Jen Michalski
State:
Maryland
Author Jen Michalski takes us on a tour of the many literary sites writers should visit while strolling the gritty streets of Baltimore.
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Jen Michalski lives in Baltimore. Her second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, is forthcoming August 2016 from Queens Ferry Press. She lives with a Boston Terrier and a human named Phuong.
“Baltimore is warm but pleasant...I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s famous quote about Baltimore might convey a town of Southern Gothic leanings to outsiders, but as a Baltimorean, I think it means that you can stroll through a neighborhood of stately, preserved brownstones while watching a rat leisurely cross the sidewalk. Or visit the Patterson Park Observatory (called the Pagoda by locals because its Victorian design is often mistaken for Asian) and throw away a box of fried chicken someone left behind on its steps. Like an imperfect gemstone, Baltimore’s real value lies in it being one of a kind. Established in the eighteenth century as part of the tobacco trade, Baltimore has always been known as a gritty harbor full of wharf rats and stevedores, a place where the newspaper would just as likely be used for fish-wrap as for reading.
And yet, when compiling the anthology City Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press, 2010) several years ago, I made the most amazing discoveries: Frederick Douglas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Dos Passos, Edgar Allan Poe, and Gertrude Stein all lived and wrote in Maryland, mostly in Baltimore, as do current literary powerhouses John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, Stephen Dixon, Laura Lippman, Alice McDermott, and Anne Tyler. This proudly blue collar, Orioles-baseball-loving, beer-drinking, chip-on-our-shoulder wharf by the bay harbors an impressive list of writers from the past.
Yet what’s more impressive to me is the number of writers who currently call Maryland home—transplants from New York City, Washington D.C., California, and even Canada, enshrouded in the halls of our numerous writing programs, living in the city itself or in the suburbs of Towson and Annapolis, sometimes even in the mountains of western Maryland. Whether one is a writer or a reader, it’s hard not be drawn to what I call our “country in a state”—our fine-sand seashores, our Appalachian mountain ridges and wintertime skiing, our golden-ribbed farmland on the Eastern shore, flush with corn and tomatoes, cherries and peaches, and our majestic Chesapeake Bay, where sailboats glide across the sunset and where Francis Scott Key, imprisoned at Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, penned “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We are famous for our seafood (steamed crabs, anyone?) and even more famous for our embattled neighborhoods (exposed to you courtesy of the critically acclaimed television series The Wire). But what I’ve found in my twenty years here has been a little city with a big heart, with scattered, pulsing arteries of ideas and talent that have finally connected to put us on the map.
Baltimore thrives on cooperation, not competition. We draw together based on our underdog status: We’re not northern or southern (during the Civil War, we didn’t secede from the union although we rebelled against them), and for years we were but a rest stop between New York City and Washington D.C. We’re ferociously proud of our confused identify, in a “whatever you aren’t, we are” sort of way. Baltimore is a town for reinvention, a place where you can be yourself, a place that if you see a need for something, well, just do it, and let us know if you need help.
When I graduated with a master’s degree in writing from Towson University, I did just that, starting the literary journal jmww. I wanted to stay in touch with my circle of friends at school and didn’t know of any other way (although I suppose, in retrospect, monthly potlucks would have been easier). Another Towson alum, Catherine Harrison, and I were its first editors, and in our debut issue we ran three stories—one from me, one from Catherine, and our only other submission.
Through jmww I met Baltimore Sun columnist, author, and Wire staff writer Rafael Alvarez. He lived in the neighborhood next to mine, Greektown, and often hosted book parties for his author friends in his basement. In exchange for buying books, we were treated to pans of his father’s lasagna, jugs of wine, and great company. I met Gregg Wilhelm, founder of CityLit Project, at one such dinner. After having a few beers at a local bar, Gregg and I concocted an idea for a monthly rotating writer’s happy hour and placed a modest ad in the local weekly, the Baltimore City Paper. If ten people showed up, we would be pleased.
