Martha Ackmann brings poet Emily Dickinson into full focus in her innovative biography These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton). Mount Holyoke College professor Ackmann drew on her deep knowledge of Emily Dickinson to describe the enigmatic woman in white, in a set of essays that form a luminous portrait. Ackmann, who has written other biographies of women obscured from history — such as America’s first female astronauts and the first woman to play professional baseball in the Negro League — zeros in on episodes that revealed Dickinson’s life in a way that deepens appreciation of her poetry. Madeleine Blais spoke with Ackmann about the writing of These Fevered Days, for The National Book Review.

Q: In These Fevered Days, you tell the story of Emily Dickinson’s life in ten distinct tableaux. I am curious about how this structure came about.

A: The book’s ten days structure came from my teaching. For nearly 20 years, I taught a Mount Holyoke College seminar on Dickinson in the poet’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was a remarkable experience to have the rooms, the views, and the light that inspired Dickinson surrounding us.

As I taught, I noticed that my students became animated when I focused the day’s activity on one specific moment in the poet’s life.  For example, when we were studying Dickinson’s poems of religious faith, we centered on a day when Emily was 17 and went head-to-head with Mary Lyon, the formidable principal of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. (The seminary later evolved into the college.)

 Lyon believed wrestling with religious questions was as important as learning the precepts of chemistry, and she hoped all of her students would become Christian believers. Emily Dickinson thought differently. So, in our seminar we read letters around that encounter with Mary Lyon and studied poems about religion that Dickinson wrote afterwards.

 It’s important to point out that Emily Dickinson’s poems are not autobiography. She was adamant about the primacy of imagination. She once famously said, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person.” Yet - like any other human being - what she experienced and how she lived informed her work.

After seeing how excited my students became by focusing on one day in Dickinson life and how much more deeply they understood her, I got to thinking about expanding the one-day perspective into a book.  If my students were engaged by that approach, I hoped readers would be too. 

I had fun selecting the ten days. I used several of the days we unraveled in class, I asked other Dickinson scholars which ones they would choose, and I popped in a few that were simply my favorites.  Always I selected days that were pivotal: when something important happened. Days when an idea, a visit, a letter, an emotion changed her, and moved her toward the poet she would become. 

Q: Can you talk about what was especially meaningful about seeing her habitat in person, about teaching in the Emily Dickinson’s home?

A: There were many things that were especially meaningful.  I don’t think any of my students will ever forget studying Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons” and then looking around the poet’s bedroom and seeing December shadows creep across the windowsills.

And I always ended each semester the same way by taking students two-by-two up to the cupola of Dickinson’s home.  It’s a small space perched on top of the house that has been untouched by time. It has sweeping views of hills and pastures and barns. I never said a word up there because I knew my students were taking everything in. I knew they were imagining how a single, determined woman turned all that she saw into such incandescent poetry. 

Q: When did you first discover the poet?

A: This sounds like I’m making it up, but it’s the gospel truth: I remember the exact moment I first read Emily Dickinson. I was 16 and sitting in fifth period English class at McCluer High school in suburban St. Louis.  We were studying 19th century American writers and our teacher, Mrs. Brandon, asked us to read Dickinson’s poem, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” 

I was a lucky kid. At 16, I had not experienced “great pain.” I had loving parents, brothers who looked out for me, and a posse of good friends.  When I read the poem, I couldn’t explain a single line. I recall sliding down in my chair (as one does) in hopes Mrs. Brandon wouldn’t call on me. 

But here’s the thing: even though I couldn’t explain the poem, I understood it. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out what happened in that moment, but I think I woke up.  Ideas and writing suddenly became alive. If I were writing the “ten days” of my own life, that day back at McCluer would surely be among them.

Q: Can you explain (or try anyway) the reasons for Dickinson’s enduring appeal and for the wide geographical net her work has cast?

 A: You’re right about Dickinson’s geographical reach.  She always has been enormously popular in Japan.  Some think the condensed style of her verse appeals to the Japanese love of haiku.  I think it’s more than that. There are exciting Dickinson studies going on in France, and an upcoming meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society will be in Spain.

I’ve been amused by recent U.S. headlines that proclaim: “Emily Dickinson is Having a Cultural Moment.” I laugh because I read those same headlines ten years or more ago.  I think it’s pretty safe to say Emily Dickinson is always “having a cultural moment.” 

 I think there are two reasons for her enduring appeal. First, it’s what happened to me at 16: I understood Dickinson before I could explain her.  She hits you first in the muscle and bone and sinew. Reading Dickinson is a visceral experience. Thought comes later.

The second reason, I think, is Dickinson takes on the big stuff – questions about faith and love, anguish and immortality.  Certainly, she can be playful and few poets write about nature better than she does. But it’s the profound questions of existence that hit us so intensely. She never shied away from staring life down, and she wants us to do the same. I think Dickinson’s enduring appeal is that she tried to capture consciousness itself and make us feel what it is like to be alive.

Q:  A reclusive poet who lived in the nineteenth century, 13 astronauts who have faded from the public consciousness, an African-American baseball player whose life burst with “firsts”: all women and all the subjects of your books.  Why you were drawn to them and what unites them? 

