Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

1 July 2025: Today's return to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery moved me more than ever before and it's hard to explain why--at least quickly. 

But I found myself crying standing in front of the tiny marker that just says "Henry," Louisa May Alcott's stone and the American flag she earned working as a nurse in D.C., Hawthorne's family group, and, of course, Emerson's rock. 

The pens, pencils, and little notes left by others get me every time, but even more this time. They are little offerings of gratitude and connection. 

So much in our country seems broken right now, on the day that stupid "big beautiful bill" passes in the Senate. 

These writers, though? They point us to a better way. And they made me who I am--the kind of person who wants to help shape that better way for everyone else. 

There they all are, at eternal rest together, but their words live on. It's corny and cheesy, but it's beautiful and left me wiping my eyes on the Authors' Ridge today. 

"The Man of the Crowd"

31 January 2022: Had a pretty wonderful time discussing Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" with my seminar this afternoon. Though I tried not to show it too much, I also found myself quite moved thinking about his epigraph: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul," translated as "This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone." 

For the titular man of the crowd, the narrator supposes some great crime keeps him from being able to be alone. But I raised the idea more generally, offering that I could understand the kind of unease or distress that we might feel when alone, something we try to chase away by being around others. I didn't want to overshare or show how deeply I feel this at times, especially lately, but it was clear that others could see the point I was making. Just one of those moments where we can feel the point a writer makes stretching across time. (Similar moments in ENGL 204 today, as we discussed "The Birthmark" and "The Minister's Black Veil.") 

So far, the seminar is going quite well, more a tribute to the students than to me. 

"The Minister's Black Veil"

11 September 2020: You know what was a fascinating experience today? Teaching "The Minister's Black Veil" while wearing a mask to a classroom of masked students. We had a great conversation about concealing parts of your face, the difference between covering your mouth (like we were) and covering your eyes (like in the story). There are no silver linings from this pandemic, but this was, at least, interesting. 

Also: three weeks done. Whew. 

Gems...

11 December 2017: "I wanted to show you this gem I found." --a student in my ENGL 204 class, taking out a two-volume edition of The Marble Faun from the 1880s that he found at a used bookstore last weekend.

So much about this charmed me. The student is non-traditional, a computer-science major, a veteran, and if you were prone to stereotypes, not the kind of person you think would be roaming used book stores and buying copies of lesser-known Hawthorne novels. But I learned long ago that these kinds of students can be the most interesting and dynamic students in a class. They are almost always hard workers, too, with such insightful readings and a passion for important cultural conversations. And he was excited enough that he carried them to campus (on the day of his final exam!) to show them to me.

Beyond that, the books themselves were lovely and (most charming of all?) had a hand-written note inside volume one, from someone giving them to her cousins for Christmas well over 100 years ago. Kind of magical, I think.

Powering through...

14 September 2016: Wednesday's good thing was (once again) linked to the 50 minutes I spent in my ENGL 312 class. Since Tuesday night (and I am typing this on Thursday night), I've been struggling with some kind of stomach ailment. Amazingly (and this is luck more than anything, I guess?), I was able to pull it together for any public time (teaching and so many freakin' meetings...), but in my down time (the break between my classes between 12:00 and 2:00, I literally spent almost an hour on the floor of my office, resting my head on the clothes I brought to school with me to change into to go walking after work. (That didn't happen...)

But that 50 minutes in that class? Talking about The Scarlet Letter? I felt amazing.

A panel comes together...

17 June 2014: Tuesday found me finalizing the details for the Hawthorne Society panel at SAMLA this year. One of the panelists is a former student of mine who is about to begin his MA work at Lehigh. He's presenting on a paper he started in my Hawthorne class and then revised more, first for his capstone project, then for his grad school writing sample. Being on a panel with him will be a terrific experience. He makes me proud.

Back to the office...

19 May 2014: After being away for a week, I made it back to the office on Monday and got started on some projects for the summer. It felt good to be back and start checking some items off my to-do list. What I am most thankful for, though, is the enthusiasm I feel for a new project for SAMLA in Atlanta in November. There's a Hawthorne story I've been wanting to write about for awhile and on Monday, I think I found my way in. Yay!

