“Many a phrase has the English language -“:
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

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Many a phrase has the English language –
I have heard but one –
Low as the laughter of the Cricket,
Loud, as the Thunder’s Tongue

Murmuring, like old Caspian Choirs,
When the Tide’s a’lull –
Saying itself in new inflection –
Like a Whippowil –

Breaking in bright Orthography
On my simple sleep –
Thundering it’s Prospective –
Till I stir, and weep –

Not for the Sorrow, done me –
But the push of Joy –
Say it again, Saxon!
Hush — Only to me!

(Fr 333)

Because fewer than a dozen of Dickinson’s nearly 1800 poems were published during her lifetime, the poems we read and teach are rarely authorized or final texts. Dickinson’s original manuscripts sometimes exist in multiple versions; contain alternate words or phrases; are drafted on odd scraps of paper with striking shapes; and have line breaks different from the tidy quatrains with which they are usually printed. For example, in this poem that plays with the relation between the English language and the language of the natural world, Dickinson writes:

Breaking in bright Orthogra-
phy

creating an unconventional break in a line about breaking. This manuscript also includes alternate phrasings; she wonders whether the “push of Joy” in line 14 might instead be the “Pain of joy.” But Dickinson did not choose. There is no right answer to these manuscript questions. And that makes them a wonderful resource for teaching, for helping students get inside of Dickinson’s creative process, and for encouraging them to ask questions without fear of “getting it wrong.”

Join Karen Sánchez-Eppler for an interactive Zoom workshop discussing how to use Dickinson manuscripts in the classroom through the free Emily Dickinson Archive. The workshop will consider different approaches to the manuscripts, including poems that exist in variant versions, manuscript poems with alternate words, and those surprising, often visually stunning scraps an editor has dubbed her “radical scatters” and “gorgeous nothings.”

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Karen Sánchez-Eppler has been a professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College since 1988, specializing in 19th century literature and history, and so has long ties both to Dickinson and to Amherst. Her first book Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993) concludes with a chapter on Dickinson. She recently served as co-editor with Cristanne Miller of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (2022) and is currently writing a brief critical biography, Emily Dickinson / Critical Lives, for Reaktion Books. Another of her book projects in process The Unpublished Republic: Manuscript Cultures of the Mid-Nineteenth Century US considers 19th century manuscript projects more broadly. Her book Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005) considers writing by children, most of which also only exists in manuscript form. That project helped spur the creation of the Historic Children’s Voices database at the American Antiquarian Society facilitating a teacher’s institute on its use in 2024 that will run again in August 2026. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the NEH, ACLS, the Newberry Library, the Winterthur Library, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Fulbright Foundation. She spent the 2019-20 academic year as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society, is one of the founding co-editors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, President of the Porter- Phelps-Huntington Foundation Board of Directors, and a longtime member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society and of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Board of Governors.

IN-PERSON ART AND POETRY INSTALLATION

Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have – A something overtakes the Mind –

The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025 through December 21, 2025.

“Did you ever read one of her Poems backward,” Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of wrapping paper, “because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—A something overtakes the Mind.” Although we’ll never know which poet Dickinson was referencing here, it’s clear that she felt the need to alter her approach to the poems at hand as a means of entering the work. A Something Overtakes the Mind—a multimedia visual art and poetry installation created by Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan for the Emily Dickinson Museum—takes a cue from these words from Emily Dickinson and, through explorations of domestic objects, biographical details, found poetry, and community testimonials, seeks to find new ways of engaging with the poet’s life and legacy. 

On August 1st, the Emily Dickinson Museum will open an art installation featuring the work of visual artist Ligia Bouton and poet Matt Donovan. The installation will be on view on the ground floor of the Homestead in spaces that historically served the Dickinson family as their laundry room, kitchen, and dining room. In 2026, the Museum will prepare this part of the historic house for the third and final phase of Homestead restoration. 

In addition to other objects from the Museum collection, the installation is anchored by two significant sets of Dickinson family objects: wallpaper fragments from the poet’s bedroom and pieces of unassembled quilts. Visitors will encounter laser-cut forms echoing the delicate contours of the wallpaper scraps, filled with curated texts spanning centuries, including biographical insights and interpretations of Dickinson’s signature “em” dash, poetically mirrored in the wallpaper’s design.

In the kitchen space, quilt fragments will be paired with shadowboxes and vitrines containing domestic objects from the Museum’s collection.  Paper scraps remaining on the quilt pieces showcase legible text, forming the basis for artistic language collages and found-word poetry.

