Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

by

National Life-Writing Month

You might know that November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but did you know that November is also National Life-Writing Month? Bucknell University Press’s catalog includes several exemplars of the genre, which we’re pleased to share with you here.

The Memory Sessions

The Memory Sessions

by Suzanne Farrell Smith

Suzanne Farrell Smith’s father was killed by a drunk driver when she was six, and a devastating fire nearly destroyed her house when she was eight. She remembers those two—and only those two—events from her first nearly twelve years of life. While her three older sisters hold on to rich and rewarding memories of their father, Smith recalls nothing of him. Her entire childhood was, seemingly, erased. In The Memory Sessions, Smith attempts to excavate lost childhood memories. The result is an experimental memoir that upends our understanding of the genre. Rather than recount a childhood, The Memory Sessions attempts to create one from research, archives, imagination, and the memories of others. 

The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence

The Dark Eclipse

by A.W. Barnes

The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes’ relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author’s relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Tanya M. Caldwell

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.

Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier

Writing Home

by Emma Alderson, edited by Donald Ingram Ulin

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country. Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

Mikhail Bakhtin

by Mikhail Bakhtin, edited by Slav N Gratchev and Margarita Marinova

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views: on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

The Imprisoned Traveler: Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon’s Italy

The Imprisoned Traveler

by Keith Crook

Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year “detention” came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth’s contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth’s encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth’s allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother.

Memoir

By Rosario Ferré, translated by Suzanne Hintz and Benigno Trigo

Memoir is Rosario Ferré’s account of her life both as a writer and as a member of a family at the center of the economic and political history of Puerto Rico during the American Century, one hundred years of territorial “non-incorporation” into the United States. The autobiography tells the story of Ferré’s transformation from the daughter of a privileged family into a celebrated novelist, poet, and essayist concerned with the welfare of Puerto Ricans, and with the difficulties of being a woman in Puerto Rican society. It is a snapshot of twentieth-century Puerto Rico through the lens of a writer profoundly aware of her social position. Included are many photographs that connect Ferré’s life with the story of her writing career.

Wreckage: My Father’s Legacy of Art & Junk

By Sascha Feinstein

In this memoir, Sascha Feinstein recounts life with his father, Sam Feinstein, who was both a brilliant artist and a hoarder of monumental proportions. He collected only uncollectible objects—artifacts that required him to give them importance—and at the time of his death in 2003, his hoarding had fundamentally destroyed all three of his large homes. Despite this, Sam Feinstein was a remarkable painter and art teacher. This strange double helix of creativity and destruction guides these collage-like reflections. Like his students’ canvases—paintings inspired by enormous still lifes constructed from the world’s refuse—this book incorporates myriad sources in order to create a more layered experience for the reader. The final result is the depiction of a painter with the highest artistic ideals who nevertheless left behind an incalculable amount of physical and emotional wreckage. 

You can order these books by following the title links to their individual ordering page, or discover more books through our partnership with Rutgers University Press or distributed by Rowman & Littlefield.

by

Interview with the Editors of Johnson in Japan

Johnson in Japan, a new collection of essays exploring the influence of Samuel Johnson and his work on Japanese academic and literary culture, was edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki, and published in October by Bucknell University Press. Here the editors speak with Presidential Fellow Nate Freed to discuss the collection and the state of humanistic studies in Japan. (Responses have been edited for clarity and concision.)

Freed: The essays focus on Samuel Johnson’s connection to Japan and Japanese academia. To some, it may seem interesting or unexpected that Johnson is studied so seriously in the country. What is it about Johnson and his writing that attracts Japanese readers’ attention? How is it that Johnson—who, as you write, thought of Japan as remote, strange, and extraordinary—has come to be studied so?

Suzuki: Our whole book might be an answer to this question, and though it’s not easy to fully reply to it in a short passage, I’ll try. As Professor Eto in Chapter 1 shows, Johnson has been an icon—a representative literary figure—to us for a long time, someone in whom we can find something to which to aspire. Those Meiji people—who wanted to learn anything from abroad after Japan opened its doors—set the trend, and we find it was not just a temporary trend; the more we learn with him, the more inviting we find he is. Though Japan was a remote country to him, I dare say his works appeal to us. I assume affinities and parallels that we can feel in his multi-dimensional complexity might be part of the explanation.

