The overview

I've always loved Emily Dickinson. Her self-imposed house-bound exile in Amherst, her use of dashes in poetry, her aura of mystery, the fact that only one confirmed photo of her as an adult exists. Most of all, I love that her poems are brief. She says what she wants to say and is done with it.

Most of the time, I would welcome self-imposed house-bound exile. Give me a book or a movie or a blog and, if there's also hot fudge cake, I would be quite content to watch the world go by for months. And I love dashes. Both the kind I use in writing and the occasional mad one to the store to pick up something I forgot and desperately need to make hot fudge cake. There aren't very many photos of me hanging around, either, so I can relate to Emily there, too - there are NO baby photos at all. (The first photo of me is when I was about two, and it's pretty scratched and beaten up. AND it includes my sister, who I think was probably the main focus of the photographer; I just injected myself into the shot. You'll notice my sister does not appear to be all that impressed about me intruding this way. Just so you know, I'm the Alien Barbie on the right in the photo above.)

The purpose of this blog is not to compare myself to Emily Dickinson, however - Lord, no. For the next 12 months, I'm going to interpret (through Wyoming photographs) 112 nature poems by Emily Dickinson.

Here we go!