Abstract

As my lovely winter sabbatical at Lake Cumberland wraps up, I found myself this morning boiling down some basics about Mabel Loomis Todd for a friend of mine who thought I might have been talking about President Lincoln’s spouse.  

My retired high school English teacher wife reminds me that I have created an abstract.  It felt like a word game, crafting only the basics of Mrs. Todd’s story into an engaging synopsis.  

I assume a lot of people who pick up my book will know of Emily Dickinson, but little more.  Surely most will know nothing of Mabel Loomis Todd.  

So I figure my job is to certify the magnitude of Emily’s poetry while connecting it’s editing and publication to Mrs. Todd’s efforts. Since that work has borne important fruit in the humanities, I want to bring the reader into a further awareness of her committed interest in the Natural world.  In short, because she bought a mostly wilderness island in 1908, the field of environmental education has been impacted worldwide.  You could look it up.     ;-)

***

A quick take on Nature’s people

Mabel Loomis Todd entered into the Emily Dickinson legend through a friendship with her brother’s family.  As a new faculty wife, Mabel was welcomed into the Amherst College community through soirees held at the home of the college treasurer and important-man-on-campus, William Austin Dickinson.  His wife Susan’s hospitality offered young Mrs. Todd a venue for companionship, engagement in the arts, and extended after-dinner conversation.  Austin Dickinson’s participation in family activities was limited, but over time his friendship with Mabel grew.  

Mrs. Todd was quite taken, and taken in, by the Dickinsons.  But all was not right at the Evergreens, Austin & Susan’s home located just through the hedge from his parents’ homestead, then the residence of Emily and their sister Lavinia.  Story in town was that Susan’s friendships burned hot and bright for a time but then cooled.  The same could be said about her marriage to Austin, who subsequently spent many hours talking with his sisters in their kitchen about life and his unhappiness.  

About a year after Mabel’s arrival in Amherst, her friendship with Austin crossed what they lovingly referred to as their ‘Rubicon.’  Their affair, an open secret in town, would end only with Austin’s death thirteen years later.  David Todd, the new college astronomer and husband, tacitly approved of the pair’s intimacy because he was sincerely fond of them both and had a bit of a reputation himself.  Their only child, Millicent, grew up in that environment.  Susan Dickinson was aware as well, and as story has it, did not make her husband’s time at home all that comfortable. 

Austin and Mabel celebrated their love as ‘of the ages.’  Surely sister Emily knew about them, though she never wrote about it, unless metaphorically in her poems and letters.  Emily’s own legend, in fact, has her in love with a married man herself, so perhaps she knew something about loving a man she could not have.  Mrs. Todd, by the way, did write about it.  A lot.  (See Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel:  The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.) 

Following Emily Dickinson’s death and discovery of an unknown wealth of poetry, Lavinia ultimately turned to Mabel Todd to make sense out of the cache of paper scraps, written-on envelopes, and sewn-together, recopied poems.  It was tedious work at a time of high family tension.  Within a decade, Mabel Todd had three editions of Emily’s poetry published along with a volume of collected letters.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Besides their entanglements with the Dickinsons, Mabel and David Todd enjoyed full and engaging lives together.  Both were popular lecturers who often spoke of their travels on astronomical expeditions to far corners of an Earth linked, at the time, only by extended ocean voyages.  Besides Emily, the Myth & her poetry, Mrs. Todd spoke and wrote about mysterious destinations traveled that most of her audiences could only dream about:  Japan, northern Africa, high in the Andes, Indonesia, Russia just as The Great War broke out.  It should be noted too, that her voluminous personal written record of journals and diaries provides such in-depth personal insight into a woman of her era that it has been used in period case studies.  (See Peter Gay’s Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud.) 

By midlife Mabel Todd made one more move that would broaden her personal legacy beyond the humanities.  Big into trees, she bought half of a mostly wilderness island in Maine.  She bought a second forest about that time, too, that one on a knob near Amherst, just to preserve the dignity of the stand.  Besides saving the trees on Hog Island, the Todds would make a summer camp there that the family enjoyed for over fifty years.  Upon the death of Mrs. Todd and the advent of Millicent Todd Bingham as island owner, the National Audubon Society entered the picture with a residential summer camp for adult leaders that has for decades impacted global environmental education while engaging the bodies, minds, and hearts of myriad campers, Nature’s people all.

I am one.  

