Mermaid House
Lebanon, Illinois

By Ryan Byrnes

For someone who only ever lived in Midwestern suburbs, I rarely encountered anything pre-dating World War II. Mine was a world of strip malls and gas stations and Arby’s drive-throughs (the quintessential post-church activity). But as a second grader, after packing into the minivan with my siblings for a thirty-minute haul to nearby Lebanon, I could travel two centuries into the past. It felt like what the Celtics used to call “thin places,” where the boundaries between the ordinary and the magical meet.

You see, Lebanon is a small but historic town. With just under 5,000 people, it boasts the oldest university in Illinois and a preserved nineteenth-century main street complete with verandas and gothic windows and four blocks of red brick-paved streets. There, I first saw the Mermaid House.

According to the Lebanon Historic Society, in 1830, retired sea captain Lyman Adams built the Mermaid House, which he named after his professed belief in mermaids. A squat two-story house of hand-sawed oak, it is the ideal rustic prairie home.

Charles Dickens spent a night at the Mermaid House during his tour of North America from January to June 1842, when he traveled by steamboats, railroads, and wagons to speak at major American cities. During his visit to St. Louis, he made a quick excursion to the prairie country in Lebanon. He praised the inn in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, writing, “In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind.” Unfortunately, the nearby prairie did not leave such a lofty impression on him. He described the landscape as “oppressive in its barren monotony” and “scarcely one … to remember with much pleasure.”

Given the historic buildings and the town’s connection to Dickens, the main street took on a Victorian character in the local imagination, so it was only fitting that every holiday season the town put on a Victorian Christmas parade referencing Dickens’ most famous story, A Christmas Carol. Local high school drama clubs would sing carols in period costumes. Shopkeepers would decorate their facades with wreaths. As darkness fell, the town would ceremoniously switch on the Christmas lights, turning the whole street to gold.

One such Christmas, when I was a senior in high school, I took my then-girlfriend to the parade. We rode in a horsedrawn carriage, then I insisted on lining up to see Santa along with the local five-year-olds. In a shed behind the antique store, Santa would sit on his throne, and parents would take their kids to sit on his lap, say what they wanted for Christmas, and snap a photo.

At age eighteen, emboldened by my embryonic frontal lobe, the idea struck me that it would be really funny to get a picture sitting in Santa’s lap, so I dragged my unenthusiastic girlfriend with me. Dickens would have been proud. After waiting in line I finally reached the Big Man’s throne, and we ended up getting a portrait with Santa — me sitting on his knee and my then-girlfriend standing in the background looking like she was about to yell “Bah humbug!” (We did not stay together long.)

After seeing Santa, we walked to the Mermaid House, which the Lebanon Historic Society had preserved and furnished with donated period-pieces like chairs and dressers. Members of the historic society gave a guided tour, recounting the events of Dickens’ stay.

I had read Dickens in school — A Christmas Carol in seventh grade and A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade — and I always regarded him as so high above me in skill and fame, from another plane of existence. But when I stood in his bedroom just as he would have seen it, I felt connected, as if I might turn around and see Dickens hovering like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At that moment, I came to understand that the Mermaid House is one of those thin places straddling the border between this world and the otherworld, where if you listened carefully, the indelible whispers of the spirits occasionally broke through.

Ryan Byrnes is a book editor in the New York City publishing industry and the author of two books: Royal Beauty Bright and My Dear Antonio. Readers can also find his work in LitHub, Fine Books and Collections, December, National Catholic Reporter, and more. He also contributes to the show The Saints on Relevant Radio. Follow him on Instagram at @ryan.byrnes.writes.

Photo by Edward Moore, 1935. Courtesy of Library of Congress, HABS ILL,82-LEBA,2.

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Harvey Pekar Park
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

By Joseph S. Pete

The modesty is the point at some landmarks such as Michael Jackson’s shoebox-sized childhood home in Gary, Indiana, or the small brick ranch home where Pope Leo XIV grew up in Dolton, Illinois. Harvey Pekar celebrated this modesty — he championed the average, the everyday, the quotidian. Known for the long-running American Splendor comic he wrote with the help of rotating guest artists, he was the bard of the banal, the elegist of the everyman, the master of Midwestern mundanity. It’s only fitting that the local landmarks where fans can pay homage to Pekar in his native Cleveland would be unassuming.

Pekar lived in the inner-ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, which posthumously honored him with Harvey Pekar Park at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road, a drag he often frequented. The modest park, located at the end of a sidewalk, has some benches and painted beach chairs, a small plaza, concrete steps that double as amphitheater seats for outdoor performances, and a few banners featuring panels of his comics. It could easily be overlooked by a passerby.

Pekar’s old stomping grounds lie far from I.M. Pei’s glittering, glassy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum on the Lake Erie lakefront or Frank Gehry’s splashy avant-garde building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Pekar’s native Cleveland is a humble Rust Belt burgh that inspired the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video to joke “come and look at both of our buildings.”

The city has been so snake-bitten by misfortunes like the infamous Cuyahoga River fire that there’s an entire book called Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters. The “Mistake by the Lake” has produced some great comic artists, including Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Derf, who penned the alt-weekly staple The City.

A Veterans Affairs clerk by day and graphic novelist by night, Pekar advanced the art form of comics like Superman had before him, even though he only did the writing and not the illustrations, penning scripts the cartoonists brought to life. Superman propelled flights of superhuman fancy to new heights of popularity while Pekar grounded comics in gritty novelistic autobiography that appealed to adult readers, helping pave the way for future generations of confessional zines and graphic novels often both written and set in coffee shops.

He was inspiring to fledgling writers like me, showing that it was possible to be ordinary in daily life and extraordinary on the page, that everyone’s story could make for compelling writing.

Pekar collaborated with accomplished artists like Robert Crumb, Gary Dumm, Alison Bechdel, and Ed Piskor to elevate the pedestrian into the epic, imbuing lofty meaning into stories of workplace drudgery, vinyl record hunting at garage sales, and trudging through the snow with a haul of library books. His work reached a wider audience with the American Splendor biopic that starred Paul Giamatti and featured a scene of haunting melancholy in which Pekar stood hunched over the rail on a pedestrian bridge, watching the river of headlights flow on the highway below.

I’ve visited many of the landmarks associated with Pekar over the years. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I usually visit Cleveland at least once a year and once swung by both Cleveland and Detroit in a weekend.

I’ve seen the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center where he worked, the Lee Road branch of the Cleveland Heights–University Heights Public Library where he read and checked out books almost daily, and the grand Lake View Cemetery where he is buried near tombstones commemorating the likes of Elliott Ness and President Andrew Garfield.

