How I Spent My Summer Vacation Part II

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part II

In August, I visited four important American authors to gather plants for the garden. Here’s the update on how those plants are faring!

Mark Twain: In Hartford, Connecticut, we visited the Mark Twain House and Museum to try and cultivate the wisteria for the third time. Master gardener Meg Lambert reports that while she is ever hopeful, the wisteria cuttings are struggling. We do have a Mark Twain Liberty burr oak tree generously donated by retired teacher Michael Brown, so Twain is represented. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the wisteria survives!

Harriet Beecher Stowe: I am so pleased to report that Beth Burgess of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, Connecticut (right next door to Mark Twain’s house!) generously donated two plants to our garden: a clematis vine and Harrison’s yellow roses. Both plants have survived and taken root in the Literary Garden.  

Walt Whitman: I could not contain my excitement when we visited Walt Whitman’s House in Camden, New Jersey. I stood in his bedroom and saw his shoes! His cane! I could not get enough information about one of my favorite poets, and curator Leo Blake kindly obliged. Late in September, the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association director, Cynthia Shor, along with volunteer gardener Leslie Lockhart, sent a lilac cutting and lilac seeds from the lilac bush at the Huntington Station, New York home. The tiny cutting seems to be thriving in a pot in the Literary Garden. We will be bringing it inside for the winter to give it the best chance for survival.

Ernest Hemingway: In Petoskey, Michigan, I had the special good fortune to spend a full day exploring Hemingway’s haunts with the president of the Michigan Hemingway Society, Chris Struble. Not only did I get to plunge my own hands into the cold waters of the spring Hemingway describes at the beginning of “Summer People,” but I also got to see, smell, and taste the mint Chris had sent to us at its source. I was ALL IN that day – when Chris said we could still check out the pilings left of the dock Hemingway had stood on with his friends, I – frustrated that I could not see – walked into the lake with my clothes on and peered into the water until I could see them for myself. Chris, more than startled, ended up following me in, his battered copy of the Nick Adams stories in his hand, reading in the middle of the lake where Hemingway and his friends had summered nearly a century ago. It was, without question, one of the most memorable Literary Garden adventures I have had! And yes, the mint has EXPLODED in our garden! The students and staff love it!

The Michigan Hemingway Society Conference is this weekend in Petoskey, Michigan, and I know Chris has been working hard to put together a terrific program. More on that soon!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, State by State - Part I

After winding down from an intense school year in 2015-2016, I took a couple of weeks in June to get some rest, practice yoga, and spend time with family and friends. I set up a watering schedule for the garden via SignUpGenius.com, and that worked beautifully - the students have shown a commitment to the garden that far surpassed my expectations, especially during an arid summer that could have easily destroyed the plants we have worked so hard to acquire.

Em takes a driving selfie

I spent most of my summer traveling, so the easiest way to describe my literary garden adventures is to give a state-by-state breakdown.

Indiana:

Me, Dr. Talhelm, and Vonnegut puppets

In July, I was invited to speak at the Teaching Vonnegut Workshop at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis. Dr. Melissa Talhelm of Southern Connecticut State University was able to join me, and together we discussed the ways that the Literary Garden enhances the content of Vonnegut's works, connects strongly to his family history, and is providing interdisciplinary opportunities with colleagues in art, science, drama, and the iCenter. I met authors Tim O'Brien and Dan Wakefield, both of whom agreed to provide plants for the garden. I also met Dr. Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies; he is working with me to provide a plant from Bradbury's childhood home in Illinois. Finally, Melissa and I even managed to snag a plant from the home where John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars. Talk about a windfall! Many thanks to Julia Whitehead, Max Goller, and the rest of the folks at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library for their generosity, goodwill, kindness, and inspiration. I'm proud to be a member of their karass.

Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

Dr. Jon Eller, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies

Typing on Kurt's typewriter...you can follow it on Twitter @kurtstypewriter

Author Dan Wakefield, a dear friend of Vonnegut's

Dr. Talhelm, me, Tim O'Brien, and KVML Founder Julia Whitehead

Trying to strike a pose as cool as Kurt's!

New York:

In Rochester, New York, we were delighted to meet librarian site supervisor Erin Clarke at the newly named Frederick Douglass Library. Justin Murphy of the Democrat & Chronicle writes:

More than 140 years after Frederick Douglass' South Avenue house burned to the ground in an apparent arson, the distinguished Rochesterian has been honored with a new home on the same spot.The former Highland Branch Library at 971 South Ave. was formally renamed the Frederick Douglass Community Library Monday morning at a ceremony led by Mayor Lovely Warren.The plot where the library now stands was mostly farmland in 1852, when Douglass and his family moved there from their home on Alexander Street. Douglass was one of the most prominent abolitionists in the country, so it was fitting that his house was a well known stop on the Underground Railroad.

