Tess and Brock get to know Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow, the so-called hometown poet of Portland, ME. To find out whether Longfellow’s fame is justified, Tess and Brock head down to the Wadsworth-Longfellow house in the center of town. Longfellow wrote his first poem and other works in the house, but the house doesn’t just honor him but the whole Longfellow family.
Tess and Brock get to know Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow, the so-called hometown poet of Portland, ME. To find out whether Longfellow’s fame is justified, Tess and Brock head down to the Wadsworth-Longfellow house in the center of town. Longfellow wrote his first poem and other works in the house, but the house doesn’t just honor him but the whole Longfellow family.
Tess and Brock also talk with Ari Gersen, the owner of Longfellow Books in Portland, and ask what the “aura” of the name does for the shop. Does having a great poet’s name on the door help sell any books?
Mentioned:
The house:
Tess Chakkalakal is the creator, executive producer and host of Dead Writers. Brock Clarke is our writer and co-host.
Lisa Bartfai is the managing producer and executive editor. Our music is composed by Cedric Wilson, who also mixes the show. Ella Jones is our web editorial intern, and Mark Hoffman created our logo. A special thanks to our reader Aidan Sheeran-Hahnel.
This episode was produced with the generous support of our sponsors Bath Savings and listeners like you.
TESS CHAKKALAKAL Literary houses are, like, the Disney Land of literature.
BROCK CLARKE I get the attraction of writers’ houses. It’s a thing you do when you’re extraordinarily bored. Is that thing you experience, though, when going to writers’ houses? Like, do you have the-the version—
TESS Do you know I-what my experience is, like “God, some of these writers were rich!”
BROCK This is Dead Writers, a show about great American authors and where they lived.
TESS I’m Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And I’m Brock Clarke.
TESS A decade ago, I became obsessed with saving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine. And I did save it. And I’m still obsessed with literary houses—not just Stowe’s.
BROCK I wrote a novel called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, because I couldn’t figure out why anyone goes to writers’ homes, let alone tries to save them.
TESS You’d think I’d hate Brock.
BROCK But you’re my colleague. You can’t hate me.
TESS It’s true. That would be awkward.
BROCK So instead of hating each other, we made this show.
TESS It doesn’t feel like Spring. Portland is freezing with icy winds cutting through our bones, but it is the end of March. Officially Spring, and time to take up the Henry-Wadsworth Longfellow House out of its Winter sleep. Inside the house, the radiators are sputtering to life, but the original 19th century furniture is still sleeping, covered with protective white sheets.
TESS I feel like it's going to turn into Casper the Friendly Ghost.
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK Yeah, right. I feel like there should be a ta-da.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Yeah I know right! And then we’ll just fold it.
[RUSTLE OF SHEETS]
TESS And here's the table and dust-free!
TESS Vivian Cunningham is its historic housekeeper, or, as they formally refer to her, Collections and Visitor Services Assistant. And Abby Zoldowski the Collections Manager. They’re carefully folding up the white sheets and gently dusting the surfaces underneath.
TESS So there's one more sheet over there. Should we take that one off? Do you want Brock and I to do it? Can I help? Do you think we can handle those?
BROCK I don't know. Well, it depends. I don't know whether we're allowed. Are we allowed?
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Um. Obviously don't touch the furniture.
[LAUGHTER]
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM But you can take
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM and BROCK The corners
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Of it and just, you know, carefully lift it.
TESS I just wanna—
BROCK Hold on, hold on.
TESS Alright, I got it. I got it.
BROCK Uh, huh.
BROCK That was the latch. I had not—
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM And now you have to fold it.
BROCK I'm not good at this in my own house, just so you know.
TESS Maybe it's time you learned a new skill, Brock.
BROCK And you flip it over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm getting there.
TESS When my kids were small, we used to play “parachute”...
TESS The Wadsworth-Longfellow House in Portland is the most preserved of the houses we’ve visited. It’s exactly as it would have been when Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow, 19th century America’s most famous poet, lived here as a child and into early adulthood. It’s been owned by Maine Historical Society since 1901 when Henry’s sister Anne willed it to them. The dark furniture, flowery wallpaper, and gilded grandfather clocks are all there, just like they were when Longfellow was a child. And now, Vivian and Abby take meticulous care of it to keep it exactly that way for another century or so.
