About the Bishie Project

Bishie i​s a participatory sound installation, facilitated by artist Molly Evans, in which listeners are able to explore the teenage correspondence from (future poet laureate) Elizabeth Bishop to her long-time sweetheart and friend Louise Bradley, great-granddaughter of Rebecca and Theophilus A. Wylie. The two met as teenagers at Camp Chequesset on Cape Cod in 1925 and continued to exchange letters until 1950. The creative prose written to Bradley from Bishop shows evidence of the restrained and coded love language indicative of the queer experience of LGBTQ+ identifying individuals of the time.

The goal of Bishie is to vocalize these singular experiences through readers of many voices in the contemporary LGBTQ+ community. These letters represent a slice of Elizabeth Bishop’s coming-of-age experience during a time when freedom of queer expression was simply not permitted. Bishop, unlike thousands of LGBTQ+ individuals like her, had an archive of her queer youth through her dedication to the art of letter-writing. By expanding this archive with vocalizations from a wide representation of the queer community, we can imagine the legion of unsung voices for whom many of these experiences also held true.

Elizabeth Bishop was known for her letters. In 1971 she even taught a seminar series about letter-writing, as she believed it was its own creative category of the written word. She was known to have had only a handful of steadfast penpals in her lifetime, quickly discontinuing written contact with those for whom the art of letter-writing did not come naturally. Although we only have an archive of one side of the conversations between Bradley and Bishop, we know that Bradley was a creative and curious letter writer, as evidenced by the IU-archived correspondence to her family. She filled her pages with poetry, humor, and light, and we can only assume that this was one of the main reasons that Bradley and Bishop were enamored enough with one another to correspond for 25 years.

These letters are part of the Wiley House Museum Archives at Indiana University.