Susie loves Henry!
Schools like Cushing Academy have a lot of the same things. Beautiful playing fields. Libraries. Classrooms and dormitories. But only Cushing has Dr. Susie Carlisle. Currently she’s the Dean of Faculty and Academics, but in her 27-year association with Cushing, she has been a full-time teacher, parent, part-time teacher, and now dean, and next spring, dean and teacher again. She has passionate interest in Henry David Thoreau as a person, thinker, philosopher, and writer. We thought it was time to get to the bottom of it.
Q: So how did it all start with you and Henry David Thoreau? What’s the real truth?
Dr. Carlisle: The real truth is it certainly didn’t start in high school. I’d love to be able to say that I’m trying to share with my students what I discovered when I was their age, but that would be a lie. So I don’t even try. I tell my students that I didn’t care very much for Henry. Maybe that’s why I’m so committed to making him real for high school kids, because I think he can be relevant to them.
I had already fallen in love with Thoreau when I was teaching at Franklin Pierce College in the early ‘90s, but it really wasn’t until I started my doctoral work that I fell head over heels.
Q: Do you think it was something about that moment in your life that Thoreau had something more to say to you?
Dr. Carlisle: I had made a conscious decision when I was 40 to go back and pursue my doctorate. I love American lit. And I knew I wanted it to be 19th century. But it was Henry that got me going.
Q: Here you are – not far from Walden. Does a sense of place add something to your teaching?
Dr. Carlisle: It’s much more powerful teaching here in New England because you can connect, I think, more deeply – or at least students can feel it more deeply. It’s one thing to talk about these ideas and concepts – transcendentalism is so difficult to grasp. It’s difficult for us who are alleged scholars to even define. But that doesn’t mean that high school students can’t get it.
I don’t take my students to Walden until we’re finished with reading Walden, excerpts from his journal, excerpts from Walking, and Emerson’s Nature. At this point, they’ve been outside and writing and drawing in their journals and trying to find the miraculous in the common all around them.
Then we go to Walden. Sometimes they’re disappointed with it, but it becomes real for them in two ways because they really do get a sense of what the place is like and what it probably felt like for Henry.
They see that it’s not out in the middle of the wilderness and it debunks all those myths of Thoreau being a hermit and never bathing and only going into town to eat his mother’s pies and stuff like that. They understand that it’s possible to have an experience like his and still be less than a mile from a town. Henry found both the wild and his sense of self almost in his own backyard.
Even so, when they see his cabin for the first time, some of them say, “Oh my gosh, I could never do this. It’s too small.” But usually most of them say, “This is so cool. I could do this.”
Q: There’s a lot about Thoreau that has the voice of a reformer with tough standards.
Dr. Carlisle: Exactly. There is that prickliness. But if I can help them understand the connectedness with nature that he has, that then helps confirm his sense of place and sense of self. Then they get it. And some are always going to be resistant to it and that’s OK. Nothing like this can be forced.
We’ve got Thoreau the naturalist and Thoreau who takes his ideas about nature and cooperation in that world and brings it to the human world, saying it’s not okay if we try and dominate another group of people simply because they’re from Africa or dominate the wild and nature. One of the messages I want to convey is that one person can make a difference. Don’t think that just because you are 16 or 17 years old that you can’t make your voice heard.
Q: Dr. Carey and I were talking about Ashburnham’s proximity to Concord, Boston, New Bedford, and the homes of all these literary figures.
Dr. Carlisle: Cushing is definitely a good place to be, not only because of this access, but also because of the particular passion that Norm and I have for Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and the others. We want to bring them back to life, to recall them, and say to our students that you, too, can feel the same kinds of things that they did in the same places and then take what you’ve learned from that experience to wherever it is you go.
Q: Writing your dissertation about Henry wasn’t enough for you. You built his cabin, too.
Dr. Carlisle: Yes! I was starting my dissertation, I was teaching full-time, I had three children in various stages of high school and college. Why not build the cabin? What the heck – I had a little free time.
I’d finished my coursework, was starting to work on my comprehensives, and I already knew what my dissertation was going to be. The man who built our house asked me if I ever thought of building Thoreau’s cabin. And I said, Well, no, but let’s do it. So we drove to Concord and looked at Henry’s cabin. I got a set of the plans and my husband Mark and I started.
It’s all post and beam – the whole frame is pegged. Once the frame was up, my husband did the bulk of it. But he and I shingled it, we did the attic floor together, we did the cabin floor together. I helped him hang the sheetrock.
Q: You’ve got equity.
Dr. Carlisle: I’ve got equity. But it really was a labor of love on my husband’s part, too.
Q: And then you wrote your dissertation.
Dr. Carlisle: That’s right, that’s where I wrote the dissertation. And it was absolute bliss because I would go out in the morning, open the door like Henry did when he lived in his cabin and wrote every morning. Bugs would fly in, birds would be right there on the granite step. And it was home.
Q: What brought you to Cushing?
Dr. Carlisle: In 1980 my sister-in-law was teaching here and said there was an English opening. So I interviewed and got the job and just fell in love with the place. I loved it for two reasons. I loved the size. I loved the fact that you were with the students all the time, as opposed to a public school or an independent day school. I got to know them. And there’s a level of investment in the students at a boarding school that you don’t – that you don’t always get in other schools. I also realized that I’d finally found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to teach. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
What makes Cushing unique is that deep level of commitment first and foremost to the students, which I know is present at other private schools, and I wouldn’t want to say that it isn’t.
But here, there’s an acceptance, an unequivocal acceptance of kids for who they are, where they are, at this exact moment in their lives. We absolutely have high expectations for all of them. But on their own terms. We truly look at the individual child.
There’s that level of passion that we have that’s conveyed to the students that helps them believe in themselves in a way that maybe they didn’t before they got here.
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