Poe in Boston

by Sheila Connolly

It was only this year that I learned that there is a public art project to honor Edgar Allan Poe in Boston.  What makes that funny is that he didn’t have very nice things to say about Boston.

As you’ve no doubt learned or seen over the years, Poe is commemorated in multiple cities. But he was born in Boston, to travelling actors.  No, the house isn’t there anymore—it was torn down in the 1960s and replaced by the state Transportation Building.  He lived in Richmond, VA, with foster parents after his own parents died.  There are Poe museums in Baltimore, the Bronx, and Philadelphia as well as Richmond; the room where Poe lived as a student at the University of Virginia are preserved in his honor.

All Poe has gotten from Boston until now is a small plaque on the wall of a luggage store. (Hmm, maybe there’s some irony there, because he certainly traveled around a lot.)

Why do we care?  What is it about dead writers that draws the average tourist accompanied by two point five whining children? Do they think some spirit of the author lingers in the stone and concrete?

It is interesting to note that the (much more successful) author Stephen King made a nice contribution earlier this year to the proposed monument.  It arrived at the Poe Foundation of Boston, which is managing the project, on April Fool’s Day, and was briefly thought to be a joke. You have to believe that King planned it that way, right?

Poe’s relationship with the city of his birth was a rocky one.  He sometimes denied having been born in Boston at all. He was contemptuous of the literary elite of Boston and the area, especially Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, saying they were “incapable of recognizing a decent poem if it fell onto their precious Common,” and frequently referring to Boston as “Frogpondium,” in reference to the frog pond at the Boston Common. In 1845 Poe gave a reading at the Boston Lyceum which bombed (he recycled an existing poem, one of his youthful efforts, rather than presenting something new) and the local papers slammed him.  In 1848 he tried to commit suicide in Boston but failed.

 

 

And still the city chooses to honor him, if belatedly.  They’ve commissioned a statue, to be erected in Edgar Allan Poe Square, a brick-paved plaza at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets.  The statue, to be executed by New York sculptor Stefanie Rocknak, features Poe with a humongous and rather terrifying raven swooping out of an open trunk, with a human heart (really? Yes, I know it’s a reference to The Telltale Heart, but still…) and loose papers fluttering behind him. Running after an elusive idea, or trying to flee a city he didn’t like?

How ambivalent we are about our writers! But maybe Longfellow had the last word when he said, “Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.”

 

Manor houses! Lost art works! A doomed romance!  All you could ask for in a mystery novel, coming February 2014

 

Guest Blogger Tamara Siler Jones

Award-winning writer, Tamara Siler Jones, mixes magic, fantasy and forensics in the Dubric Byerly mysteries – Ghosts in the Snow, Threads of Malice, and Valley of the Soul. Tamara is currently working on the fourth book in the series. Visit her website at www.tamarasilerjones.com

Black Feathers

Many, many years ago, a man named Walt Disney made a movie about an elephant. Most everyone has seen it - I hope - and most folks know that Dumbo was an elephant that could fly because he had these REALLY BIG ears. And, well, he could just fly. How cool is that?

Anyway, some well meaning blackbirds and a mouse convinced Dumbo that, in order to fly, he needed a black feather. He didn't. He just needed to believe in himself.

Sometimes writers, both working and aspiring, cling to their black feathers, often when they're faced with failure. They brandish their feather and lay blame somewhere else. It's difficult to believe in yourself, it's a lot easier to believe in the feather, or fault things that render the feather impotent.

My critique group sucks!
I can't find a critique group!
I write perfectly! Don't need a critique group!
I write too big for genre!
I write too niche for genre!
I'm too original for these small minds!
I write too cozy for these highbrows!
They're all crooks anyway!
My book's worth a million dollars!
My cover art sucks!
My cover art doesn't fit my story!
How-to-write books are all wrong!
How-to-write books say this is the way!
How-to-write books disagree!
My agent dropped the ball!
My editor doesn't give me enough time!
Writing well is all about following the rules!
Writing has nothing to do with the rules!
I had shitty distribution!
I hate first person but that's all they buy!
I hate third person but that's all they buy!
Marketing didn't advertise it!
No one understands my brilliance!
I deserve to be published!
Reviewers get paid to write hatchet jobs!
XXX has it in for me!
My story's got plenty of plot!
It's literary! I don't need a plot!

And on and on and on. We've all heard them, we've probably all said them. I have too, on occasion.

The truth of the matter is, there are no black feathers, no tricks, no gimmicks, no sure things. It's up to us to fly. It's also up to us to make sure that we write things other people want to read. If you've submitted your story to every publisher and agent on the planet and they've all said "No", toss the feather away and admit it's probably not them.

It's the writer's job, their responsibility, to tell a compelling story that people want to read, in fact they'll want to read it so much that they'll pay money for it. It's the writer's job to fly, not the feather's fault when they don't.

"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild -- timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline -- a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample -- that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that, Dumbo didn't need the feather: the magic was in him."
-- Stephen King,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Gotta love The Steve. :)