Tom Schaefer

Lake Cumberland 

23 February 2014

***

I realize folks don’t like to comment much on this blog.  If you have any thoughts about what I’m doing here, I’d really appreciate your saying something.  I want to be sure I tell this narrative True.  I’m acting like that’s possible.  

tom@earthspeaks.org

image:  ‘Lobster House, c. 1905’   From Yale University archive, used without permission.  I’ll get all the details straight by the time the book comes out.

Movements

The other day as I was jotting down writing progress notes, I found myself using the expression movements for the essays that make up the preface and chapters of Nature’s people: The Hog Island story from Mabel Loomis Todd to Audubon.

I surely like the rhythm and musical action such an expression implies.  I don’t know that I can reach those melodic heights, but the flow-through of musical and project energy permeates my writing process.  

So thinking in those terms today, I can report that I have three movements in decent early draft shape with another about to begin.  

The preface has been written at least once before. This newest version came late in week one down here as a writing rant to just get me started.  I just rambled on for a few pages about my Hog Island story, and before too long I felt ready to jump to chapter 1.  So the preface is pretty rough, but before I head back to Dayton I’ll be refining it, maybe even combining some ideas from the first one.  

Chapter 1:   Introducing Mrs. Todd  

Early draft put to bed a couple weeks ago.  Again, maybe things to add, things to consider, things to talk about with mentors, maybe some things to delete and/or reassign, but overall, an early draft I can be proud of.  I was thinking of telling folks during talks I’ll make, if you don’t read any more of the book, read chapter 1.  Overall synopsis of the whole story. 

Chapter 2:  Transcendental activist

Rebuilt and augmented this week; D1 completed yesterday.  Phew.

Argument made that Mabel Loomis Todd’s legacy deserves to include her belief and action taken for the preservation and appreciation Nature as well as the energy spent in bringing Emily Dickinson’s writings forward.  

Thanks to Julie Dobrow from Tufts for both her essay ‘Saving the land’ and her tip on reserving Mrs. Todd’s journals and diaries on microfilm from Yale’s Sterling Library.  

Now it’s on the movement 4:  Of astronomy & Dickinsons

Major interest in Mabel Loomis Todd is due her impact on the Dickinson family.  This chapter endeavors to describe the major players and the Emily Dickinson narrative as objectively as possible.  Dickinson publication issues will be covered, through the trial, into the 30 year hiatus.

Subsections:  Mabel Loomis Todd early bio to 1881/Amherst; David Peck Todd early bio to 1881; Susan and William Austin Dickinson in earliest Todd Amherst years; Emily Dickinson, publication drama, affair, subsequent court, case and the Emily sequester years; Millicent Todd Bingham as family rear guard and Emily Dickinson contributor in her own right.

Movement 5 (this spring):  Vacationland

Discussion of Maine’s development into vacationland:  boarders, summer villagers, then cottage builders progression.  Focus on 1908:  what was America like when Mrs. Todd signed the papers in Wiscassett?  Retelling the story of Hog Is origins and summers at the Point Breeze.  This section will follow the Todds through summer 1913 when Mabel has a debilitating stroke as she prepares to travel to Maine.  

Movement 6 (summer 2014):  ‘God’s own heaven’

The story of summers at Camp Mavooshen beginning in 1915.  David soon leaves the summer picture when he is hospitalized for a progressing brain disease brought about by syphilis.  But summers go on.  Lots of stories from Mrs. Todd’s daily diaries and a half dozen or more essays from her unpublished Epic of Hog collection.  

The Plan calls for working on this movement on Hog Island this summer while I serve as writer-in-residence and actually live — I kid you not — in Mrs. Bingham’s former cottage that hasn’t been occupied for decades.  Goodness.   

Movement 7 (fall  2014):  Mavooshen’s men

At a time when women were beginning to feel their political and social clout, the guys deserve mention for services contributed to the camp’s successful operation.  To include:  

David Todd:  his father wrote books about efficient home building.  David was significant in construction of camp buildings and maintaining water transportation.  Further/final description of his profession accomplishments & his giving Mabel great topics to write and lecture about through family travel around the world.  

Frank Lailer:  the local retired smack captain who became the handyman who kept the camp running.  Ran Romany Girl in assistance to Todds in many ways.  Family came to dinner now and then.  Not much on Frank, but he was key.  

