The Rosemary Spell by Virginia Zimmerman Read Free Book Online Page B

four.
    â€œWelcome!” Mr. Cates beams at us. He explains how we’ll research the poets we’ve chosen and then tomorrow, we’ll start assembling our poetry projects. Working with our partners, we’ll put together a binder of poems by our poet but also poems we write that are inspired by the poet. “A conversation in verse,” Mr. Cates explains.
    Mrs. Wallace leads us to a bank of computers and shows us how to find this online thing called the
Dictionary of Literary Biography.
She demonstrates how it works by looking up Shakespeare. I study the portrait of him while she talks about the different kinds of information we can find.
    â€œHe had earrings!” I whisper to Adam.
    He grins. “Like a pirate.”
    â€œThank you, Mrs. Wallace,” Mr. Cates says. “All right, folks, we only have about forty minutes before the bell, so get to work.” He hands out half sheets of blue paper with the assignment printed in a medieval-looking font.
    Adam reads the instructions while I pull the diary from my bag. “For the biography part, we’re supposed to learn about our poet’s life and pick some detail that interests us. Then we’re supposed to read poems by the poet that might be about that detail and also write our own poems about it. Like, if we pick the fact that our poet had a dog, we could write about our own dog.” He looks up at me. “Except neither of us has a dog, so a different detail than that. Obviously.”
    â€œMr. Cates?” I raise my hand. “Adam and I want to do Constance Brooke. Is that okay?”
    â€œI thought you jaded citizens of Cookfield felt overexposed to the celebrated Constance Brooke,” he replies.
    â€œYeah.” Adam shrugs. “But since Rosemary lives in her house and all, we thought, you know, it could be, uh, interesting.”
    â€œIndeed!” Mr. Cates smiles and pushes his curls back. “You may certainly research whatever poet you find ‘uh, interesting.’”
    He winks at us and goes to help Josh and Alex, who are pretending they don’t know how to get off YouTube.
    I set the diary next to the keyboard, where its ancient, cracked cover looks just plain wrong.
    Adam clicks through to the biography site and types
Constance Brooke
in the search box. The first thing that comes up is an entry from
Twentieth-Century American Poets.
    â€œWow!” I say as Adam scrolls down the list of publications. “She wrote a lot more than twenty poems!”
    He gets to the actual biography part, and we read together. She was born in Cookfield in 1914. Her father, Arthur, taught Shakespeare at the university.
    â€œLike your mom,” Adam points out.
    Constance lived with her parents on an island in the river. We already know this. I start skimming. Her mother died in the 1919 flu pandemic when Constance was five.
    â€œThat’s sad!” I exclaim.
    â€œWhat?” Adam catches up. “Oh, that sucks. So it was just her and her dad, I guess.”
    Now we’re both skimming. The 1924 flood destroyed their house. They moved into town. Into my house. Early writing, which they call juvenilia.
    Maybe I should write
juvenilia
in the diary—it is our poetry journal after all—but I don’t want to open the book. I try to pin down whatever is making me uneasy, but it skitters away.
    â€œMaybe we shouldn’t . . .” I begin.
    Adam glances at me. “It’s too late to worry about writing in it, Rosie. Just go ahead.”
    â€œOkay,” I agree, but my stomach churns, like when I have to do a presentation in front of the whole class. I find the page where we jotted notes yesterday and write
juvenilia
at the top and then =
writing she did when she was a kid.
    â€œDoes that mean our poems are juvenilia?”
    Adam cocks his head. “I think it’s only juvenilia if you become a famous writer. It’s, like, retroactive.”
    Mr. Cates appears