Paintings
As part of the Amherst Poetry Festival of 2015, I was able to sketch, together with painter Nancy Meagher, in Emily Dickinson's bedroom, where she wrote all of her work. It occurs to me that much of what Dickinson did to write her poetry was: to move from thinking out a phrase or idea (writing it down & putting it carefully in the pocket sewn into her dress) to finally coming "home" to the bedroom and writing it out into a poem and then stitching it into a fascicle. She was always mending seams of thought. The objects that would have caught her eye would look to us like a still life: hence the lemon, and the picnic tablecloth. The book pages in the upper right are from a French edition of Jane Austen's EMMA... Austen was another suingular woman, working alone, mending seams.
