Bringing it all back home

April 27, 2023 5:00 pm • Last Updated: April 27, 2023 8:56 am

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Reputations were made — and possibly fortunes — by various authors working the theme of “you can’t go home again.”

“Home,” of course, can be metaphorical or symbolic or indeed the space where the joys and misfortunes of one’s childhood somersaulted along.

Or, in this case, home can be the Mystic Arts Café, the ongoing and venerable literary series that started in 1994 and has continually presented readings by world-renowned poets and writers, as well as those who are up-and-coming and/or deserving of greater popularity.

The Café was conceptualized by a group of writers including Christie Williams and Albert Kausch, and they in turn recruited a writer named Melanie Greenhouse to liaise with the Mystic Museum of Art to provide a home for the series. Greenhouse then served as director of the organization for a decade before passing the reins to Williams, who, on retirement, was replaced by current director Lisa Starr.

Now, on Friday at the La Grua Center in Stonington, Greenhouse returns as the featured voice when the Arts Cafe Mystic presents local high school poets laureate at the annual “Youth Will Be Served” event. And for Greenhouse, a longtime educator, playwright and poet, the chance to serve as mentor to the young writers is a wonderful reason to come back.

Just in time

Another is to celebrate “The Republic of Sunlight,” her first collection of poetry, which has just been published by New London Librarium press. Interestingly, “The Republic of Sunlight” has a curious provenance.

“When Lisa asked me about mentoring the young poets and to read, I was thrilled,” Greenhouse says by phone earlier this week. Over the years, she’s appeared on Café programs as a support poet, but this will be her first time as headliner. “Then it occurred to me that I didn’t have a book! I had plenty of poems and two manuscripts fermenting on my computer, but no actual published collection.” She laughs. “And I didn’t want to be the first Arts Café poet without a book.”

She reached out to an old friend, Glenn Alan Cheney, whose New London Librarium has published numerous respected works of poetry, fiction and art throughout the region.

Greenhouse says, “I asked Glenn, ‘How fast can you put a book together?’ By the end of the day, it was formatted.”

A wise, wide-ranging collection

The alacrity with which “The Republic of Sunlight” went to press should not be confused with a slapdash approach to the work therein. Indeed, “The Republic of Sunlight” is a wonderful collection of pieces roughly grouped into certain themes. Greenhouse writes movingly and in honor of her parents and their flight from Slovakia in 1938 when the Nazis were coming to power. She examines the Palestinian/Israeli conflict through the prism of epigenetics.

There are also personal anecdotal and frozen moments from relationships and motherhood, as well as observations on the world around us. She can as insightfully ponder a child’s carefree approach to, well, peeing in a lake just as shrewdly as she can lament firearms in our society.

Throughout the collection, Greenhouse is thoughtful, often in awe or wryly amused, and capable of delivering humor as well as wistful melancholy through deft and clever turns of phrase.

“Life is tough,” Greenhouse says. “We lose our parents and experience a lot of difficult things. But there is joy. There are funny, quizzical moment — and all these events enter your psyche.”

Greenhouse says she’s always kept a journal — “nothing academic, just the events of the day” — and that it’s not only therapeutic but triggers creativity when it comes to her writing.

“I love studying poetry,” she says of her own approach to craft. “I don’t want to be too flowery. I like form and convention and certain disciplines. I like using poetry to explore the meaning of life and our purpose and connections as people. But if it gets too metaphorical or out-there — TOO poetical — I don’t feel comfortable.”

Teaching and writing

Greenhouse grew up on the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland before moving to Noank in 1984, where she raised three sons. She moved to Columbia, Conn., in 2018 to be closer to family. Greenhouse has a master’s degree in teaching and, before turning full time to writing, worked with learning disabled and emotionally disturbed children. Among her writings are several plays that she’s also directed across Connecticut and Rhode Island.

In her time running the Café, Greenhouse hosted over 60 poets including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Charles Simic, Charles Coe, Maraget Gibson, Marilyn Nelson, Wally Lamb, Sue Ellen Thompson, Rennie McQuilkin and many more.

In 2008, Greenhouse started a memory care program at local assisted living communities. She collects life stories of residents and shapes them into narrative poems they can then read and revisit their personal histories. That program has evolved into the Intergenerational Poetry Project where high school students are paired with local elders to work creatively together in a mutually educational format.

A special night

The latter concept is ideal for Greenhouse’s mentorship of Friday’s high school poets laureate. She’ll spend three hours this afternoon in workshops with Kai Febus (Fitch High School), Jayden Tapia (Marine Science Magnet High School), Jayden Saguiped (Montville High School), Moon Patnoad (Norwich Free Academy), Sarah Doberger (Stonington High School), Pankhudi Prasad (Waterford High School), and Natalie Gray (Westerly High School).

“I’m proud to get to spend time with these seven students,” says Greenhouse, who speaks highly of the work she’s read so far. “I’ve seen some really delightful images, and my job is not to cast a pall over the workshop with criticism but to help them explore the things that concern them and that they’re trying to convey. I want to be respectful of their poems and the subject matter.”

Each of the seven students will read prior to Greenhouse at the event, and the evening’s Musical Voice is Westerly’s Lily Fuller.

“Melanie is an ideal fit to work with these lucky students,” Starr says. “She’s dedicated her life to advocating for poetry, in particular with students and elders. She created our Youth Will Be Served program 28 years ago, and she’s a passionate and devoted teacher.”

Star doesn’t want to overlook Greenhouse’s own contributions to Friday’s event. “And I think Melanie is a darn good poet, and her book is a beauty.”