Freed: How do you find Johnsonian studies in Japan fitting in with broader scholarship (eighteen-century or otherwise) in Japanese academia? How might the Johnson Society of Japan affect, or even effect, this situation?

Suzuki: A distinguished Johnsonian, Professor Harada, has been the president of the English Literary Society of Japan, one of the largest humanities societies in the country. His extensive knowledge, the clarity of his talks, his wide range of interests, and his general sociability are appreciated well in the greater milieu of Japanese academia and he has been a key figure in maintaining the Johnson Society of Japan. However, the Society recently has been struggling in recruiting new members, which is a shared problem among many literary societies in Japan.

Freed: Yuri Yoshino’s essay focuses on Jane Austen and the Japanese path to Johnson. Some recognize Austen’s “literary debt” to Johnson, and how, through Sōseki Natsume’s reading of Austen, Johnson indirectly influenced Sōseki’s work. How has Japanese academics’ engagement with writers like Austen shaped their understanding of Johnson and the field in general?

Ogawa: Today there is a large number of Japanese academics who are engaged in Austen research, many of whom are now taking interest in Sōseki’s contribution to the spreading of her work in early-twentieth-century Japan. As Yoshino has stated, Johnson’s interest in “engag[ing] in portraits” has much relevance to Austen’s realism. I think that many Austen scholars are able to see one of the key features of modern novels through Sōseki’s literary theory (which is now translated into English). Perhaps his novels such as Light and Dark,which are much indebted to Austen’s realism, also reveal how important Johnson’s legacy was for her and consequently for Sōseki.

Freed: How do you interpret Johnsonian studies’ affecting the way Japanese academics engage with writers like Mary Shelley, given your proposition that Johnson’s work (specifically Rasselas) more directly influenced Shelley’s Frankenstein than previously recognized?

Ogawa: If I am allowed to elaborate on my own experience, Johnsonian studies have literally opened my eyes to a new aspect of Mary Shelley’s novels. Perhaps there is still a shared feeling in Japan that Romantic studies must be explored within a certain field, namely from the pre-Romantic era to the Romantic era (including Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley). Tracing the origin back to the early eighteenth century is not an orthodox method. However, after looking closely at Johnson’s writing, I realized that there is clearly an important genealogy that runs through to Romantic literature. Now that I know Shelley had read Rasselas twice, I can confidently say that she was greatly influenced by Johnson’s pessimism as well as optimism about scientific progress that is portrayed in the novel.

Freed: Your introduction mentions the dilemma around understanding the need for promoting the sciences while still simultaneously promoting and encouraging the critical study of the humanities. What problems do you see potentially arising from an undervaluing of and/or a failure to deeply understand the impact of Johnsonian studies on the social, physical, and life sciences as they are today in Japan?

Suzuki & Ogawa: In 2015 the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issued a statement that was widely understood as an encouragement to dismiss humanities in national universities. Things have changed over these five years and it seems that the worst is now behind us; students of the humanities have begun to regain confidence in their field’s values. But this year in October, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga denied six nominees to the Science Council of Japan, all of whom are from the humanities and social sciences, and this has sparked a huge debate about why he rejected them. The council, which was established in 1949, is the representative organization of the scientific community—not just those pursuing natural and life sciences, but also the humanities and social sciences. The council’s mission, which is to debate and offer solutions to the important scientific issues of the day, requires input not just from scientists but also from humanities experts. A failure to deeply understand the impact of Johnsonian studies on the social, physical, and life sciences in Japan would lead to cases like this, and we feel that valuing interdisciplinary research—such as Johnson was able to show—would promote the understanding of why both communities need to coexist in harmony.

Johnson in Japan, edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki, and with a foreword by Greg Clingham, is available in paperback, cloth, and ebook. To order, visit:
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/johnson-in-japan/9781684482412

by

#ActiveVoices: Q&A on African American Arts

On the last day of University Press Week’s blog tour, hear from several of the voices behind African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity, edited by Sharrell D. Luckett. This anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S.

