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Spring Virtual 'Trouble Begins' Lecture Series Set

Elmira, NY (04/28/2020) — The spring portion of the 2019-2020 The Trouble Begins Lecture Series presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies features four online lectures, with the first event set for Wednesday, May 13. All four lectures are free and available to the public on marktwainstudies.org. Lectures will be available by noon on the scheduled lecture day.

The first lecture, "Guilty Pleasure Editing: Mark Twain's Marginalia of 'Bad' Poetry," will be presented by Lisa McGunigal of Hope College. Considered a satirist, travel writer, and lecturer, Twain was rarely presented as a poet or appreciator of poetry to the public during his life and still today many people assume an antagonistic relationship between Twain and verse. This lecture will discuss how Twain enjoyed not only reading bad poetry but also writing marginalia within his personal poetry collection-often consisting of snarky remarks criticizing the sentimental tone or rhyming structure- illustrating his active investment in altering and questioning the text as an enjoyable activity.

On Wednesday, May 20, the Series continues with "Witnessing the Civil War: In Elmira with Mark Twain," presented by Shirley Samuels of Cornell University. Mark Twain did not go to Elmira during the Civil War, so the title has some deliberate ambiguity. What Elmira held during the last year of the war was a prisoner of war camp, and I am intrigued with the idea that Twain might have visited the site with the small dread that he could have been confined there or in a place like it if he had been captured during his brief foray into serving with a renegade group of would-be confederate soldiers. Most of the presentation focuses on his uncomfortable writing about the war in Life on the Mississippi.

The Series continues on Wednesday, May 27 with "Riding with Mark Twain," presented by Laura Skandera Trombley from Southwestern University. Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Samuel Clemens took a foray through the Holy Land. He had signed up because he was desperate for a future he couldn't imagine. He had arrived at this juncture exhausted from fighting for a sense of self-worth and fearing that whatever he had managed to accomplish would vanish unnoticed. As contrarian as it might appear, he was convinced that travelling to Europe and then galloping through Palestine was his best opportunity to secure a lucrative future.

The spring portion of the Series wraps up on Wednesday, June 3, "Scandal at Stormfield: Mark Twain's 'Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,'" presented by Lawrence Howe of Roosevelt University. In 1908, when Sam Clemens moved into his Italianate mansion, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut, he seemed to have turned the page on his sadness of recent years and begun a happy chapter. About a year later, this happiness was disrupted by a scandal: his personal secretary Isabel Lyon and his business manager Ralph Ashcroft betrayed his trust. Mark Twain addressed their deceptions in his final text, the "Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript," a tortured piece of writing in which he struggles to come to terms with their treachery.

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain's October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire's Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College's campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.

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