Emma Walton Hamilton by the Book(s)

Any way you look at it, this has been quite a year for author Emma Walton Hamilton — with both its ups and its downs.

On the upside, 2022 brought the publication of not one, but two books — the first, a picture book for children which Hamilton wrote with her mother, Emmy and Academy Award-winning actress and singer Julie Andrews, the second, a more personal endeavor representing Hamilton’s first foray into the world of published poetry.

But on the downside, with 2022 came the passing of Hamilton’s father, Oscar and Tony Award-winning scenic and costume designer Tony Walton, who died March 2 at age 87.

On a Friday or two before Christmas, Hamilton sat down in the Green Room bar on the third floor of the Sag Harbor Cinema to share the stories behind the creation of both her new books and also reflect on her first holiday season without her dad.

“Last Christmas was hard,” admitted Hamilton. “He came home Christmas Eve and was going into hospice, so we knew it was the last one. This year was also my first birthday without my dad.”

But as she spoke, spirits, it seems, were not all that far away, in a very real and tangible sense. That’s because currently on view at the cinema just beyond the entrance to the Green Room is “Julie and Tony,” an exhibition that pays tribute to Hamilton’s parents and their creative lives together. The display is a family album, of sorts, and among the objects on view are Walton’s early costume and set sketches for the film “Mary Poppins,” (starring Andrews, of course) along with letters and memorabilia from her parents’ personal collections, and artistic collaborations between the three of them, including many children’s books they created together as a family over the years. There is even a photo of baby Emma sitting on her mother’s lap during production of “Mary Poppins.”

And like much of their creative life together, despite very differing audiences, in both of Hamilton’s new books there is a strong connection to family and life in Sag Harbor, where she lives with her husband, Stephen Hamilton, and their two children Sam (who works at Sag Harbor Cinema) and Hope, who is in her freshman year of college.

Hamilton’s new poetry book, which came out in mid-September, is a truly personal project. Titled “Door to Door,” the book-length sonnet explores several phases of Hamilton’s life, as well as one of her ancestors, in free-verse. The poems in the book were the basis of Hamilton’s MFA thesis in the Creative Writing program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she also teaches. Among the references in “Door to Door” is a section of poems dedicated to Prentice Mulford, a real-life figure from 19th century Sag Harbor who has long been a source of intrigue for her.

“The first time I got interested in Prentice Mulford was when my dad lived on Madison Street and we would always go for a walk after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner,” explained Hamilton. “We’d visit Balanchine’s grave and the Broken Mast Monument. One day, I think I was in my early teens, we came across this very substantive gravestone and it said ‘Thoughts are Things,’ and then ‘Prentice Mulford, philosopher.’

“I was like, ‘First of all, how cool that he gets his own philosophy as his epitaph,” she said. “And second, what a statement. ‘Thoughts are things.’”

Mulford, who was born in 1834 and raised in Sag Harbor, became a well-known humor writer and an adventurer of sorts. But perhaps Mulford’s biggest claim to fame was his founding, along with other notable writers, of the popular New Thought philosophy. In the last decade of his life, Mulford lived off the grid in a one-room cabin which he built in the swamps of Passaic, New Jersey. In 1891, he died mysteriously in his boat as he was sailing to Sag Harbor from New York City to visit his sisters here.

“A couple of years, later I was at my mom’s house in Switzerland, I don’t remember why, but I was looking on her bookshelf and all of a sudden I saw this book,” Hamilton said, pulling a little yellow book from her bag that Mulford had penned. “I was like, ‘Wait, Mom, why do you have this book? You know, this guy is buried in Oakland Cemetery.’

“She totally didn’t know that,” added Hamilton. “I opened it up and saw that it was gifted to her from my great Aunt Joan, her mother’s sister, who was a converted Christian Scientist and a big follower of Prentice Mulford.

“So the whole New Thought movement, the Christian Scientists had adopted it themselves,” said Hamilton.

A few years later, Hamilton wrote a column about Prentice Mulford for the Sag Harbor Express and learned more about his life. She discovered his memoir, “Swamp Angel,” in which Mulford tells of inheriting his father’s hotel in Sag Harbor at the age of 14, failing in the business and then heading west to become a writer, among other things.

“He eventually went to the swamps of New Jersey and built a shack, like Thoreau,” said Hamilton. “I was fascinated by that.”

It’s Mulford’s time in the swamp that Hamilton focused on in “Door to Door.” She recalls that the idea to incorporate Mulford into her work came as the result of an assignment in a poetry class for her MFA. Faculty member Julie Sheehan brought in guest poet Marilyn Nelson who had written “Fortunes Bones,” a series of poems in the voice of a slave from Connecticut. Afterward, Sheehan gave students the assignment of writing a poem in the voice of a historic character.

Hamilton knew immediately who her character would be. In “Door to Door,” there’s a section called “Swamp Angel,” seven poems that reference Mulford’s time in New Jersey.

“I definitely feel like he’s here and, to me, it feels like he’s constantly trying to say, ‘Someone notice me, somebody tell my story.’ He keeps injecting himself into my life over the years. I’ve been so fascinated by him all this time,” she said.

Though “Door to Door” is primarily poetry related to Hamilton’s life, there are two departures — the Mulford section, and another part of the book where she pays homage to a man she never met — her great grandfather, William Arthur Morris.

