Mount Auburn Cemetery Memory Poems: A Conversation with Emily Duggan

Meet 2025-2026 Artist-in-Residence Emily Duggan (she/they). On Sunday, March 29, visitors joined Emily inside Bigelow Chapel for a reading of poems created during her residency at Mount Auburn. At the close of her residency we asked a few questions about her experience.

How do you approach writing a custom poem contemporaneously with a visitor collaborator?

It’s all about listening! Listening with acceptance. During our conversation, my task is to pay attention to everything my collaborator is expressing: the story they’re telling, or the memory they’re recounting, the specific the diction they’re using, the imagery and idioms, and where I can observe particular resonance to them in the moment to their own retelling. Not all of this will make it into the poem, of course, but the best of my poems will be able to serve as a mirror to the story’s teller, but still a mirror shaped like a poem. That is to say, I hope they can see themselves in it right away, but that they might yet be a little surprised by how clearly, as if it’s showing them something they could see the whole time.

How has your creative and professional background (such as in performance, Playback Theatre, improvisation, as a tour guide) influenced your poetry writing?

In this work, I borrow heavily from my training in Playback Theatre, a form of improvisational ensemble performance that requires this type of listening. Practically, this means I try to listen in a way that prioritizes what I am hearing over my reaction to it. One of my core creative values is the belief that everything is worthy of being the subject of a piece of art – it’s just a matter of making the art.

Poetry happens to be the discipline I can do, and the discipline that most readily serves as a repository for the years I’ve spent years both deliberately and incidentally loading my subconscious with imagery, associations, metaphors, quirks and quiddities of language, through curiosity, observation, critique, and what I’m sure is, interpersonally, a maddening fascination with etymology. And, personally, I have always been drawn to creative pursuits that happen in the moment. That’s not to say that there’s not a great amount of preparation involved, just that the process of creating is a key and immediate part of the product. And that the process relies on trusting myself to be, at any moment, as good a listener and as responsive a writer as I can ever be. If I can make that pact with myself, that with every poem I’ll do the best possible job I can, and then after that will keep learning and growing – then the work can happen.

What is your favorite experience, memory, or interaction from your time at Mount Auburn?

It was an honor to become a part of so many people’s visits, and, in so doing, invited into some small aspect of their lives. I learned so much from these conversations – about citizen science, about the flora and fauna around us as we sat together in the landscape, about the passing of time, about what love looks like, about what a life can look like. I spoke to folks who could describe memories of the Cemetery as far back as their childhood, and some every year since; folks who were acquainted with Mount Auburn, but not formally introduced until the onset of the pandemic led them to seek solitude and sanctuary outdoors; people visiting loved ones’ graves or stopping to check in on their own “last address.” I met someone who’d been on more flights that month than I’ve ever taken in my life. I learned about a bird-call app (Merlin Bird ID; a loving, unpaid endorsement) that I’ve opened on many early mornings since, looking out my bedroom window and eagerly reporting “House sparrow!” “Song sparrow!” “American Crow!” to my cat beside me, who is, inexplicably, less interested in the nomenclature. Folks discussed delights and anxieties, lingered on species of flowers, colors, light and dark, and the idea of home; and spoke as often, if not more so, of other people in their lives. I wrote poems for birthdays, for anniversaries – many for transitions; for new beginnings; and fewer than I’d expected of memorials, though the dead were often remembered.  I’m certain, without fact-checking it, that I was writing at Mount Auburn on the single hottest day of the year, the single foggiest day of the year, and the most astonishingly beautiful day each of the spring, summer, and fall. Now, as then, I’m so grateful for all of it.

Are you working on any other poetry projects right now?

As StoryTailor Poems, I’m continuing to reach out to folks and institutions to offer my work as either a speed-focused “poems to go” novelty or as “listening poetry” similar to my work at Mount Auburn, with the vision of supplementing guests’ experiences at other cemeteries, museums, libraries, and cultural centers. In fact, I’ll be set up with a typewriter to that end this coming Saturday morning at the Melrose Public Library – anyone is welcome to come and leave with a poem!

I also have a poetry manuscript I’ve been tinkering with for about a decade – a perfect example of why I favor art that must happen now and then be done with! As soon as I can trick it into leaving the most obsessive corners of my brain, and lock the door behind it, I’ll let you know.

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Emily Duggan (she/they) is a poet and performer insistent that there is art in everything. Her practice of creative improvisation spans customized poetry, Playback Theater, and improv comedy, with a brief stint as an improvisational illustrator. She has performed poetry, improv, or some combination of the two with Boston Poetry Slam, Uptown Poetry Slam (Chicago), the Rozzie Square Theater, and in the Granary Burying Ground with Ghosts & Gravestones Boston. Her writing can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Writers Without Margins, Academic Psychiatry, and any one of 8,000 notebooks scattered across her home. She is @StoryTailorPoems on Instagram, and every now and then remembers to update www.storytailorpoems.com.