Seeing it again...

13 May 2014: So about Tuesday: First, anyone who knows me pretty well knows that I can be a worrier and that I am creature of habit to such a degree that a big challenge or disruption (like a trip in which you are in charge of everything) can bring out a lot of anxiety. Second, everything we saw and did on Tuesday was something I had done or seen before on my previous trip to Concord. Third, without going into any details, I was not feeling well at all on Tuesday. Those three factors might have made Tuesday a less-than-pleasant day.

But it was actually quite lovely. One chief reason is that I got to see all of these sites again through their eyes. That made me excited to see them again. It made me feel better, feel relaxed. It helped me have fun.

At The Old Manse.

Alcott's grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Thoreau's grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Salem, MA

12 May 2014: Monday found us in Salem, MA, a place I hadn't been to before. We had a blast.

Students at The House of the Seven Gables.

Hawthorne Birthplace.

Pretty flowers at The House of the Seven Gables.

Duck statue at The House of the Seven Gables. 

The Custom House. As a Scarlet Letter-loving nerd, this really excited me.

 Hawthorne statue in Salem.

I'll focus my specific "year of thanks" shout-out on my friend/colleague, Tim, who joined me as a second chaperone (not that you need chaperones in the traditional sense when traveling with college students). I am really so blessed to have him in my life. He's smart, kind, funny, and always there for me when I need him. Having him on this trip made it exponentially better--for me and the students.

It was inevitable. He proposed at the Witch Museum. Ha!

Emily Dickinson on Hawthorne

"Hawthorne entices, appalls."

Perfect, right? And so very Dickinson.

Hawthorne on Melville

Wineapple's book continues to provide great little glimpses of Hawthorne and his world. Much has been written about Hawthorne and Melville's relationship and it seems like Hawthorne wasn't the good friend that Melville needed him to be. But Hawthorne clearly got Melville. He writes in his journal, "If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us" (293).

The barn at Arrowhead, where Melville and Hawthorne would sit and talk when Hawthorne visited.

Summer tableau

This doesn't tell the whole story of my summer, but it tells a lot of it (so far).

Bing has excellent taste in biographies.

Hawthorne: A Life

To prepare for my seminar this fall, I am re-reading Brenda Wineapple's great biography of Hawthorne. (Actually, I think this will be the first time I've read the whole thing.) Whenever I dive into these big biographies, in addition to the "serious" notes I take, I keep a list of random facts/anecdotes that stand out to me. So here are a few from the opening chapters:

Hawthorne's kids sound like they were just as warm, fuzzy, and optimistic as their dear old dad. Daughter Una (an inspiration for Pearl in The Scarlet Letter) once wrote a poem called "Dead Sunshine" (11). Ha.

Hawthorne's Uncle Robert (Manning), an important figure in his life, since Nathaniel's father died when he was only four, once sent his young nephew these words of advice: "Study the hard lessons, learn all you can at school, mind your mother, don't look cross, hold up your head like a man, and keep your cloths [sic] clean" (24). Words of wisdom that still hold up today!

I hadn't come across this reference before, but I imagine it must be the letter that launched a thousand (okay, maybe dozens?) of dissertations/articles/book/conference papers: Fifteen-year-old Hawthorne, bemoaning that his carefree, childish days are behind him and the fact that he has to go to boarding school, writes to his sister Ebe, explaining, "But the happiest days of my life are gone. Why was I not a girl that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother's apron?" (39). I am sure there were plenty of women who would have gladly switched places with poor Nathaniel.

