Lovecraft, Melville, and Douglas: Providence, RI to New Bedford, MA: Literary New England III

lizshine74by lizshine74

In On writing, Travel.

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On our way to Providence, Rhode Island, to find a shrine to Lovecraft, we got informed we might touch base with Poe as well. That turned out to be false, though Poe did visit Providence a few times and was a huge influence on Lovecraft.

The day we crossed the India Point Park Bridge into Providence around noon, temps had already crept into the 90s. We sought out a place called Lovecraft Arts and Sciences. It turned out to be just a bookstore called Weird Providence, in a building called The Arcade, that must have been really something at one time since it had its own parking garage but currently hosts only a few little shops with filmy windows. The only other people we saw enter the building were a homeless man with an injured foot looking for food money and a goth-bedazzled family (also looking for Lovecraft Arts and Sciences). The inside of the building had vaulted ceilings with lots of natural light. The walkway between the shops was narrow and stiflingly hot.

Weird Providence housed loads of uncanny reading material, and employed two of the most chatty, friendly bookshop employees I’ve ever seen. While Chris and I browsed the shelves, they chatted on and on in a high enthusiasm register about all sorts of things, without a cellphone in sight.

Inspired by Poe, Lovecraft emphasized mood over action. Like Poe, he was a nocturnal writer, which I thought about as I browsed the store. I’m a morning/daytime writer—always have been. I’m also working right now on a project that stretches my style a bit into the uncanny. It’s a book I haven’t started writing yet, but I am pre-writing it in my head as I work on editing another book. What if I wrote in the evenings sometimes? How would that influence my work? I came across a writing prompt from Kelly Link (another uncanny writer whose books graced the shelves at Weird Providence) in Poets and Writers some months back, about the practice of full moon writing. Maybe?

Lovecraft kept a dream journal, and many of his stories were based on nightmares. He meticulously outlined his works (A plotter!) and was a world-builder. He wrote over 90,000 letters in his lifetime. He took a scholarly approach to his exploration of questions about the universe.

In the end, we decided that we had gotten all we needed from this one weird little bookstore before heading on to New Bedford, Massachusetts. I bought a collection of Lispector stories and Chris bought a Lovecraft anthology. The two clerks checked us out and chatted us up, lingering in my mind as perhaps the uncanniest part of our Lovecraft adventure.

In New Bedford, we went first to Seaman’s Bethel, mostly a shrine to all the men over the years who’ve been lost at sea. It also pays homage to Melville, in particular to his now famous Moby-Dick that failed commercially in his lifetime.

Melville wrote in the mornings at a stand-up desk and became emotionally invested in his works. Another letter writer, he wrote to process the emotional ups and downs of this work of writing. This is a common theme among the writers we’ve visited. It isn’t unlike what I am doing here, writing to all of you, and makes me think in general about the parts of our practice that help us process the burden of this work. Melville read voraciously and (like me) cared not a whit about keeping the margins of books tidy. This practice is also a kind of correspondence. Reading inspires an inner dialogue with the author. The material and the practice of marginalia is one way to process those conversations. It’s at the heart of Maria Popova’s wonderful newsletter, The Marginalian. Perhaps the central motif of the life Chris and I are making together is our shared belief in the power of books to better understand and transform the self. Though I’ve only mentioned a few here, our trip has also taken us into every independent bookstore we come across. As I said to Chris a couple of days ago, “We will leave no bookstore unturned.”A church with a ship in the middle AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Moby-Dick is a book so many of us aspire to read or reread. Its allegorical nature  evokes a deep conversation with ourselves. It’s a flex to say you’ve read it, let’s be honest. It seems that allegorical nature was inspired by the works of Hawthorne, who Melville admired. The lack of commercial success of Moby-Dick drove Melville to work in poetry later in life, they say. I’m not sure why that makes sense, but it kind of does. A novel is a beast to sustain. Not that poetry is easy, but it can be held more completely in the imagination in the making.

In a whirlwind of a day, our last stop in New Beford was the Nathan and Polly Johnson House and the park dedicated to Frederick Douglass [CH1] and the house of abolition across the street. New Bedford was an abolitionist hotspot. Chris and I have not finished the most recent Douglass biography yet, but we got a good start. It was enough of a start to know that even before visiting this place, what I was taught about Frederick Douglass in school wasn’t exactly wrong, but it wasn’t right, either. He was indeed a slave who taught himself to read, and escaped slavery. But he was not a rare miracle. He is a miracle, don’t get me wrong. But his work was bolstered by a vast network of activists and intellectuals, black and white, also pushing for the cause of abolition. Why is this important? Black intellect and black power are more rule than exception. And that matters.

Not surprisingly, Douglass’ writing focused more on clarity and argument over style. His writing often originated from speeches and shows the marks of that rhetorical style: parallelism, direct address, biblical allusions, and irony. His work was urgent and morally driven.

As this day came to a close, I found myself thinking about how a writer’s purpose shapes their work and how knowing that, we can then shape our creative habits to align with our goals. Maybe today is a day to pause and take stock of what you are doing this work for. Maybe today is the day to get curious about what habits or routines might move you in new directions. (Full moon writing, anyone?)

Maybe it’s time to start a dream journal, or consider work at a stand-up desk.

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.