But the best place to pay homage is Coventry Road, his old haunt where one Redditor described him as “just another guy you’d see around the neighborhood doing normal stuff.” It’s not only home to Harvey Pekar Park, but also to two of his favorite hangouts: Tommy’s Restaurant and Mac’s Backs–Books On Coventry.

The neighboring businesses are connected, so one can browse the stacks for books in the three-level bookstore while waiting for a table. The funky bohemian restaurant blends classic deli favorites with hippie-ish vegetarian fare. When I visited the restaurant, I could imagine Pekar grousing in his cantankerous, curmudgeonly way over a corned beef or tuna salad sandwich. Mac’s Backs has crowded floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves crammed with used books on every subject imaginable. Fliers, posters, and zines plastered on the stairwell down to the basement serve as a cultural history of concerts, plays, author appearances, and other bygone events.

One can envision Pekar hunting for new reading material or gathering material over coffee and conversation next door. One can picture the disheveled everyman striding stoop-shouldered down the sidewalk, absorbed in whatever mundane matter he would next alchemize into art. It’s almost like a living history museum for one of America’s most splendid graphic novelists.

The descendant of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock, and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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34th Street & Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Ellen Lansky with Greta Gaard

On Tuesday night, January 6, 2026, the lesson at the Introduction to Judaism class my girlfriend, Greta Gaard, and I are taking was “Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Before the Tuesday night class at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we’d started watching Shoah. In the interviews of Polish villagers in Chelmno and Treblinka, we saw that they knew what lay in store for their Jewish neighbors when the gas vans came to take them away. The Polish women spoke openly about their envy of the beautiful Jewish women, of the wealth their families had accumulated, of the homes that they had. After their Jewish neighbors were crammed into gas vans and rolled off to be cremated, the Polish villagers moved into Jewish houses and apartments and took over their businesses.

Greta said, “How is it that the Jewish families out-earned their Polish neighbors? Weren’t they also Polish?”

“I’ve never heard of a Jew described as a Pole.”

“What else would they be?”

The next morning, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good at 34th and Portland Avenue. Portland Avenue is a southbound one-way street with a wide bike lane and on-street parking, that, at 34th Street, features duplexes, apartments, and single-family houses: domiciles, private residences, homes. The people who live in these homes are White, Native, Asian, Latine, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, Jewish, Muslim. They are poets, visual artists, prose writers, sculptors, musicians, political activists, family members, friends, neighbors.

For many years, I lived in this neighborhood, and I still know people who live there. Three miles east, where I live now, everyone was affected by the aftermath of George Floyd’s death by cop-suffocation on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue—only a few blocks away from 34th Street and Portland Avenue. Less than two miles from my house is the torched police station, still surrounded by a fence festooned with signs promising a new Democracy Center and mocking graffiti next to the signs. When it burned, I could smell it.

What I understand now is that, like my dad’s Jewish family in Eastern Europe, I live in the Bloodlands. Today, the Twin Cities are occupied by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). All that is missing are checkpoints.

When the news and videos began to circulate, especially the video from the poet and musician Lynette Reini-Grandell, a Portland Avenue resident, we learned a more detailed story about the latest murder event in the Minneapolis Bloodlands.  Renee Good’s son is not an orphan, as originally reported. Renee, her wife, Becca, and their dog had just dropped off their son at school and pulled over to check out the commotion caused by ICE vehicles and agents on Portland Avenue.

We also learned that Renee Nicole Macklin Good was a poet. Soon, the link to her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” was posted everywhere, easily accessible  via “Poem-a-Day” from the Academy of American Poets.

Dissecting fetal pigs is a standard assignment for many high school and college biology students. Beyond the title, fetal pigs do not appear in Good’s poem, but they do not have to. The mere words in the title evoke fear, panic, and revulsion. Fetal pigs stink. What’s the point in cutting them to pieces? I can just hear the students at my big suburban high school complaining and clamoring until the assignment was removed from the curriculum. In my biology lab at the Catholic women’s college in St. Paul, we also didn’t dissect fetal pigs—probably because of the fetal implications. Renee Nicole Macklin did it and wrote a poem about it. In her poem, the consonants hiss and pop-pop-pop like gunshots in phrases such as “tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches” and “the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures.”

Now, I’m wondering if there’s anything more traif — more unkosher, more unfit for human consumption— than a fetal pig. Certainly, the ICE agents, with their masks and their guns and their light-brown outfits, are law enforcement traif, outnumbering the police forces of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

Even so, in the Minneapolis Bloodlands, people are not looking away. We are not moving into our neighbors’ houses or apartments, taking over their businesses, or turning their places of worship into furniture warehouses. We are blowing whistles, holding up signs, marching, protesting, cussing at the masked thugs in ugly light-brown shirts, witnessing and recording and testifying.

On the Sunday morning after Renee Good was murdered, Greta and I stopped at our neighborhood Target—the one that was looted and rebuilt. We were both trying on sunglasses, looking in the mirror and at each other. Greta found a pair she liked, and we turned toward the store’s main aisle toward the check out.

Then, we heard voices, wafting like plumes of pepper spray, saying, “ICE is here. ICE is here.”

A young person in a red Target T-shirt was pushing a cart down that main aisle. “ICE is here. ICE is here. ICE is here,” she said. She was not shouting; she was not raising her voice, but without being alarming, she was speaking at a pitch that got everybody’s attention.

“ICE is here,” I repeated. I thought, “What are they doing here? They’re not coming after me, but they weren’t going after Renee Good the other day, and they shot her in the face. They’re coming after all of us. Who is ICE targeting in our Target?”

Two of the front-end people were patrolling the area between the self-service section and the check-out lanes. Neither one looked panicked nor even disturbed, but they never, ever do. Nearby, an employee huddled with a Somali dad and a few other nonwhite folks.

 I said to the Somali dad, “Where are they?”

Was ICE was getting ready to nab somebody, or were they in our Target to grab a coffee at Starbucks before they nabbed somebody in the parking lot, as they did the other day at the Target in Richfield, about six miles away? Was somebody going to get killed?

The dad said, “They’re here.”

In that moment, everybody in the store clicked into action mode. We looked at each other, nodded, and moved to the front of the store.

Ellen Lansky lives in Minneapolis and taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Inver Hills Community College.  Her fiction includes Golden Jeep and Suburban Heathens, and her essays on literature and addiction have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies.

Greta Gaard’s creative and scholarly writing emerges from intersections among ecofeminisms and queer studies. After 35 years in academia, she is completing a creative nonfiction narrative, She UnNames Them: Mindfulness, Ecofeminism, Dementia.