Q: It’s been nearly a year since African American Arts was published, and what a year it has been. In the introduction, you wrote that “this anthology anchors itself in a place that might be betwixt and between the not yet solved and the unsolvable, the never broken and the unbreakable, the dream deferred and the daydreamer. Borrowing from Childish Gambino, many of these essays function as a clarion call to not only wake up (upending from an induced, albeit conscious sleep—a state of un(rest)), but to stay woke.” How can arts, aesthetics, and activism help us continue to wake up and stay woke as we move into the future? How can organizations in the arts and humanities, like University Presses, continue to help raise up artist and activist voices?

African American Arts

Sharrell D. Luckett: Artists run the world. As long as artists continue to make art, the world has no choice but to evolve and revolve when necessary. As citizens we must engage in art to help guide us in our life-long pursuits. Art, broadly defined, speaks when no one or nothing else can. Organizations in the arts can continue to support artist-activist voices by providing platforms for artists to share their work. Funding is also critical to the sustainability of art in certain forms or with certain needs. And of course, connecting artists with audiences is always ideal.

Luckett is an award-winning director and bestselling author and editor of several books. At the University of Cincinnati, she is the Director of the Helen Weinberger Center for Drama and Playwriting, professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, and faculty collaborator with College-Conservatory of Music. Luckett is the founding CEO of the Black Acting Methods Studio, a face-to-face, virtual, and mobile performance training institution.

Q: In the eleven months since African American Arts was published, what did you take away, from your own work or another essay in the collection, about the role of African American arts and activism in our society? What moment or statement stuck with you?

Genevieve Hyacinthe: ANOINTED. Like the North Star, the photoprint, Untitled (Anointed) (2017) by genius, Carrie Mae Weems, is the opening image of African American Arts, Activism, Aesthetics and Futurity, aligning the constituent essays into consonance. In it, Weems layers the word ANOINTED over a soft hue of red through which we see the majestic profile of Mary J. Blige. Two graceful arms enter the picture plane on the left just above Mary’s head, viewed in the midst of coronating her with a resplendent crown that hovers just above her distinctive copper-tinted hair, here swept up into a lush cluster. But the word, ANOINTED, is in the past tense. Mary is already Her Majesty, anointed, divine, whole, saved, omnipotent, ordained.  Our writing, like the placing of the crown, simply shines a light on what is both immanent and transcendent: We too are the ANOINTED ones following the Sovereigns near – Mary, Carrie, Sharrell, Kamala, Stacey, D. Soyini, Adrian, Wangechi, Alicia, Opal, Patrisse, bell… and nearer – Carmen, Octavia, Beverly B, Nina, Toni, Breonna, Tamir, Natasha, Riah, Dominique (Rem’mie), Sylvere… on and on…

Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Anointed). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Hyacinthe is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Program at California College of the Arts.

Q: African American Arts speaks to futurity. At this critical political juncture, how can the arts help us envision and shape a more equitable future? How do concepts such as Afrofuturism and Transfuturism inform visions of the future in your own art?

Amber Johnson: Art aids us in Futurity because art is where the imagination lives. The future has yet to be written, experienced, or lived. With art, we get to imagine and build the future that we want. Artists have a very special place in society because they have the ability to project their ideas (ideas that don’t exist in the universe and visual world yet) and onto a blank canvas of their choosing with different forms of media in an effort to manifest the future that they want. When I think about Transfuturism, I think about the body being that blank canvas where imagination is projected. So the trans and non-binary body, just by way of existing, is a form of artistic futurity. 

Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Communication at St. Louis University, Co-Founder of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity and Founder of The Justice Fleet.

Q: Your essay “The Conciliation Project as a Social Experiment: Behind the Mask of Uncle Tom-ism and the Performance of Blackness” discusses the intersection between the performing arts and activism through The Conciliation Project. Can you speak to the importance of the arts in activism, or in activism within the arts?

