Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson

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Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson

PERSONAL: Daughter of a presidential chaplain; married; husband a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Education: Holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.

ADDRESSES: Office—Concordia University, St. Paul, Department of English and Modern Languages, 275 Syndicate St. N., St. Paul, MN 55104-5494. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. Concordia University, St. Paul, MN, professor of English, 1983–. Taught in and around Washington, DC, for eighteen years and in Liberia, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright dcholar, University of Hong Kong, 1998; Marian Reedman Greenblatt Award for teaching.

WRITINGS:

Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Explicator, Emily Dickinson Journal, Women's Review of Books, and Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin.

Contributor to books, including Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia.

SIDELIGHTS: Eleanor Elson Heginbotham is a writer, educator, and scholar of renowned poet Emily Dickinson. Her research interests include influences on Dickinson as well as Dickinson's own influence on poets of the twentieth century. Heginbotham is a teacher of literature, journalism, and writing, and is a frequent presenter at scholarly conferences around the country.

Another of Heginbotham's major Dickensian research interests are the publications known as the fascicles of Emily Dickinson. She thoroughly examines these in Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities. The fascicles are collections of Dickinson's poems gathered, printed, and stitched together by Dickinson herself. Nearly 900 poems appear in forty hand-made books, each ranging between sixteen and twenty-four pages in length. For scholars, the fascicles offer a rare opportunity to read the poems in a context that Dickinson herself preferred, arranged and juxtaposed in a manner that suited her own concept of how her poems should be presented. In effect, Dickinson served as her own editor, and Hegin-botham suggests that the fascicles represent Dickinson's work as the poet wanted it to be seen. "The strength of this study lies in Heginbotham's demonstration that reading poems in fascicle contexts encourages interpretations that are either not apparent or not as vivid when the poems are read in isolation," observed Paul Crumbley in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Dickinson's arrangement of the fascicles allows poems to be read side-by-side, or in a particular order, arranged to enhance the relation-ship between poems that can be interpreted in context with each other. In this way, Heginbotham opens up entirely new interpretative possibilities for Dickinson's work. Her readings are "enticements to future readings that provide a much welcomed reminder of the way Dickinson's poetry ceaselessly provokes fresh relation-ships with her readers," Crumbley observed.

"Heginbotham's study makes an important contribution to Dickinson scholarship by modeling fascicle reading that effectively communicates not only the interpretive insights enabled by the fascicles, but also the pleasures that attend reading Dickinson's poems in the setting Dickinson selected," Crumbley concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, June, 2004, Paul Crumbley, review of Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities, p. 251.