Dickinson Scholar Martha Nell Smith Visits Woman-Stirred Radio!

Well-known Dickinson scholar Martha Nell Smith comes to Woman-Stirred Radio this Thursday, December 6, at 5:00 p.m. (EST), to talk about Open Me Carefully, a work that illuminates the correspondence between Emily Dickinson and her friend, confidant, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson.

For more than thirty-five years, Emily and Susan wrote to each other almost daily. The uncensored letters and poems in Open Me Carefully "invite[s] a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work.... Here is Dickinson in her own words--humorous, playful, passionate, and fully alive."

Emily Dickinson has been variously described as a weird recluse and a brilliant poet, whose body of work still mesmerizes and influences millions of readers.

Through the research and scholarship of Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, Open Me Carefully reveals the truth about the poet and her relationship with Susan, a passionate friendship that has been hidden, erased, and reconstructed to fit a heterosexual paradigm.

So join Merry Gangemi and Martha Nell Smith for an exploration into the life and love of Emily Dickinson. Interview begins at 5:00 p.m.

Woman-Stirred Radio, the premier queer cultural journal, can be streamed live at WGDR.

Nicki Hastie joins me afterwards to continue our discussion of what lesbians read.