Howard Hilder:  The camp artist who both created a studio in a summer dwelling he build just down the shore from the family camp (known as the Osprey cabin) and also painted the osprey and great blue heron murals in Mavooshen’s ‘living room.’  Great family friend and help to Mrs. Todd at camp. 

Walter vanDyke Bingham:  Millicent’s psychologist husband who made medical history by helping write the first aptitude tests for the US Army c. World War I.  Famous on island for his humous essay Homo sapiens auduboniesis which seeks to describe the peculiar island visitor, the Audubon birder.  

Then on to movement 8 (fall 2014):  The advent of Audubon

Pretty much the story of Audubon’s presence on the island from 1936 to Project Puffin today.  More later.  

At this point on the calendar I have 2.5 weeks left at this amazing winter writing sabbatical.  It’s been a cloudy, grey Kentucky winter week prior to now.  The sun is out, the day is warming a bit, and the birds are working very hard at finishing the sunflower seeds left in the feeder, while I talk to you all before plotting out how this next movement comes together and what sources I need to tell the narrative True.  

It’s a good job if you can get it.  

image:  The author’s photograph of the camp ‘living room’ as it stood in 1981, having been unoccupied for about twenty years.  Recent restoration efforts have improved the structure. 

Writing process

Well, the book is coming along, but as I just posted on Facebook, even here in writing sequester at lovely, solitary Lake Cumberland, one can be distracted by squirrels in the sunflower feeder and bald eagles flying by the window.  Let alone sitting for some zen time contemplating the extensive rock face just across the water from my perch in the Kentucky hills.  

The first week here I couldn’t get the television to work like at all.  I listened to music instead, and had a little more quiet couch time, I think.  After Shannon came by and showed me the right buttons to push it’s been NASA TV at lunchtime and Rachel at 9 with the occasional search for something good to watch.  Last night I turned it off and went back to music.  

I was going to make this pretty quick today, but let me address the issue of writing a book as I know it.  I think about this stuff a lot, but don’t write about it much.  Bear with me.  

Writing a book is hard on many levels IMHO:  

1.  One must be sure to have enough of the right material to tell an historical ballad true.  My protagonist was a prolific writer, accomplished artist, and popular lecturer, besides having a very interesting love life.  First, it’s tough to get one’s head around the whole story all at once, and second, there’s so much stuff to read — most of it unpublished and archived in an ivy league university library far away — you hope you got all the good stuff.  One can have doubts about these things, but I think I’m okay.  Still lots to read, anyway you cut it.  

2.  Sitting for hours concentrating on plan/outline, specific subject matter, word choice & sentence construction, noting sources, revising as you go, and hoping like heck you haven’t left anything out takes a toll on one’s brain.  This, I think, is what most folks think about when they say writing is hard.  

3.  And then there’s the issue of life’s free-will choices.  I believe I could have done work other than teaching junior high and high school kids for thirty years and feel more beat up than I do.  Shoot, I got to teach thirty years and walk.  Thirty years.  Retired at 52.  When I have friends all around who say they’ll never be able to retire due to their job and personal savings limitations, it’s hard not to feel guilty.  Humbled, for sure.  

So I rather enjoy doing lots of stuff in my life.  I find cutting out most of the fun stuff to write a book that is really hard to do, presents a book production problem.  You might be able to guess such is the reason I’ve been at this project for over ten years.  

4.  Still, when I get going with the words on paper part of the writing process — aiming for 500 words/day minimum [per the advice of a wise university friend] — the ease of syntax feels pretty good.  I most often fear the muse will leave me at any time, though.  So a couple weeks ago when I got started late morning and didn’t quit until failing light after 5 for two days in a row, I felt a warm satisfaction.  

I now doubt what I wrote then is really so good.  Taking chapter two apart and rebuilding it is next on my docket and I’d rather not go there, for some reason.  It just feels like hard work.  I understand, indeed, the necessity of revising and editing.  See #6 below.  

5.  Work on The Dressy Adventuress project continues in one way or another, however.  Besides re-crafting the ‘Transcendental activist’ chapter, I have begun detailed planning for the next ‘movement’ which brings in the Emily Dickinson connection.  I am eager to get there, where I feel much love and energy.  I hope to be there by Monday, but don’t hold me to it.  I also have the need to cull out specific details of summer life on Hog Island from the already collected diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd.  This newer generation synopsis will be on my desk as I construct paragraphs.  And then there is the composite list of all of David Todd’s global solar expeditions.  I should have this stuff at my fingertips when I write content.  