Beyond these rather incidental bits, Wineapple provides some rather insightful commentary on Hawthorne and his work. I really like these words from her opening chapter, a chapter that begins by discussing where the three Hawthorne children ended up as adults: "With an insight so fine it bordered on the voluptuous, he crafted a style of exquisite ambiguity, of uncompromising passion and stubborn skepticism. Yet his characters are often curiously static, poised between self-knowledge and indifference, and like Hawthorne himself, confounded by what and who they are. For Hawthorne was a man of dignity, of mordant wit, of malicious anger; a man of depression and control; a forthright and candid man aching to confess but too proud, too obstinate, to ashamed to do so; a man of disclosure and disguise, both at once keen, cynical, and intelligent, who digs into his imagination to write of American men and women: isolated in their communities, burdened by their history, riven by their sense of crime and their perpetual, befuddled innocence; people ambitious and vain and displaced and willing, or perhaps forced, to live a double life, a secret life, an exemplary life, haunted and imprisoned, even as his children were--or, in Hawthorne's terms, as are we all" (12).

Work Cited

Wineapple, Brenda. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

Seminar preview...

Rebecca Harding Davis in Boston...

Since mid-December, I've had a Word document filled with notes from Rebecca Harding Davis's 1904 memoir Bits of Gossip sitting on the desktop of my computer. I recently wrote a (very short) introduction to Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" which will appear in the new volume of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers. (Davis is the second heritage writer the anthology will include--last year's volume included Jesse Stuart's "Split Cherry Tree," for which I also wrote the introduction.) This evening, I am giving myself a little break from other work, and decided it's about time to write about those notes I've had saved since before Christmas.

The bits from Bits of Gossip were beyond the scope of my introduction, but I saved them anyway, especially the parts where Davis recounts her 1860s visits to Boston and her meetings with various American literary luminaries including Bronson Alcott (she was not a fan), his daughter Louisa (more about her below), Ralph Waldo Emerson (she was quite a fan, but felt he was hopelessly out of touch and felt his deep respect for Bronson Alcott was "almost painful to see"), and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These memories are especially interesting for someone studying 19th-century American literature, because they show us an "outsider's" perspective on the sometimes very insular world of the Boston literati.

I'll share just a few parts here. First, on Louisa May Alcott:

"During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her. Presently she came up to me.
'These people may say pleasant things to you,' she said abruptly ; 'but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm very poor;" and in the next breath she contrived to tell me that she had once taken a place as 'second girl.' 'My name,' she added, 'is Louisa Alcott.'

Now, although we had never met, Louisa Alcott had shown me great kindness in the winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure at a time when every hour counted largely to her in her desperate struggle to keep her family from want. The little act was so considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural for her to do such things as for a pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.

Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them, but never one so big and generous in soul as this one in her poor scant best gown, the 'claret-colored merino,' which she tells of with such triumph in her diary. Amid her grim surroundings, she had the gracious instincts of a queen. It was her delight to give, to feed living creatures, to make them happy in body and soul.

She would so welcome you on her home to a butterless baked potato and a glass of milk that you would never forget the delicious feast. Or, if she had no potato or milk to offer, she would take you through the woods to the river, and tell you old legends of colony times, and be so witty and kind in the doing of it that the day would stand out in your memory ever after, differing from all other days, brimful of pleasure and comfort.


With this summer, however, the darkest hour of her life passed. A few months after I saw her she went as a nurse into the war, and soon after wrote her 'Hospital Sketches.' Then she found her work and place in the world.

Years afterward she came to the city where I was living and I hurried to meet her. The lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead, there came to greet me a large, portly, middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to the rustle of her satin gown told me of assured success.

Yet I am sure fame and success counted for nothing with her except for the material aid which they enabled her to give to a few men and women whom she loved. She would have ground her bones to make their bread. Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true and fine, but she never imagined a life as noble as her own. "

It seems to me here that Davis is especially insightful and sensitive to so many important factors: what drove Alcott in her work, what it was like for women like Louisa who really did wonder what their place in the world was, how she very nearly did write herself to death to support her family. Yes, it is a bit sentimental, especially towards the end, but I find the whole sketch quite moving (especially her description of "that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her.")

Davis's recollections of Hawthorne reveal her deep admiration for him and his work, not surprising since he was a life-long influence on her own work. She writes of her final meeting with him, a few months before his death. They walked around Concord, and sat down on the grass in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery:

"...In a few months he was lying under the deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where he sat and laughed, looking up at us. I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said:-- 'I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.' The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot them and me as he turned into the house. And yet, because perhaps of the child in the cherry-tree, and the touch which the magician laid upon her, I have never forgotten them. They seemed to take me, too, for one moment, into his enchanted country. Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life, this was one of the pleasantest and best."

