50. Allison Sansone Connects Writers and Readers at the American Writers Museum Museum Archipelago

When the American Writers Museum opened in Chicago in 2017, it became the first museum in the US to celebrate all genres of writing. Early in the planning phase, founder Malcolm O’Hagan made a couple of key decisions: no artifacts and no single curator.


In this episode, the museum’s programs director Allison Sansone explains how these decisions continue to shape the museum, from a timeline of 100 significant authors of fiction and nonfiction to galleries honoring the craft of writing.


This episode was recorded at the American Writers Museum in Chicago, IL, USA on September 2nd, 2018. This episode was released in tandem with Club Archipelago 5. 50th Episode Extravaganza 🎉.


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Topics Discussed:
00:00 Intro
00:15 Museum Archipelago's 50th Episode 🎉
01:50 The American Writers Museum
02:00 Programs Director Allison Sansone
02:15 Museum Founder Malcolm O’Hagan
02:50 Early Decisions
03:45 American Voices Exhibit
05:30 The Mind of a Writer Gallery
06:45 Story of the Day Exhibit
08:20 The Craft of Writing the Museum
09:11 Outro







Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 50. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript




[Intro]

Well, not quite. This is the 50th episode of Museum Archipelago, and I’m celebrating by compiling this message, from listeners like you.

[Message from Museum Archipelago listeners]

Thanks so much for being a listener for these first 50 episodes. It really means a lot. If you can’t sill get enough, support the show directly by becoming a member of Club Archipelago on Patreon. You get access to a bonus podcast feed, where I just posed a retrospective on the first 50 episodes of the show, and how the podcast media and museum media landscape have changed since the first episode.

Now, onto the next 50. Let’s really get started.


Allison Sansone: The idea is to highlight the impact that writing can have on the culture and in our daily lives. My Name is Allison Sansone, I’m the programs director here at the American Writers Museum.


The American Writers Museum opened in May of 2017 on the second floor of a stately but nondescript building on Michigan Ave. But the story of the museum begins decades ago, when the founder of the museum, Malcolm O’Hagan, immigrated to the United States from Ireland.


Allison Sansone: He is a lover of literature and a fan of American writing, and after a visit back home to Ireland, to the Irish writers museum in Dublin, he came back to DC and asked around about where the American Writers Museum might be. Hearing that we didn’t have one, he said, I’ll fix that, and 10 years later, here we are.


Those 10 years were filled with decisions about what to include in the museum — and what to leave out.


Allison Sansone: Malcolm made a couple of decisions that are very important in the design of the museum. The first is we are not to make this an artifact-based space. Malcolm tells this great story: he’s a docent at the Library of Congress and he’ll take people over to see the Gutenberg bible. It’s in a glass case, so you can’t touch it. It’s in German, so you can’t read it. People absorb a snippet of information about it, they take a selfie with it, and they leave. He really wanted this to be a place where people could really dive into the writers and their works and learn something. The other decision that was made really early on was to not have a single curator. We had more than 40 subject matter experts from all across the country, all different literary and eth