6.  The sage university professor told me, too, to expect ten rewrites of my book.  I don’t doubt that’s true, and that feels okay.  But rewrites can only follow ‘writes’ — or drafts.  

Having lots of time all by myself to find a way into that writing is a real blessing that I thought might help production.  It is working, but at a weathervane pace that points and takes me to places I don’t always know are connected.  

Have I ever told you how lousy my self discipline is?  I’ll save you the details…  

Today’s elder idea:  

for Bruce 

Yesterday on the phone

when you told the story of helping 

your unknowing mother 

relearn how to wipe herself

the feeling in my heart was warmth

for you and her sharing such a personal 

moment that breeched the parent / 

child continuum.  You came of age. 

In the coming to that place you 

did not welcome — where stature and 

family position reversed from caregiver 

to tended — I felt for you

a welcoming hand into the realm of the elder

where I, too, see a diminished mother

fighting tooth and nail the coming darkness —

one who will not go gently into that good night.  

I watch her struggle.  You watched your mother do the same.

Neither woman selected this path. 

Both would rather be baking on a hot summer day or

sorting laundry, wondering how one family could create so many dirty clothes. 

Maybe they might even rather re-experience 

the discomfort of the eighth and ninth months

of carrying us, struggling with weight gain 

and wanting, then, the ordeal to be over. 

Maybe not so much now.  

Both Nancy and Gertrude have become passengers swept

onto a nonreturnable journey that has served them well —

that has gifted them with time on this Earth 

in the presence of parents and friends and family

and the kids, like you and me, who now live into

our years as elders, singing & telling stories of what 

they taught us and what we now know as true.  

Tom Schaefer

Lake Cumberland 

4 February 2014

image:  In Mrs. Todd’s front yard on Hog Island.  (summer 2013)

Note:  This blog entry was also posted @ 'The Back Porch'  /  http://tomschaefer.blogspot.com/2014/02/writing-process.html

Winter writing retreat

Well, it’s been a energized couple of weeks at my winter writing retreat at Lake Cumberland. 

I was hoping getting extended solo time in a retreat atmosphere would get this project moving onto the next level.  I think it has.  Who knows when the thing will be completed and how I get the thing published, but right now I am on the cusp of putting the whole, lovely narrative in written record.  

The journey to get to this point has been a joyful burden.  I ingested the whole enchilada, hook and all, upon visiting Hog Island for the first time in 1981.  I had just been smitten by Emily Dickinson the academic quarter prior when I took a graduate workshop under Jim Hughes at Wright State.  All of this has changed my life and still has me under its spell.

Still, I am chagrined to see entries here at The Dressy Adventuress blog dated months and even years apart with seemingly little progress.  Such disappoints me, but I trudge on. 

As of now, I have reconsidered the lengthy book outline constructed a year or longer ago.  Back then I concluded along with mentor David Dominic that I could work on any of the six planned chapters at any time by just picking a topic that seemed timely (based on current reading) and go for it.  I would do that for a week or so — then all would fall silent for weeks or months while life reasserted itself back into my days — and I would just shake my head wondering if this book would ever be finished.  

But then now and again I would get an email or a clipping from someone who is a Hog Island or Mabel Loomis Todd fan, wishing me well on my writing journey, saying they were eager to see what I come up with.  To all of you who have reached out to me in this often frustrating endeavor, I say, thank you. 

So sometime mid- to late-2013, I figured the January/February 2014 timeframe would be important to The Dressy Adventuress progress.  And, I concluded, based on writing and/or life advice resurrected in my brain from some unknown source, if a body wants a different result, something has to change.  I figured the best thing I could do for this writing project was to sequester myself somewhere so I could dedicate days and weeks in a row to grappling with this large and complex puzzle I have been blessed with assembling. 

As it turns out, a former student and good buddy Shannon Wood had just the sterling opportunity I was wishing for.  Shannon and her partner had purchased a rustic, but updated, cabin along a ridge road on the south side Lake Cumberland not too far from the Kentucky-Tennessee state line.  Shannon was proud of the purchase, and since she knew Cindy Lou and me as authentic Nature fans (Shannon and I walked to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon back in the day), she was eager for us to come down to see what she and Sabrina had discovered. 