BROCK So how neat are your own homes, would you say? Do you get all your cleaning out of your system by working here? Or...yeah.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Yeah. Well, I will say my Saturdays are entirely spent cleaning my house. And unless it's raining, I actually take the rugs out and I go beat them outside. So this actually has fueled my cleaning, and some people that I live with think I'm a little bit crazy.
[LAUGHTER]
But yeah, I go through—I don’t mop all the time. I mop about once a month or when it’s really rainy I’ll mop really frequently because of the mud and stuff.
TESS But you’re a clean freak.
BROCK Yeah.
ABBY ZOLDOWSKI The same is for the house though. I don’t want her to mop the house every week, especially with the floor clock we have. So it’s only on a as needed basis. If it looks like it’s been a muddy weekend, then I would have her…
BROCK So you’re often, “Vivian, hold your horses.”
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK “Easy with the mop!”
ABBY ZOLDOWSKI Yes! I don’t think it’s asking too much. I think she’s fine with it.
[LAUGHTER]
TESS Vivan doesn’t seem the least bit crazy, but she does seem different from the other historic literary home enthusiasts we’ve met. She's easily about 40 years younger and, without a doubt, the most fashionable person with an eye toward style and textiles.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM So, a little bit of backstory about me: I have a Bachelor’s, sorry, a Bachelor's in Fine Arts for Fashion and Textiles with a focus on Historical Costuming and Reproduction. I am a history nerd at heart, and I annoyed my teachers with this fact. But MHS reached out to MECA.
TESS That's the Maine Historical Society that reached out to the Maine College of Arts and Design, where Vivian was a student at the time.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Specifically the fashion and sculptor department with this paid internship for building mannequins for this exhibit. And my teacher basically tied me to a computer and said, “Apply to this and get out of my hair.” So I did, and I was accepted. So first thing that I really did for Maine Historical was build—
ABBY ZOLDOWSKI Create.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Create…it feels like a million mannequins.
TESS It wasn’t a million but close. Vivian made 118 life-sized mannequins. She built them for an exhibit called Northern Threads that was on view in 2022. It’s clear that Vivian loves the house and all the stories that come with each and every little object in it. But we don’t hear that much about “Longfellow the Poet" when we’re waking up the house. His house.
BROCK Speaking of Longfellow,
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK Back to the poet. So do either of you—have either of you read Longfellow, and do you have favorites? Or are you mostly in it for the house and the costumes?
TESS And the clothes.
BROCK And the clothes. Yeah. Not the costumes.
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK Right. Clothes. The costumes for your mannequin. For the hard bodies.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM I'm mostly in it for the house and the collections, the building. I mean, yes, I have some Longfellow that I enjoy reading occasionally. I don't have any favorites. I don't talk about it with the guests really.
BROCK Do the guests want to talk about it?
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Sometimes. Some of them really do, and I'm like, “I'm sorry, I cannot, I cannot repeat any. I will not recite any. I only know really the titles that are important to this house.”
TESS Like “The Rainy Day”.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Like “The Rainy Day” and “Battle of Lovell's Pond”, and, obviously, there's “Paul Revere's Ride” and “Evangeline” and yada yada. But that's about where I start.
TESS You don’t get into analysis…
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM I'm not a Longfellow fanatic.
TESS Yeah.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM And I do love other members of the family.
TESS It does sound like you prefer other members of the family! Really getting that sense.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM My whole belief on it is this, undoubtedly and factually, this was Henry's boyhood home, but he was only here for 14 years. And yes, he did come back. And yes, he did write really important and some of his most famous poems and his first poems here, but he had other family members and they were all very important. And they did things for the city. They traveled around the world. And, you know…
TESS So you basically, Vivian,
[LAUGHTER]
TESS It sounds like you think Henry's gotten too much credit.
BROCK That's right.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Henry has a house in Cambridge!
TESS Yeah. So fuck Henry basically!
TESS Yeah, fuck Henry. But he did write his first published poem in this house, “The Battle of Lovell's Pond”, that was published in the Portland Gazette in 1820 when he was just 13.