Tawnya Pettiford-Wates: As an organization, The Conciliation Project emerged because of an urgent need within our community to address the historic effects of race, racism and systemic oppression. We began initially by examining the thesis presented in a seminal novel of the American cultural continuum; “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”  by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was supposed to be a class project, an academic exercise. We had no idea that the creative process involved in this interrogation would transform a community and create a commitment to use the play we collaboratively created and the platform that the performance of Blackface and whiteface minstrelsy built for open and honest dialogue about America’s destructive and damaging legacy, would ultimately form a company. An arts organization that has, since its inception been dedicated to the restoration of lost stories/histories and the conciliation of our collective racial past through arts and activism. The Conciliation Project has performed and worked in communities regionally, nationally and internationally since 2001.
What makes the work of The Conciliation Project most effective in the arena of social justice and social change education and initiatives is the ability of the Dramatic Arts to empower disenfranchised or marginalized communities and facilitate a process whereby those communities tell their own stories regarding the significant issues and historic events that impact them. Transformative change is the goal and healing the traumatic and historic legacy of America’s racial dysfunction, and the destructive impact it continues to have on our lives and our culture. And finally, we believe, “All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.” —- August Wilson 

Pettiford-Wates is a Professor of Graduate Pedagogy in Acting and Directing at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the artistic director and founder of The Conciliation Project.

by

Curators of Creative Error

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

A parson tucked away in the tiny village of Ousby who formulates an evidence-free theory of the evolution of the earth.

A forgotten poet who imagines that the citizens of Saturn enjoy a marvelous overhead view of planetary rings.

A nutritionist whose dietary recommendations give clients so much energy that they exercise themselves to extinction.

Along with many other unusual persons granted a second life in university press books, these eighteenth-century thinkers could be generously styled creative, but they might also, more accurately, be deemed wrong.  Such eccentric if occasionally entertaining earners of that off-putting adjective, incorrect, epitomize the many real and fictional figures who missed the mark while showing a bit of creativity.  Whether bad leaders who erred their way to their destinations, such as HMS Bounty Commander William Bligh; whether “tech” inventors who max out at 98% accuracy, such as those who struggled to make an accurate clock for use in maritime navigation; or whether make-believe heroines like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, who never seems to know what is happening to her yet who ends up as lady of the manor, the erroneous outnumber the accurate in studies of the past.

Aided and abetted by an assortment of university presses, I have spent most of my professional life in (sometimes) creative commentary on the vast corpus of early modern errors.  A life spent in nonstop discussion of ideas that stand no chance of being true might qualify as “creative” in the worst sense: a diddling away of a tiny bit of talent on miscellaneous curiosities.  In this peculiar diversion of educational resources, I am far from alone.  By the brutally pragmatic standards of twenty-first century industry, the vast majority of what university presses publish must count as little more than a distraction from the pursuit of productivity.  The prognosis is not much better for those actively creating the cultural history of our own era.  Given the proliferation of discredited ideas in the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, we may infer that most of our notions will eventually end up among quaint collectibles, like old farm equipment nailed to the walls of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

Creative thinking—figuring out the meaning of our history or artfully understanding the culture of yesteryear or discovering something in the past that has unexpected applications in the present or future—is largely about the sympathetic stewardship of error: the willingness to cut some slack to the past and to appreciate what even crackpots (perhaps inadvertently) achieved.  After all, mainstream figures like astronomers William and Caroline Herschel can seem freakish, what with sitting out, night after night, a brother and sister team looking at luminous smudges about whose true nature they have nary a clue.  In the effort to appreciate the productive irregularities of the past, university presses make a colossal contribution.  At 250 pages and under the imprimatur of a legitimizing institution, a university press book provides the perfect vehicle in which to observe not only one or two historically significant mistakes but to view manageable arrays of discarded phenomena or ideas—to reveal worthwhile patterns amidst a bevy of blunders.  The significance of the university press book as a genre expressing creative curatorial concern for the variably valuable paraphernalia of the past is easy to overlook.  A comparison between the compact modern university press book and an intelligent but unwieldy commercial synoptic production such as Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization will immediately show the amazing ability of the university press format to extract an abundance of knowledge from unusual topics.

