigley presents three brilliant new editors from the magazine Poetry Wales: Kandace Siobhan Walker, Tangie Mitchell and Zakia Carpenter-Hall. These rising poetry stars will talk about where they find comfort, reading classic poems such as “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ alongside less well known Dickinson poems and their own work.
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, National Book Award and MacArthur Genius grantee Terrance Hayes and award-winning poet Krysten Hill, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with moderator Nicole Callihan.
Callie Siskel and Elizabeth Metzger, poetry co-editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and poet Dorothea Lasky, will use the Higginson-Dickinson correspondence to consider the role of the poet as editor or editor as poet today and rethink our assumptions about the editor. Beyond the aim of publishing our work as poets, how might we see the conversation between poet and editor today as expanding possible pathways of creativity? We often think about the relationship between poet and reader, but the special role of the poet-editor offers an intermediary process that has the opportunity to transform, elevate, or pressurize our solitary artistic visions–sometimes by offering concrete feedback, sometimes by asking us to formulate our aesthetic vision or reconsider our projects and values, and other times simply by creating space in our society for a larger conversation around poetry, life, and listening. In a poetry world in which many editors are poets themselves, and a main avenue for becoming a poet is the workshop classroom, how might the editor-poet relationship create a correspondence that is at once formative, supportive, and expansive, and a relationship that is personally and professionally meaningful and ideally non-hierarchical?
Emily Dickinson is known to have written more than a thousand intimate and poetic letters in her lifetime. What fueled these correspondences, and how did these correspondences fuel Dickinson’s creative mind? In this workshop, poets Nicole Callihan, Tina Cane, Caitlin Grace McDonnell, and Zoë Ryder White will discuss the necessity and ascendancy of correspondence in their own lives and work. Panelists will consider poetry’s deep intersection of private world and public sphere, and then ask participants to do the same as they pen their own letter-poems. This generative writing—if Nerve not be denied!—will be shared.