House (Noun) A building for human habitation; a constructed place with walls, roof, and rooms
Home (Noun) The place where one lives, feels emotionally rooted, safe, loved, connected.
Most of these pieces came into being in our morning workshops inside the Mark Twain House. These apprentices never ceased to amaze me and all our guest writers with their creativity. The house became a muse that sparked all these beautiful words. As Mark Twain wrote in a letter to his close friend, Reverend Joseph Twichell, “to us our house was not unsentient matter– it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome—& we could not enter it unmoved.” I know, year after year, I cannot enter the house unmoved. For the past six weeks I see these faces light up as each room welcomed us as we wrote:
Persona poems and fairy tales in the Drawing Room as the floor to ceiling mirror faithfully reflected us, the mauve carpet, the blush of the stenciled ceiling, the pale salmon tufted seats, Steinway, Bust of Olivia, Statue of Mercury, unlit fireplace.
Haiku Suites and Haibuns emerged in the Mahogany Room surrounded by Candace Wheeler’s honeycomb wallpaper & flowering plants & 12-foot windows that watched the porch for the arrival of the 1st tour that would break the spell at 10 AM.
Fantasy stories took shape in the Nursery among the toys & books & dolls & games & little brass beds & the frog he would go a wooing go wallpaper & the Schoolroom where the girls romped, where Sam used to write his own tales until there was too much play to get any work done.
Golden Shovels and Braided Narratives formed in the Billiards Room with the deep red walls where Sam played pool, rocked in his chair, smoked cigars on his balcony, imagined his characters, where words flowed onto his pages.
Victorian Language of Flowers poems bloomed stanzas of lilies & roses & orchids & Peonies & forget-me-nots in the July garden outside.
Flash Fiction and humor pieces and ekphrastics crafted in the library as we listened to the fountain in the glass conservatory jungle filled with morning light, lounged by the bookshelves and dark walnut paneling, under the Cat in the Ruff, nestled next to Sam Clemens’s reading chair, or the dark oak mantelpiece from a Scottish castle with an added inscription, the ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it, and I realize maybe we are the friends who frequent this space now. The apprentices are the writers. They are speaking their eloquent truths. & we have created a home inside this house through relationships, through memory, through language, and through care. & the beautiful thing about a home is that you can carry it with you, even after you’ve left the house.