Ladies Night at the Dreamland

by Sonja Livingston

Overview

At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself.

Harnessing the power of language, Livingston breathes life into subjects who led extraordinary lives—as rule-breakers, victims, or those whose differences made them cultural curiosities—bringing together those who slipped through the world largely unseen with those whose images were fleeting or faulty so that they, too, remained relatively obscure. Included are Alice Mitchell, a Memphis society girl who murdered her female lover in 1892; Maria Spelterini, who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1876; May Fielding, a “white slave girl” buried in a Victorian cemetery; Valaida Snow, a Harlem Renaissance trumpeter; a child exhibited as Darwin’s Missing Link; the sculptors’ model Audrey Munson; a Crowwarrior; victims of a 1970s serial killer; the Fox Sisters; and many more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820349138
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Series:	Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Series
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

SONJA LIVINGSTON is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first book, Ghostbread (Georgia), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for Nonfiction. She is also the author of the recent essay collection Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses.

SONJA LIVINGSTON is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first book, Ghostbread (Georgia), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for Nonfiction. She is also the author of the recent essay collection Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses.

Table of Contents

The Dreamland 1

Sly Foxes 7

We Ghosts 19

Some Names and What They Mean 27

A Thousand Mary Doyles 39

Mad Love: The Ballad of Fred and Allie 43

Dare 57

The Goddess of Ogdensburg: A Rise and Fall in Seventeen Poses 63

Big 79

Manuela, with a Hip 87

On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees: A Study in Two Photographs 99

Meroines of the Ancient World 103

Twyla 115

The Opposite of Fear 119

Human Curiosity: A Circular Concordance 131

The Second Morning 139

Rosalie, from the Philippines 147

Blue Kentucky Girl 153

The Other Magpie 163

Freeze-Frame 175

A Girl Called Memory: A Triptych 183

Return to the Dreamland 187

Acknowledgments 195

Sources 197

Editorial Reviews

Livingston engages her subjects in a deeply personal way, bringing her own fascination, sympathy, and identification with them into her accounts. . . . Livingston’s visceral understanding of the myriad ways the world confines women and destroys them, robbing them of the fullness of what they might have been, gives the stories in Ladies Night a power they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Chapter16.org - Maria Browning

We are unlikely to forget the women we encounter at the Dreamland. Livingston is concerned with names and their meanings, and her meditation on the women’s names becomes like a spell for remembrance. But it’s more than repetition that mesmerizes. Livingston’s language enchants us like lyrics crooned by a dance hall chanteuse.

Colorado Review - Kim Kankiewicz

A vibrant and textured creation of women throughout history, some of them famous, others notable for the bravery of their more private lives. Line by line, the writing sings. What a marvelous collection of essays. What a glorious celebration.

author of The Bright Forever - Lee Martin

What’s remarkable about [Livingston’s] latest work is how she’s captured the ability to sustain engaging narratives through such vividly reflexive poetic prose.

PopMatters - Hans Rollman

★ 2016-02-03
Radiant essays inspired by "slivers and bits" of real women's lives. The Dreamland was both a real dance club that burned down in 1923 and a dreamscape, where Livingston (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis; Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses, 2015, etc.) reunites women as disparate as activist Susan B. Anthony, tightrope walker Maria Spelterini, artists' model Audrey Munson, and poet Adelaide Crapsey. The author calls her startlingly original essays literary nonfiction, but some read more like historical fiction, spun as they are from documented sources; and some—a brief evocation of Virginia Dare, for example—read like lyrical prose poems. Livingston is taken with wild women: daredevils and rebels who do not "stick to crosswalks and curfews and submit to regular cholesterol testing." Human wildness, she writes, "is a precious and fleeting thing," worth celebrating. Among the subjects in her panoply are schoolgirl Alice Mitchell, who fell in love with Freda Ward and proposed that they elope, Alice dressed like a man. Freda's family quashed the plan, leaving Alice so bereft that she cut Freda's throat. Insanity was the verdict at her trial: her love for a girl, in turn-of-the-century Memphis, "was considered more outrageous than the act of murder." Based on scanty correspondence given to Livingston by her mother-in-law, she revives the mysterious Manuela Grey, who sailed on the Saturnia for Bologna, to be treated at an orthopedic hospital for arthritis in her hip. It is 1935, and Livingston pictures her as Claudette Colbert, a fashionable sophisticate who reads Edna St. Vincent Millay. In portraits of 15-year-old May Fielding, a white slave; Krao, a girl exhibited as Charles Darwin's missing link; and a shunned Filipino classmate, the author displays uncommon empathy: "Aren't we all looking for something to connect us to others while locating the truth of who we are?" Wise, fresh, captivating essays.

Kirkus Reviews

A swirling, wise dream of a book, filled with gorgeous writing and a poignant crowd of characters, rescued from the stream of history with ardent insight.

author of The Beauty of Ordinary Things - Harriet Scott Chessman

These essays—sometimes charming, sometimes searing, always revealing—investigate history, gender, and the bittersweet stories of those often veiled or suppressed. Livingston writes with a gentle and inquiring spirit, a keen intellect, and a deeply compelling lyrical voice.

author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats - Kristen Iversen