VIVAN CUNNIHAM Now there is a room known as the summer dining room that's down the hall but also known as the Rainy Day room, because, supposedly, Henry wrote his poem, “The Rainy Day” in it. I love the word “supposedly” because, unless I have facts and proof that cannot be denied, it's all just what the family has said
BROCK It's an ironclad caveat. Yep.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM It's like, it's nice to believe that Henry wrote “The Rainy Day” in the summer dining room while looking out at the Longfellow garden that his sister lovingly kept, probably on a rainy day because those happen a lot around here. But—
TESS We don't know for sure.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM We don’t know for sure.
BROCK Supposedly.
TESS Yeah, supposedly.
BROCK I’m going to say this all the time now.
TESS Brock is supposedly a writer. Supposedly.
BROCK I supposedly teach.
TESS For Vivian, it’s Henry’s sister, Anne, who is the most interesting Longfellow. The one who lovingly kept the garden and pretty much everything else around the house.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM Running this house was her full time job. She was pretty prominent in Portland, very active in, you know, the church life and kind of the social etiquette around—that kind of surrounded families such as the Longfellows, who weren't by no means richest or in that top wealth bracket, but they did have wealth behind them. They had this house that had been here…
TESS As a wealthy woman Anne had the luxury to choose not to marry and stay in her childhood home. She lived there for 87 of her 90 years.
VIVIAN CUNNINGHAM She also was the sister of pretty much the world's most famous poet. And it is actually because of Henry that she donated the house to Maine Historical Society to become a museum, to be able to save his boyhood home.
TESS So Anne wanted to preserve his legacy. She willed it to the Maine Historical Society to preserve in 1901. And that’s what we have now. We keep exploring the dark little rooms of the Wadsworth-Longfellow house for a while longer. We see a creepy old toy horse made out of real horse hide and marvel at the Downton Abbey like bell system that looks like a torture device. Then, we let Vivian and Abby get back to their task of waking the house up for another season of school groups and cruise tours. They’re all there to check out the home of America's most famous poet. The author of the “Courtship of Miles Standish”, the “Song of Hiawatha”, “Evangeline”. Portland’s favorite son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
[MUSIC]
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL [READING “MY LOST YOUTH” BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW] “Often I think of the beautiful town/ That is seated by the sea;/Often in thought go up and down/The pleasant streets of that dear old town, /And my youth comes back to me. /And a verse of a Lapland song /Is haunting my memory still/ 'A boy's will is the wind's will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'”
TESS Longfellow was only 14 when he was sent to Bowdoin College in 1821. The plan was for him to become a lawyer like his father. But once he was at Bowdoin, he got more interested in literature and writing. He joined the Peucinian Society, a sort of 19th century debate club with a literary focus. A society that still exists today,
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL Longfellow is one that really kind of, as a poet of his time, embodied, or at least we like to think embodied, a lot of what the old society was about.
TESS Aidan Sheeran-Hahnel is a Bowdoin College junior. And the current president of the Peucinian Society.
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL It feels very intertwined with our mission to the point where, when we invite new members into the society, we have a process of claiming them as new members. We read them three stances from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life" and say that this is kind of, it's very intertwined with what we do here, or it embodies a lot of it.
BROCK And we're going to hear that poem, right.
TESS We're not going to hear “A Psalm of Life” actually, but maybe we will. Yeah. How about if you give us those three stanzas that you like to read to new members?
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL Sure. This is “A Psalm of Life”, or at least a selection of “A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
[READING] Tell me not, in mournful numbers,/ Life is but an empty dream!/ For the soul is dead that slumbers,/ And things are not what they seem. //Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal; /Dust thou art, to dust returnest, /Was not spoken of the soul. //Art is long, and Time is fleeting,/ And our hearts, though stout and brave, /Still, like muffled drums, are beating /Funeral marches to the grave.”
TESS And that works pretty well for new members? And it keeps Longfellow's spirit alive, I guess, is the idea? What is the idea by reading “A Psalm of Life” to everybody like that?
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL I think it just kind of does exactly what poetry is supposed to do. I read it, and my hair stood up on end, and I was like, “Wow, this really gets at something that feels deeply familiar and profound.”
TESS The Peucinian society has some, let’s say, odd rituals.
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNELN One of the more eccentric and well-known traditions of the Peucinian Society is that our members all have what we call “noble names”. And noble names are names that are given to them at some point in their Peucinian trajectory by the upperclassmen of the society. And these names are historical figures that are since dead and that are supposed to be deeply personal connections for the individual members
BROCK What's yours?