A final feature will invite audience interaction through a hands-on poetry-making station using words from the papers enclosed in quilt fragments, alongside a video installation featuring community members reading Dickinson’s poetry and reflecting on her enduring legacy.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and currently divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico in the US.  Her creative work combines sculpture and photography with performance and digital video to recreate appropriated narratives and research drawn from the history of science, literature, and other sources.  Bouton’s recent projects have been shown at museums such as the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.  In 2016, Bouton’s work was featured in the exhibition, “Charlotte Great and Small,” celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England.  Bouton’s video work has been shown at Art Claims Impulse in Berlin, in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nimes, France, and at the Temporary Art Center, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as well as in The Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague.  Reviews of this work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times.  She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant for the opera “Inheritance” which premiered at University of California, San Diego in 2018 and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her project “25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”.  Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Bouton is currently Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks: We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Walden, co-authored with Jenny George, Bull City Press 2025), The Dug-Up Gun Museum (a collection of poems about guns and gun violence in America, BOA 2022), Missing Department (a collaborative collection of art and poetry created with artist Ligia Bouton, Visual Studies Workshop 2023), A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (a book of lyric essays, Trinity University Press 2016), Rapture & the Big Bam (selected by Lia Purpura for the Snowbound Chapbook Competition, Tupelo Press 2016), and Vellum (selected by Mark Doty for the Bakeless Contest, Houghton Mifflin 2007). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

ABOUT FAIR AND SOFTLY

“Fair and Softly” is a small band that particularly explores music for English Dance, a social dance that was popular in Emily Dickinson’s lifetime. Indeed there are some dances in her personal music book. We imagine that playing this old music while celebrating a new installation for the Homestead is a fitting background to the exploration of 19th century poetry. We hope that our period instruments invoke the sounds and sensibilities of the age.

Aaron Hayden is an engineer at Amherst College and has been involved in early music since elementary school; he currently plays and sings in several early music ensembles in the Pioneer Valley.

Madeline Zanetti is a graduate of New England Conservatory with a degree in Music Performance who has been active for many years in early music performance in Colorado and New England.

Sue Matsui is a school music teacher and church musician who has been in love with early music since childhood, and plays a variety of medieval instruments.

Spark your students’ imaginations by visiting the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Plan a field trip to the place she called home in Amherst, MA by signing up for The Power of Poetry tour or This was a Poet tour — learn more below!

If you’d like to work with the Emily Dickinson Museum, but don’t see an opportunity that would fit the age or needs of your students, please reach out to us at edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org. We’d love to connect with you!

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Partnership Programs for K-12

If you’d like to work with the Emily Dickinson Museum, but don’t see an opportunity that would fit the age or needs of your students, please reach out to us at edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org. We’d love to connect with you! We can discuss:

• How to tailor content or teaching methods to support your group
• Experiential learning activities you’d like to develop or offer in collaboration with the Museum

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Patrick Fecher
publicrelations@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Digital rendering of completed Evergreens Carriage House (edmsSTUDIO)

EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM OPENS NEWLY RECONSTRUCTED CARRIAGE HOUSE THAT ONCE STOOD ON THE HISTORIC PROPERTY

On Saturday, May 10, the Emily Dickinson Museum will celebrate the opening of the John and Elizabeth Armstrong Carriage House and the reopening of The Evergreens during its annual Poetry Walk event.

(AMHERST, Mass., April 3, 2025) – The Emily Dickinson Museum has completed the reconstruction of the carriage house that once stood to the east of The Evergreens, the home of Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin and his wife Susan. The carriage house will initially serve as a site for visitor welcome, orientation and museum shop, while also enabling the third and final phase of the Dickinson Homestead restoration.

The exterior appearance of the carriage house is as faithful as possible in its design to evidence accumulated from historic maps, lithographs, and photographs. The interior layout mimics that of the historic carriage house while optimizing modern functions and flow. At the outset of the design phase, museum staff worked with architects at edmSTUDIO to track down details of the original structure in historic maps, deeds, insurance documents, photographs, and archaeological reports. During the course of construction, museum staff discovered that the carriage house was most likely constructed at the same time as the Italianate portion of The Evergreens dwelling, built in 1856, rather than earlier as originally thought. In a photograph taken in about 1870, the carriage house appears as a prominent yet simple vernacular structure with window and door openings barely visible. Insurance maps from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed that it was a wood frame structure with two levels and a metal roof. Wandering journalist Christopher Morley documented the structure in his 1936 travel memoir Streamlines. Details such as these gave the design team guidance about the exterior appearance and finishes.

Along with reconstructing the historical appearance of the carriage house, the Museum prioritized sustainability with the goal of achieving passive house certification from the Passive House Institute US. Architects Monica Del Rio Perez and Tim Widman of edmSTUDIOS collaborated on a design using construction techniques and materials that will result in significant energy savings and eliminate reliance on fossil fuels for heating and cooling. The Museum engaged Teagno Construction, Inc., who recently worked on the second phase of Homestead restoration, as general contractor for the project.