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12th Street Beach
Chicago, Illinois

By E.N. Couturier

Standing at the concrete edge of a Chicago beach, you can almost rest your eyes from civilization.

As a teenage wannabe farmer feeling trapped in the city, I loved the lake for this reason. Behind me, the apartments and factories and train tracks weren’t just chaotic; they were a puzzle I couldn’t solve and a hand I couldn’t grasp.

I recognized this terrain of postindustrial memory immediately in the first story I read by Stuart Dybek, who’s written numerous collections about the city in the 1960s and 70s, cataloging and untangling a change I sensed, a lost world that stabbed at me.

His work consistently hits home, but none more than “Undertow,” which connects to my own family history while echoing my younger experiences of turning away from the roaring city humans had built to the organic strength of Lake Michigan.

In this chapter of the 2003 novel-in-stories I Sailed with Magellan, 13-year-old Perry rides through Chicago with his father, “Sir,” and younger brother, Mick, toward 12th Street Beach on a summer day.

Sir drives their rattling junk car past lumberyards, an electric plant, Chinatown shops, shabby streets, El stops, the telephone book printing factory where workers stare from the windows like inmates and the open-air bazaar on Maxwell Street where on Sundays he takes Perry to hunt for scrap wood and used plumbing fittings among frightening characters.

Then, sudden cold air and the beach, where the breeze “blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan.”

The family has always come here to swim, but today their father plans to take them into deeper water, to the Rocks. Sir swam there as a boy, picking rocks up from the lakebed and carrying them back to the concrete beach with Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic swimmer who went on to play Tarzan onscreen in the 1930s. The old-time swimsuit Sir still wears gives Perry a weak feeling, memories before their mother got cripplingly nervous.

“You shoulda seen this lake,” Sir tells his sons. “… when I was a kid you could see the bottom off the Rocks.”

Before I’d ever heard of Dybek, I heard similar stories from my father, who was raised in 1960s Chicago.

All four of his grandparents and their extended families left farms in the old country for this city. Some never adjusted; they planted backyard gardens their kids were ashamed of, couldn’t hold factory jobs, raised hunting dogs that paced the kennel fence unblinking when grandchildren came over.

Wandering Chicago beaches and parks alone after school, I thought about them and tried not to remember that I was at least an hour’s drive away from any working fields. I was drawn to a life out there, with the physical world beyond people, but couldn’t figure out how to go, if it was still possible for me.

My father also wanted such a life, but he never got it. First, he needed the money, then he had the job, then people depended on it, then there was my mother, then there was me, then the three of us moving between other cities. We tried the country once, a mostly empty tract of desert where few people lived and little could grow. We left it to return to Chicago when I was 15.

I’d heard so much about the city, riding the train, running down the sidewalks, knowing the neighbors; I wanted all of it to still be real.

Sitting in someone’s mother’s SUV on a summer weekend, listening to friends argue over the white boy rap on the stereo, I could almost detach from the moment and step into another, of my father’s Chicago and the one known by two generations before him.

They swam with Weissmuller too, I’d heard.

In truth, their world was gone, the families and the factories and the people they knew. My dad said so himself with no audible disappointment. Driving through his streets and going to mixers after basketball games at his all-boys Catholic high school, I wanted to understand what had once been there and what it meant that it was lost.

At the same time, I missed living on open land as I knew they once missed it, though in the past I had hated the isolation – hearing insects, seeing animals other than the remarkable coyote. There was so much I had not learned, so much I feared it was too late to understand, about life in nature

Perry experiences something similar in “Undertow” watching his father search for scrap lumber: “His ability to gauge instantly the dimensions of things both mystified and intimidated me. It was a gift I seemed to lack completely, one expressed in a language I was ignorant of, with a vocabulary one needed to gain admittance into the practical world of men.”

His father has another language of secrecy — Polish — and, later in the story, speaks inaudibly to his son under the water at a life-and-death moment.

Perry is afraid at first to jump into the lake, where Sir is washing himself with laundry soap after a hair-raising “torpedo dive.” Mick is more interested in climbing a pile of limestone on land. Out beyond the Rocks blink lights that Sir says belong to an ocean liner.

A bystander warns Perry that the undertow is strong, says that someone went down and never came up earlier that day.

In the water, Perry loses his nerve once and then calls for his brother to watch as he dives, peeling through cold layers until he sees rocks, the ones his father saw when he swam with Tarzan.

No ancient history to be seen there; only seaweed and beer cans. Perry lifts a rock, but the current pushes him in, toward a cavern beneath the beach walkway where he fears he’ll disappear under the city forever.

He accepts he’s about to die, but Sir appears, pushing him up, appearing to say something his son can’t hear.

Could I understand my father? Could I know what people I never met had felt, in a city far from a home they’d never return to, when they looked out at the water and could catch a fish again, could feel a current or a fresh breeze?

Approaching shore, Perry realizes the beach is a solid wall. He shares a smoke with two Mexican boys on the concrete. He thought the big ship was coming in over him, he tells them. They laugh and say it’s only the pumping station. Even the real Tarzan wouldn’t swim out there.

In the dark, the lights appear to be slowly moving.

In time, my own memories — on top of other people’s — started to bind me to the places I passed walking toward city beaches: the sidewalk where I slipped on ice and skinned my knee after softball practice, the park we sat in to watch fireworks on the fourth of July. I listened to music on the public high school’s radio station and imagined something was knitting these sights into a larger whole, a dome of meaning containing my life or a current determined to carry me somewhere. Reaching the water, I would look out over it and think, like Perry, that I could see the forests of Michigan on the other side.

In a 2016 interview with The Rumpus, Dybek said each story in this book is built around a song. At first, I couldn’t locate one in “Undertow,” only a fragment Sir sings in the car, seemingly in passing. His singing embarrasses his sons, who laugh and cover their ears:

“Workin’ on the railroad, workin’ on the farm, all I got to show for it’s the muscle in my arm…”

“Looks like I’m never gonna cease my wanderin’,” he goes on.

E.N. Couturier is the author of Organic Matter (Autofocus Books, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in jmww, Farewell Transmission, Offrange and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Photo by John H. White, 1973. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, NWDNS-412-DA-13844.

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Black Youth Healing Arts Center
St. Paul, Minnesota

By Chandler Peters-DuRose

It was March 2023, a week after my 19th birthday. We were in the McClinton room of the Black Youth Healing Arts Center (BYHAC), located in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. Even though the building is now home to the BYHAC, it was previously Red School House, a Native American charter school founded in 1972.