Erin explained that the site, which connects to a community center and a school, were all part of a parcel of land that Douglass and his family owned. It's difficult to pinpoint the exact spot where his house stood, and a survey of the grounds for a suitable plant proved to be fruitless given the plethora of poison ivy that snaked along the grounds. However, the beautiful old trees that line the lot may need to be looked at by a specialist to determine their age; their size alone convinced me some of them could have dated back to Douglass's time. 

In any case, Erin was a font of information and an enthusiastic supporter of our garden. The library would also like to create a Victorian garden that would feature plants that Douglass and his family would have grown, and they would also like to work with us to connect our students to their younger patrons. It's so exciting to have the potential for these kinds of collaborations around the country.

We are also working with Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. The cemetery has important links to American literary history, as Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony are both buried there. And, in a nod to Vonnegut, Joe Crone, his fellow soldier who inspired the character of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, is also interred there. It is only fitting that we work with the cemetery to obtain plants or flowers to place in our literary garden to honor these significant literary and historical figures. 

Massachusetts:

We headed to Walden Pond, of course! Emily had never seen it! 

We are working with American Heritage Trees to purchase a red maple tree from Walden, as they work with The Walden Woods Project to sustainably propagate historic trees of national importance. I cannot praise both of these fine organizations enough, and if you are looking for a literary tree of your own, I would urge you to contact and support American Heritage Trees and the work they are doing.  

We visited the site of Thoreau's original cabin, which is now marked with a pile of rocks,

a sign bearing some of his most famous words from Walden, and site markers that clearly delineate the size of the cabin. It's clear Thoreau would be a big fan of today's tiny house movement! 

We also stopped in Concord to visit my friend Tom Beardsley at The Old Manse. Last fall, Tom and Susan Adam donated at least a dozen plants from the Old Manse to our Literary Garden. I wanted to stop by and let him know how well the plants were doing.

Tom was delighted by our surprise visit and even more impressed by my picture of the corn. If you scroll below, you'll see the bloody butcher corn in the Literary Garden and the same corn at the Old Manse taken just days apart:

Tom's generous donations - which are tied to three key American Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau - formed the foundation of the Literary Garden and are absolutely integral to the teaching of the garden in American literature classes. Thank you, Tom, for recognizing the importance of bringing a sense of the authors' landscape to the students of West Bloomfield High School! I know the garden started to make sense for my students this past year when they read Hawthorne's "Buds and Bird-Voices" on Tom's recommendation and were able to see, touch, and smell the very same lilac bush that had inspired Hawthorne himself. 

Here's to you, Tom, and to all of the wonderful partnerships that I have made through my work on the Literary Garden in the last year! 

Please stay tuned for Part II of "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" for more news on Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Ernest Hemingway!

One Year

One year.

It’s been one year since we broke ground on the semicircle of sod and weeds surrounding a red brick wall in the West Bloomfield High School courtyard. In May, 2015, I had some promised literary plants and a couple of volunteers. By June I had picked up a second grant, and donations were trickling into the school website, but it wasn’t enough “seed” money to fund everything we needed to do over the summer.

I did not own a wheelbarrow. (Sorry, William Carlos Williams, I just hadn’t quite caught on yet.) I was begging – yes, begging – for dirt from the big box stores, from landscape supply companies, on Facebook, from signs on the side of the road that promised “free fill dirt.” The Mark Twain wisteria cuttings? They DIED. The Emily Dickinson rosebush cuttings? They DIED.

I was starting to freak out. How was I going to make this happen?

And then, on July 31, 2015 (a VERY important date in literary history; it is a birthday shared by Juliet Capulet AND Harry Potter as well as Harry Potter’s creator, J.K. Rowling), something magical happened. Amy Goldman wrote me an email at 9:17 P.M. that night that changed the course of this project completely.

I know that you are working to fund this project and what a difficult job that can be. My grandparents established a family foundation prior to their passing in order to help organizations that our family felt were meaningful. Upon hearing about this project, I presented a request to my family to consider a donation.

I am excited to tell you that the Garber Family Foundation will be donating to the Literary Garden.

The donation was completely unexpected (I did not know Amy, nor had I had her children in my classes), but I could not have known that three weeks later Amy and I would be, with dozens of other volunteers, hauling wheelbarrows full of pea gravel and dirt as we began creating a home for the plants I did not yet have. National Public Radio came out to cover our fledgling efforts!

Also in August, I visited the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and met with founder Julia Whitehead, who agreed to be our Literary Garden sponsor; more funding meant more essentials for the garden. Even more exciting, Julia set up the opportunity for Melissa and I to meet Edie Vonnegut to get the Vonnegut hydrangeas for the garden.

