The American Writers Museum opened in downtown Chicago in May, and my combined love for writing and museums meant I've been trying to find time to go for two months. I managed yesterday.
It's a small place on the second floor of a skyscraper off Michigan, so you have to go in the lobby and take one of the elevators up a single floor while the person you share the elevator with goes up to floor 18. The gift shop is a wall of shelves with coffee mugs and magnets with inspirational writing quotes, and you pay for the merchandise at the front desk where you bought your admission. The museum itself is a circular hallway that flows from one gallery to the next, and it took me about an hour to make my way through, back to the gift shop and the kids manning the front desk.
There's a gallery of children's literature, which points out that you can tell a culture's morals, fears, their goals for their children and their biases by looking at what they read to their children. They go into depth with just a few examples: The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte's Web, Little Women, and Where the Wild Things Are. They tell stories about the authors' motivations, large scale edits, publication history, and public reception. My favorite part was reading about how Maurice Sendak's mother used to call him Wild Thing! in Yiddish, and how the wild things in the book are how he remembers members of his extended family with rolling eyes and big teeth.
There was a temporary exhibit: a dark hall filled with plants and rain forest sounds, where I sat on a bench and listened to poetry about palm leave read aloud on a looped track. It was peaceful, and gave the poems some context while also giving me a peaceful place to just listen and absorb and find my own meaning.
There was a hall with a long row of 100 American authors, put in historical order from the 1400s to the 20th century (Vonnegut was just a few from the end). Each author had a big picture and then a rotating info box with three sides of facts about them. With this setup, they were able to show how historical events affected literature. There was a big group focused on abolitionists and a big group around the Vietnam War. They were able to show how authors started movements and trends, influencing later authors. I could see an active intention to include diverse voices, but with the exhibit's intention to tell a historical narrative (which had a mostly white perspective), and with the desire to display authors from the American canon (who people are going to expect to see at the American Writers Museum, and who are overwhelmingly white) the authors were still a pretty pale bunch. There was also not much room given to genre fiction, which is my bag.
Other highlights include Kerouac's original scroll of On the Road in a temporary exhibit. I was expecting a reading room that was on a listicle that's been floating around of the 10 best places to sit and write in Chicago, so I brought my computer, but the reading room is like three uncomfortable looking sofas, no tables, and a steady stream of museum visitors going past, so my suspicions that that list is nonsense has been confirmed. I also found out there's a kid's story time where children's authors come and read, so I'll be back with toddler in tow.
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