Between the Dashes #3 – An Emily Dickinson Museum Blog • August 19, 2026
This guest post is authored by Mary A. van Balgooy and was originally and independently published in Engaging Places, a design and strategy firm that connects people and historic places.
The Emily Dickinson Museum is grateful for feedback from visitors like Mary and deeply appreciated her insights on our tour.
A House That Reveals a Poet
By Mary A. van Balgooy
Before visiting the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, I knew surprisingly little about Emily Dickinson. The Museum encompasses two historic houses: the restored Homestead, where Dickinson was born, died, and wrote most of her poetry, and the unrestored Evergreens, the neighboring home of her brother Austin, his wife Susan, and their family. Although the Museum includes both houses, it was the Homestead that demonstrated how a historic house can become the key to understanding a poet.
I knew Emily Dickinson was one of America’s greatest poets, that she published very little during her lifetime, and that she lived much of her adult life in relative seclusion. I was also familiar with a few of the recurring stories surrounding her life—her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her close relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and the questions surrounding her withdrawal from society. Beyond that, she remained something of a mystery. What I did not expect was that the house itself would become the key to understanding her.
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.
Instead of beginning with furniture or architecture, the guide frequently began with one of Dickinson’s poems. Often, one of Dickinson’s poems opened a conversation, and the room became the backdrop for understanding the experiences, questions, and relationships that informed her writing. The library became a place to discuss education and the books that expanded her thinking. Her bedroom became a place to examine the extraordinary burst of creativity that produced more than a thousand poems in just a few years. Family spaces became opportunities to explore the network of people who made her work possible—from her father, who supplied books; to her sister Lavinia, who assumed many household responsibilities; to sister-in-law Susan, her closest reader and intellectual companion. The result was a tour that never reduced Dickinson to either biography or legend. It was one of the most effective literary house tours I have experienced.
What impressed me most was the guide’s willingness to embrace uncertainty. Rather than presenting tidy answers, she repeatedly acknowledged where historians continue to debate Dickinson’s life. Why did she withdraw from much of Amherst society? What was the nature of her relationship with Susan Dickinson? How should we understand her religious beliefs? Instead of resolving these questions, the tour demonstrated that uncertainty itself was central to Dickinson’s way of thinking. She resisted simple conclusions in both her life and her poetry, and the interpretation respected that complexity.
The house itself became more than a collection of historic rooms. It became evidence of the environment that shaped Dickinson’s intellectual and creative life. Visitors could see the spaces where Dickinson read, wrote, observed, questioned, and developed the distinctive poetic voice that challenged nineteenth-century literary conventions. The physical setting helped explain not simply where she lived but how her intellectual world was formed.
That approach sets the Homestead apart. Many literary house museums understandably focus on the author’s daily life or preserve rooms much as they appeared during the occupant’s lifetime. The Dickinson Homestead certainly does that, but it goes further. The furnishings and objects rarely become ends in themselves. Instead, they serve the larger goal of helping visitors understand the development of a remarkable mind.
By the end of the tour, I realized I wanted to do something I had not expected: read more Emily Dickinson. Not because I felt obligated to appreciate a famous poet, but because the tour made me curious. It introduced Dickinson not as an icon frozen in history but as an endlessly questioning thinker whose poems continue to reward careful reading.
That may be the highest compliment one can give a literary house museum. It did not simply teach me about Emily Dickinson. It made me want to know her better.
Historic house museums often ask visitors to imagine what life was like within their walls. The Emily Dickinson Homestead accomplishes something more difficult. It uses the house, its objects, and Dickinson’s own words to illuminate the experiences, ideas, and relationships that shaped one of America’s greatest poets. Emily Dickinson remains unknowable in many respects—as all remarkable people do—but I left feeling that I understood not simply more about her life, but more about the mind that produced her poetry.
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 with moderator January Gill O’Neil. Books will be available for purchase with a signing to following the reading.
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 possibly 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
This workshop is for all writers to explore the meaningful relationship between protest and power. With the rise of protests in today’s society, writers can use their craft as a tool of resistance and collective action. This diverse panel with Black, Puerto Rican, activist writers and professors of literature in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will share helpful writing strategies and prompts for writers to incorporate protest into their writing and daily craft practices. Through a series of prompts and sample poems, the audience will leave the workshop with at least one draft of a new poem.