2026 Trouble Begins and Park Church Lectures
The 2026 Trouble Begins Lecture Series and Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the generous support of The Mark Twain Foundation.
2026 PARK CHURCH SUMMER LECTURES
Wednesday, July 8 at The Park Church (7:00 PM)
Sexuality, Insanity, and the Problem of the Will: or, Pudd’nhead Wilson on Trial
Benjamin Bascom, West Virginia University
In May of 1868, the body of Cornelius Holmes was found bludgeoned to death in some woods nearby Plymouth, MA; the accused Samuel M. Andrews counterclaimed that his one-time friend had sexually assaulted him, leading Andrews to bash stones into Holmes’s face, killing him. The sudden onslaught of Andrews’s violence seemed to evince what the trial record assessed as his “temporary insanity,” or Mania Transitoria. This diagnosis became suggestive as Andrews apparently had no memory of the events though he did, through the course of the trial, accuse the deceased of having made previous unwanted advances. Disparities in age and class frame this story, with Holmes a wealthy bachelor in his 50s and Andrews a married day laborer in his 30s. These men had often traveled together, and the older fellow presented gifts and monetary necessities throughout their 16-year acquaintance that became something like a relationship. Circulating within the news and gossip of this tragedy are references to a will that Holmes left for Andrews, shortly before the murder, which bequeathed to the younger man an abundant inheritance. This temporal coincidence suggested a motivation for murder. After six months of trial, however, Andrews was found guilty only of manslaughter and sent to the state prison for 19 years, with his family’s history of mental illness used as evidence to support the decision. What this unusual trial brings forward are questions of inheritance and the multiple valences of will, where the term means both a legally binding document and a personal drive or inclination.
“Make the Finger-Prints That Will Hang You.”
Illustration by E.W. Kemble from Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. Édition de Luxe. American Publishing Company (1899) 220.
Wills, of course, abound in nineteenth-century American literature, most prominently in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893), where Tom Driscoll is written in and out of inheritance, and he seemingly can’t help but self-sabotage over and over again. There is something compulsive to how this character unravels: he is represented as perpetually breaking and ruining his social and familial bonds, led inevitably to repeat self-destructive behavior. When the botched attempt to rob his uncle leads to murder, the “natal autograph” intervenes in the story and asserts Tom’s bodily legibility as superseding his agency—as speaking forth a truth that he (and Roxy) would rather have buried. The details in this novel become particularly suggestive when put into relation to the earlier legal case of Samuel Andrews’s conviction. Indeed, what juxtaposing this novel with the previous legal case provides is a way to think about the interrelation between desire and will, and the extremities of both that signal stepping beyond bounds—and into the category called insane. I argue that these conjoined stories suggest the intricate relation between sex and insanity to imagine what constitutes the will.
Ben Bascom is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University and teaches and researches early and nineteenth-century American literatures and contemporary LGBTQIA+ cultures. The research and writing for his first book, Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Oxford UP, 2024), was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and tells an alternative account about the early US through focusing on outsiders who desired to belong but faced a series of exclusions that rendered their lives queer. He is working on a second book project that considers the relationship between what today gets called “mental health” and sexuality. Additionally, he co-edits with Christopher Hanlon ALH Review.
Wednesday, July 15 at The Park Church (7:00 PM)
“Brockway’s Paddle”: Institutional Violence and Press Protection at the Elmira Reformatory
Mary Lemak, University at Buffalo Law School
The late-nineteenth saw expansion in both reform movements and public institutions in the United States. States around the country were giving women the right to vote, passing early labor laws to protect women and children, and dealing with an ever-changing and growing immigrant population. During this time, some progressives were also concerned with an oft overlooked population: incarcerated people. As a trial run of “the new penology,” progressives in the American Penology Association pushed for a brand-new facility in which they would focus on rehabilitation and reintegration instead of retributive punishment. Because of its rural locale but relative proximity to major cities, the New York legislature decided to build this facility in Elmira, New York. The Elmira Reformatory, as it was originally called, was founded with the intent to rehabilitate vulnerable youth and give them access to the skills and resources necessary to deter future crime. Instead of following its mission plan, the Reformatory quickly became a hotbed of poor conditions and gruesome violence. Its superintendent, Zebulon Brockway, originated the plan for the Reformatory. He became a highly controversial figure, bolstered by the New York Times and disparaged by the New York World. However, his support in the press allowed him to escape any consequences for the abuse he was almost single-handedly responsible for.
Photograph of Zebulon Brockway inspecting a parade. Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society
This talk contains two major arguments: first that Brockway was able to get away with abusing the residents of the Reformatory for so long because there was no oversight; and second that Brockway escaped punishment because of his support from the New York Times and its connections to the political elite. This talk first discusses Zebulon Brockway’s early life and career in the criminal justice system. It then outlines Brockway’s initial plan for the Reformatory. It then shifts and discusses press politics and the dynamic between the New York Times and New York World in the Gilded Age. This talk then provides a thorough analysis of the New York State Board of Charities’ investigation into the conditions and management at the Reformatory. It discusses the press’s reaction to the Board of Charities Investigation and details the subsequent Legislative investigation into the Reformatory’s Board of Managers. Finally, it discusses the lackluster aftermath of the investigations and discusses the modern reputations of Brockway and the Reformatory.
