2025 QUARRY FARM FELLOWS

Talia Argondezzi is a satirist and humor writer whose work has been featured in McSweeney’s, The New Yorker Daily Shouts, and several other humor publications, both print and online. She specializes in academic and literary humor, and, in 2023, became the first writer to have three comedy pieces on McSweeney’s year-end most-read list. Inspired by Twain’s tongue-in-cheek advice essays, she wrote a satirical self-help book called Lean the F*ck Out (2023), which light-heartedly pushes back against girl-boss hustle culture. She directs the writing and speaking program at Ursinus College, where she teaches humor writing, American literature, and writing pedagogy.

At Quarry Farm, I will complete my forthcoming humor book, Bedtime Stories for Academics: Funny Fairy Tales to Help Faculty, Staff, and Grad Students Survive the Semester. The collection imagines familiar stories from literature, Mother Goose, mythology, and folklore, transforming them into irreverent satire of the issues that keep higher education workers up at night. The collection will include a chapter inspired by Twain’s most canonical novel and tentatively titled “Professor Huck Finn Fakes His Own Death to Avoid Attending One More Faculty Meeting”; other planned chapters include “Hester Prynne Demands Her Scarlet ‘A’ Be Changed to an ‘A+,’” “Professor Rip Van Winkle Awakens to Discover He’s Been Canceled,” and “Captain Ahab Writes Letters of Recommendation to the Crew of the Pequod.” With any additional time, I will start my next humor book: AITA, Socrates? Dead Writers Solve Modern Problems asks what would happen if the greatest writers and thinkers of all time were called upon to weigh in on the inane arguments and dilemmas of today. I will use a few of Twain’s lesser-known satirical advice essays and pamphlets to let Twain give his opinion on contemporary challenges. I’m so excited to use comedy to bring these classics of American literature to a broader, non-specialist audience.

Quarry Farm and the Center for Mark Twain Studies are important components of this project because the farm itself and the Center’s holdings of Mark Twain are components that the majority of teachers and pre-service teachers—both English and Social Studies—have little to no concrete information on. And, if the teachers are unaware or are too afraid, our students around the country may never, ever, experience this man, his time, his phenomenal body of work. Especially important to me is the dearth of substantive knowledge teachers and students of color have not only of the man and his work, but also, and equally as important, the historical time period in which Mark Twain not only wrote but also his impact around the world—an impact that only his speeches, interviews, notes/journals, and letters reveal so clearly.

Using my time at the Farm will allow me not only to make use of the primary documents but also to make use of photographing the outside of the farm and grounds—again for the myriad of teachers, students, and librarians who will never, ever make the pilgrimage to this, to me, sacred site. In and of itself, the new book is unique and different in content, approach, and depth. Having the real presence of Quarry Farm and the Center for Mark Twain Studies as critical and prescient resources, readers can see and experience through the lens of a teacher, one like them: one with whom many of them are aware and with whom they already feel a connection. My ultimate aim is to foment a new, and hopefully, a more willing audience for not only the teaching of Mark Twain pieces, but more importantly, the keeping of this writer, husband, father, and thinker in classrooms around this country forever.

In and of itself, the new book is unique and different in content, approach, and depth. Having the real presence of Quarry Farm and the Center for Mark Twain Studies as critical and prescient resources, readers can see and experience through the lens of a teacher, one like them: one with whom many of them are aware and with whom they already feel a connection. My ultimate aim is to foment a new, and hopefully, a more willing audience for not only the teaching of Mark Twain pieces, but more importantly, the keeping of this writer, husband, father, and thinker in classrooms around this country forever.

Michael Czarnecki is a poet, photographer, oral memoirist and small press publisher. In 1995 Michael gave up other work to devote his time and life to creativity. Since then he has made his living solely through creative work. In the last 30 years he has given hundreds of featured readings throughout the country. His Poems Across America Tour in 2013, a 14-week journey, featured a reading in each of the 48 contiguous states. Michael has had 18 chapbooks and books published, including The Rockwell Museum: Poetry Inspired by the Collection, a collection of ekphrastic poems with accompanying paintings. As a photographer he has produced three traveling photo shows and 15 of his photos have been used on covers of books.

