Emily Dickinson’s bedroom can now be rented by the hour
The Amherst home of 19thcentury reclusive superstar poet Emily Dickinson reopened to great fanfare last summer, and now you can rent her bedroom by the hour. Don’t be alarmed: it’s not what it sounds like (“Wild nights — wild nights!”). The Emily Dickinson Museum recently announced the reopening of “Studio Sessions,” in which Dickinson’s room is available for up to two hours for poets, novelists, scholars, musicians, artists, just plain fans, or anyone seeking inspiration in an unusual setting.
Most of Dickinson’s wildly original poems were written in this very room. In one of them, Dickinson writes: “Sweet hours have perished here; This is a mighty room.”
In her mighty but chaste room, overlooking the spacious lawns leading down to Main Street, you can spend a sweet hour sitting at her teeny cherry wood desk and gazing at her iconic white dress and the portraits of her literary idols, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Executive director Jane Wald observes that participants in studio sessions “are profoundly inspired by Emily Dickinson’s private work space where they can plumb the depths of their own creativity in an echo chamber of her poetic genius. In this space, Dickinson found freedom for her artistic powers to thrive.”
According to Elizabeth Bradley, who heads up educational programming at the Museum, time slots are available in the early morning and late afternoon (outside of the public tour hours) and fill up quickly: “Being in the room at a quiet time can make it a richer and more contemplative experience.” It’s not an inexpensive experience, however. It costs $300 for one person to rent the room for one hour, and it’s $500 for two hours. It’s $500 for two people to rent it for an hour, or $600 for two people for two hours.
Bradley notes that a significant number of reservations are purchased as gifts, often for writers or other creators who are perhaps embarking on a new project or celebrating the end of one. Visitors bring pencils, paper, musical instruments, or just themselves, to experience the Emily Dickinson of it all and hope her lingering presence will encourage their own spirit to soar.
Ruby Granger, a recent visitor from the United Kingdom, proclaimed her time spent in Dickinson’s room to be “the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”
To reserve your studio session, contact the museum: www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/studio-sessions.