VIRTUAL PROGRAM
For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. View the full educator workshop lineup.
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.
Nature and God – I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew Me
They startled, like Executors
Of My identity –
Yet Neither told – that I could learn –
My Secret as secure
As Herschel’s private interest
Or Mercury’s Affair –
(Fr803)
Emily Dickinson’s opening claim in this poem is a bit disingenuous: her poems contain hundreds of references to nature and God. She “knew” them quite well, yet both continually “startled” her, and her true “identity” was an explorer of their “Secrets.”
Dickinson’s allusions to local flora and fauna, as in “The Lilac is an ancient shrub” and “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” are well known, but her fascination with science extended to many fields, from astronomy (as in the Herschel reference above—he discovered Uranus) to geology (including five poems about volcanoes alone) to medicine (five about surgeons) to mathematics, technology, and many more (White).
Science, which she studied with great interest from her school days onward, and which was burgeoning with new developments during her lifetime, provided Dickinson the poet more than a rich technical lexicon and a trove of startling metaphors; it also offered a method for experimenting with spiritual problems.
In this workshop, we will read and discuss a range of Dickinson poems with scientific content and examine the ways they intersect with her lifelong struggles with religious faith, confirming or confounding her understandings of nature and human life. We will also explore contexts for teaching the “science poems.”
Work Cited: White, Fred D. “‘Sweet Skepticism of the Heart’: Science in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.”College Literature, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 121–128.
Bruce M. Penniman, Ed.D., taught writing, speech, and literature at Amherst Regional High School for 36 years and is still an advisor to the Sene-Gambian Scholars exchange program there. He served as Site Director of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught numerous graduate courses for teachers. In 1999 he was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and finalist for National Teacher of the Year, and he is the author of Building the English Classroom: Foundations, Support, Success (NCTE, 2009). He has been a teacher curriculum mentor in all four NEH Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place workshops and has facilitated discussions for the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group on topics ranging from “Emily Dickinson and the Bible” to “Emily Dickinson and Science.”
Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
Tatyana Feeney grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and spent a lot of her early childhood going to the library and listening to stories. She still loves books and reads as much as she can in her free time. She is now based in County Meath, Ireland where she spends a lot of time working on illustrations and new story ideas. Most of her artwork is done using monoprinting but she often adds collage or watercolor to the finished pieces. Her books have been nominated for several awards including: The UKLA Book Award, the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize, and the Kate Greenway Medal. Little Owl’s Orange Scarf was the winner of the Rotherham Children’s Book Award in the Picture Book Category in 2014. Her artwork has been exhibited in Dublin, Belfast, Vienna, Bologna, London and The Hague. Illustrations from Small Elephant’s Bathtime were included in the Society of Illustrator’s Original Art Exhibition 2015. In addition to children’s books, she has also provided illustrations for CD covers, magazines, greeting cards and websites. Learn more at 
Thursday, May 16, 6pm ET
Thursday, June 20, 6pm ET
Thursday, July 25, 6pm ET
Thursday, August 15, 6pm ET
Thursday, September 26, 6pm ET
Thursday, October 17, 6pm ET
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a transsexual poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, The Southeast Review, MoMA Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (2016). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and is currently a professor of creative writing. Jennifer lives in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog. 
Marta McDowell teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and is a popular lecturer and writer. Her latest book is Gardening Can Be Murder, about the horticultural connections to crime fiction. Timber Press also published Unearthing The Secret Garden, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, New York Times-bestselling All the Presidents’ Gardens, and Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, now in its ninth printing. She was the 2019 recipient of the Garden Club of America’s Sarah Chapman Francis Medal for outstanding literary achievement.
Richard Michelson’s poetry collections include Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant Books), More Money than God (U of Pittsburgh Press), Battles and Lullabies (U of Illinois), Tap Dancing for the Relatives (U of Florida) and two limited edition Fine Press collaborations with the artist Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. Michelson wrote the libretto for the off-Broadway music-theater piece, Dear Edvard, and his many children’s books have been named among the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and The New Yorker; and among the 12 Best Books of the Decade by Amazon.com. Michelson has received a National Jewish Book Award, and two Sydney Taylor Gold Medals from the Association of Jewish Libraries. He has received two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships, and his work was chosen to “highlight the literary culture and history of Massachusetts” at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival. In 2019 Michelson became the sixth recipient of the Samuel Minot Jones Award for Literary Achievement. Michelson’s poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Common and many other journals. A native of East New York, Brooklyn, Michelson served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the owner of R. Michelson Galleries, and the host of Northampton Poetry Radio.