I have read of Mark Twain mentioning willows and oaks and summertime lightning in his writing about Quarry Farm. I would like to research to find more of what he may have written specifically about the place. Did he mention flowers and birds? Other trees besides willow and oak? Weather conditions other than thunder-storms? I know much has changed at Quarry Farm in the time since Mark Twain was last there. Yet, I’m sure there are some consistencies that have also remained. I’d like to explore those consistencies and changes with photos and words.

Conventional, and indeed ancient, wisdom has it that humans are unique in the animal kingdom because we are the only sentient beings who laugh. Yet contemporary research in neuroscience has demonstrated that rats are ticklish. What is more, they seem to possess a “laugh center” in their brains. Research in bioacoustics has also revealed that nonhuman animals laugh, and not just our evolutionary relatives, i.e., chimpanzees and gorillas. Dogs laugh. Dolphins laugh. Birds in general have—it might be said—a sense of humor. So what? My recent scholarship, and the work that I will continue to pursue at Quarry Farm, grapples with this question. More specifically, I will delve into what it might suggest that laughter is not unique to human animals and, relatedly, what nonhuman animal laughter might suggest about the significance of our own ostensibly exceptional capacity to laugh, to be humorous, and to embody a comic spirit. Mark Twain is essential to this line of inquiry not only because he was a notable advocate for animal welfare but also because of how much nonhuman animals feature in his writing. Furthermore, the time in which he wrote was a time when people were adopting a broad sense of what Harriet Ritvo calls “rhetorical animals” and, following Susan Pearson, looking at oppression and sufferance as evidence of misplaced ideations about our own exceptionalism. Among Twain’s works to which I will pay particular attention are essays and stories like “A Dog’s Tale,” “Birds with a Sense of Humor,” “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” “Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man,” “The Laughing Jackass of Adelaide,” “The Idiotic Ant,” “The Dogs of Constantinople,” and “The Phosphorescent Sea-Serpent,” as well as “A Horse’s Tale,” “The Jumping Frog,” “A Fable,” and—of course—“The Lowest Animal.” I will also work through portions of The Mysterious Stranger and Letters From the Earth with a specific focus on expressions of laughter that capture the tension between the human and the nonhuman (i.e., spiritual, or supernatural). Put simply, the point will be to really dwell on Twain’s notion that a sense of humor is part and parcel of human nature as well as the natural “comic” way for many, many animals whose lived experiences can reveal a great deal about who we are, and who they are, too. I will consider Twain’s concept of laughter as a primal thing, a natural thing, and thus a transnational thing for so many creatures of the world, and thereby rethink that old idiom of imagining not “if animals could speak” but rather “if animals could laugh.”

Thomas W. Howard is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University (Ankara, Türkiye). His research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature and science as well as the environmental humanities. His current book project, Aphoristic Science: Ecology, Psychology, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, centers an open-ended aphoristic style in the emergence of transatlantic scientific methods, especially among the American Transcendentalists and Pragmatists. His research has been previously supported by The Huntington Library and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany. His work appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

Susan Poulson is a Professor of History at the University of Scranton in northeast Pennsylvania, where she teaches twentieth-century US history and the history of American women. Her publications have been in gender, higher education and women’s rights and include Suffrage: The Epic Struggle for Women’s Right to Vote (Praeger, 2019), which chronicles the seventy-two-year struggle for the Nineteenth Amendment. Her current research is on the rising use of the insanity defense during the Gilded Age.

At Quarry Farm, she will be writing a manuscript that examines two high-profile murder trials in 1870-71. Both defendants were involved in love triangles and pled not guilty by reason of insanity, a new legal concept imported from Great Britain. Many Americans were skeptical of this defense, however, including Samuel Clemens, who warned that attorneys will use it to manipulate gullible jurors and undermine justice. He railed against its abuse in editorials and in his first co-authored novel, The Gilded Age. She will also examine how Clemens’ observations of American life relate to the rise of an ostensible new disease—neurasthenia—first “discovered” by respected physician Dr. George Beard in 1869. Dubbed “Americanitis” for its high rate of diagnosis in burgeoning Gilded Age cities, the disease, Beard asserted, was caused by the frenetic nature of modern American life.