Literary New England VI: Franconia, Bennington, Amherst

lizshine74by lizshine74

In On writing, Travel.

Literary New England VI: Franconia, Bennington, Amherst

We were headed to Franconia and craving a second cup of coffee, but didn’t want to settle for just anything. We wanted a local place with a local roast, the kind of thing you can’t go a mile in the PNW without running into. We saw dozens of dispensaries and passed three Dunkin Donuts, but no indie coffee shop. I said to Chris, let’s hold on; there’s going to be a White Mountain Coffee coming up any minute. A fair guess for the name of the coffee of my imagination, since we were driving through the white mountains at the time. It was 2:30 by the time we caved and pulled into the fourth Dunkin we had passed. Within one hundred feet of pulling back onto the road, what did we see? White Mountain Cafe. There’s a lesson in this, I’m sure.

This is the view from the porch of The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, where Frost lived and wrote for five years. Just pause and look at that view of the White Mountains.

The air in Franconia is like that view; it revives you. We took a self-guided tour after paying our twenty dollars each. The farm is a museum, and also a retreat for poets. In the welcoming barn hang portraits of poets who’ve sojourned there, including my biggest living poet crush, Robert Haas.

The Frost Place gives you glimpses of a life: a photo with Jackie O., others of the children and wife who Frost outlived, Time Magazine covers.

Frost wrote longhand on loose sheets or yellow legal pads. He carefully revised, often putting in dozens of revisions for a single poem. Frost blended traditional forms with the natural rhythms of speech. He would compose in his head while out taking daily walks in nature. He used nature as a metaphor for larger themes. He often wrote and revised at night, asserting that at night emotional truths surfaced easier. He was known for public readings and performances. He did not adhere to a strict daily writing routine.

After touring the house, there is a poetry trail to take a walk through. I’ve created a virtual version of the stroll here for you if you want to walk along with us. We took turns reading the poems aloud and marveling at their beauty and power. Chris took this picture of me right after we’d read the last poem on the walk, “After Apple Picking”.

I took this picture of him taking in the view from the porch.

After the tour, we toured the art walk in Franconia and took in more of the beauty of the place before heading to our lodging for the night in The Allard, a building in Whitefield, in the process of being restored and turned into a teashop and a respite for tired hikers.

We traveled on to Bennington, Vermont, the next morning. After having to turn around to retrieve a bag left behind (adding two hours to our already three-hour drive) we saved Shirley Jackson for the morning.

Shirley Jackson wrote whenever and wherever she could, in the nornings and evenings, at the kitchen table among the chaos of a house with four children in the 1950s. She shows all the pampered writers who could only write in solitude (most every writer we’ve come across so far) what’s what. She is most known for her short story “The Lottery” which, even if you haven’t read anything else by her, you probably read in high school. There’s a 2017 biography called A Rather Haunted Life that I just moved up my reading list. Pictured is the inspiration for Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: Jennings Hall, at Bennington College. If you haven’t read We’ve Always Lived in the Castle yet, make a cup of tea, put a cookie on a plate, and get down to it.

From Bennington, we drive to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. The next two tours were all booked, so we made it on for the 1:30. We took the time to stroll Main Avenue and grab lunch at Paradise of India. (Recommended!) I had the vegetarian thali (a little of everything!) and Chris had shrimp tandoori, though it really was a free-for-all, as we like it. The one-hour tour kept us completely captivated. Our guide was knowledgeable, passionate, and did not miss a beat. Here’s a picture of Dickinson’s desk.

It’s the sort of desk you had at the time if you were a lady. And still, she persisted. Dickinson famously never married, and withdrew from society around the age of thirty. We learned this time coincided with the death of her dog, Carlo. No one really knows why she withdrew, but the two theories our guide said had the most support were (1) so she could focus on her writing; and (2) an increase in social anxiety. Not mutually exclusive explanations.

Dickinson wrote daily on any scrap of paper she could find. She stitched some poems together into booklets. She did not publish any poems purposely during her lifetime, but she did send them out through letters to trusted readers, which is how four were published without her consent. Her poems were compact and experimental for the time (slant rhyme, no titles, dashes instead of end stop punctuation). Nature was her muse; she loved to garden. Our guide did point out that her most prolific period was during the time the family hired help. So, in addition to being single, she would have had more time away from chores to write. A lady writer’s dream!

What this reflection has me thinking about is how our creative work can happen any place at all, if we show up for it: at a busy kitchen table, a tiny, cramped desk, looking out from the porch at a stunning view of the White Mountains.

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.

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.