The restored Stowe House.
“One of the reasons I started this whole thing was because of my work on the Stowe house,” she said. “It taught me a lot about preservation.” She was also struck, particularly during her travels in England and France, by how much some places revere and commemorate their dead writers. “Their writers are part of these nations and how people understand their connection to one another and where they live,” she said.
In the US, she observed a different pattern. Individuals or groups of people on their own—often as volunteers—will make it a project to protect buildings or sites associated with dead writers. “They’re doing it for the love of literature,” Chakkalakal said. “I love the enthusiasm for literature that inspires these people. I have felt that myself.”
Though the podcast’s tone will be conversational rather than overly professorial, Chakkalakal considers the show an extension of her teaching. As part of many of her Bowdoin classes, she leads students on walking tours around Brunswick, encouraging them to imagine Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Stowe walking the same routes a century or more ago, perhaps pondering their next sentence or chapter.
Chakkalakal’s desire to share her knowledge and passion with a broader audience is one of the reasons Bartfai is excited about producing Dead Writers. “I am so inspired and impressed by Tess’s devotion to the public humanities, and her insistence on taking this amazing scholarship she made at Bowdoin and making it accessible and inviting people into it,” she said.
One way the team plans to do this is by speaking with the people—the docents, the literary enthusiasts, even the cleaners—who inhabit the spaces where these dead writers once made their marks.
“When we were thinking about how to take the pod out of the home and away from two literary critics going ‘blah blah blah,’ we decided to find people to interview, like the twenty-year-old former art student who cleans the Longfellow house,” Bartfai said.
Though Clarke might not in the end be won over by the houses themselves, he, too, is looking forward to meeting the characters “who work at them, who visit them, who walk by them on the street not knowing, say, that Sarah Orne Jewett lived there, and for that matter not even knowing who Sarah Orne Jewett is, or was,” he said.
“I’m trying to make the podcast relevant to today,” Chakkalakal said. “It is not meant to be comprehensive or a rigorous literary analysis, it’s to get people moving,” to go check out a house, or maybe even a book.