Well, to make a long story short, the two girls who had both fallen in love with Lake Cumberland, had purchased a second property, this one an income-producing lakefront summer rental.  Gallons of paint later and with a touch of updating, the Lakeview House was ready for business summer 2013.  And a good summer for rentals, it was.  

Still, the house was, indeed, a summer property.  How would Shannon and Sabrina feel about my borrowing the place for winter 2014?  As it turned out, the gracious and generous pair offered me use of the house as the writing retreat I had hoped for.  I’ve been at Cumberland for just over a week now with about five weeks to go.  

So I got my wish.  Now it is time to produce. 

Just after New Years, I drove my small SUV fully freighted with books collected, binders of reading notes, and outlines constructed over time to Cumberland for a rebirth of this project.  After a few days of getting into the rhythm of regular writing, I was frustrated with little progress.  

It was after a morning of ‘storming’ that I sat at my Mac with the intent of making The Dressy Adventuress sound more like a narrative and less like a history treatment.  By the end of that day late last week, I had a fifteen page sequence of narrative that I felt pretty pleased about. The time had come to put the story on paper. 

I had begun telling this story a handful of times already, as the gentle reader of this blog already knows.  Now it was my goal to produce at least 500 words a day of narrative as was recommended by Martha Vicinus, a retired distinguished faculty member in women’s studies from University of Michigan and a Friend of Hog Island volunteer who shared pot scrubbing responsibilities with me a couple summers ago in the Audubon camp kitchen.  

And that’s pretty much where I am as I write this.  My goal is to get the minimum 500 words on paper every day, a recommendation Dr. Vicinus gave graduate students who were struggling with writing dissertations.  Yesterday  I got to just over 1600 words of story exposition, trying to find a way to hook my reader into wanting to know more about Mabel Loomis Todd and her contributions to the world of Emily Dickinson, but more importantly her efforts to enhance a deeper appreciation of Nature based on years of summers spent at her Camp Mavooshen on Hog Island.  

This is hard, you know?  ;-) 

And, as Dr. Vicinus advised, expect to write at least ten updated drafts of the story.  

In the words of Uncle George, Oh, myyy…

image:  The Plan:  The new narrative outline sees the light of day.

Journals and diaries

When I began my trek years ago into the works of Mabel Loomis Todd in order to tell her Hog Island story, I found myself at the Sterling Library at Yale where the Todd Bingham family archive is housed.  As a ten-year public school teacher at the time and a newly-initiated graduate student, it was the first time I had ever delved into anybody’s archive, let alone one cataloged at prestigious, ivy league Yale.  It was a memorable experience for this Midwest kid to sit in the reading room, poring over boxes of files that allowed me to personally handle Mrs. Todd’s papers.  

Back then, I was interested in finding materials related only to Hog Island in an archive collection that spanned “51 linear feet (124 boxes).”  I read recently that the Todd-Bingham collection is a treasure trove for historical researchers since both Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Bingham seemed to save every scrap of paper they ever created.  While I don’t know if that’s exactly true, the women surely had an eye on posterity as they worked on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters, as well as recording the myriad other things they experienced in their lives.  

Lucky for me, there was a Hog Island section in the Yale collection that provided all I needed for my graduate project.  Still, that left many, many boxes and files undiscovered at the time.

As mentioned before, my intention for The Dressy Adventuress is not to re-hash the Dickinson-Todd story told so well by Polly Longsworth, Richard B. Sewall, Lyndall Gordon, and other biographers.  I am relying heavily on what those scholars have already reported to retell the Dickinson-Todd part of the story for my readers.  I am attempting to look more deeply into Mrs. Todd’s affinity for Nature to flesh out a part of her story that has not been well told to date.  Nature and Hog Island get mentions in most texts referred to above, but only briefly. 

Recently I realized that I need to look more carefully into another part of Mrs. Todd’s archived works where I have not yet been: her journals and diaries.  The Hog Island files worked well enough for grad work, but if I want to know more about what she was thinking summer 1908 when the Hog Island epic began, I really should look at her diaries and journals for insights.  

While I was figuring I would need at least another week at Yale to see what I could find, I discovered that Mrs. Todd’s diaries and journals are available on microfilm via interlibrary loan.  It would be much more cost effective if I could peruse those works here at home.  Unfortunately, I have discovered that my home university will not let alumni -- even one expanding on work done as a graduate student -- to borrow works via ILL.  But all is not lost.  I am currently working with a Wright State faculty member to secure those journals and diaries for me.  I am hopeful all will work out.   