By September and October, the plants came rolling in, by mail and by car, a plethora of perennials populating the backseat of my Jeep, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s false indigo pods shaking in terror as we made our way into Michigan. My students and I planted on a warm October afternoon under the direction of master gardener Dani Connolly. We made it into The Detroit Free Press, my mustachioed mug plastered across the front of the Life section for the world to see!

In November, tragedy struck our West Bloomfield community for the third time when we lost another tenth grade student to suicide. I had just learned about the Carton2Garden challenge and wondered how we could use it as an opportunity to help the students process their grief. Driving home one night, my playlist randomly shuffled to They Might Be Giants – “Put a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul.” My mind immediately flashed to Emily Dickinson:

What if we made the cartons into BIRDHOUSES? Birdhouses that wouldn’t just house our feathered friends in the courtyard, but birdhouses that would symbolically remind our struggling students to keep room for hope to perch in their very souls, that things would get better? I called on my dear friends Karen Matynowski (science) and Mimi Hoffman (art) for help. I knew I could not do this alone, but I was so excited about the idea, I had to share it immediately!

This was another aspect to the garden entirely, but it was so very important. So important to acknowledge the grief and pain and worry I saw in their writing. None of us could make sense of these tragedies, but we could try to move forward, one inspirational quote at a time, nudging each other towards brighter days.

I would stand at the window over the winter and worry endlessly about the school, our students, the plants. Would we survive the ice, the frost, the snow? It was so important that we try.

My dear friend Robin Tracey and her team at Moonlink Studios / Ringside Creative donated their time and efforts to create a video for us to submit to the Carton2 Garden contest in April, and in May, we found out that we were one of 14 national award winners! Prairie Farms Dairy rewarded our students with an ice cream social, and The Detroit Free Press covered our award in its Life section on June 11, 2016.

In May, the West Bloomfield Public Library announced that they would be donating a deposit collection of books to our WBHS iCenter to allow students to check out books for the authors they find interesting in the garden. Media specialist Julie Abeska and I are working on providing a special space in the iCenter to showcase this generous collection.

Spring finally sprung, and after a rash of late frost warnings, we finally had our official spring planting on June 3, 2016. We have been approved to begin a WBHS Literary Garden Club and have over 60 interested members signed up – as a matter of fact, they have already begun working on cleaning the courtyard, and they helped with the spring planting and with the decorating for the Literary Garden Grand Opening Gala.

On Friday, June 10, we opened the doors of the courtyard to the West Bloomfield Central Administration, School Board, Educational Foundation, donors, volunteers, students and parents to give them a chance to see the garden in all of its glory. 

None of this would have been possible without the generosity of the organizations that have supported the garden through generous grants, starting with the West Bloomfield Educational Foundation, the Garber Family Foundation, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Public Education Leadership Community Grant, the Penguin Random House Teacher Awards for Literacy, the Troy Garden Club, and the Carton2Garden Middle/High School Award.

There would not be a garden without the herculean efforts of the museums, homesteads, families, scholars, and organizations of authors - and some of the authors themselves! -  from around the country. They include: Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, Eugenia Collier, Emily Dickinson, Sharon Draper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nikki Giovanni, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Ken Kesey, Thomas Lynch, Carson McCullers, N. Scott Momaday, Flannery O’Connor, Holly Painter, Marge Piercy, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roethke, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Walt Whitman, and Jeff Zaslow. I am so grateful that when I came knocking at your doors, you responded so generously. I know that you don’t necessarily have the time and funding that you need in your own organizations, and I am endlessly grateful that you took the time to bring a swath of American literary history to the students of West Bloomfield High School.

We have so much more that we want to do! Here are just a few of the goals we have set for the next year.

a. Care and maintenance of the plants of the garden, year round

b. Acquire new plants generated from student reading, interest, and discussion

c. Read books and poetry not already in curriculum tied to the authors and poets in the garden and explore the connections to the plants.

d. Write “secret poetry” on the sidewalks in the courtyard that only shows up when it rains. 

e. Plan poetry slams, yoga in the garden, and other events would showcase student talent and provide opportunities for student community building.

g. Provide West Bloomfield community opportunities to create literary-themed art projects in the courtyard.

f. Become the umbrella organization for courtyard improvement. We would work with the Art Department on the Art Garden to help get them up and running. They will apply for grant money this fall to revitalize their end of the courtyard.

If you would like to support the garden, we have set up a way for you to do so that provides a more lasting legacy. You can now purchase a tile to commemorate a special moment in a student’s life, to cement a connection you have to the Literary Garden, or to note some other seminal moment you have connected to an American author or with West Bloomfield High School. See the brochure information here for more details.

Thank you, all of you, for making the West Bloomfield Literary Garden a reality, and stay tuned for YEAR TWO!

Birdhouses and More - Read All About It!

It all started with a simple paper carton...with some inspiration from Emily Dickinson...

 and They Might Giants...

Read all about our latest garden project in the West Bloomfield Spectrum here!