Mary Lemak is a Juris Doctor Candidate entering her final year at the University at Buffalo School of Law. She has a Bachelor’s of Arts in History from the University at Albany; she focused her senior honors thesis on the Park Church’s Reverend Annis Ford Eastman and Elmira’s Gilded Age politics. She currently works with incarcerated people on their post-conviction proceedings. Some of her clients are incarcerated in Elmira. Upon graduation, she hopes to continue her work in criminal defense in the Southern Tier.
Wednesday, July 22 at The Park Church (7:00 PM)
“Mark Twain’s History of the Novel”
Emily Gowen, University of Notre Dame
This talk will offer a reconsideration of Twain’s entire oeuvre as a response to the juvenilization, popularization, and material dissemination of canonical novels in the 19th Century United States, and will argue that his early immersion in the culture of reprinting and adaptation established the foundation for his approach to satire. Twain’s work offers us two useful historical vantage points through which to understand the long-term consequences of the way canonical texts were metabolized and canonized in early nineteenth-century print. First, Twain, like all the nineteenth-century authors, grew up reading reprinted and adapted European books, and thus understood canonical novels as always open to reconfiguration and Americanization. His career, however, took off long after the forms of publishing that sustained the profusion of adapted steady-selling novels had faded from view. Twain’s oeuvre thus offers us a retrospective theorization of the consequences of a finite period in U.S. American publishing, in which steady-selling British prose fictions were especially fungible literary resources. Moreover, many of Twain’s own works went on to become, in their own afterlives, contested, ambivalent, and interpretively unstable steady-sellers, enshrining and enacting the very ideas of literary history they set out to interrogate, and bringing the consequences of these print culture dynamics up to the present.
Photograph of Mark Twain reading on a porch. Photograph courtesty of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, UC Berkeley
Emily Gowen is an incoming Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She has previously taught at Boston University and Harvard University, and has held research fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and The American Antiquarian Society. Her current book, Fictions in Print: Transatlantic Reprinting and The Popular Dissemination of the Novel in the 19th Century United States will be published by The University of Pennsylvania Press. Her work has appeared in ELH, American Literature, J19, and several other print and online journals.
PAST 2026 LECTURES
Wednesday, May 6 in the Quarry Farm Barn
“‘You think you’re better’n your father?’: Mark Twain and John Marshall Clemens”
Ann M. Ryan, Le Moyne University
In his autobiography, Mark Twain writes with warmth and wit about his mother Jane Lampton Clemens, and she surfaces again in his fictional representations of devoted mothers and loving aunts. His father John Marshall Clemens, however, is present in Twain’s memory as an absence, or maybe better yet, as a cipher—an unknowable, impenetrable icon. Twain writes of his father:
My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.
The young Sam Clemens is only twelve years old when his father dies; yet, the adult Mark Twain continues to do battle with his father, breaking and suffering, for the rest of his life. No matter the incarnation—Pap Finn, Judge Driscoll, John Canty, Colonel Grangerford—Twain’s fathers share a number of qualities: they treat children like property; use shame and intimidation to discipline; and if they are not the direct instrument of violence, they are, nonetheless, the source of it. By the time of his death in 1847, John Marshall had moved his family from Kentucky, to Tennessee, to Missouri, bought and lost homes, opened and closed businesses, and treated slaves like poker chips to be cashed in when liquid funds were needed—and they were always needed. What emerges from the memories of those who knew John Marshall Clemens is a portrait of a dual personality, at once fragile and stern, idealistic and foolish, studied and rash. In other words, John Marshall may have been the first Clemens to also be a “twain.” And while Twain occasionally exposes his father’s temper and satirizes his ambition, he spends a lifetime trying both to rebel against and embody the values of John Marshall Clemens. In her talk for the “Trouble Begins” series, Dr. Ann M. Ryan will explore Twain’s tense, fraught, longing relationship with his father, and how it haunted both his life and his fiction.
Ann M. Ryan is Professor of American Literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is the past president of the Mark Twain Circle, the former editor of The Mark Twain Annual, and co-editor of Cosmopolitan Twain. She is the author of The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Memory, Masculinity, and Race.
Wednesday, May 13 in the Quarry Farm Barn
“‘Mr. Clemens and the Cure: the Rediscovery of a Lost Twain Reminiscence”
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Award-Winning Writer
A year ago, while reviewing a new biography of Mark Twain for Harper’s Magazine, I discovered a fascinating and obscure text that was unaccounted for in the existing scholarship. An obituary-essay written just days after his death, the piece appeared in, of all places, a British military newsletter published in Lahore, Pakistan (then a part of India). The roughly 1,000-word essay is intimate, detailed, moving, eccentric, admiring, and includes multiple unfamiliar anecdotes of Twain’s life and personality, as well as stray glimpses of his wife, daughters, and friends. Equally interesting is the identify of the woman who wrote it: a forgotten American doctor and author (of poems, essays, and short stories) named Adele Gleason, who had grown up in Elmira, New York, at her family’s well-known hydropathic “water cure” sanitarium, where Twain took his baths in the summer and liked to spend time. Like Twain himself, Gleason was highly interested in dreams, and the possibility of telepathic communication via the dream state. She was a passionate person, a world traveler, famed for her beauty and deeply involved all her life in progressive causes. She was also a lesbian who fought to live openly in a repressive society. This lecture will attempt to weave together three threads: Gleason’s life and work, the legacy of her remarkable family and of the institution they built in Elmira, and the uniqueness of her perspective on Twain. What can we learn about “Mr. Clemens” by seeing him through the lens of such a brilliant and unusual mind?
