The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell

by Michael Griffith

Overview

The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell is a literary love letter to the joys of wandering graveyards. While working on a novel, author and longtime Cincinnati resident Michael Griffith starts visiting Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, the nation’s third-largest cemetery. Soon he’s taking almost daily jaunts, following curiosity and accident wherever they lead. The result is this fascinating collection of essays that emerge from chance encounters with an interesting headstone, odd epitaph, unusual name, or quirk of memory. Researching obituaries, newspaper clippings, and family legacies, Griffith uncovers stories of race, feminism, art, and death.

Rather than sticking to the cemetery’s most famous, or infamous, graves, Griffith stays true to the principle of ramble and incidental discovery. The result is an eclectic group of subjects, ranging from well-known figures like the feminist icon and freethinker Fanny Wright to those much less celebrated— a spiritual medium, a temperance advocate, a young heiress who died under mysterious circumstances. Nearly ninety photos add dimension and often an element of playfulness.

The Speaking Stone examines what endures and what does not, reflecting on the vanity and poignancy of our attempt to leave monuments that last. In doing so, it beautifully weaves connections born out of the storyteller’s inquisitive mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947602298
Publisher:	University of Cincinnati Press
Publication date:	04/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Michael Griffith’s previous books are Trophy (named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2011), Bibliophilia, and Spikes. He is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and was the Founding Editor of Yellow Shoe Fiction, an original-fiction series from Louisiana State University Press.

Table of Contents

A State of Ungress: Composing as Rambling
The Absent Guest: Leon Van Loo
Bake Visibly!: Gustav Huenefeld
“A Great Awkward Bunglehood of Woman”: Fanny Wright
Interlude: The Bank-Shot Unmemoir
“Death’s Taxicab”: Willard Hess and Martin Hale Crane
Accidental Charon: Jacob Strader, Dred Scott, and Body-Snatching
“Due Allowance for Foam”: Martha McClellan Brown and the Ohio Women’s Crusade
“Another Well-Picked Skeleton”: Homunculi, Mail-Order Tree Stumps, Petrified Logs, and the Many, Many Charles Millers
Outlook Hazy: Laura Pruden, Harry Houdini, and Arthur Conan Doyle Interrogate the Spirits
Ghosts of the Walldogs: Gus Holthaus
Interlude: The Crypto Auto-Obituary
“And They Did Kill Her by Inches”: The Strange Case of Carrie Elder
The Sculptor, His Son, the Odd Fellows, and the Weird Assassin: Louis Rebisso(s) and Oscar Mundhenk
Six Degrees of Jonathan Cilley
The Permeable Earth
Acknowledgments
Index
Notes
Illustration
Credits                                                                             
 

Editorial Reviews

"Michael Griffith's The Speaking Stone is a marvel: a marvel of erudition, a marvel of curiosity and craft, a marvel of intellect and openness. This a book that is obsessed—with gravestones and signs and cities, sure, but also with the stories of the people who made the signs, who are under the stones, who lived in the cities. Those people are gone, but wherever they are, I hope they realize how lucky they are that Michael Griffith is the one telling their stories. By telling their stories, Griffith has come up with a one-of-a kind way of telling our own, and his own. What a wise, funny, deeply humane book!"

Brock Clarke

"Michael Griffith is a masterful and quirky storyteller, and his new book will be known to future generations as one of the great literary oddities. I would be happy to sell it out of the trunk of my car - that’s how much I love The Speaking Stone."

David Kirby

"These essays track the subtle ways history intersects with individuals, and they remind us that pride and ambition lead inexorably to oblivion. Griffith simultaneously sharpens our sympathy for solitary lives and chastens us for harboring fantasies of immortality."

Chattanooga Times Free Press - Sean Kinch

"The Speaking Stone is a brilliant book of essays springing from Griffith’s soulful rambles around a cemetery in Cincinnati. It’s an ingenious anti-memoir full of strange and delightful tales from the lost corners of history, not least among them those concerning the author himself."

author of The Portable Veblen Elizabeth McKenzie

"The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell is a collection of non-fiction essays inspired by its author Michael Griffith’s daily walks in Cincinnati’s historic Spring Grove Cemetery. Each chapter takes a deep dive into the life of one or more of the people whose gravesites Griffith randomly encountered during his constitutionals at sprawling (733 acres) Spring Grove. . . . While The Speaking Stone is deeply researched and written, Griffith has some fun with his work as well, chiefly by throwing pop culture references into the mix."

PopMatters

Griffith is a master storyteller. He begins finitely and then goes everywhere, and we readers are delighted to go with him. He makes the local, universal. This book will appeal to readers everywhere.

Florida State University David Kirby

“A fascinating read. The author’s examples of Fanny Wright, Crane and Breed, and so forth are accurate and compelling. The ironic twists of the Crane and Breed/Hess and Esienhardt scenarios—tied to the assassinated presidents Lincoln and Kennedy—are exquisite exercises in critical thinking. The author’s ties between Jacob Strader, the Supreme Court case Strader v. Graham, the later Dred Scott case, and John Scott Harrison are simply ingenious!”

Northern Kentucky University Paul Tenkotte

2021-02-13
Novelist and English professor Griffith finds a fruitful ground for his research into the past in a vast Cincinnati cemetery, the third largest in the country, that contains poignancies and mysteries alike.

Early on, he confesses to an avidity for obituaries—not just the ones that mark the deaths of the rich and well known, but also those about ordinary folk that “can offer the reader a sense…of the multifariousness of the paths not taken, of the range of occupational choices and ways of contributing to (or wrecking) humanity.” One such obituary commemorates the man who invented the red Solo Cup, another the Chinese-born painter who, unsung, incorporated Song dynasty conventions into his work on the Disney film Bambi. Roaming the 750-acre Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, Griffith limns a wonderland of crypts, tombs, and mausoleums tucked away in profusions of nature—1,200 species of trees and other plants and abundant wildlife. His wanderings introduce us to noteworthy figures from Cincinnati history, including a Belgian-born photographer who was there to record Ulysses S. Grant’s visit to the city with William Tecumseh Sherman; the mother of the British writer Anthony Trollope, who “took her revenge upon fair Porkopolis” (as the city was once known) in scathing prose, offering “a witty and brutal takedown of not only Americans’ reeking, offal-strewn streets, foul habits, and general uncouthness, but also…their hypocrisy about slavery”; the pioneering feminist Fanny Wright, who offended the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe “with her great masculine person, her loud voice, her untasteful attire”; and even the inspired man who invented the modern oven’s glass-windowed door. Along the way, Griffith writes entertainingly of the city’s early breweries, forgotten figures of national politics, local scandals and murders, and the like, concluding with the well-considered thought that when the time comes, “it might be nice to have a stone…for people to stroll past.” It’s a fine prose rejoinder to Spoon River Anthologyand other similar works.

Lyrical reflections on death and remembrance.

Kirkus Reviews