When not studying the peculiarities of the long eighteenth century, I spent a certain amount of career time—over a decade—in “faculty” or “shared” university governance, dealing with the astounding range of people, activities, and administrative arrangements in a multi-campus public university.  This experience repeatedly showed the centrality of university presses for whatever remains of creativity in modern mega-universities.  By persisting in the protection of impracticalities, university presses keep their sponsor institutions honest, open, and, in a word, creative.  Reliably and consistently attracting media attention, university presses remind everyone that higher education really should be about innovative thought rather than about sport, grants, and state legislatures.  Throughout my years in university governance, I never ceased to be amazed at the reluctance among powerful administrators, when budget cuts came along, to withdraw even the slightest bit of support from a costly press that would never turn a profit.  Such, to make an odd comparison, is the power that religious symbols exert over Dracula.  Books that gleefully celebrate knowledge without concern for gain dazzle every eye and sear through resistance. They surprise even the skeptical with their sacramental power. The more peculiar, offbeat, and creative the volume, the stronger the enchantment.  Paying heed, in a university press book, to all those historical figures who made creative mistakes thus brings us happily back to the true, energetically creative purpose of universities.

Kevin L. Cope is Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University. He is the author or editor of dozens of books and articles, including Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment and, with Cedric Reverand, Paper, Ink, and Achievement: Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship. He is also the founder and editor of the annual journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. A former member of the National Governing Council of the American Society for University Professors, Cope is regularly referenced in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and is a frequent guest on radio and television news and talk shows.

by

Amplifying Voices from Sierra Leone

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

“Sierra Leone, your tragedy was too painful to be a poem.
If you could speak, it would be raw in my bones!”
–Syl Cheney-Coker, “Lake Fire,” in Stone Child and Other Poems (2008)

My work in postwar settings has taught me that our moral indignation and empathic response to others’ pain sometimes recedes, and we grow numb, no longer capable of effective political action to prevent, oppose, or end injustice. Unlike sterile news reports, creative expression such as poetry can help us move past numbness and retain (or regain) a capacity to respond. After spending more than five years working as a psychologist and human rights advocate in international contexts, I was drawn to “found poetry,” a genre in which phrases from existing sources are presented in new ways. Found poetry is a vehicle for transforming seemingly indescribable events into literary expression, and powerfully impresses on the mind of the reader the voices of those affected.

I first encountered public transcripts from the UN-backed international war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone in 2005, when serving as a psychologist for the trials held in Freetown. It became evident to me that eleven years of civil war had resulted in a new reality in which the unthinkable had become a part of daily life:

“…in Kono
when they chop off people’s hands
we use tobacco leaf
to tie it round the wounded place.”

The rebels who had tried to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government were eventually defeated, but the country suffered tremendous losses. The testimonies – comprising hundreds of witness reports – deserved the attention of the international community, but that attention was limited. A number of poets from the West African sub-region have tried to rectify that by creating poems pertaining to the war. Among these, the most notable are Liberian American Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who has published several collections featuring poems about the two civil wars in neighboring Liberia, and Syl Cheney-Coker from Sierra Leone, whose 2008 collection contains compelling poems about the civil war in his homeland. Now, I have rendered the public transcripts into poetry to make a broader global community aware of the war’s impact and to underscore the twin truths of survivor suffering and resilience.

After I compiled this collection, I was faced with the task of identifying a publisher who would consider a book by a first-time author, the subject matter and genre of which were largely unfamiliar. I had a hunch that commercial publishers would not accept this book, but that a university press might. In spring 2019, I was blessed to contact Dr. Carmen R. Gillespie – poet, literary scholar, professor of English, founder and director of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University, and editor of Griot Project Book series. She had a warm, encouraging attitude toward my proposal, and despite her sudden passing in August 2019, the book is now due out from Bucknell University Press in July 2021.

 As I sit here today reflecting on the results of the U.S. presidential election, my mind and heart go back to the many Sierra Leonean women, men, and children whose limbs, lives, and voices were taken from them as a punishment for exercising their right to vote for a civilian government and their refusal to support a rebel force that tried to rob them of that right:

 “Since you say you love a civil government
we are going to chop off your hands,
we will not let you go free.
If we don’t chop off your hands,
we’re going to kill you.”

