By Moira Stockton, Research Assistant
Dr. Laura Laffrado, Director of the Ella Higginson Recovery Project, received the Society for the Study of American Women Writer’s (SSAWW) Edition Award for her book Selected Writings of Ella Higginson (2015) at the SSAWW conference in Denver, Colorado on November 10, 2018. Of the Edition Award, the SSAWW website reports, “The SSAWW Edition Award is given every three years at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers’ conference in order to recognize excellence in the recovery of American women writers.”
Dr. Laura Laffrado: I promise I will keep this brief. I am utterly, utterly delighted by this, and especially delighted that this award comes from an an organization so dear to my heart, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. I think I can safely say that the last time Ella Rhoads Higginson’s name would have been publicly proclaimed in the great state of Colorado would have been at the turn of the twentieth century, at the peak of her fame. This would have been around the same time that a review in the Chicago Tribune of her latest book of short stories described her as the author “who put the Pacific Northwest on the literary map.” That was an accurate assessment. Higginson would publish over eight hundred works in her lifetime—I catalogued all of them—she was the recipient of a variety of national literary awards, her poems were set to music and were sung by the major dramatic singers of the day such as Enrico Caruso, and she was elected first Poet Laureate of Washington State. Despite all that, for reasons that every single person in this room understands, she was completely erased from the literary record, pretty much without a trace. It has been one of my pleasures in recovering Ella Higginson to find her self-designed gravestone, a gravestone she designed long after she had been forgotten, on which she had had engraved, “Ella Higginson, Poet – Writer,” just waiting for the moment when sometime in the future she would be found and recovered. I would like to thank the organizers of this wonderful conference. I know how many moving parts there are in a thing like this, and this has been just such a deep pleasure. I would like to close by reading a poem, if you will, by Ella Higginson celebrating her beloved Pacific Northwest, the region with which her writing is most closely associated. This is “The Snow Pearls” from 1897:
I love the pale green emerald,
The ruby’s drop of flame,
The rare and precious sardonyx
Of deeply envied fame;
I love the opal’s restless fire
With green lights interwove,
And e’en the royal amethyst,—
But most of all I love
The string of snow-pearls set around
This great blue sapphire, Puget Sound.
The modest garnet, finely cut,
Gleams like some rich old wine;
I hold the diamond’s crimson flash
As something half divine;
The turquoise—chill December’s gem—
Blue as the blue above,
Is precious unto every heart—
But more than these I love
The string of snow-pearls linked around
This cool, blue sapphire, Puget Sound.
When up Mount Baker’s noble dome
Struggles the morning sun,
And waves of crimson and of gold
Across the pale sky run;
When every fir-tree flashes out
Like a tall gilded spire,
Sweet as a hope rooted in Heaven,
Springs a soft, sudden fire
Upon the snow-pearls strung around
This deep blue sapphire, Puget Sound.
Take, then, all the jewels of the earth
Which only gold can buy—
Not one is worth that glistening chain
Linked in God’s pale green sky!
Let him who will, roam East or West,
On prairie or on sea,
Searching for empty gems—but oh!
Let us contented be
With these pure snow-pearls clasped around
Our own blue sapphire, Puget Sound.