Still, there will have to be at least one more trip to the Sterling Library before I finish my book.  In addition to assorted pieces of correspondence and lecture texts I’d like to get my hands on, Yale also holds “50.0 linear feet (94 boxes)” in the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection.  I suspect there are a few gems therein that will enhance the appeal of my book.  Now to find those images and make arrangements with Yale to publish them.   After all, a picture is worth a thousand words --  and looks mighty good in publication. 

In the meantime, I’m eager to get my hands on those journals and diaries.  More on that adventure as it develops.

Image:  Untitled (c. 1915) from The Todd-Bingham Picture Collection.  I call it “High Tide at Mavooshen.”  Foreground:  the family launch, Takusan, flying Japanese colors.  Background:  A woman stands at the door of ‘the lobster house.’  Farther back in the woods:  a torii gate.  Japan-rich, indeed.  

The Mavooshen 'puzzle'

Some months ago when I committed myself to another serious round with The Dressy Adventuress, I realized I needed to have an outside consultant who could offer some insights about any number of issues I’d be confronting.  In addition, I figured if I had someone else to report to, perhaps he/she could help hold my feet to the fire to a higher degree and I would see more progress.  

As mentioned in my last blog entry, that academic friend is David Dominic, Earth & Environmental Sciences department chair at Wright State University.  I might mention that David presented at the AWP conference in Boston a couple weeks ago on a panel discussing ‘Knowledge and Manifestation: Science in Contemporary Poetry.’  We are scheduled to meet next week and I’m eager to hear how things went.

I focus on Dr. David today because of an observation he made in an email over the winter that got me to thinking about my writing process.   Here’s what he wrote in response to a comment I made on my difficulty making progress:  

I do know that writing is hard work and is best approached as such. To students, I stress the ability to write non-linearly, by which I mean the opposite of the directive given to the White Rabbit: 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'  If you can see the whole, you should be able to write parts of any piece. I think this is critical for getting around ‘blocks.’

That got me to thinking.  Indeed, I have organized The Dressy Adventuress in outline form a number of times now.  Each new iteration seems a bit tighter and I find that a good thing.  And as new/remembered ideas come up in my thinking, I can add them by hand onto the hard copy outline that is my master blueprint.  

Up to now, though, I figured I’d be starting with chapter one and progressing until finished, as the White Rabbit was advised.  With David’s suggestion that writing does not have to work like that, I reset my thinking and came to the conclusion that writing a book can be very much like assembling a jigsaw puzzle.  Assemble the border first [outline], then sort pieces by color and content, working the myriad variables until they find their long lost partners.  

Since David’s suggestion, I have continued my research by reading and note taking, then writing ‘concept pieces’  about that research in three to five page documents.  I liken the process to sorting and organizing the jigsaw pieces.  I figure sometime down the road these segments will come together in some logical order awaiting segues and transitions that will render the book organized, and thus readable.  

Life still consorts to keep me from my book writing tasks.  For the last week I have been in Hilton Head with the lovely Cindy Lou, giving her an opportunity to shed some winter blues and get her feet in some warm sand.  I figured I’d be note taking while she sunbathes, but such hasn’t been the case.  Being this close to the beach is too tempting!  

So upon our return home this weekend I’ll reinstall myself in my basement writing post next week and get back into the process of assembling my Camp Mavooshen puzzle.  Such seems workable.  Stay tuned.    

Today’s elder idea:  Science fiction is more than just our collective dreams for a human race that reaches to the stars.  In many ways, the dreams of yesterday are becoming the realities of today and the path for tomorrow.  

George Takei, from his internet book, Oh Myyy!

Reading Mr. Sulu was more fun that working on my writing this week.

image:  Millicent Todd Bingham cutting birthday cake with long time camp director Carl Buchheister standing by.  (1960)

From the Hog Island Audubon Camp picture archive.

February 2013 update

One of my New Year’s commitments to self and community was to gear up my work on The Dressy Adventuress, my book on the Nature side of Mabel Loomis Todd, the first editor of the Emily Dickinson poetry.  And I must report, so far, so good. 

And as a way to handle two things at once (I hesitate writing ‘killing two birds with one stone’ in this scenario), I thought I would publish monthly book progress in the same blog entry posted on both my blogs, The Back Porch and The Dressy Adventuress.  If you are reading this, then you’ve found at least one of them.  

