Alive Together (A Quarry Farm Testimonial)
EDITOR’S NOTE: We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on their experiences as Twain scholars, teachers, and fellows. Applications for Quarry Farm Fellowships are due each Winter. Find more information HERE.
Cindy Hunter Morgan is the author of Far Company (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and Harborless (Wayne State University Press), which was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. She also is the author of two chapbooks, Apple Season (Midwest Writing Center Chapbook Award, 2012) and The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker (Ledge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). She teaches creative writing at Michigan State University, where, for several years, she also taught book arts. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including Tin House Online, Passages North, Salamander, Sugar House Review, and West Branch. For several years, she was a regular contributor for Murder Ballad Monday, a blog devoted to the exploration of the murder ballad tradition in folk and popular music. She is a co-founder of FILMETRY: A Festival of Film and Poetry. She leads various poetry workshops and book arts workshops. Her artist’s books are held in private collections and in Murray & Hong Special Collections at Michigan State University Libraries, the Zhang Legacy Collections Center at Western Michigan University, and the Rolvaag Library Special Collections at St. Olaf College.
I have long felt that I belong to two ages, and place, nearly always, is what delivers me to that other age. Sometimes my allegiance to both ages feels like a divide, but more often it feels like a semi-permeable membrane. I cross back and forth; I live in both worlds. During my time at Quarry Farm, I was very much Cindy Hunter Morgan in Elmira, not Hank Morgan in Camelot, but the experience of stepping into the house on the East Hill had some sense of the impossible made possible that pervades Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Living in the house for nearly two weeks – reading upstairs in the library, sleeping in Twain’s bedroom, studying book plates in the downstairs library, savoring morning sunshine in the parlor, staring at the same hills that soothed Twain – allowed me to reconstitute not just some part of the nineteenth century but some part of Twain’s nineteenth century.
on the Quarry Farm Porch (2024)
The new project I am working on – a series of letters to Twain that dispense with traditional notions of distance and chronology – is built around and depends on a sense of intimacy with Twain, and being at Quarry Farm allowed me to cultivate that intimacy. I was curious about everything in the house: the coin silver of the old sink and counter in the room off the kitchen, the provenance of rugs, the books in the old library downstairs, the corkscrew on the wall, the embossed wall coverings, the cubbies in the slant-top desk in the room off of Twain’s bedroom. I opened every cupboard and every drawer. Sometimes I felt restless, so glad I was to be there. I walked from room to room, down one stairway and up another. I watched rain scurry through new copper gutters. The restlessness never lasted. The great house calmed me, as did the breeze and the hills and the books and the general sense of time transformed by and into tranquility.
My letters to Twain are part of a larger epistolary project, and the Twain part of the project began with a kind of voracious research, some of it empirical (to dwell in his house! to cook in a kitchen where Mary Ann Cord cooked!), some of it scholarly (the Quarry Farm library is wonderful), some of it imaginative. Twain relied on historical research for much of his work, and it feels right and appropriate that my work began with various kinds of research, too. The deep joy of all research is felt when we discover something we didn’t even know we were looking for, and staying at Quarry Farm set me up for these opportunities for discovery. I did not anticipate an aspect to my project that now feels inexorably intertwined with its success, and that aspect is an element I identified because I had time in the house. A few days into my stay, I found myself documenting all of the patterns I found in the house – in wallpaper, in tiles, in heat registers, in glass, in furniture. I began recreating these patterns on paper to fashion into stationary for my letters to Twain.
Twain’s study on the hill, shaped as it was and perched as it was and separated as it was, served as his pilot house. The little room on the front of the house at the top of the stairs (and up one more step) was my study and pilot house. It is a quiet, breezy place in an already quiet, breezy place, and it was my favorite place to read and write and think and stare. My work as a poet and book artist engages with the intersection of what is both gone and ever present. It depends, variously and often simultaneously, on silence, isolation, tranquility, and resources (libraries!). Quarry Farm is rich in all of these. The East Hill gave Twain “a foretaste of heaven,” and it gave me a place to dwell in the multi-pronged intersection of history, literature, art, architecture, and the natural world. The first night at Quarry Farm, I watched a red fox slink across the great lawn at dusk. I texted a friend, who replied, “It was Twain.” I think it was. I felt him everywhere: in that fox at dusk, under the eaves, in the library, in the kitchen, on the porch, and in the song of the hermit thrush, which I heard one afternoon when I was reading on the porch. It sang – or Twain sang, oh, holy holy, ah, purity purity eeh, sweetly sweetly. It sang – or Twain sang – what I felt but had not released in song.
Among many joys available at Quarry Farm is the sense that one is alive together with Twain and with the Langdon family. Something feels possible through the preservation of Quarry Farm, and I am so very thankful for all who protect it and so very thankful for the opportunity to make artist’s books in that place where Twain appears not only in the books outside of his bedroom but also in a fox at dusk, in the throat of a bird, and (hopefully) in what we create because of our time there.
“Kaleidoscope” A book project created by Cindy Hunter Morgan (2024) – Image taken on the Quarry Farm Porch