After the war finally ended, Sierra Leoneans began the long, hard work of attempting to rebuild—and restore faith in—their society and country. That effort is ongoing in Sierra Leone as, indeed, it is in the United States and many other countries across the globe where rights have been violated and power abused. In August 2007, shortly before I left Freetown, millions of Sierra Leoneans all over the country braved long lines to vote in the first presidential election since the end of the long civil war. Those who had had one arm severed by the rebels voted with the other. Those who had been cruelly robbed of both arms voted with their toe-print. There is so much, so very much, that the world can learn from Sierra Leoneans’ determination to survive and to preserve or reclaim their dignity and human rights, including the right to vote and be counted.

University presses help make it possible to know about these stories, and to develop a keener alertness to the ways that language is used in public life: the kind of rhetoric that rationalizes aggression and the kind that serves to reduce it. If we strive to pay attention, we can discern truths that would otherwise slip away. Where do we locate the words to give voice to these truths? The words that we need might be anywhere. The words that we need might be everywhere. Listen. Read.

Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her collection of found poetry, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in June 2021.

by

Excerpt: Writing Home

The following excepts are from Donald Ulin’s new book Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier, which offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Quaker immigrant Emma Alderson through her own letters.

From the introduction…

“On September 17, 1842, a Quaker family of seven stepped off the Shenandoah at Philadelphia, having left Liverpool six weeks earlier. Emma Botham Alderson, age thirty-six, had grown up in the village of Uttoxeter, in the Midlands county of Staffordshire, the daughter of a land surveyor and the youngest of three sisters. Having lived under the shadow of her sister Mary Howitt, one of the day’s most popular writers, Alderson was finally setting off to make a new life of her own. Her husband, Harrison Alderson, age forty-two, had been born to a farming family in Yorkshire but, like so many other farmers’ sons, had left the countryside to find work in the city. After an apprenticeship to a grocer and a few years in the tea trade, he had met Emma. Together they had returned briefly to farming before making the momentous decision to seek a new life in North America… ”

A letter to Ann Botham on stationery, with engraving of Cincinnati, presumably from the Kentucky side of the river.
From Alderson’s letters…

“The woods both in Ohio & Kentucky are, however, very beautiful; the remaining greens were intermingled with every variety of yellow, orange, red, brown and occasionally a purple oak with here and there the trunk & arms, \wreathed with the Virginia creeper/, of some dead tree starting up like great scarlet sticks in the very thickest of the forest. The hills, where divested of wood, are of the brightest emerald green, & the river, with its now full and rapid stream, forms a scene of such varied & glorious beauty that I often long you, our beloved friends, could witness it. The houses & villas that are built near the river both in Kentucky & Ohio are all white and enliven and increase the natural beauty of the scenery…”

“I hope, dearest mother, there is no need for alarm on the ground of war between England & America. It is now confidently reported that the Oregon question is settled by partition of the territory. I hope it is, but I do believe there is great disinclination to war in the body of the people here. All know & acknowledge the impolicy of it, & as far as we can judge, it is little worth contending for, with immense tracts of excellent land still uncultivated. What have the Americans to do in seeking to add to their already over large country by the seizing of such distant & unremarkable lands, & England, I am sure, has more dominions than have done her good long ago, but war with this country & Mexico is said to be inevitable. The annexation of Texas was an evil thing because it was intended thereby to strengthen & perpetuate slavery & these are its early bad fruits: war & bloodshed…”

 A letter to Ann Botham on stationery, with engraving of a street plan of Cincinnati.