More than fifty writers attended that first happy hour. I’ve since met at least a couple hundred working writers from Baltimore, south to Annapolis and Washington, D.C., and west to Gaithersburg. I’ve been in writers groups with them, participated in readings with them, and socialized with them over dinners and drinks. Many are on co-ed sports teams together, run other literary journals and reading series, and a few run their own presses. I consider them my second family, and I don’t think I’d be the writer I am without them.
But why are we here, in Baltimore, Maryland? Surely, the writing programs play a big part. Traditional programs abound, like University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins, and others, like Loyola College and University of Baltimore, have innovative classes in publishing in which students acquire, design, and sell books (Loyola even has its own publishing house, Apprentice House). And then there are the festivals. Every September the Baltimore Book Festival, which features programming from the CityLit Project, takes place at the picturesque Inner Harbor (to some, Baltimore’s crown jewel for tourists), and the CityLit Festival, held Saturday every April at the University of Baltimore uptown, has welcomed Junot Díaz, Jaimy Gordon, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and George Saunders. This year’s special guest was Claudia Rankine, and featured authors included Paul Lisicky and D. Watkins. Western and Southern Maryland also have gotten in the act, with the Gaithersburg Book Festival and the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, along with the Bethesda Literary Festival and the Annapolis Book Festival.
City Guide Baltimore
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Festivals aren’t the only places to see national writers read in Baltimore, though. The Woodberry-Hampden-Remington area in Northwest Baltimore City is a good place to sample a mix of local, regional, and national talent. In the Northwest corner rests Woodberry, the home of Baltimore’s historic old textile mills (many of which have been converted into upscale living spaces and businesses). James Beard Award–winning chef Spike Gjerde opened the world-class Woodberry Kitchen here in 2007, helping to revitalize the neighborhood, and it’s also home to a reclaimed stone story turned neighborhood coffee shop, Artifact Coffee. One Monday a month, I host a fiction reading series at Artifact called Starts Here!, sponsored by the Ivy Bookshop. Over the past two years Starts Here! has hosted some of the best upcoming and acclaimed novelists and short fiction writers, including Laura van den Berg, Pamela Erens, Stephen Dixon, Julia Fierro, and Gina Frangello.
Just south on Falls Road, Hampden is the quintessential DIY, local-food-movement, hipster neighborhood, anchored by a long, historic shopping avenue on 36th Street full of great vintage clothing and art galleries, grocery markets-turned innovative dining establishments like the Hampden Food Market and Corner Charcuterie Bar (an old diner whose specials now offer squirrel and roast pig) to bookstores like the nationally renowned Atomic Books, where owners Benn Ray and Rachel Whang sell comics, underground books, and fanzines. They also run a fiction reading series, hosted by Benn Ray and writer and Goucher professor Kathy Flann; a poetry reading series, Writers Under the Influence, hosted by Elizabeth Hazen; and serve as a fan-mail depot for Baltimore icon John Waters. Hampden is a short walk away from Johns Hopkins University, where many writers have attended the highly regarded MFA seminars and MA writing programs, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has hosted Opium Magazine’s quirky Literary Death Match.
Just southeast of Hampden is Remington, one of the hottest neighborhoods in Baltimore. The aforementioned Spike Gjerde recognized its potential in 2014 when opening the farm-to-fork restaurant/butcher shop Parts & Labor. But he’s not the only one. You can catch an occasional poetry reading at the speakeasy W.C. Harlan or even peruse novels like Moby Dick and Ulysses, which line the walls in lieu of usual bar entertainment. If you’re not sure of your writing inclination, you can attend Writers and Words across the street at the co-op café/restaurant Charmington’s. Run by area writing graduates Michael Tager, Ian Anderson, Amanda Ponder, Mike Shattuck, and Michelle Junot, the series hosts one fiction writer, one essayist or memoirist, one poet, and a “wild card” one Tuesday a month, for which they also compile and produce a handmade zine of the featured readers’ work to sell at the reading.
