140: Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier

In Episode 140, Gen and Jette get to revisit one of their favourite books, Paper Houses, with the sequel, Pale Shadows. Dominique Fortier’s follow-up to her reimagining of Emily Dickinson’s life, traces the publication of Dickinson’s poems after her death and the women who made it happen.

Obviously we loved this. It’s time to add every Emily Dickinson collection to our reading lists.

Show Notes

We learned a lot about the process of readying Emily’s poems for publication, which included removing dashes and deciding on which word Emily intended for the poem. There are several different collections with slightly different versions of the poems. The one being published in Pale Shadows was edited and transcribed by Mabel. A later edition was done by her daughter, Millicent.

Shout out to Coach House Books for never steering us wrong. Paper Houses was the first book of theirs we ever read on the podcast.

If you haven’t listened yet, check out ⁠Episode 26 on Paper Houses⁠.

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium was also published and it has been ⁠digitized by Harvard Library for anyone to look through⁠.

In our next episode we’ll be reading James Baldwin’s essay collection, Notes of a Native Son.