“A few weeks ago I was invited to join a party at the house of a lady in the country. It was the meeting of an anti slavery sewing society & to me a very interesting occasion. Their object is to provide clothing for poor runaway slaves, who often lurk about in the woods & through the country & are frequently discovered by their abject & miserable appearance. Of course this is composed of the red hot stigmatized abolitionists & a thing little known amongst Friends [Quakers] but and a very questionable affair altogether, but I am perverse enough to have rather a peculiar pleasure in their society & to give a decided preference in my own mind to their proceedings. They told me with a kind of triumph of the arrival of two bands of runaways from Kentucky within the last few weeks, \each/ consisting of upwards of 20 persons. One gentleman lost 11 slaves & these were aided in their effort for liberty, clothed & helped forward on their northward route by the good abolitionists of Cincinnati…”

Along with transcriptions and images of Emma Alderson’s letters, Writing Home includes introductions and notes that situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson’s letters and her sister Mary Howitt’s Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.

To learn more about Emma Alderson and how Donald Ulin accomplished this incredible project, check out our recent author interview or a copy of Writing Home.

by

Quakerism, Archives, and Cross-writing: An Interview with Donald Ulin

Donald Ulin, editor of Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier, talks with our graduate assistant Madison Weaver about the challenges of archival work, Quaker views on social justice issues, and how the life of an ordinary nineteenth-century woman resonates with the contemporary immigrant experience.

Weaver: How did you find your way into the project of Writing Home? 

Ulin: I grew up Quaker, attending a very liberal, unprogrammed Friends meeting, vaguely aware that there were other Quaker traditions, but not really thinking of them as real Quakers. In graduate school, my work on representations of the English countryside led me to William Howitt’s Rural Life of England (1837). From there I began learning about the Quaker couple William and Mary Howitt. As an American scholar of British literature, I became interested in Mary’s Our Cousins in Ohio, and was trying to put together an edition of that, since it’s been out of print since 1866. Then one day a Google search for “howitt” (just for the hell of it!) turned up a new page on the University of Nottingham’s website saying they had recently purchased a huge collection of Howitt correspondence—including letters from Mary’s sister Emma, the inspiration for Our Cousins in Ohio. I planned to include a few letters as an appendix to the book, but when I visited the Nottingham archive, decided that the letters deserved a publication of their own.

As I began to realize that Alderson and her family represented the more theologically conservative tradition that I had only ever heard of growing up, I had a kind of falling out with her and the project. As I persisted, however, I came to see the history of Quakerism, and perhaps religion and politics more broadly, in more inclusive and less binary terms.

Weaver: This sort of archival work seems a difficult and time-consuming undertaking. Could you tell us a bit about the processes of doing archival work in preparation for this book? Was there anything that surprised you in your research over the course of the project?

Ulin: There’s a tough balance to strike between thoroughness and efficiency. You want to collect every detail: paper size and type, watermarks, odd orthographic features, formatting, and so on. But there’s only so much time, so you have to define the parameters of the project and collect just what you’re going to need. Just reading the handwriting was challenging, but over time it became easier. Another challenge was the cross-writing—where the letter-writer finishes a page, rotates it 90 degrees, and then writes on top of what she has already written. I have included several images of these cross-written letters in the book. When I reached the letter in which Emma apologizes to her mother for the cross-writing and promises not to do it anymore, I breathed my own sigh of relief.

An example of Alderson’s cross-writing in her letters.

Weaver: Writing Home centers on the life of a Quaker immigrant on the American frontier. What can Emma Alderson’s writings illuminate about the immigrant experience in the nineteenth century, or perhaps even today?

Ulin: What’s particularly important about this work is that it brings to light the life of one particular immigrant, independent of any generalizations that we might make about “the immigrant experience.” That experience is different for every individual immigrant, which might be one of the most important truths to keep in mind in talking about immigrants from any period. Quaker immigrants in the nineteenth century had the benefit of an extensive support network of Quakers who had gone before. Through these networks, an immigrant was able to sustain some of her old national identity while finding her way into her new life as a productive member of this ever-changing country. In general, if not in specifics, this experience is no doubt shared by communities of immigrants in the United States today, be they Hispanic, Somalian, Rohingyan, or anything else.  

Weaver: Part of what makes Emma Alderson’s story so engaging is how her letters are steeped in her Quaker views and experiences. Could you speak to how her Quaker beliefs might offer a unique perspective on the events of the time period? 

