Author: Maryland Humanities

Writing Baltimore: A Celebration of Women’s History Month through the Works of Emily Post, Lucille Clifton and Anne Tyler

Posted on by Maryland Humanities

When asked to describe her training in etiquette by a reporter The Baltimore Sun, Emily Post declared that her education primarily “consisted of nothing more complicated than…life among people trained like herself from infancy to do the right thing at the right time in the right way.” Post was not only elaborating on her background; unwittingly, the author and Baltimorean “by birth and in heart” was also characterizing a common thread in the writing styles of several of female writers who are associated with the city.

Baltimore’s literary culture is both vast and variegated, but overall the writers associated with the city share a drive to in the words of John Updike, “…give the mundane its beautiful due.” In particular, this common purpose in examining everyday life is highlighted in the works of two of Baltimore’s best-known female writers, Lucille Clifton and Anne Tyler.

Photo courtesy of www.poetryfoundation.org

Born in Depew, New York, in 1936, Clifton was the first member of her family to graduate from high school, and later obtained a scholarship to Howard University, where she studied drama. Ultimately, Clifton decided that poetry was her main inspiration, and began publishing her poems while employed at a succession of state and federal government jobs. In 1971, Clifton began focusing on her poetry full time when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore. It was during this residency that Clifton began a long, rich relationship with both the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland at large. Following the publication of her works Good News About the Earth and An Ordinary Woman, Clifton was named Maryland’s Poet Laureate in 1979, holding the position for several years. After a short stint living in California, Clifton returned to Maryland, and was a faculty member at St. Mary’s College in St. Mary’s City from 1989 until her passing in 2010.

 

 

Of her work, the poet Rita Dove noted that “…Clifton’s poems are compact and self-sufficient…Her revelations…resemble the epiphanies of childhood and early adolescence, when one’s lack of preconceptions about the self allowed for brilliant slippage into the metaphysical.” Clifton wrote in a “quiet, even woman’s voice,” telling readers truths that could be as dark and hurtful as they were luminous and uplifting.

Written in lowercase type while raising her six children, Clifton’s work was quietly, concisely resilient in the face of the adversity she experienced as an African American woman. As she said in “Won’t You Celebrate with Me,”

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman …
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Although she was not a contemporary of Clifton’s, Anne Tyler nonetheless shares in Clifton’s Baltimorean style of every day truth telling. Originally hailing from Minnesota, Tyler began writing short stories at an early age. She moved to Baltimore with her husband Taghi Modarressi, a child psychiatrist and fellow author, in 1965. Following a career hiatus after the birth of her two children, Tyler refocused her efforts on her writing, and in 1970 she began a prolific phase of her career that has lasted to today.

There is a clear symbiosis between Tyler and her adopted city that is evident throughout her work. Tyler has set sixteen of her novels in the city, and Baltimore’s unique culture serves as a springboard for her prose. In her novels, Tyler has preferred to focus on large themes that characterize people’s motivations rather than a plot-driven approach; the question of “how to live” undergirds her characters’ lives. Similarly to Clifton, Tyler utilizes a quiet, even voice, and the nuances of her work are bolstered with a bevy of details that animate her writing.

Tyler has been frank about her fascination with the middle class, and it’s perhaps fitting that her characters share her home neighborhood of Roland Park. However, Tyler’s novels show that her fixation on the middle class’ soul searching is far from mutually exclusive with central human struggles. Tyler is sanguine about the way in which her characters interact with those of a grittier story such as The Wire, noting in a recent interview that, in a “pocketed city” such as Baltimore, people from different backgrounds “walk the same streets, … (but) we almost don’t see each other.”

“Pocketed” as the city and their respective works may be, Clifton and Tyler’s styles speak in a style that is uniquely Baltimorean. The work of Clifton and Tyler addresses elemental truths about what is most important to people: celebration, love, and survival. Irrespective the content of their writing, both women have wrangled with the monumental basic things of life, the things that animate us to continue to struggle and to survive.

 

Citations 

Alexander, Elizabeth. “Remembering Lucille Clifton.” New Yorker, February 17, 2010. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/remembering-lucille-clifton

Allardice, Lisa. “Anne Tyler: A Life’s Work.” The Guardian, April 13, 2012. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/13/anne-tyler-interview

Thomson, Graeme. “‘I began writing with the idea that I wanted to know what it would be like to be someone else:’ Why Anne Tyler Might Be the Greatest Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of…” The Daily Mail, January 31, 2015. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2931435/Anne-Tyler-began-writing-idea-wanted-know-like-somebody-else.html

“Emily Post: October 27, 1873-September 25, 1960.” The Baltimore Literary Heritage Project. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://baltimoreauthors.ubalt.edu/writers/emilypost.htm

“Lucille Clifton: 1936-2010.” Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/clifton.html

“Lucille Clifton: 1936-2010.” Poets.org. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/lucille-clifton

Happy Maryland Day! Humanities Connection Archive

Posted on by Maryland Humanities

Today is Maryland Day, a state holiday commemorating when the first settlers disembarked from two ships, “The Ark” and “The Dove” onto St. Clement’s Island in the Potomac River in 1634. We commemorate Maryland Day today with a Humanities Connection segment* by Kristen Schenning, Director of Education at the Maryland Historical Society, which aired March 13, 2014.