Let me briefly recap my story with Mrs. Todd for those who might be unaware of how the woman has impacted my life.  Back in 1980, I was encouraged by an administrator in the junior high school where I taught to get working on a masters degree.  I had been teaching for nine years at the time and was, indeed, ready to continue my education.  

Within short order I was enrolled as a graduate student in a new academic offering at Wright State University, a master of humanities program.  By the third quarter of study I signed up for a workshop on Emily Dickinson facilitated by a favorite prof of mine, Jim Hughes.  The following summer I was awarded a grant by the Dayton Audubon Society to attend the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine on Hog Island, a lovely 330 acre site in Muscongus Bay.  Three years later I finished my MHum with a monograph entitled ‘The Epic of Hog’: The Todd Bingham Family and the Establishment of the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine.  As it turned out, the island was ‘saved’ from clearcutting in 1908 by the one and only Mabel Loomis Todd.  

My masters project was good in what it tried to accomplish:  placing Mabel Loomis Todd in the framework of American conservation history.  But it wasn’t really enough.  There was so much more of her story to tell. 

By the time I retired from teaching in 2002, I was active with Friends of Hog Island, a newly formed organization dedicated to help the Audubon camp flourish as an environmental education center into the future.  At the time, the summer program was hemorrhaging cash for Audubon and the camp’s future was uncertain.  

About that time I committed myself to enlarging my focus on island history and write a publishable piece that Hog Island lovers, Mainers, Emily Dickinson aficianados, and Auduboners everywhere might like to read.  And so, in due course, The Dressy Adventuress was born. 

For a few years I tried to figure out a writing schedule as I dusted off old files and collected new ones.  Books that I had read about during the masters project that were not available for purchase at the time, had in the interim become available with the dawn of ‘print on demand’ technology.  At this time I have a shelf full of old books newly printed and acquired.  

I also determined that the January through May timeframe would be the best for me to focus hard on the book.  Other months of the year draw me into perennial volunteer projects, travel, and summer grandchild care.  The winter months seemed perfect for getting lost in writing.  And that’s where I am now.  

In order to hold my feet to the writing fire, I figured I should report to you all in my blogs monthly (January-May).  I also solicited the help of an academic friend, David Dominic, Earth & Environmental Sciences department chair Wright State, to meet with me regularly for a writing update.  I am pleased to report progress in both of those areas.  

My hope for these monthly updates is to let you know a bit about what I’m learning and how the book is developing.  Here’s where I am today: 

When I first organized the book in prewriting, the working title was Nature’s people which intended to compare the Nature loving behavior of both Ms. Dickinson and Mrs. Todd, different as they were, yet similar.  As of January, the nine chapters initially conceived were condensed into six.  

I had been advised to consider each chapter as an extended essay, and I figure the fewer chapters, the fewer essays.  If I need to expand into other chapters I will, but for the meantime, I feel good about the compression of topics.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been focused on researching the year 1908, which was the summer Mabel Todd observed forest cutting on Hog, an island she had no connection to prior.  That same year President Theodore Roosevelt held the very first national governor’s conference in Washington with focus on the ‘new’ concept of conservation.  1908 also marked Henry Ford producing his company’s first Model T for the masses, as well as the Wright brothers mastering controlled flight for extended periods.  It was a very important year in American history.   

Currently I am looking into ship building in the Hog Island region to fill in details about the first structure on the island, a ships chandlery.  I am also intent on unraveling the mystery of Howard Hilder, an artist friend of Mrs. Todd, who graced the main camp building with two fine murals painted c. 1922.

As mentioned in previous blogs, this is my first book and I have been working hard trying to figure out how that process works.  I think I have things moving in the right direction and am energized to continue.  Tune in here again the first week of March and I’ll let you know how it’s going. 

Comments and encouragement always welcome!  ;-) 

Today’s elder idea:  We must handle the water, the wood, the grasses, so that we will hand them to our children and our children’s children in better and not worse shape than we got them. 

Theodore Roosevelt

current epigraph for chapter 1

images:  (above) Mabel Loomis Todd’s Camp Mavooshen main building following restoration by Friends of Hog Island.  (summer 2012)

(below)  Detail of Howard Hilder’s mural of nesting osprey.  (summer 2011)