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL Mine is Cardinal Richelieu, who was the Prime Minister for King Louis the XIII.
BROCK That's funny. My main experience with Cardinal Richelieu was in The Three and Four Musketeers Movies where he's a force for evil.
AIDAN SHEERAN-HAHNEL Yeah, it's certainly a complicated one.
[AUDIO FROM THE THREE MUSKETEERS]
TESS What would your noble name be, Brock?
BROCK I could tell you what my ignoble name would be.
TESS What would that be?
BROCK I’m not going to tell you.
Tess C’mon. You gotta have a name.
BROCK You gotta go first.
TESS Geez. My noble name would be…
BROCK Cheeseburglar.
TESS Ronald McDonald.
BROCK Yeah, that’s right. It has to be some sort of corporate overload. That should be our—whatever the Maine Public Corporate Overlord would be.
TESS Grimace. I would definitely be Grimace.
BROCK Yeah. Which one was Grimace actually?
TESS He was the big purple character.
BROCK I like the actual Hamburglar because he’s always skulking around. He’s rubbing his hands together.
TESS He’s rubbing his hands like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
BROCK He’s a real creep but a silent one. He never talks. Maybe none of them ever talk
[MUSIC]
TESS So the Peucinian Society is a bunch of students sitting around, drinking port, or brandy, or something, and debating important philosophical issues. Have I got that right?
BROCK It sounds like you got it right. So I wonder if the drinking port and brandy and not beer or crappy red wine says a lot about the Peucinian Society in the sense that like, “Hey, we’re doing this thing that no one does anymore”—caring about writers that no one cares about anymore.
TESS But I don’t really think they’re caring about writers. Longfellow was part of the Peucinian Society, and they recite his name when someone new is initiated into the Peucinian Society. But that’s the extent of Longfellow’s place in the Peucinian Society.
TESS It’s not like they’re reading his poetry at every one of their meetings.
BROCK It’s like cult meetings where they say Satan’s name over and over again.
BROCK They invoke it.
TESS Longfellow will be turning over in his grave right now just thinking about that.
TESS But it’s weird that, okay so, Longfellow’s name is on the library, it’s part of the Peucinian Society, but, other than that, where’s Longfellow?
BROCK Yeah, I mean…so yeah, it’s part of the major trouble with him. Our major trouble with him is that he stands for so much, not just Bowdoin, not just the Peucinian Society. Around Portland too his name is everywhere. But is his name a kind of thing that’s just there because it’s always been there and it doesn’t have a kind of relevance anymore? It’s the kind of thing when you look at the wall, and there’s an ancient relative there, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. There’s Leonard”, without knowing who Lenoard is and caring.
TESS That’s not on my wall. I have no ancient relatives on my wall.
BROCK There’s a Leonard on your wall. There’s a Leonard on everyone’s wall.
TESS Well, that—okay.
TESS Longfellow, if he was alive today, would he be a member of today’s Peucinian Society at Bowdoin?
BROCK I mean, would the man drink brandy? I mean, does he drink the right drink in order to be apart of the club?
TESS I mean, I think he does.
BROCK Then yes he would. I mean, he was always—I mean, the thing about the Peucinian, this is the danger of societies in general, they’re always so backward looking.
TESS I don’t think that’s a danger. Why not look backward?
BROCK Um, what if The Man himself was always looking backward? Don’t be, don’t be—we’re not arguing here.
TESS Well, I just mean that the Peucinian Society wants to conserve these traditions. Longfellow’s poems were written in a style, a traditional style, rhyming about Ye Old Subjects. And what’s wrong with that?
BROCK I guess there’s nothing, except the “Ye Old” part is something that might be wrong with it, this sense of nostalgia, this sense that there’s something important buried in the past. I mean, this is what Longfellow himself was always about as a poet. We have “Hiawatha”; we have “Miles Standish”; we have “Evangeline”. So all these things are things he pulls from the past, as if the past has automatic meaning.
TESS Yeah, to make them part of today, part of our culture and life today. And I think these kids, sitting around, drinking their port, they’re missing tradition. And it’s fantastic that Longfellow today gives us these names—”Miles Standish”, “Evangeline”, “Hiawatha”—figures from our past that we would have otherwise not know.