On an early March day 380 years ago, two small ships sailed into the Chesapeake Bay. This was the beginning of a new colony and a pious experiment – a colony based on the concept of religious toleration. Lord Baltimore had a problem. The primary investors in his Maryland colony were Catholic, like he was, however the majority of the colonists were Protestant indentured servants. To have a successful and prosperous colony, he needed to find a solution to a religious feud that had plagued English society for years.

This unlikely collection of pioneers, along with a small contingent of Jesuit priests, set sail from England on November 23, 1633, on St. Clements Day – interestingly the patron saint of mariners. The voyage however was not smooth sailing for the future Marylanders. The two ships making the voyage, the Ark and the Dove, were separated by a storm within days of leaving port.

Without knowing if the other ship had survived, both forged ahead and eventually reunited in the Caribbean before continuing north to the Chesapeake Bay.

The colonists landed on an island they named for St. Clement off the coast of what became St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s first capital. The colonists were fortunate find a Native American nation, the Piscataway, willing to aid them in their settlement. In thanksgiving for their successful journey, Father Andrew White, one of the priests who made the voyage, said a mass on the feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1634.

Although it started as a day of thanksgiving for the original colonists, the celebration of Maryland Day as we know it today began in the early twentieth century when the State Board of Education designated March 25 as a day for the study of Maryland History. It became an official state holiday in 1916.

The purpose of Maryland day is to remind us of nearly four centuries of Maryland history and to examine the contributions of Marylanders such as Frederick Douglas, Francis Scott Key, Clara Barton, Margaret Brent, Harriett Tubman and many many more. This year we are honoring those citizen soldiers who, during the Battle of Baltimore, inspired Marylander Francis Scott Key to capture the feeling of a nation with the words, ‘O Say Can you See…”

* This essay excludes original content about the Maryland Historical Society’s Maryland Day celebration activities last year. To learn about this year’s events, visit www.mdhs.org.

 

Great Books College: St. John’s College – Humanities Connection

Posted on by Maryland Humanities

Last week on Humanities Connection we featured a commentary by St. John’s College President Christopher Nelson.  St. John’s College in Annapolis is a liberal arts college where students focus on collaborative inquiry and the study of original texts to examine the fundamental questions of what it means to be human.

We’ve reprinted it below. For those of us who would rather hear the audio, listen to President Nelson’s Podcast below.  What do you think about their approach to learning?  Let us know in your comment below.

 

Humanities Connection.2.25.15.St.John’sCollege

 

President Christopher Nelson, St. John’s College

St. John’s College is known as the first Great Books college, with a single Program of study which all students follow for an entire four years. When people first hear of what we do they can scarcely believe their ears. We invite them to come and see. If they are familiar with other institutions of education, here are the main differences they will observe:

  • First, we go back behind the modern departmental division between humanities and sciences to an older ordering: authors and arts. We regard all studies—including mathematics and science—as humanities, because they all contribute to human growth. Hence almost half of our curriculum is math and science, while the rest encompasses language, literature, history, social science, philosophy, and music.
  • Second, our Program is entirely unified; thus, there are no departments at all and practically no electives.
  • And third, there is no lecturing in class. Our faculty, who teach the whole Program, are not professors of knowledge, but advanced learners assisting novices in serious and penetrating inquiry.

We deal directly and immediately with books, which we read together with our students during their four years. These books are not, as is often imagined, a museum of dusty texts composed by privileged people. They are the living springs of the modern world, through which we come to know the terms we live with. They help us know ourselves.

This point of view—that to know ourselves we need to know our tradition—is different from “historicism,” the notion that we are the products of impersonal historical forces set into deterministic motion at some point in the long-dead past.

We want nothing to do with what is dead and bygone. When we speak of “tradition,” we mean individual works by thinking authors that have shaped contemporary life in ways of which we are largely unconscious. We can bring these works back to life by reading them not as historical documents but as living presences that made us who we are and taught us to talk as we do. We are convinced that these Great Books contain a live wisdom necessary for thinking out our daily lives, for living with awareness.

Our students come to us with a love of reading, a thirst for learning, and a desire to create their own education by actively participating in it. Ideally, when they graduate four years later, they have a keener understanding of themselves, the limits of their knowledge, and the world around them—together with the courage to continue identifying and correcting imperfections both within and without.

We believe that this is the true purpose of liberal education. We strive to provide the occasion for it to all who want it. And we welcome students of all ages who seek it to visit us at St. John’s College.