Ulin: Quakers, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren are recognized as the three “peace churches” for their absolute rejection of war. I don’t know so much about the other two, but the Quakers have also been well-represented in the ranks of those fighting for various social justice causes, including prison reform, abolition, and women’s rights. We can see these attitudes quite clearly when she writes about soldiers on their way to Mexico, freed slaves seeking to live their lives amidst terrible racism, and (to a lesser extent) the influential women in her own life. But Quakers were far from united in either their politics or their theology. The movements and controversies in American society around the war with Mexico, slavery and abolition, and the rise of evangelicalism are reflected in conflicts within the Society of Friends. Historians are familiar with the names of leading, public Friends who occupied one side or another of these conflicts—Joseph John Gurney, his sister Elizabeth Fry, John Wilbur, Levi Coffin of the underground railroad. What I think is unique about Alderson’s correspondence is what I can only call a more “ordinary” and personal perspective on this political and theological landscape.

Weaver: Emma Alderson’s writings seem to invoke fascinating intersectionality between her gender, class, religion, and nationality. How does this intersectionality speak to the uniqueness of her story? Is there a special moment in her letters or journals that has stuck with you? 

Ulin: Very interesting question. It’s easy to generalize about women in nineteenth century America or Quaker women. They are either oppressed drudges or committed and articulate activists. Many (not all, of course) of the more activist women came from relatively privileged backgrounds, which gave them the education and liberty to pursue their work. As a middle-class, English-speaking white woman, Alderson occupied a privileged position on most counts. I’m not sure how clearly she recognized that fact, but the twenty-first century reader of her letters is always aware of the Black, or poor, or German-speaking others passing through the narrative, individuals both with whom and against whom she is constructing her own identity.

Weaver: Aside from Emma Alderson’s letters themselves, what other kinds of material are available in Writing Home? Why is the commentary and context so important in this sort of project?

Ulin: The book contains quite a few images of the actual letters, and I have also reproduced many non-textual elements, particularly the drawings and little sketches by Alderson or her son, William Charles. I have also included illustrations by Anna Mary Howitt for her mother’s Our Cousins in Ohio. These are interesting, not as illustrations of Alderson’s actual children, for indeed, two of the four illustrations depict incidents that did not actually occur, but for the ways in which Howitt’s book refigures those children for her own literary and ideological purposes.

The general introduction puts Alderson’s life and correspondence in historical context, with information about postal history, Quakerism, immigration, and more. In that introduction, I also situate this correspondence more theoretically in relation to recent scholarship on epistolarity, women’s writing, trans-Atlantic studies. The introductions to the three sections of the book provide historical and biographical background to the letters in those sections. The introduction to the third section provides the first detailed analysis of how these letters were transformed collectively by the two sisters into Our Cousins in Ohio.

A Directory of Names gives some information about most of the people named, including the pseudonyms assigned by Mary Howitt in Our Cousins in Ohio. So, a reader of Howitt’s book can quickly learn more about the real life of any of those characters. 

Readers may also be interested in the epilogue, which follows the remarkable lives of the main characters and their descendants.  One went on to found Bryn Mawr College, another set international legal precedents at the Nuremburg trials, another helped pave the way for the establishment of the Adirondack State Park.

A short appendix gives all of the physical attributes of the letters, including paper size, postmarks, and addressing.

Weaver: We live in a time when letter writing has fallen mostly out of practice, and the United States Postal Service faces serious risks of losing funding. How can Writing Home help us think differently about how we communicate, then and now? 

Ulin: The materiality of the letter makes it an embodiment of, or a surrogate for, the distant sender. Time and again in these letters, Alderson reminds us of the power of a physical letter. In one letter she describes the pleasure of corresponding with her mother as a “pleasure of holding converse with thee.” Another time, thanking her mother for a parcel, she writes “it seems as if every thing was sanctified by thy touch; the very stiches on the wrappers are endeared to us.” Since working on this project, I’ve been trying to write more physical letters. It’s hard when you know that whatever news you are sharing will probably be broken in an e-mail or a phone call long before the other person gets the letter, but I know they still appreciate it when it arrives.


Donald Ingram Ulin is an associate professor and director of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. His new book Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson (1806-1847), an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight.