Museum Roundup News & Updates from the Maine State Museum April 2022 A Time for Renewal Celebrate April—the beginning of Spring. In this issue of Museum Roundup, we honor National Poetry Month and welcome new ‘Friends.’ Read more below about cherished Maine poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and learn how museum staff are bringing new ideas into programs and exhibits.

The Latest... Learning from our Museum Friends In March, Maine State Museum staff visited the Children’s Museum and Theater of Maine. It was a research trip, but it was also a lot of fun! Starr Kelly, the director of education and exhibits, gave MSM a behind-the-scenes tour of the building which opened last year at Portland’s Thompson’s Point. The museum is a celebration of learning through play, and we’d recommend you visit. Join the Listening Tour! We want to hear from you! We’re collecting feedback from people across the state to learn what they want to see from MSM. In addition to a series of virtual conversations in communities across the state, you can join the tour by filling out this online survey. Your responses will guide the museum’s work in the coming years about exhibits, collections, public programs, and educational offerings. Click here to learn more. Spring and Longfellow In celebration of National Poetry Month we bring you from the Maine State Museum collections an 1898 desk calendar featuring an image of Maine poet and writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the center. Longfellow was born in Portland in 1807 while Maine was still part of Massachusetts. He attended and later taught at Bowdoin College before moving to Cambridge to teach at Harvard University and concentrate on his writing. Among the early great American poets, Longfellow often wrote in a lyric style that explored the beauty and simplicity of nature and life. MSM 2016.64  APRIL I open wide the portals of the Spring  To welcome the procession of the flowers, With their gay banners, and the birds that sing  Their song of songs from their aerial towers. I soften with my sunshine and my showers  The heart of earth; with thoughts of love I glide Into the hearts of men; and with the Hours  Upon the Bull with wreathed horns I ride. From The Poet's Calendar, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

New Staff at the Friends

Ellen Dyer, Friends of the Maine State Museum. Ellen previously worked at Rockport’s Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Maine Memory Network, General Henry Knox Museum, and Patten Free Library. The Friends of the Maine State Museum welcomes Ellen Dyer as its new director of membership and development. In a sense, this is a “welcome back!” Between 2013 and 2018, Ellen held two important positions at the Maine State Museum, first as state-wide coordinator for the Cultural Emergency Resource Coalition (CERC), and later as consulting archivist, during which time she developed a long-range plan for managing and cataloguing the MSM’s archival collections.  A resident of Thomaston, Ellen looks forward to meeting and recruiting many museum “Friends” around the state, to raising funds in support of new museum initiatives, and to participating in the planning process that will lead to the MSM’s major reopening in a couple of years.

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