Last Saturday's Sylvia Plath on Zoom event with Donnie Secreast and Jeanne Marie Beaumont is now live on the Sylvia Plath Info YouTube channel .  Thank you again to Donnie and Jeannie for participating and to those who attended.  All links accessed 8 June 2021.

On Saturday, 25 July 2020, Gail Crowther and I hosted our third and final Sylvia Plath Zoomposium. The featured speakers were: Janet Badia, Marsha Bryant, Emmeline Downie, Olivia Foster, Gillian Groszewski, Natalie Hurt, Craig Johnson, Jeremy Lowenthal, and Laura McKenzie. We are proud to announce that the recording is now available on the Sylvia Plath Info YouTube Channel . Please note Gillian Groszewski's presentation was removed. We are grateful to all thirty total speakers for their generosity and willingness to prepare talks on such short notice, to help feel a sense of community during a strange period in our lives. And thank you, of course, to all the people that registered for and attended the events. All links accessed 28 July and 1 August 2020.

[ This blog post was mostly written after/during too much to drink, at nearly "Midnight in the mid-Atlantic" on my flight back, back, back to Boston (not "On Deck", but far, far, back in coach...) ~pks ] I am so stupidly happy. After leaving Belfast, after such wonderful days at the Conference, after too many night of getting too little sleep, after meeting so many wonderful people and after having so many wonderful conversations, I had a long, six-hour layover in Heathrow airport before my connecting flight from Belfast to Boston. The idea of spending just about as much time in the airport as I would in the plane was unpalatable; so I decided it was worth the effort to zip into London for at least two hours; to make my way of course to Primrose Hill; to walk around and be beaten by wind, rain, air, sun: whatever the elements were offering that unknown day in the future when plans were made. After learning that someone whom I have wanted to meet for years was un...

A month ago I was in England and took this video of the churchyard of St. Peter's in North Tawton and of Court Green. I apologize for the awful video quality; the settings on my camera were not set very high unfortunately. As the video progresses, I walk towards the "wall of old corpses" ("Letter in November") -- (also known as "a row of headstones" ("The Moon and the Yew Tree") -- and get a shot of Court Green, with daffodils abloom. And here are two photographs of Court Green, taken with appropriate camera settings...

Today we (Gail Crowther, David Fitzwilliam, and I) visited Heptonstall to see the gravesite of Sylvia Plath. It was during a snowstorm; the winds were vicious and snow was blowing and drifting everywhere; it had to be seen to be believed, which is why I took some video. The village of Heptonstall was quite and we were the first to traipse to the grave. After visiting the grave, we walked up through the village and into Heptonstall Slack to see the Beacon, where the house was exposed to the full force and fury of the storm. The road at the bottom of the images (and video) was impassable from the snow drifts. Retiring after this exertion for a coffee at the Cross Inn was well earned to warm up before facing the rest of the day. This was my fourth visit to see Plath's grave and the first since 2003, which was in February of that year but at that time the weather was crisp and fine. Today's weather made for quite a surreal experience in what has been an truly magical, mysterious...

The archive today was fun. Karen Kukil had Plath's Royal typewriter out for someone else to photograph, so she and I started typing on it. We were comparing the way it typed against some of the documents Plath created on it, circa 1953 when she obtained it. Plath was quite proficient and efficient on the typewriter...I am not. In the process of working with it, I typed the first sentence from Plath's 19 June 1953 journal fragment, which was typed in New York City during her guest editorship at Mademoiselle . It is probable that Plath typed that fragment while at the offices of Mademoiselle, but it could be that it was typed in her hotel room (room 1511) at the Barbizon Hotel. This line I typed was "All right, so the headlines blare that the two of them..." (see Appendix 4, page 541 of The Unabridged Journals ). The video. For the rest of the morning I worked with Plath's personal papers, including her address book, her 1962 Calendar, and other items. I had loo...

When Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes moved to Court Green in September 1961, they had abundant living space for the first time in their married lives. Each even got a room to serve as a study. In a 15 September 1961 letter to her mother, Plath writes about settling in Court Green and that her brother Warren “has been really a wonderful part of the family “ (429). While he was there, Warren Plath assisted in “sanding an immense elm plank which will make me my first real capacious writing table” (429). Over the next 14 months, Plath would probably write all her new poems and stories on this elm plank. And probably also typed letters home and made entries in her journals. That elm wood desk was part of Plath’s estate sale that, in 1981, would go to the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. How wonderful and coincidental that Plath lived on Elmwood Road! To celebrate this piece of elm wood and the works composed on it, here is a badly shot video. It hangs in the offices of the Mortimer...

This video captures a scene from Chapter 11 of The Bell Jar . In the scene, Esther Greenwood sits on a bench in Boston Public Garden. 

This is the first Sylvia Plath Info video post. In April, I visited the Mortimer Rare Book Room and took this (poor quality) video of Plath's library. There are two parts. Stay tuned for more video posts in the future, I think. Part 1 Part 2 Sorry both go a bit sideways...