BROCK Yeah, I don’t know what my problem is about the Peucinian Society. It’s not a problem with the Peucinian Society. It’s the sense of veneration. There’s this thing, it sounds as though it's almost like a Harry Potter convention where you have people dressing up and, in some ways, diminishes the seriousness of, maybe, the writing. It’s not looking so much at the writing as trying to evoke the feeling of what it must be like to be in “Ye Old Times”.
TESS So when I teach Longfellow, my students get really irritated because he’s this rich, White guy who has everything done for him. His uncle pays the tuition, his uncle pays for him to go to Europe, and then he’s writing all these poems about these poor people and Hiawatha and indigenous people. And they’re irritated by it because it’s this, what we call today, cultural appropriation. And they don’t want to read Longfellow writing about, of all things, Hiawatha.
BROCK Do you have the same irritation?
TESS No! I do not!
[LAUGHTER]
TESS Because I think cultural appropriation rocks, and we should do more of it!
BROCK Cultural appropriation number one forever!
[LAUGHTER]
TESS It’s not just at Bowdoin that the name Longfellow is scattered on buildings and clubs all over. In Portland, Maine, there’s a Longfellow Square, a Longfellow statue, a Longfellow bar, a Longfellow elementary school, a Longfellow street. I can go on. But what we’re really interested in is Longfellow Books. A bookstore at the center of town. We go looking for the bookstore’s namesake books on the shelves.
BROCK Is it in the main section or in the poetry section?
TESS It's totally not. It’s in the poetry section.
BROCK Wonderful, uh huh. Not “Local Author.”
TESS Selected poems and the Song of Hiawatha.
BROCK Do you have a favorite by him?
TESS By Longfellow? I really like “The Courtship of Miles Standish”.
BROCK I do. I do too. What do you like about it?
TESS I just find the story captivating. It's a love triangle and…
BROCK Standish is such a jerk and then he becomes a sheepish jerk.
TESS Yeah!
BROCK Yeah, it doesn't happen that often.
TESS Yeah.
BROCK Yeah.
TESS And I—I'm surprised it doesn't have more of a life now.
BROCK Why do you think it doesn't? I mean, one—
TESS Was there ever a cartoon made of it or something? Was it animated?
BROCK It seems like it would be made to be a cartoon. Easily boiled down with love triangle.
TESS Yeah, exactly.
BROCK You can imagine people in pilgrim wear.
TESS And you would just think that some of Longfellow's characters, like Standish, would be like Rip Van Winkle, where he'd just be kind of in the air. But I don't get that sense of Longfellows characters that they become figures…
BROCK No. I have some vague memory as a kid of having a Longfellow something or other being part of a Thanksgiving celebration. It had nothing to do with, I mean, I'm sure it was “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, but I think it had nothing to do with what was in there and just like, “Hey, people in New England, at that time.”
TESS He is the New England icon. Really? That's mostly…and he’s, for me, he’s, I guess, this is what he's become kind of milquetoast and…
BROCK Well, he's just a name that gets put on things in Portland, at least now especially.
TESS We ask Ari Gersen, the owner of Longfellow Books, what he thinks that the name does for his bookstore. A store that has been in his family since 2000 when Ari’s late father bought it. It survived through the Amazon years and the dotcom years and the Borders years and Barnes and Noble years and all the discounting and is still standing. A fixture of Monument Square. Downtown Portland’s community’s bookstore.
TESS Well, congratulations! That’s a huge anniversary, huge accomplishment. I mean, this might sound like a lame question, but how much of that localness, you said before Longfellow is Portland, how much is having the name Longfellow, do you attribute some of the bookstores success to that?
ARI GERSEN No.
[LAUGHTER]
ARI GERSON I mean, honestly, no. You know, I think that there's a small chunk of people who associate Longfellow with Portland. I think that, you know, but I think, no, the success of this store is because of its people. It's the staff. I think it's always been that way. I mean, we've always tried to keep our team as a diverse set of engaged readers that enjoys the process of reading and then sharing. And that's what’s critical.
TESS So if you'd kept the Bookland name, if it was called something else, you don't think there would be much of a difference?
ARI GERSEN I’m sure we could come up with some names that would turn people away if we tried!