 A: HA!  I get that a lot – what in the world are you doing bouncing from astronauts to ballplayers to poets? 

On the surface, I think I’m drawn to those subjects because I like them. My father was in the Army Air Corps in World War II and became a cartographer who worked on mapping the moon. Airplanes and space flight are in my blood. And everyone from St. Louis is a Cardinal fan. You drink the water there and immediately know what a 3-2 count is.  And, Dickinson – well - she’s been in my mind since that moment in high school. 

On a deeper level, though, I think I’m always trying to figure out “What is America.” In the Mercury 13, I was trying to understand ambition and the price of discrimination.  In Curveball, I wanted to confront Jim Crow and our country’s insidious racism. And with These Fevered Days, I wanted to learn about the source of Dickinson’s staggering imagination.  Where did it come from?  How could a recluse see so far?

Q: Do you think your long and productive career teaching at a women’s college expanded your sensitivity towards all the lost stories involving women and if so, how?

A: I think it did, especially in the 1980s when so much of the work of women historians was focused on recovering lost stories.  I used to teach a course at Mount Holyoke called “The Art of Fact” that involved students working in archives to research and write a narrative non-fiction story. They loved finding files about women’s lives that no one had looked at for years and years, and trying to come to terms with what that life meant and why it mattered. 

Q: One of your books was a Broadway play last summer and will be produced in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. this year. There must have been a million highlights to this accomplishment.  Can you share some of the thrills?

A:  We had such a wonderful run last summer with Toni Stone at the Roundabout Theatre in New York. The play was based on my book Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone,  about the first women to play professional baseball in the Negro League.

It’s no overstatement to say I adored every minute.  Writing is a solitary business, but the theatre is collaborative. I score about 93% on the introvert scale, so I was surprised by how much I loved being part of a company.  I so enjoyed working with Lydia Diamond, Toni Stone’s remarkable and generous playwright, and getting to know the cast and crew. 

You asked for a highlight.  I treasured hanging around the theatre after performances, seeing stagehands set up the ghost light, and saying goodnight to the props and box office folks. I guess it was the feeling of belonging to this new world that warmed - and delighted me so. 

Q: Rattling around in my memory bank is the factoid that you considered a different title for These Fevered Days. Can you say what it was and why you put it aside? 

A: I originally was going to title it Vesuvius at Home – another line from a Dickinson poem. I like that phrase because it explodes the notion of Dickinson as a fragile spinster.  But there is an important essay of the same name by Adrienne Rich. We worried people might confuse the two. 

When my editor asked me to find another title and do it quickly, I re-read every Dickinson poem in a single sitting one winter afternoon –nearly 2,000 of them. I was reading for what would make a good title, came up with a list of nine, and ranked them. These Fevered Days was at the bottom.  But, after sleeping on it, I realized that phrase did exactly what I wanted it to do: show a writer who was ablaze with words.  And I liked that the title had the word “days” in there.  I wanted a nod to my original concept of focusing on pivotal moments.

 Q: I understand that you have a beautiful writing cabin in the woods. Can you explain what it is like, what it looks out on and the importance of having a room of your own?

 A: I love my cabin.  Best decision I ever made was to build that cabin.

No matter what’s going on in my life – writing that’s not going well, a deadline that’s bearing down on me – every time I open the cabin door, it takes my breath away. It’s so quiet and small and solitary and elemental. 

My friend Peter built the cabin in nine days and one afternoon when he was constructing it, he came in with a large glass door. I sort of frowned and said, “but I don’t want all that glass in a door. I want more privacy.” But Peter turned it horizontally. “It’s not a door,” he said,” it’s now a window.”

So, my desk has this big window that looks out on woods and an old logging trail. I see Pileated Woodpeckers, and deer, fox, bear and bobcat.  I also hear that train go by on the same tracks that Emily Dickinson’s father brought to Amherst over 150 years ago.  

At the risk of sounding high falutin’ – being in the cabin feels sacred to me. It’s where I try to do my work in the world. 

Q: Finally, the inevitable question, what’s next? And if you haven’t settled on a topic, can you at least share the kinds of prerequisites you look for in a subject, knowing you will be devoting years of your life to it?

A:  You’re absolutely right about dedicating years of your life to a subject.  You better love it and find your topic endlessly fascinating! Which brings me to Dolly Parton. I think Dolly is my next subject.  I’ve followed Dolly Parton’s career for years, and I want to write a book that takes her seriously. And back to my interest in “What is America?”  I think Dolly Parton can tell us a lot about class, persistence, and a particular kind of American reinvention.

I already have the ending to the book. Last fall, I attended Dolly’s 50thanniversary concert at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. There was a young girl sitting near me. She couldn’t have been more than twelve.  When Dolly began singing Coat of Many Colors…. well, I won’t tell you what happened.

All I’ll say is - it was everything.  I knew right then and there, that I had found the ending to the book.  Now all I need is the first 300 pages! 

Madeleine Blais is the author of the forthcoming biography Queen of the Court: A Life of Tennis Legend Alice Marble, to be published by Grove Atlantic. As a reporter with the Miami Herald, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is also the author of several other books, including the memoirs Uphill Walkers and most recently, To the New Owners.