John Jeremiah Sullivan is an award-winning writer in multiple genres who lives with his wife and two daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His 2011 essay collection, Pulphead, was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His next book, The Prime Minister of Paradise, about a forgotten 18th-century utopian experiment, is forthcoming from Random House. He is a co-founder of the Third Person Project, a non-profit research collective dedicated to uncovering the forgotten Black history of the Cape Fear region.
Wednesday, May 20 in the Quarry Farm Barn
“Seeing Double: Two Poets on their Quarry Farm Stays”
Michael Czarnecki and James Plath
Michael Czarnecki (’25) went to Quarry Farm to create a body of work, both in words and photographs, documenting two weeks at Quarry Farm and attempting to capture the quietness, beauty and spirit of the place. James Plath (’23) went to Quarry Farm to write an essay on how Twain modeled being a celebrity writer for both Ernest Hemingway and John Updike, who became arguably the most visible and ubiquitous writers of their generation. But like Czarnecki, he also ended up writing poems. On May 20 they will read some of their Quarry Farm-inspired poetry, share insights, and talk about what it was like to live and write where Twain composed so many of his best-loved works.
Photograph of Quarry Farm by Michael Czarnecki
Michael Czarnecki wrote his first poem as a junior in high school nearly 60 years ago and hasn’t stopped writing since. For over three decades he has made his living solely through the creative word. Michael has published 18 books and has given hundreds of readings throughout the country. In 2013 he embarked on a 14 week “Poems Across America” tour in which he gave a reading in each of the lower 48 states. As a photographer, many of his photos have been used on the cover of poetry books. Since 2014 he has been posting a daily photograph on Facebook as well as a daily spontaneous poem.
James Plath, Colwell Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, is a recognized Hemingway and Updike scholar who taught Twain as a Fulbright Scholar in Barbados. Fascinated by old houses, he rehabbed his 1906 American Foursquare residence in Bloomington, Ill. and directed the renovation of The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa., for which he also curated ten rooms of exhibits. He is the author-editor of eleven books, including The 100 Greatest Literary Characters and three books of poetry: Courbet, on the Rocks (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 1994), Everything Shapes Itself to the Sea (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and At Quarry Farm (Kelsay Books, 2025).
Wednesday, May 27 in the Quarry Farm Barn
“The Politics of Illustrating Children in Twain’s Adaptation Network”
Maggie Morris Davis, Illinois State University
Across the 1885 illustrations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a used 1960s mass-produced coloring book, and Philip Stead and Erin Stead’s The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine (a children’s book adaptation of archival notes of a bedtime story that Mark Twain told his daughters), this talk will consider what these illustrations require of the child in poverty as well as what meaning this text invites a child reader to make. Most notably, Morris Davis will offer close readings of the illustrations within The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, to illuminate intersectional differences that might otherwise go unnoticed and that show—quite literally— a precise hierarchy of class and race even as authors and illustrators claim a politically neutral text.
Maggie E. Morris Davis, author of Reading the Classed Child: The Language of Depression-Era Children in Poverty (University of Georgia Press, 2026), is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University. Her work has most recently been published in American Quarterly, Children’s Literature, and Resources for American Literary Study as well as several edited collections. Her research focuses on class and childhood/youth and how, as social constructions, representations of these concepts enter not only our language, culture, and literatures, but also shape our classrooms, curricula, and pedagogy. She first began writing what became this talk during the inaugural Quarry Farm Graduate Student Workshop in August 2022.
Cover of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Coloring Book” #354. Treasure Books, Inc. (1960)
The Barn at Quarry Farm
The Barn in 1925
The Barn today
The Barn at Quarry Farm has been repurposed as a lecture venue. This was made possible from a generous preservation grant from the Jon Ben Snow Memorial Trust. It also contains a number of Quarry Farm-focused exhibit display created by students enrolled in Elmira College’s Museum Studies classes.
Attendees can park on Crane Road or on the grassy area behind the Barn. Quarry Farm is a fragile, natural environment. Please exercise care. If using a GPS, enter 131 Crane Road, Elmira, New York
The Park Church
Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, including Jervis Langdon, Mark Twain’s father-in-law, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history. Some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain, including Susan Crane, who donated flowers from Quarry Farm every Sunday. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community. Thomas K. Beecher, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe and friend of Mark Twain, was the first minister at the Park Church and presided over its construction. Before its demolition in 1939, the Langdon Mansion was located directly across from the Park Church.
The Park Church is located at 208 West Gray Street, Elmira, New York.