To add to the WLCB team publications list, I recently published “The Celebrities of John Street” as the inaugural installment of a new column, Long Ago and Right Here, which will be appearing in the Bolton Hill Bulletin. The piece focuses on a looooong newspaper article that Club member Emily Lantz wrote when she was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, on the supposed “celebrities” living on a quiet little street in my neighborhood (which we briefly visited while on our WLCB writers’ walking tour in April).

Featured in the article—withhold your astonishment–are several Club members, including Lucy Meacham Thruston (who didn’t actually live on John Street), and Katharine Pearson Woods (who wasn’t living there at the time).

Clearly, Lantz was using her post at the Sun to help make the work of women writers visible and found creative ways of doing so. She continued to feature women writers, artists, and professionals throughout her long career. You can read many of her pieces in the Virtual Library section of the site.

Rereading this piece, I realized that it included a picture of one of the authors we had not been able to locate during the semester: Katharine Pearson Woods. It’s a terrible reproduction (scanned from microfilm, it looks like) but at least we get a glimpse of her. I’ve now included it in her bio on the WLCB website.

Meanwhile, Marina has been working on collecting all the publication information for the Parole Femine anthology into a provenance list which we’ll be including in the book. She also has found a whole bunch of publications from a newly discovered published Club member, Mary (Marian V.) Dorsey, sister of Hester Dorsey Richardson, which I’ll eventually be including in the Virtual Library. Mary Dorsey published recipes and pieces on home decor and entertaining, as well as some pieces on Maryland history and folklore, in newspapers and magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazar. 

And Cynthia is finishing up the transcriptions of the meeting minutes held at the Maryland Historical Society, which Marina will be proofreading to correct the numerous names and titles that may were incorrectly transcribed.

All this is to say, work on the project continues. More anon.