Further south rests the neighborhood of Station North, anchored by North Avenue. Known for years as a truck route from downtown to Interstate 95, North Avenue is no longer a congested, four-lane street separating the green, residential corridors of Charles Village/Waverly and Bolton Hill from downtown Baltimore. Joe Squared Pizza, on the west end of North Avenue, is popular with writing faculty and students from the University of Baltimore (UB) and Maryland Institute, College of Art (MICA). It’s also the perfect place to meet up before heading to readings at the Windup Space (home to the New Mercury Reading Series, Baltimore’s only nonfiction series, founded by Deborah Rudacille and John Barry, and named after Mencken’s magazine The American Mercury). A few doors down from the Windup Space, Liam Flynn’s Alehouse hosts Submit 10, a different type of open-mic night where writers submit stories of ten minutes or less, and other writers read them. You’ll want to check out Red Emma’s, where you can browse their massive selection of “radical books,” eat vegetarian offerings, and attend readings geared toward the politically conscious and environmentally sustainable. Finally, stroll a few blocks north on Charles Street to the Crown Bar and Restaurant to check out “Hey You, Come Back!,” a monthly reading series on Thursday nights hosted by students in the master’s program at Hopkins.
Head further south into the city and you’ll reach University of Baltimore, or UB, whose beautiful buildings line much of Mount Royal and Maryland Avenues. Within the past few years, the university’s MFA reading series has hosted Teju Cole, Amy Hempel, and Ann Patchett; the fifth-floor Hilda and Michael Bogomolny Room hosts a panoramic view of Baltimore that is unparalleled. D. Watkins, who burst on the scene last year with the critically acclaimed essay collection, The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America (Hot Books, 2015), is a recent graduate of UB’s MFA program.
Further south still, you’ll find yourself at ground zero of literary Baltimore. If you want a little ancient history in your writing, your first stop should be the Walters Art Museum, which houses work from ancient Egypt and Greece, Medieval and Renaissance art, illuminated manuscripts, Old Master and nineteenth-century paintings, and more. The Museum has been known to host a literary event or two, as well as up-and-coming local bands. Located in the beautiful, historic downtown district near the Washington Monument, the museum is within walking distance of the Stafford Hotel (now an apartment building for students), where F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed while his wife Zelda was being treated at Sheppard Pratt Hospital. Across the square, John Dos Passos wrote in the George Peabody Library at the Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute during the fifties.
Down the street is the renowned Enoch Pratt Free Library, the hub of Baltimore’s library system (which has more than twenty branches) and is the size of an entire city block. In 1882, Baltimore businessman Enoch Pratt gifted the City of Baltimore the central library and five branches along with an endowment of more than one million dollars, noting that the library “shall be for all, rich and poor without distinction of race or color, who, when properly accredited, can take out the books if they will handle them carefully and return them.”
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Enoch Pratt’s money has been well spent, particularly at the central location. Its huge display windows outside are decorated as imaginatively as old department stores, particularly the annual Lego® Christmas constructions. Inside, the H. L. Mencken room boasts an archive of books, letters, and other ephemera from our “Sage of Baltimore.” The library’s special collections include thousands of historically significant documents, rare books, and other unusual items of interest, including my favorites, the postcard and greeting card collections. The downtown branch is also home to the wonderful Writers LIVE! series, which hosts national and local authors alike. If you head a few blocks north on Cathedral, you may want to stop to do some writing at City Café, then swing by the Baltimore School for the Arts. H. L. Mencken lived in an apartment on the location that now houses the school, and the late Tupac Shakur was once a student here. Also on Cathedral is the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, where Edna St. Vincent Millay was known to read her work.