That day, we were sitting at one of the grey classroom tables donated to us by the school. Despite it being a classroom table, it lacked the writing left by burnt-out students or the gum underneath that a student couldn’t be bothered to throw away.

Now we sat, the poet Danez Smith, about seven other students, and me, imagining the shape of what we now know as ‘Poetry Lab’.  Danez started the conversation by asking what we wanted to work on. That led to someone asking, “what even is a poem in the first place?” We had no concrete definition. Danez said they didn’t even know, that a poem could be whatever we wanted it to be. I was confused — how could someone who has been writing poetry my entire life not know what constituted a poem?

We dreamed the question that ultimately became the heartbeat of the space: “How do we get people to cross the boundaries of their imagination?” Writers are so often told what should be written, and we did not want to restrict those young writers who engaged in the space. We wanted to address what was possible.

As we talked, we realized we couldn’t do that without remembering where we came from, which prompted the idea of studying the past, present, and future of Black poetic history. Every week we read work from the ancestors who came before us, our contemporaries who were writing into our current conditions, and still others who took it on themselves to write into the possibilities of tomorrow.

I don’t think any of us predicted just how much this would impact the BYHAC community. In the same way the BYHAC started as a twice-a-month program in the basement of a church and grew so much it needed its own building, Poetry Lab became a years-long weekly meeting of poets. Some of them had been writing for decades and some had only written one poem in their life. Then of course there was Danez, the poet who got me into poetry and was my mentor in the craft all the way from first poem to first publication.

For three years Danez showed up weekly with two poems and a writing prompt. The rest of us came with a notebook and the audacity to write vulnerable and healing poems and share them. The core group of poets came regularly despite it being a walk-in class. Trust grew. We would delve deep into the hurt, grief, and healing that make us humans and poets.

Through some of the hardest times in my life, poetry was there. The community was there when my roommate died unexpectedly and there when I was trying to form my own adult identity. When I had to drop out of college, they were supportive. At times when the last thing I wanted to do was write, I showed up. Weekly.

Danez worked to allow us a space to show up as we were, and we held that space sacred.  What is more sacred than artists creating amidst the horrors of the world?

In their most recent book Bluff, Danez writes in the poem “principles,”

Let us not be scared of the work

because its hard

let us move the mountain

because the mountain must move.

After Trump was elected for a second term, the urgency of the poems grew. While watching multiple genocides take place and fascism in this country becoming more and more overt, our poems needed to match that urgency. What was a political pulsing vein turned to a steady heartbeat. I had started by writing extremely personal, heartbreaking, and at times retraumatizing poems but during this time shifted into a political conversation.

As my poems developed, so did my confidence. In the beginning, Poetry Lab felt hard. I could barely read without anxiety and was constantly comparing my work to the poets around me. Then in August 2024, Danez was curating for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. They asked me and a handful of other poets to publish our work. I was honored to say the least, and on August 9, 2024, my poem “Rest Stop” was published. While I believe I would have been published at some point, without BYHAC I don’t think I would have had the opportunity so soon to share my work this widely.

The year prior, Danez had helped me put together my first zine, titled Transplant after a poem I had written and edited in that space. A few months after the book came out, Danez and I were in the car, and they asked if I could read the poem. I thought they meant as an artist share. But no, they wanted to teach it. In that moment, I was no longer in their car. I was 16 finding poetry for the first time, 18 meeting Danez at a coffee shop for the first time. Back in the car, at 20, I said yes.

Later, at the center, I was reading, expecting feedback. I got nothing but praise for my work and the book. A week later, a poet from the space came back to me and said they wrote a poem after “Transplant.” I had felt like I had succeeded as a writer, in every way.

Now, I’m 21 and have three publications. I’m working with Cave Canem and writing my second play. I attribute a lot of my success to not only Danez’s mentorship but also the work I and other poets have put into making the BYHAC a space for poets — especially poets of color — to thrive. Danez and I talked extensively about how spaces for poets don’t exist like they used to, especially after lockdown, when everything moved online. While we have a robust poetry scene in the Twin Cities, opportunities for community are few and far between. The places that do exist are often inaccessible financially.

Poetry weaves metaphor with meaning to create art. I have learned to make poetry a place where my politics and ethics can grow. I’ve learned the ways in which words and images work together to create something nothing less than magic. I’ve seen poems manifest into my daily life. I have built community around writing. I have felt my words resonate with people in ways I never would have imagined. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment in a coffee shop with a good mentor to show what is possible. That possibility can lead to enough audacity to ask, no really, what if…

Chandler Peters-DuRose (they/them) is a Black Queer adoptee poet and the author of Transplant (2024). Their work appears in Poem-a-Day, from the Academy of American Poets. They reside in the Twin Cities.

Photo courtesy of Irreducible Grace Foundation and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center

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Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
Hannibal, Missouri

By Cindy Lovell

The best time to visit Hannibal, Missouri, is right after you’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), especially if you chase it with the sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The other best time to visit is when you haven’t read these books in many years. You see, Hannibal stands ready to awaken memories, stir dormant imaginations, and welcome you to its literary folds. The question is, are you ready?

I first read Tom Sawyer in the fourth grade. I would spend the next 30 years trying to get to Hannibal as I reread Tom Sawyer and learned more about its author, Samuel Clemens, pen name Mark Twain.

Although critics claim Huck Finn as the better book, Tom Sawyer provides the gateway where Clemens initially resurrects the people and haunts of his youth. No other town has served the purpose of literature as well as Hannibal. No other author fictionalized his own childhood in such a way as to constantly be inviting all who read the book to come home, come home to Hannibal … or “St. Petersburg.” The line between fact and fiction is lovingly blurred.

My first pilgrimage was in the summer of 1996. Exiting Highway 61 past a handful of motels and diners, I steered downhill until the Mississippi River sprawled before me, a river of rafts and perils and adventures. I ditched the car and climbed across the levee to feel the power of place. Jackson’s Island loomed large. The Mississippi River may border or pass through ten states, but Mark Twain staked Hannibal’s claim on it when he wrote Tom and Huck.

Two kinds of tourists visit Hannibal: those who have read the books and yearn to feel the connection, and those who enjoy nitpicking impossible points and whining about commercialism. Yes, that’s Sam’s face on the Pepsi machines. To those lacking imagination, I say: lighten up.