That reads a bit like a fan-girl's dream come true, right? To have one of your favorite writers--someone who has influenced you so much--share such kind words with you? Good stuff. As a side-note, I like this little memory of late-in-his-life-Hawthorne because so much of what I came across while writing my Marble Faun paper indicated how unhappy and unpleasant he was late in life. It's nice to see that there might have been some exceptions to that general mood of dissatisfaction.

You can read more of Bits of Gossip here (the whole thing's on Google Books!) or just look at the "Boston in the 1860s" section here.

True story...

As I work on  my SAMLA paper, these words seem so very appropriate:

“To participate in the critical discourse on Hawthorne is to step into a fast-rushing stream, crowded with fishermen of varying orientations, all in hot pursuit of a specimen that, no matter how many times it is caught, always ends up back in the water. Thus the sport of Hawthorne criticism has its pleasures and short-lived rewards, but perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the catch has not been its flesh, but its slipperiness, the accompanying sense that the canonical ‘big one’ always gets away. Textually well-supported arguments, often diametrically opposed--we might want to call them studied and elaborate fish stories--are advanced with great regularity, but only seem to incite further discourse. The famously ambiguous Hawthorne has maintained his claim on critical attention by just this capacity of his work to sustain widely disparate readings.”

Seriously. Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode. 

Citation:

Onderdonk, Todd. “The Marble Mother: Hawthorne’s Iconographies of the Feminine.” Studies in American Fiction 31.1 (2003): 73-100. MLA International Bibliography. Web 26 April 2010.

Oldies but goodies

[Disclaimer: besides actually wanting to write about the subject addressed below, this post is also the result of A) being burned out after a long day and needing a break and B) my need to push that awful tomato worm picture further down the page. Every time I see it, I cringe a bit. Why in the world did I put it up there? And yeah, I know I can take it down, but that seems dishonest or something.]

Okay, so I know I've posted about this topic before (a long time ago), but sometimes I get real satisfaction out of reading old (and sometimes really old) criticism of a work. As I work on this year's SAMLA paper--about Hawthorne's The Marble Faun and Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Miss Grief"--I am working my way through the relevant sections of J. Donald Crowley's Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. For those outside English studies, these "critical heritage" books are great resources--basically anthologies of criticism/reviews of a major writer's texts. A couple of gems from James Russell Lowell's April 1860 review of The Marble Faun in The Atlantic Monthly:

"Had he been born without the poetic imagination, [Hawthorne] would have written treatises on the Origin of Evil." (This one makes me laugh because it's pretty darn funny and because Hawthorne already kind of does write about the "Origin of Evil.")

One more: "If you had picked up and read a stray leaf of it anywhere, you would have exclaimed, 'Hawthorne!'" I'm not quite sure what I think of The Marble Faun. It's took me two tries to really get into it and even now, it's not what you would call "fun" reading. And in lots of ways, it's very different from Hawthorne's other books. But, like Lowell says, read any page, and there's no denying it's all Hawthorne.

How I've been spending this Sunday...

...up in my office again, this time organizing and copying creative writing submissions for our second Sigma Tau Delta conference.

Up next, re-reading some Hawthorne (for my paper at SAMLA later this year), and after that, maybe some fall syllabizing...

I need a life, but can't find the time.

Link Dumping: Academia Edition

1) Have you heard about these 60-second recaps of "great works"? Kind of fun, no? (Yes, I know some students might use these instead of doing actual reading, but let's face it, they are going to use Sparknotes or whatever.) Maybe start with this one. After all, it's my favorite book. More about the girl behind them here.

2) Teaching after midnight? Seriously?

3) A pretty cool lesson about how math can be useful and interesting in the "real world." Here's a teaser: the express lane at checkout is NOT necessarily faster. (I could have told you that, but it's nice to have math backing me up.)