The carriage house reconstruction project was supported by a major pledge from former Board members and long-time friends John and Elizabeth Armstrong. “We’ve always been proud of our association with the Museum, recognizing its importance to our regional community and now–through the wonders of technology–to the world.” stated Elizabeth, adding, “We’ve been drawn over the years to supporting singular projects that open multiple possibilities for the Museum. The carriage house is just such a project.”

Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald says, “Opening the carriage house is a significant milestone in long-range goals for the Emily Dickinson Museum established more than twenty years ago. Much has happened between then and now thanks to the many supporters who have shared the Museum’s vision–and especially thanks to John and Elizabeth Armstrong who have been steadfast friends of the Museum since its establishment.  By moving some functions into the  carriage house, the Museum can more quickly complete the last phase of restoring Emily Dickinson’s Homestead so that her daily life and literary legacy can be more fully presented and appreciated in the place it was created. Moreover, we couldn’t be more pleased that this commitment to passive house construction and environmental responsibility reflects Dickinson’s regard for the natural world and the inspiration she drew from it.” 

Erin Martin, Senior Director of Development says, “We are deeply grateful to the Armstrongs for their extraordinary generosity and leadership – which moved this project from the pages of our long-range plan and made it a reality. The carriage house is a testament to the Armstrong’s’ long partnership with the Emily Dickinson Museum and is their gift to the wide community of people both here and around the world who love the poet, and this place. 

Closed since August due to carriage house construction, The Evergreens will reopen to the public on May 1st. The Emily Dickinson Museum used the period of closure as an opportunity to stabilize and conserve the first floor hallway wallpaper. This work was completed by Works on Paper, LLC. As of May 1st, tickets to the Emily Dickinson Museum will include tours of both the Homestead and The Evergreens.

On May 10, in honor of the 139th anniversary of the poet’s death, the Emily Dickinson Museum will host their annual Poetry Walk through downtown Amherst, the town Dickinson called “paradise.” This year’s Walk celebrates the opening of the newly reconstructed carriage house and the reopening of The Evergreens with stops that explore its significance to Amherst’s cultural landscape and to the poet herself. This is a free public program. 

ABOUT THE PROJECT
The design calls for reconstructing the exterior historic appearance of the carriage house as faithfully as possible while optimizing interior functions and flow. At the outset of the design phase, museum staff worked with architects at edmSTUDIO to track down details of the original structure in historic maps, deeds, insurance documents, photographs, and archaeological reports. The original structure may have been built as early as the 1840s as an outbuilding associated with the modest cottage owned by the poet’s father, which was incorporated into The Evergreens dwelling, built for Austin and Susan Dickinson in 1856. In a photograph taken in about 1870, the carriage house appears as a prominent yet simple vernacular structure with window and door openings barely visible. Insurance maps from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed that it was a wood frame structure with two levels and a metal roof. Details such as these gave the design team guidance about the exterior appearance and finishes.

Archival photograph of The Evergreens and Carriage House (in middle ground of photo)

As new construction, the carriage house gives the Emily Dickinson Museum an opportunity to combine its sustainability and historical priorities. Since 2006, the museum has recognized that full interpretation of the historic Dickinson site and the poet’s life cannot be completely understood from a functional and aesthetic perspective without reconstruction of the outbuildings. While the current project is being carried out as a “historic reconstruction,” it also gives the museum the opportunity to advance its sustainability goals. Working with Monica Del Rio Perez and Tim Widman of edmSTUDIO, the design calls for construction techniques and materials selections that will produce significant energy savings and carbon reduction for heating and cooling. The museum has engaged Teagno Construction, Inc., as general contractor for the project.

Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald says, “Reconstruction of the Evergreens carriage house is a true milestone for the Emily Dickinson Museum. It’s the linchpin of our future plans to complete the Homestead restoration – an effort that’s already transformed our sense of who Emily Dickinson was and how she lived. Not only does the carriage house begin to fill out the Dickinson landscape, but its flexible interior also offers greater comfort, better service, and much-needed space for public and educational programming that’s already on the drawing board.”

For press-approved images: https://bit.ly/Press-Carriage-House

To learn more about Poetry Walk: EmilyDickinsonMuseum.org/poetry-walk-2025

ABOUT THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM

The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to sparking the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home.

The Museum comprises two historic houses—the Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens in the center of Amherst, Mass.—that were home to the poet (1830-1886) and members of her immediate family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum was created in 2003 when the two houses merged under the ownership of the Trustees of Amherst College. The Museum is overseen by a separate Board of Governors and is responsible for raising its own operating, program, and capital funds.