At the corner of Hill and Main, Sam’s two-story boyhood home surveys the town, his bedroom windows facing the river and Cardiff Hill, scenes that presented irresistible temptation. Missing is the one-story ell upon which Sam (and Tom) landed when climbing out the window. Imagination supplies the invisible summer kitchen where the boys landed. Across the street stands Laura Hawkins’s girlhood home. Laura was the model for Becky Thatcher. Other period buildings complete the scene, such as Sam’s father’s Justice of the Peace Office and Grant’s Drug Store, where the family lived during harder times.

If you squint, power lines and cars disappear, revealing imaginary barefoot boys scampering toward adventure, eluding an unseen Aunt Polly.

Poke your head inside the replica of Tom Blankenship’s home, making sure to duck if you’re on the tall side. Blankenship was Huck’s real-life counterpart, and his house is catty-corner to the Clemens home, providing excellent proximity when the boys meowed to each other as a signal at night. Museum benefactors built this tiny abode on the site of the original home that housed the vast Blankenship clan. The house was rebuilt using period lumber and conjures enough cramped authenticity to remind modern visitors why Huck preferred sleeping in hogshead barrels. They were roomier.

A few blocks north, a memorial lighthouse, absent during Sam’s childhood, invites visitors to climb 244 steps up Cardiff Hill. The vistas of the river are worth it. Take out your copy of Tom Sawyer and reread the passages describing this “Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” Sam got it just right.

As twilight descends, meander farther away from the river toward the Old Baptist Cemetery, where Tom and Huck found “round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.” In summer, one million lightning bugs await to enchant the devoted reader. You are forgiven if you yield to temptation and go barefoot in the grass.

In the distance a train slouches through town, each whistle unique, composed by the engineer. On Lovers Leap, out-of-towners listen expectantly.

Two miles south, the Mark Twain Cave reaffirms Clemens’s meticulous memory. In Huckleberry Finn, he provided these directions:    

We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn’t a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped. 

            I have followed those directions to that room. It is uncanny that young Sam knew that cave so well as to remember these directions decades later when he wrote Huckleberry Finn. The oldest cave signature is in this room, dated 1819. Young Clemens himself autographed a cave wall as did his friends. I imagine Sam pulling the pencil out from behind his ear, or maybe his pocket. The cave is sacred ground. Utterly sacred.

Hannibal itself is holy to all who fall under the spell of Sam Clemens’s pen. When Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine writer visited, his only wish was to touch the Mississippi River in Sam’s hometown. He wept.

I have witnessed schoolteachers, students, and others respond similarly. Between my first visit in 1996 and moving there in 2007, I lost count of the dozens of people I brought to explore Sam’s boyhood home. They marveled at the cracks in the plank floors where Tom poured the dreaded Pain-killer. They peered at Becky Thatcher’s house from the parlor window and asked if Laura Hawkins stayed in Hannibal or moved away as Sam did. (She stayed.) They lingered in the kitchen imagining Sandy, a young enslaved boy whose services were rented by the Clemenses, sleeping on a rug.

Their questions attempted to discern fact from fiction. All were worthy visitors. They brought no snipe, no snark, no snide remarks dismissing the commercialization of Hannibal’s most famous resident. They brought respect, curiosity, and imagination. And Hannibal rewards such folks.

Cindy Lovell is a writer and educator. She teaches a course on Tom Sawyer for Quincy University, which is on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. She is the former executive director of both the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum (Hannibal, MO) and the Mark Twain House & Museum (Hartford, CT). Cindy wrote the narrative for Mark Twain: Words & Music, a double-album benefit project for the Boyhood Home, featuring Jimmy Buffett as Huck Finn, Clint Eastwood as Mark Twain, and Garrison Keillor as narrator. Grammy Award-winner Carl Jackson produced the project, and performers included Brad Paisley, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and other fans of Mark Twain.

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East Hill
Elmira, New York

By Matt Seybold

Now it’s just a small, oddly-shaped clearing in a dense wood. At the top of the large pile of limestones we generously call a “staircase,” a space opens up in the trees. It feels like a good place for a pagan ritual. And every four years, on the final night of the International Conference on The State of Mark Twain Studies, that’s kind of what happens. A gaggle of scholars, creative writers, actors, filmmakers, and other Twainiacs gather in the moonlit clearing to smoke the cheapest possible cigars, their inexpensiveness a point of pride, as it had been for Sam Clemens himself. Winners of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and every imaginable academic fellowship scrape dry flakes of tobacco off their tongues and pretend to know the words to “Oft in the Stilly Night.”

From 1874 to 1953, in this space stood an octagonal study, designed to resemble a steamboat pilothouse, in which Mark Twain drafted the majority of the works for which he is now remembered. After too many midcentury literary tourists made pilgrimage, trapsing across the property where Twain’s in-laws still resided, the study was relocated to the campus of Elmira College, where his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, was an alumna and his niece, Ida Langdon, was a professor. Elmira College would eventually become custodian of Quarry Farm as well, and the home of the Center for Mark Twain Studies, where I work.

While I once cringed at the solemnity with which my fellow scholars sung “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” after four days of academic panels and roundtables, I’ll admit in the intervening years I have occasionally secluded myself in that clearing for a few idle minutes of, I don’t know, reverence.

When Twain was here, most every Summer from 1869 to 1890, and periodically thereafter, there were no woods. The study was, as he put it, “perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.” One can still approximate this view from the veranda of the main house at Quarry Farm, a hundred yards southeast and downhill from where the study stood. On a clear day, the blue hills are visible well across the Pennsylvania border, seven miles south.

It was this view, across the Chemung River Valley, this panorama of church steeples, lumber barges, railways bridges, and smokestacks, of commercial development buttressed by wilderness on all sides, which inspired Twain’s imaginative return to antebellum Missouri. First the early chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and then the greater parts of Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were drafted here, along with dozens of other novels, memoirs, plays, essays, stories, speeches, and at least one pornographic farce solely for private circulation. Twain estimated that he wrote ten chapters in the study at Quarry Farm for every one he wrote elsewhere.

Visitors joke, often enough for it to become something of a cliché amongst our staff, that Twain’s productivity must have been fueled by boredom. His other regular haunts during the Gilded Age – Hartford, New York City, London, Vienna, Berlin – are so cosmopolitan and Elmira so provincial by comparison. It must have been easy for him to avoid distraction up there on East Hill. I have myself sometimes described him as looking down on Elmira like the Grinch over Whoville. But there is no evidence that Sam Clemens disdained or eluded the social scene of Elmira. To the contrary, some of his most cherished friendships were developed here, with Thomas K. Beecher, Charley Langdon, John T. Lewis, and John B. Stanchfield. And he did not vegetate at Quarry Farm, waiting for them to come to him, either.