If north Baltimore is the mind of our fine city, then south Baltimore is its gritty soul. From the sweet, pungent waterfront to the neighborhoods carved out by ethnicity (Little Italy, Greektown), vocation (Butcher’s Hill, Brewer’s Hill), and geographical advantage (Highlandtown), south Baltimore has found life on film in Barry Levinson’s Diner and the gravely underrated television series, Homicide: Life on the Street. Past the tourist-friendly Inner Harbor and Fells Point, the Creative Alliance, housed in the old Patterson Movie Theater on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown, is the southern beacon of the city to Hampden’s northern lights. In addition to offering artist residencies in its second-floor studios, the Creative Alliance houses a functioning theater, gallery, classrooms, administrative space, and a restaurant and bar, and offers writing classes and workshops in fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and poetry, as well as various readings and performances. The Creative Alliance was also the birthplace of the “Stoop Storytelling Series,” a wildly popular monthly theater performance featuring Baltimoreans from all walks of life detailing their funniest and most painful, embarrassing, and triumphant moments.
Not only does Baltimore have a variety of reading venues, it also has many great places to write. If you’re the traditional coffeehouse author, try the bustling Evergeen Cafe, located in the upscale Roland Park neighborhood (home to novelist Anne Tyler, who has been spied shopping at the neighborhood grocery store Eddie’s).
Likewise, Firehouse Coffee in Canton Square is a destination of writers in South Baltimore. Although located in Canton—more popular for its jock than arts culture—the Firehouse is minutes away from the waterfront, where a pedestrian path that begins in Canton snakes for miles westward beside the water over to the Inner Harbor. Not only are there great views of the harbor, tugboats and other working ships, sailboats, and the iconic Domino Sugar sign, the path also crosses in front of the City Pier—otherwise known as the Homicide police headquarters.
One can get a great feel for Baltimore’s blue-collar history along this Canton-Fells Point-Inner Harbor East promenade. At the turn of the century my family grew up in its cramped, now renovated rowhouses with the marble steps, hard-working Polish immigrants living seven or eight to a two-bedroom house, toiling as stevedores on the waterfront and canners at the American Can Co. on Boston Street (now a mixed-use building of restaurants and office space). They lost fingers and broke backs and put their kids through Catholic schools throughout the southeastern district, and they gave me many stories to write about. Just as Anne Tyler has immortalized Roland Park in her novels, ours is a neighborhood that Rafael Alvarez made famous as a city desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun and later in his fiction. If you haven’t already, be sure to read my favorite of his stories, “Johnny Wichodek’s Thanksgiving Duck,” in the collection The Fountain of Highlandtown (Woodholm House, 1997). Portions of my first novel, The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), are set along these dirty cobblestone streets, where musky bars abut residential blocks like bookends, and Edgar Allan Poe is rumored to have died (at the Fells Point bar The Horse You Came in On, although others say he actually died blocks north at the old Church Home and Hospital, now part of Johns Hopkins).
Another former Baltimore Sun reporter, mystery queen Laura Lippman (whose husband, David Simon, produced The Wire), made another south Baltimore location famous—Federal Hill, a once blue-collar, now gentrified neighborhood across the Inner Harbor. In addition to serving as a backdrop for some of her mysteries, the neighborhood also houses the coffee shop Spoons, where Lippman has penned a work or two.
I have avoided mentioning much about famous filmmaker John Waters up to now—not because I don’t like him (I, in fact, love him), but because Baltimore too often gets paired singularly with his vision. In a sentence: rent Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, and Cecil B. Demented to get the scope of his movies and read his book Role Models (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) to learn about how Baltimore shaped the man who introduced the world to Divine.
I’d rather pay tribute to a writer who was not born in Baltimore, did not live or write in Baltimore, and did not die in Baltimore. However, she is buried here, at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, under a plaque that reads “Excuse My Dust.” After being rescued from a lawyer’s file cabinet in New York, the ashes of Dorothy Parker, whose name is nearly synonymous with New York City and the Algonquin Hotel, forever resides in Baltimore because she willed her estate to civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. In the event of King’s death, she further stipulated that her estate should go to the NAACP (who also hold the literary rights to her work). Although the circumstances are a bit unusual, it seems a fitting end for her, sharing the soil with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe (who, though forever claimed by Philadelphians, lies for eternity at Westminster Church and Burial Ground in downtown Baltimore). A fair bit of warning, then: Even if you leave our fair city, we might just claim you anyway.