“He was my mother’s grandfather. He was a poet and a he was a coal miner in northern England,” explained Hamilton. “He wrote a lot of poems in his spare time … He was a real swain and ne’er do well, an army deserter. His wife my, great grandmother, was a downstairs maid, he was an alcoholic, he died of syphilis. He was a real dude, and a poet.”

Though Morris ran the coal mine by day, by night he traveled to smoking parties and performed his poetry, sometimes with the guitar.

“And apparently, writing poetry in those days was lucrative enough that somebody tried to steal his poems and pass them off as their own,” said Hamilton. “So he ended up putting up this statement on lampposts, saying ‘I wish to inform the public that several men are duplicating my poems and selling them door to door. If it happens call the police.’”

Hamilton took her great grandfather’s statement and turned it into “Over the Tannoy,” a call and response poem that can be read three ways — first as Morris’s words, secondly as Hamilton’s words, and finally, as two poems put together to form a third poem.

“I had so much fun doing this,” said Hamilton. “After I finished my thesis, Julie said, ‘Poets submit their work to contests. You should probably submit some of your poetry to writing competitions.’”

Hamilton learned about the Bridport Prize poetry contest in England and saw that the poet judging the competition, who was born hearing impaired and had cochlear implants, was specifically looking for poems that had visual interest as well as aural interest on the page.

“I was like, ‘Well, this poem kind of has visual interest, there are two poems that make a third and it has British roots. Maybe I’ll submit this poem.’ So I did… and I won… and I won first prize — 5,000 pounds,” laughed Hamilton. “It blew my mind. So now I get to be a first time poet and a prize-winning poet at the same time.

“Never in a million years when I decided to do poetry for my thesis, did I think, I’m gonna be a published poet,” she said. “That was the furthest thing from my mind. I wanted to do something that is disconnected from all my other writings and is just for me.”

A few weeks ago, Hamilton took “Door to Door” and headed over to Peconic Landing in Greenport, where her stepmother now lives, and offered a reading to residents there.

“I was absolutely amazed. That audience was the perfect audience because they understood the Prentice Mulford reference,” she said. “They also got all the stuff about my great grandfather. You talk about certain specific historic details they were so keyed in and appreciated it.”

Peconic Landing wasn’t Hamilton’s only reading this month. She also visited a group at the other end of the age continuum — the students in grades K-4 at the Ross School where she shared the story of “The First Notes: The Story of DO, RE, MI,” the children’s book which came out November 1. Andrews and Hamilton have co-authored more than 30 books over the years as a mother/daughter team, and this time around, they explore the little known history behind the creation of written music.

Inspired by the song “Do-Re-Mi” which Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote for “The Sound of Music,” the book tells the story of Solfège, the system of music notation invented by a monk named Guido more than 1,000 years ago. Though the picture book is set in Italy, Hamilton explains that there is a Sag Harbor connection to the tale.

“When my son Sam was little, he was taking guitar lessons with a wonderful musician out here, Sarah Greene, and at a certain point she came over and my mom was there and we got into conversation about ‘Do-Re-Mi,’” recalled Hamilton. “Sarah said, well you know ‘Do-Re-Mi’ was invented by this Benedictine monk a thousand years ago. Come to find out, many musicians and music scholars had never heard this story.

“It was amazing to us how seldom this story has been told and how few people know about it,” she added. “There was so little information. So we had to do a deep, deep dive into the research and we reached out to a museum director in Pomposa Italy, medieval scholars and Benedictine monk scholars to piece the whole thing together.”

So as the song says, “Let’s start at the very beginning.” As Hamilton explains it, Guido the Benedictine monk, loved music but in those days, the only way to learn songs was by memorizing them.

“What you would sing in one monastery would be different than another,” said Hamilton. “But he had this idea. From his favorite hymn, Guido noticed there were only six tones, and those tones repeated themselves over and over again, no matter how low or high you sang.

“He heard music and kept thinking, because he worked in a library, there must be a way to write it the same way every time,” she said. “He noticed that this Latin hymn went up the scale. He used the first syllables of the first six lines of that hymn to be the notes. It was ‘Ut, Re, Mi,’ originally. He was the first person to figure out how to notate or write music and teach it in a way that people could read it. Even if they had never heard it before, they knew how to sing it.”

“It was such a cool story,” said Hamilton. “We wrote this during COVID so we couldn’t go to Italy and had to do all research online. But the illustrator we were assigned to is Italian, and she lives in Italy and was able to go to the abbey and did her own research so everything is very specific.”

That illustrator, Chiara Fedele, referenced many features of the abbey where the monk lived, which is now a museum, in her drawings.

“We obviously tell his story, but we also tie it to my mom’s relationship with that song and the film ‘The Sound of Music’ and at the end of the book we have this coda where we say, imagine if Guido could sing the famous song. What fun he would have singing with students. So we end the book with the whole song and envision him using that song to teach his students the solfège.”

When asked why the story of “Do-Re-Mi” from Sam’s long ago guitar lesson in Sag Harbor is just becoming a picture book now, Hamilton explains.

“This is one of those things that stayed in the back of our heads and we were stewing over it. Initially we had a different idea how to approach it. It didn’t work and the publishers were not interested in it.

“But picture book biographies in the last couple years have become a big thing. We finally realized we could actually think of this as a picture book biography of this guy and tie it into the song,” she said. “That’s how we hit on how to do it. Then our publishers were excited. I was looking for something to connect to that is unique to us. We have a unique relationship to this story. When we shared this idea with them they’re, like ‘Yep.’”

It certainly sounds like somebody up there is listening.