Dead Writers Podcast: Secret Encounter: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Dead Writers takes listeners inside famous American authors’ homes. Riffing on literature, history, home décor, gardens, and ghosts, literary critic Tess Chakkalakal and novelist Brock Clarke bring great American writers and the books they wrote back from the dead.

The first episode, “Secret Encounter: Harriet Beecher Stowe,” will air on Maine Public Radio at 8:00 p.m., Sunday, July 28, 2024. Six more episodes will follow, one each week in the same time slot. Following the airing of each installment on Maine Public Radio, the episodes will be available on the Dead Writers Podcast website and wherever you get your podcasts.

Dead Writers brings classic American authors back to life for a contemporary audience through a podcast series that takes listeners on a tour of literary homes, transporting them inside the houses in which the authors lived and wrote. The first season is dedicated to Maine’s literary landscape and will highlight such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe (Brunswick), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Portland), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Raymond).

Chakkalakal says it was during her decade-long battle to preserve the Harriet Beecher Stowe House that she became fascinated with literary houses and the ways in which people interpreted these homes and used them for various purposes.

“I was surprised by the important role these houses played in bringing people from various backgrounds and experiences together,” says Chakkalakal. “That was quite amazing and interesting to follow as we met the people who worked and visited the houses.”

Using humor and storytelling, Chakkalakal and Clarke structure the first season’s seven episodes as a guided conversation–talking to the people who take care of the houses and fellow visitors to give listeners a chance to get inside American literature and introduce these authors to a new generation.

“I hope listeners will read the books written by the authors whose homes we visited,” Chakkalakal says. “They are really good and underappreciated, because they were written such a long time ago, but still relevant today.”

Chakkalakal, associate professor of Africana studies and English and director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House at Bowdoin College, (pronounced “Chah-KAHL-ickle”) has published widely on nineteenth-century African American and American literature. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Illinois, 2011) which earned the Robert K. Martin Prize for best book on American literature and “a must read” title designation by Choice. She is coeditor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (Georgia, 2013). She is also coeditor of Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs: A Critical Edition (West Virginia Press, 2022).

Clarke, Bowdoin’s A. Leroy Greason Professor of English, is the author of four previous novels, including the bestselling An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers Homes in New England, as well as three collections of short stories, the most recent being The Price of the Haircut.