One of Twain’s most healthful habits was his near-daily constitutionals. He was a “pedestrianist,” as he put it. Often accompanied by friends, often chain-smoking, he would walk shocking distances over tough terrain. During the seasons he spent here, downtown Elmira was connected to Quarry farm only by what one visiting reporter described as “a winding road, which is steep, very steep, and at times is really a dangerous driveway.” Twain was well aware of the danger, having witnessed the occasion in 1877 when a runaway carriage containing his sister-in-law and niece nearly careened into a deep ravine, saved only by the heroic efforts of Lewis.

The “dangerous driveway” no longer exists. It has been replaced by a pair of paved two-lane surface roads, still very steep, and treacherous when icy. This commute should be considered as essential to Twain’s writing process as the porch where he read each day’s work aloud to the assembled family and maybe even as the study itself.

Throughout his forties and fifties, Twain tripped his way down (and back up again) to visit the barber shop of Henry Washington, the self-emancipated man whose mother is the narrator of Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It”; to play pool with Beecher in the makeshift billiard parlor the radical theologian had created in the southwest corner of the Park Church; to gossip with other men of his guild at the newspaper offices of the Elmira Advertiser, Gazette, and Telegram;and to wet his whistle at Klapproth’s Tavern.

Far from being a recluse during the three or four months he spent in Elmira every year, Twain was someone you were likely to bump into during a summer stroll, a fixture of the downtown scene. When Twain died, legions of well-wishers gathered for a public viewing in New York City of the celebrity who Robertus Love, in his obituary, deemed “the most famous man on earth.” But Twain’s eulogy, written by the first woman ordained in this state, Beecher’s protégé, Annis Ford Eastman, was read at the Park Church in Elmira, and he was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, next to his wife, son, and the two daughters who preceded him.

Frank Gannett, the newspaper magnate who was then the publisher of the Elmira Star-Gazette, noted in his obituary that though Twain’s celebrity and works belonged to the whole world, his “personal attributes, idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of disposition, temperament and moral attitude” felt like they were peculiar to Elmira. Nearly every Elmiran could recount secondhand stories, if not personal memories, of the famous author’s local exploits, and could testify to his “labors in the path of universal education,” his “insistence on an exchange of absolutely honest and honorable relations in every business and social enterprise,” and his “domestic life full of examples of faithfulness and devotion.”

That steep, winding, hazardous road between Quarry Farm and downtown Elmira connected the pastoral idyll — which was undoubtedly good for Twain’s productivity — to a diverse cast of quirky characters and social dynamics, which were also, I contend, generative for his art. Part of what I have elsewhere called the “Quarry Farm Style” is its dialectic of romance and realism. The novels written under these conditions move from King Arthur’s Court to scathing critiques of feudal and industrial society, from vivid naturalist descriptions of the Mississippi River to violent scenes of crisis and collapse along the banks, from prevailing American myths to reportage which debunks them, from the lifestyles of deluded princes to those of grasping paupers (equally deluded).

By the time he first came to Elmira, 33-year-old Mark Twain well knew what it was like to climb. How hard. How irrational. How unlikely. And I expect every time he contemplated those two miles back up East Hill, he was reminded again. The bootstrappers, the strivers, the grinders, the scrapers, the self-title entrepreneurs: all the lunks in the streets blindly hustling some mirage of success in a society structured to ensure their defeat; aren’t they ridiculous?

Well, so am I.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. He is executive producer and host of The American Vandal Podcast and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and (with Gordon Hutner) of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications.

Photo of Samuel Clemens looking out from the study window, Quarry Farm, East Hill, Elmira, New York, 1903. By T.E. Marr, courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive at Elmira College.

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Mark Twain House & Museum
Hartford, Connecticut

By Jacques Lamarre

In 2008, with no ceremony, I was handed a simple brass key to Mark Twain’s Hartford home. Having just been hired as the director of Marketing and Special Programs, I was given a few rules: do not touch anything, do not sit on the furniture, and, for God’s sake, don’t enter the house after the alarm has been set. The key went onto my keychain alongside those for my house, my Jeep Liberty, and my shed, and I began my efforts to lure visitors into the Clemens family’s house and its adjacent museum.

Up until that time, I only had been to the Twain House on an otherwise unmemorable date. I don’t know who chose the house tour for a date activity, but it likely had to do with my being a resident of the West End of Hartford, and, at the time, without a car. I cannot remember my date’s name, but the house made an immediate impression. That was the Clemenses’ intention.

One can track the trajectory of Twain’s life, work and gathering sophistication by visiting his homes. I have visited Samuel Clemens’ childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri as well as his birthplace, a humble two-room shack in Florida, Missouri. Both homes lay bare his Lower Midwest roots and illustrate the elements that would feature heavily in several of his most popular works. He left Missouri a Clemens and found his pen name of Mark Twain when he went out west.

His time in the rough-and-tumble, Wild West atmosphere of Nevada would find him living in a variety of frontier structures. In California, his accommodations ranged from mining camps to boarding houses. Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, engaged his services as a traveling correspondent to cover the first transatlantic pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. This trip on the steamship the Quaker City would not only expose him to a rich world of antiquities and awe-inspiring sights — all chronicled with a wry cynicism in his first major work, The Innocents Abroad (1869) — it would also introduce him to his future brother-in-law, Charley Langdon.

Twain experienced love at first sight after seeing an ivory miniature picture of Charley’s sister Olivia “Livy” Langdon. After meeting in New York City in 1869, an ardent courtship ensued, much of it conducted in the Langdon family home in Elmira, New York. The Langdons’ wealth and social prominence, along with Twain’s burgeoning success as an author and lecturer, allowed him to graduate into a new circle of society and a heightened level of ambition. After their marriage, Livy and Sam two moved into a gorgeous, fully-furnished home on a highly-desirable street in Buffalo — a gift from Sam’s father-in-law. Their time in Buffalo was brief, only one year. Twain set his sights on a move to Hartford. It wasn’t his first visit to a city that would loom large in his life.

In 1868, Twain visited Hartford — at the time the wealthiest city per capita in the United States — to meet with the publisher of the forthcoming The Innocents Abroad. Always one to economize efforts, Twain used the visit to file one of his ongoing travelogues to the Alta California. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief…. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

Sam, Livy, and their first child Langdon moved to Hartford in 1871 to be close to the American Publishing Company. They rented a home in Hartford’s West End, then known as Nook Farm. Named after a bend in the Hog River, Nook Farm was and would be home to many of Hartford’s cultural and political elite, including author Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, journalist, Charles Dudley Warner, actor and playwright William Gillette, Senator Joseph Hawley, and, eventually, Katharine Hepburn.