[LAUGHTER]
TESS Like the Portland Bookstore. Do you think it’d be the same thing? I think I’m just wondering about the aura around the name Longfellow. I kind of like this idea of this one poet being so strongly associated with our city, with Maine's biggest city. I don't think that's really true of other cities. I mean, Paris has so many say—New York has so—Bryant Park, and there's so many different—but Portland is like you said, Ari, it's Longfellow. That's it. That's our guy. Yeah. I wonder if that's limiting rather than—
BROCK We should have several.
TESS Yeah, it just seems like just this one guy. This one drunk guy?
[LAUGHTER]
ARI GERSON Well, I mean, it's interesting. There's that sort of historical bit, but, I mean, now you've got a very rich literary community in Portland and the surrounding area.
TESS But we don't have those kinds of—
ARI GERSON So you're saying that we need a statue of Brock?
BROCK Yeah.
TESS Yeah! Totally.
ARI GERSEN Is that basically what we're saying?
BROCK It's going to be a ground swell, it's going to be a movement as it sort of comes up from this interview.
TESS I just wonder if all the Longfellow stuff has kind of drowned out other possibilities for writers to make their mark.
BROCK Although it sounds like you're saying you think this is a—seemed like a more actively literary city than other cities its size?
ARI GERSEN I have always felt that Portland is not just in literature, but, in general, far more active creatively than it ought to be based on its size. It's not, I mean, 60,000 people, maybe it's a hundred thousand with the surrounding towns and whatnot, but there's so much going on at any given time in Portland and it's amazing that the population supports it.
TESS So Ari insists that Longfellow doesn’t have much to do with the success of his bookstore. It’s his staff that does it. So we walk over to the part of the store, a pretty big section of a wall that’s visible as soon as you walk through the door, where they have put all of the staff recommendations.
BROCK So this is all stuff that you booksellers have recommended? This comes from them?
ARI GERSEN This is all bookseller. Exactly.
TESS It says Longfellow recommends, not Longfellow Bookstore.
ARI GERSEN Yeah. So the name gets put at the bottom. Yeah. Book sellers are funny. Some of them are shy, but, no, these are all tagged with whose recommendation it is.
BROCK And you give 'em free reign. It's up to them. You're not trying to strike any kind of balance of any kind with genre, or…?
ARI GERSEN Nope.
BROCK Yeah. Interesting.
ARI GERSEN Nope.
BROCK I think you've struck one anyways though.
ARI GERSEN Well, that's what I mean. If you put together the right group of people, that was what will happen. Right?
BROCK And so Tess, what have we learned about the great cultural appropriator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?
TESS Not a lot?
BROCK That’s kind of true. We went to his house and learned that it was really his sister’s house.
TESS According to Vivian.
BROCK I’m inclined to agree with Vivian. At least in public. I wouldn’t want to mess with her.
TESS She did have a duster. You don’t want to mess with a woman armed with a duster.
BROCK And then we went to a bookstore named after Longfellow and had a few of his books on the shelves but otherwise had nothing to do with him.
TESS And you have a problem with that.
BROCK I have no problem with that.
TESS You think the bookstore would be a better bookstore if it stocked more Longfellow.
BROCK I think it’s already a great bookstore. I think it’d be a worse bookstore if it stocked more Longfellow.
TESS Because you think Longfellow is a bad poet.
BROCK Hey, you’re the one who called him milquetoast
TESS And you’re the one who said Longfellow Books would be a worse bookstore if it stocked more Longfellow.
BROCK That’s because Ari and the gang don’t want to stock more Longfellow. They want to stock the books they love.
TESS Longfellow Books and the Longfellow House are only three blocks apart. And yet Ari and Vivian have never met. We should put them together. Ari can bring the store’s copy of The Song of Hiawatha. Vivian can bring the duster.
TESS You have listened to Dead Writers with me, Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And me, Brock Clarke. Our managing producer and editor is Lisa Bartfai.
TESS Cedric Wilson has created our theme music and mixed the show.
BROCK Ella Jones is our web editorial intern. Thanks for listening.
TESS And a very special thanks to our generous sponsors, Bath Savings, and listeners like you.
BROCK You can find more information about the writers, their books, and their houses at our website on MainePublic.org. Thanks for listening.