Literary New England VII: The End, Salem to Boston

lizshine74by lizshine74

In On writing, Travel.

two people standing on either side of a statue

It did not take long to figure out that Salem is a haven for tourists. When we pulled into town and passed a huge graveyard to the left, the cab in front of us advertised their company: Witch City Cab. The historic district bustled with energy: novelty shops, bars, and restaurants on nearly every block. We made our way to The House of Seven Gables just in time for the five o’clock tour.

Though the tour was not exclusively about Hawthorne, we did learn that the most recent owner did renovate to make the space more responsive to Hawthorne’s novel. She even added a secret passageway—that never appears in the novel—in response to a character who keeps mysteriously popping up in places he isn’t expected.

Though the house came from money earned through trade (and functioned on the backs of slaves), eventually it fell into the hands of Caroline Emmerton who turned it into a museum and uses the money the attraction earns to fund a non-profit that provides ESL lessons and citizenship classes to immigrants.

Hawthorne never lived here. So, how did he know the house?

His cousin’s family owned it for a time, and she told him loads of stories about the house over the years. Hawthorne’s birth home is on the museum property, though. It was moved there from a few blacks away, and thereby saved from demolition.

Hawthorne preferred morning writing, in solitude. He wrote slowly, embracing research and time for ideas to become fully realized before getting down to work. He used fiction to explore psychology and morality, and his treatment of symbolism inspired his friend Melville when writing Moby-Dick.

Hawthorne, so embarrassed by the legacy of his family (prosecutors in the Salem Witch Trials) added the ‘w’ to his family name.

The witches of Salem consist of a huge part of the tourist industry here in Salem. There are dozens of witchy shops. On the way to the Salem Witch Memorial you can have a friend snap a photo of you in stocks. It’s hard to know how to feel walking around this amusement park of the exploits and horrors of colonialism and religious zeal.

The drive to Boston for our very last day of chasing writers and bookstores all over New England was short yet hectic. (Turn left! Stay in right lane!) The chaos solidified our plan to park the car in a garage and take the T to our destinations.

We started in Cambridge and went to The Harvard Bookstore (great used book selection!) and to the birthplace of E.E. Cummings at 104 Irving St. After returning home to the Northwest, we realized we’d missed a chance here to connect with Margaret Fuller, perhaps the most badass of all the Transcendentalists, and even the inspiration for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne.

If you know Cummings, you know he broke the rules off form, punctuation, and typography. He wrote in the mornings, following a steady routine. He drafted on a manual typewriter. He shunned convention in his poetry and in his life. He was also a painter. The first poem of his I fell in love with was “since feeling is first.” I was somewhere in my late teens at the time. Like Auden, Bishop, and Whitman, that first poem left me smitten. I read his work over and over again, as if reading and re-reading aloud could crack the walls in my that blocked my own poetic expression.

We hopped on the train and continued on to three destinations, all near Boston Common: a Poe statue outside a Starbucks on Boylston, Brattle Book Shop, and the apartment Sylvia Plath lived in on Beacon Hill for a time. The Brattle Book Shop is an all used-bookstore with three floors full of books, plus a stunning outdoor discount section (pictured).

Poe wrote at night and focused on producing a single emotional effect, which explains why he stuck to shorter forms. Plath woke up early in the morning to get several hours of writing time in before her children woke. She was a scholar and perfectionist, known for her confessionalism and emotional intensity.

We drove all over New England, looking for writers. Everywhere, we found shrines to them. Though we teach literature and History as separate subjects, the truth is more complicated. Writers then and now are alchemizing events and notions of their time, turning them into art public consideration and discourse.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

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lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.