It was during this time that four significant events occurred. The first, the tragic death of their young son in 1872, a devastating blow for the family. This was followed by the joyful births of their daughters Susy in 1872 and Clara in 1874. The fourth, Sam and Livy purchased a plot of land on Farmington Avenue to begin construction of the first home that they could properly call their own.

Positioned overlooking the Park River (the new and much nicer name for the Hog River), the property sat on the edge of Hartford adjacent to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s final home. Sam and Livy engaged architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design a house that would be both a family home and a jaw-dropping showstopper that reflected the Clemenses’ growing social importance. The construction of the massive Victorian Gothic home with its ornate brick and woodwork would cause tongues to wag around the conservative town. The Hartford Times wrote, “The novelty displayed in the architecture of the building, the oddity of its internal arrangement and the fame of its owner will all conspire to make it a house of note for a long time to come.” They weren’t wrong.

The seventeen years that the Clemenses lived in their beloved home were to be their happiest and were Sam’s most prolific and productive. Ironically, it was during his time that he wrote three of the works that would lean most heavily on his Midwest roots: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Of his Hartford home, Twain wrote in 1897, “To us our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome—& we could not enter it unmoved.”

Over my years at the Twain House, that simple brass key would grow in weight and import in my pocket. Every day when I left, I would swing by the bust of Twain in the lobby and say (quietly, so no one would question my sanity), “I hope I did right by you today.” In 2016, I left the Mark Twain House for another job. I still live in the Hartford area and can visit, but I feel acutely the loss of that key and my access to the bewilderingly beautiful and eccentric home that I too could not enter unmoved.

Jacques Lamarre is a playwright and a marketing specialist who consults for The Mark Twain House & Museum.

Photo by Frank Grace Photography, courtesy of the Mark Twain House & Museum.

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Dollis Hill House
London, England

By Thomas Ruys Smith

It’s the first real day of spring and I’m in Dollis Hill — an unremarkable suburb of North London that sits just inside the North Circular, the multi-lane road system that encircles the centre of the capital and is synonymous with traffic congestion and an entrenched atmosphere of urban decay. Still, in Gladstone Park, the sun is out and so are the local residents: in the ruins of what was once Dollis Hill House, a children’s birthday party is winding down just as a group of women begin an impromptu karaoke session; our miniature schnauzer Winifred is making the acquaintance of a fluffy white pomeranian apparently named Snowflake. This might seem an unlikely location for a ghost-hunt, but that’s why we’re here.

If you wanted to seek for the restless spirit of Mark Twain, there would be worse places to begin, at least according to the man himself. Interviewed in 1907 as he embarked on what he knew would be his final trip across the Atlantic, Twain was clear that he intended to spend his afterlife in the modern Babylon that had often served him as a second home: “I may never go to London again until I come back to this sphere after I am dead,” he told a reporter, “and then I would like to live in London.”

As an academic based in the UK, I’ve spent much of my career exploring Mark Twain’s relationship with the Mississippi River, tracing the way that the river wound its way through his life and work. In surprising ways, that muddy water often washed up at my own front door across the Atlantic: British writers had a surprising influence on the creation of the Mississippi as a powerful global emblem of America. Now, though, I’m reversing that transatlantic equation. It seemed time to pursue the traces of Mark Twain in my own backyard — in London, the city in which he spent roughly three crucial years on numerous trips, from his inaugural visit in 1872 to his final victory lap in 1907. A number of Twain’s London residences still exist, most famously the Langham Hotel which hosted his early visits and the house he rented at 23 Tedworth Square in affluent Chelsea, which bears a blue plaque erected by English Heritage to announce to passers-by that Mark Twain, American writer, had once lived there in 1896-7.

For me, though, there is something especially evocative about Dollis Hill House, occupied by Twain with his wife Olivia and daughter Jean in the summer of 1900. Compared to the glamour of his first trips to London as a literary lion ensconced in the Langham, or the awful gloom of his secluded residence in Tedworth Square after the death of his daughter Susy, there is an appealing softness to Twain’s time in Dollis Hill: after years of personal turmoil, including bankruptcy, the months he spent in the house were a relatively sunny sojourn. By 1900, his fortunes had been largely restored, enough for his family to return to America after a period of financial exile in Europe, and Dollis Hill House was a final hiatus before the end of this odyssey.

Twain’s description of this time exudes a warmth and peace that was rare in his later years: “Dollis Hill House comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I have ever occupied. … It is within a biscuit-toss of solid London; yet it stands solitary on its airy hill, in the centre of six acres of lawn, and garden, and shrubbery, and heavy-foliaged ancient trees.” His only complaint was the lack of a telephone. Today, of course, London has swallowed up Dollis Hill and what had been “country, pure and simple” to Twain is now surrounded by urban sprawl. Even on a warm spring day, “paradise” seems a stretch. However, as Twain himself noted, the land around the house had just been “bought for a park, to be for all time a memorial to Mr. Gladstone” — a frequent visitor to the house during his time as Prime Minister — which meant that, to some extent, the landscape that Twain loved really would “remain as it is.” Unlike hotels or his other residences that still function as private homes, this Twain-imprinted place remains immediately and freely accessible to all.

There’s also something about Dollis Hill House’s ruin that adds a poignancy, and a piquancy, to its association with Twain. A series of fires in the late 1990s left it a derelict shell. Though money was earmarked for its restoration, it became a casualty of austerity when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled the funding during his time as London Mayor. A final fire in 2011 precipitated its demolition. Now, it remains an absent presence in Gladstone Park: a short course of bricks marks out the building’s floorplan and a fragment of one wall remains. People make their own use of this liminal space — like today’s birthday party.

An absent presence is also how I’ve come to think about Mark Twain as I search for him in London. Today, I can’t swear that the park-goers in Dollis Hill are thinking much about its famous former resident, but across the closing decades of the nineteenth century London was infatuated with the writer who seemed to embody their dreams, and sometimes nightmares, about America. In 1907, local newspaper The Hendon and Finchley Times proudly claimed him, “Our friend Mark Twain, who is associated with this district owing to his residence at Dollis Hill House.” Another paper judged that Twain’s connection to Gladstone Park would “add a certain … literary flavour in the public mind to its natural attractions.” These are vivid and hyperlocal examples of what Twain’s some-time associate Ralph Ashcroft declared in 1907: the English — and Londoners in particular — were “part-owners with the American nation of Mark Twain.”

