User:Logatorial/sandbox

The American poet James Merrill and his partner David Noyes Jackson moved to the borough of Stonington, Connecticut, in 1954, purchasing a property at 107 Water Street. It had once been a nineteenth-century residential and commercial structure that had first served as a drug store and a residence for the owner's family. Merrill spent summers in Stonington borough until his death in 1995. Village life and the apartment itself inspired some of his most important work, including The Changing Light at Sandover, his book-length epic poem based on Merrill’s and Jackson’s communications with the spirit world by means of a Ouija board in the turret dining room on the third floor. After James Merrill’s death in 1995, the Stonington Village Improvement Association (SVIA) transformed the Jackson and Merrill apartments into a place for writers to live and work. A group of Stonington residents and friends of Merrill’s began a program that would make the apartment available, rent-free, to writers and scholars for academic-year residencies. The Merrill apartment looks much the way Merrill left it. The spirit of the place, the personally eclectic décor, the wallpaper, the views of three different states on the Long Island Sound, the light, the privacy, and Merrill’s spirit remain. In the years since Merrill’s death, nearly thirty writers have used this space as a residence and retreat.