4) What do you think of colleges and universities scheduling a mid-day activity hour for meetings and such? At first blush, I gotta say I like the idea, since there are few things more hellish than trying to schedule a freakin' meeting. Another alternative: one of my friends teaches at a university that doesn't have Friday classes, so all the meetings and things are on Fridays. Not a bad solution, either, although this means classes meet (at most) twice a week and I do best with classes that meet three times a week. [If you work outside academia, you might consider this a really boring and unimportant question, but trust me--it matters. I have already had seven committee/organization meetings this week...]

5) Community premieres tonight and I am planning on watching, primarily because of my love for Joel McHale. As you may have heard, this show is already a bit controversial...

6) Finally, some GOOD news: UNCG has decided to renovate--not demolish--the historic quad. Fantastic choice, folks!

Atlanta

As some of you know, I was in Atlanta last weekend for the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's (SAMLA) conference. I was part of the panel sponsored by the Hawthorne Society, and presented a paper on the pedagogical rewards of teaching Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Scarlett Letter. I won't say too much more about that (unless you actually want to hear more), but I think it went very well. The other papers on the panel were quite interesting, and there was some great discussion afterwards.

The not-so-well kept-secret about conferences, though, is that as much as they are about scholarship and professional development, they are also about having at least some fun. I try to apply to conferences in interesting places and I always try to talk my friends into applying, too. This year I was successful in getting my friend David (from UNCG) to apply and (naturally) his paper was accepted, too. I flew down from WV (actually out of Dulles Airport) and he drove down from Greensboro, bringing our friend (Liz) Vogel with him.

Now you know I wanted to take lots of cool pictures for the blog, right? And I got off to a good start. Here, for instance, are a few from our balcony of our hotel room (we stayed at the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel, where all the conference events took place):


The road you see there is I-85. Gotta love that tacky Olympic torch.


Off to the left of the interstate and the tacky torch, you can see the Georgia Tech campus and football stadium (I think).


And here's the view to the right--lots of big buildings. Yup, that's all I can say about them.

So, you can see that I got off to a good start with my picture-taking, right? But then life (and the conference) intervened. We ended up having to spend most of Saturday inside doing conference stuff (and no, I am not really complaining about this--that's what we were there for, after all). We did go out on Saturday night, but I still haven't mastered using my camera in the dark. (Remember those lighthouse pictures from my trip to Cape Cod?)

I did, however, get some good pictures of my friends while we were doing what tourist do best: eating.


Here are Vogel and David at dinner on Saturday night. We ate at this very cool Chinese restaurant called Mu Lan. It was in this beautiful old Victorian house on Juniper street. My favorite dish? The honey-walnut chicken. Yummy.

Another restaurant we enjoyed was Mick's. We had dinner there on Friday night since we were looking for something on the affordable side. (Remember--some of my friends are still poor graduate students. I know--as if I am rolling in money.) We went back to Mick's for dessert on Saturday night and, perhaps inspired by Amber's food photography, I took some pictures.


My dessert: apple pie ala mode. Yummy. Side story: I was actually in the bathroom when the food arrived, and by the time I returned, the other folks had already tried it and assured me it was "delicious." Can you tell we are a close group?


David ordered this bigger-than-your-head Heath bar pie, and it too, was delicious. Seriously. Take a look at that thing: how can it not be delicious?


Vogel ordered strawberry shortcake, but the waitress dropped it on her way over to the table. By the the time she brought a new one, I forgot to take a picture. You'll just have to settle for this picture of her waiting patiently for her dessert, which was also delicious.


Sugar makes David silly, as evidenced by this picture he took of himself. I post it here only to be mean. I'm like that.

Speaking of restaurants, if you are ever in Atlanta, let me give you another restaurant recommendation: Gladys and Ron's Chicken and Waffles, (owned by Gladys Knight and Ron Winans). We went there for lunch on Saturday and oh my Lord, that was some good food! We meant to go back and take pictures, but didn't get the chance. We also wanted to go back and order the "Midnight Train," four chicken wings and a waffle. Well, maybe next time.

Okay--a couple more pictures:


Vogel and David posing in a English-style phone booth outside a bar.


Me on Saturday night. Not an awful picture, right?