In turn, Twain himself was infatuated with an urban space that was like no other on the face of the planet. “Everything in this monster city interests me,” Twain announced during his first time in London. And it always did. I would argue that outside of America, there is no other location that meant as much to him, or that had as much influence on his sense of self. Just as this ruined corner of London will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost, so London should always be a part of our understanding of this iconically American writer. And for me, there is something particularly significant about having this enigmatic shell on my doorstep, a short drive away from my own home along the grey river of the North Circular. Tracing the outlines of the rooms of Dollis Hill House as my daughters eat an ice cream purchased from the old stable block and modern life buzzes throughout this liminal shell, I can conjure up Twain as a near-neighbour, a fellow suburbanite, a Londoner, available for afternoon calls. In Gladstone Park, the sun is shining, and Mark Twain is lounging in a deckchair beneath the trees, forever.

Thomas Ruys Smith is an academic and writer who specializes in the study of nineteenth-century America. He is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and co-editor of the journals Comparative American Studies and New Area Studies.

“Gladstone Park, at Dollis Hill, to Be Opened on May 25.” The Illustrated London News, 1901.

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23 Tedworth Square

London, England

By Susan K. Harris

When Mark Twain reached England at the end of his 1895–96 lecture tour around the British Empire, he first sojourned in Guildford, 25 miles southwest of London, where he began work on what would become Following the Equator (British title, More Tramps Abroad), his record of that trip. However, shortly after he and his travel companions — his wife Olivia, and their middle daughter Clara — moved in, his oldest daughter, Susy, died in the family home in Hartford, CT, and, according to Twain legend, the family fell into a period of deep mourning from which Olivia, at least, never fully recovered. In October, after their youngest, Jean, joined them, they moved to 23 Tedworth Square, London, a five-story townhouse where they would dwell for the next nine months. There, the story goes, the family lived in almost complete seclusion: Olivia grieving, the two girls faithfully attending her, and Twain alternately railing against God and knuckling down to writing. As he bitterly told his old friend Joseph Twichell, “I am working, but it is for the sake of the work — the ‘surcease of sorrow’ that is found there. I work all the days, and trouble vanishes away when I use that magic.”

Tedworth Square is in Chelsea, a leafy section of London. In Twain’s day it was a modest neighborhood; today it shows all the signs of upscale gentrification, with apartment sales starting at over a million pounds. I made London my final stop when I followed Twain’s route around the world in 2013-14. Like Twain, I was relieved to have my journey finished. Although I had visited Australasia, India, and South Africa in separate trips, interspersed with teaching and other domestic duties, the collective undertaking had proven far more exhausting than I had anticipated — in part because I was always conscious of being an outsider, especially in cities where the sight of a lone woman triggered outspoken commentary from male spectators. In contrast London seemed welcoming and strangely safe. It was, I realized, a transitional space for me: familiar — I had visited often and lived there one summer — though still distant from domestic stress; a place to tie up loose research ends at the British Library, stroll through parks, and collect myself before I hit home and the myriad responsibilities awaiting me.

I suspect Twain and Livy felt the same way, despite — or perhaps because of — their bereavement. At least the family had been spared the shock of hearing about Susy’s death while surrounded by strangers and unknown tongues, and London was old stomping grounds for them, too. Chelsea also afforded some distractions, even for a grief-stricken writer living in (relative) seclusion. Tedworth Square enters obliquely into Following the Equator, in the India portion of the book. There Twain compares the flawless beauty of black and brown skins to “the white ones which are streaming past this London window now.” Not only are his neighbors’ skin colors “fish-belly,” “sallow,” and “mustard yellow,” one passer-by sports a “boiled-cauliflower nose in a flabby face veined with purple crinklings.” Not a generous assessment, but an early marker of the angry misanthropy that Twain developed in the wake of Susy’s death, I suspect. 

Today’s London complexions are generally better — for all our urban pollutants, at least we don’t struggle with coal dust — but my journal reminds me that while I was sitting across from #23 a man stumbled by who did look like the people Twain described. Disheveled and unshaven, he was drinking beer at 11 am and smelled like a horse. Even upscale Chelsea isn’t entirely shut off from London’s outcasts.

Nor was the Clemens family entirely shut off from London’s social life. The story that the mourning family isolated themselves is, like many Twain stories, largely a myth, probably originating in Twain’s attempts to fend off interviewers by claiming sequestration. In fact all four had contacts with the world beyond the house. Although Livy rarely went out, she did see close friends at home, and Barbara Snedecor’s edition of Livy’s letters shows that she quickly resumed responsibility for family correspondence, including paying bills and (because Twain had shifted ownership of his copyrights to her prior to declaring bankruptcy) dealing with Twain’s contract negotiations. Clara and Jean certainly supported their mother, but not 24/7; David Frears’ Mark Twain, Day by Day, notes that they acquired bicycles and learned to ride them in the Square, and Clara’s memoir My Father, Mark Twain recounts long Sunday walks around the city with their father. With friends, both girls also attended concerts and theater performances.

Twain always gregarious, visited friends, including Poultney Bigelow, John Hay, Bram Stoker, and Rudyard Kipling, and he willingly attended the theater and social/public events, including a Zangwill reading, at least one meeting of the Savage Club, a Parliamentary session, and the Queen’s Jubilee. Letters also show him keenly following the McKinley/Bryan presidential race in the U.S. Moreover, though resisting most demands for lectures and interviews, he allowed his friend Adele Chapin to persuade him to “tell stories” to patients at the London Hospital, an event that delighted the patients and forced Twain out of his self-absorption.

We associate sprawling cities with loneliness and alienation. But their small neighborhoods and parks can also provide shelter, quiet places to harbor while learning how to shift from one stage of life to another. London proved transitional for the Clemens family, furnishing them the physical and social spaces they needed to navigate their lives without Susy. For them as for me, the city served as interstitial space, between the upheavals of travel and the resumption of familiar routines. They could mourn together inside the five-story house, but they could also venture beyond it: a bike ride around the square, tea with a friend, an afternoon concert, dinner at a social club. Day by day, month by month, 23 Tedworth Square harbored Livy, Clara, Jean, and Samuel Clemens while they worked through their initial shock and relearned the social skills they would need for the remainder of their lives.

Susan K. Harris’s studies of Twain’s life and works incorporate many perspectives, from his yearning to escape human time and space, through his courtship days, to his later anti-imperialism. Her most recent book, Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now (2020), follows Twain on his journeys through Australia, India, and South Africa, exploring the cultural phenomena that he noticed (and those he ignored) and discussing her own relationship to one of America’s most powerful writers. 

Photo by Becky Dale.

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