Literature, Writing, and Language   

The course will have speaking, reading, and writing. The primary objective is to teach enough vocabulary and expressions that you can begin to speak and understand others who speak Spanish. We will build a community of safety together, where everyone is praised for trying to communicate and there is no room for criticism. It is difficult to learn another language, making it necessary for everyone to be patient with one another. We can laugh together while we all make mistakes!

Required text: Dorothy Richmond, Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, Fifth Edition

Sorry, this isn’t a course about fashion sense and/or adult beverages. Instead, it asks what Charlotte Perkins Gilman, O. Henry, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, and four other authors have in common. Answer: They each have written a short story that appears on a “great” or “best” list of national and international short stories.

So, what makes these “shorts” memorable? Do they surprise you with unexpected elements? How do the authors elevate your reading experience? What makes them great or the best? Join me as we determine for ourselves whether they are the BEST!

As for “the unexpected part,” the commentaries are 21st century essays that explore the Beatles and hip-hop. Thus, one might ask: what relationship exists between the “shorts” and the “commentaries?” Maybe none. However, perhaps our readings, analyses, and discussions will reveal multiple connections.

Soft copies of all stories and essays will be emailed to participants.

James McBride's The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in the Chicken Hill area of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. This sets up a sense of mystery as the narrative jumps back nearly 50 years to explore the town, its secrets, and its people.

Chicken Hill is a vibrant community of Jewish and Black immigrants--a mix of characters with intertwined lives and shared histories. McBride, who is Black and Jewish, tells their stories with affection, humor, and some vexation with the world when a deaf boy in town is left without a mother and the state looks to take him into their custody.

It's a well-written, intriguing story about people who are struggling, and their ambitions, successes and disappointments. In this compassionate, life-affirming and often funny novel, McBride explores what it means to live in a community on the margins of "white" America.

Required text: James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

Imagine a memoir in 17 syllables all about beauty and endings, the two greatest topics in literature. Personal stories are so relevant today, but how to take a different, exciting, simple, and approachable path, both for writer and reader? Poetry is the answer! Many Asian forms in particular, such as the familiar haiku, are conducive to pithy statements that embody far more than the actual words, an unexpected impetus to the memoirist ready to share sparkling bits of experience, but perhaps not a full book. This class bridges reading, appreciation, discussion, and a generative writing workshop to create mini-memoir poems. Presentations first offer a wide-ranging variety of poetic and short poetic prose works for analysis and inspiration; second, explanations of structure, style, punctuation (or not), and how to find the “right words” to begin the path toward valuable experiential memoir; and third, end with composition and time to share and appreciate creative efforts with participants.

Book club and armchair travel! We focus on mysteries with a powerful sense of place, this time exploring various American regions or cities. A different author/series each week gives us stories to explore place as a character and how that location plays into the plot. Choose a couple or read a book a week, but plan to join in the wide-ranging discussions every week.

The novel is set in East Texas during the Great Depression. A family of women, abandoned by their husband and father, set out to rebuild their lives through their own ingenuity and resourcefulness. The book should be purchased before class begins and is available online and at local bookstores. Although you may be tempted, please do not begin reading before class.

We approach reading as discovery in a reading community; therefore, much of the reading is done in class so that, together, we encounter the text as a group. We encourage all class members to mark their books to aid in discussion.

Required text: Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather. Please purchase before class begins.

The Bible is considered the foundation document of Western thought and is often taken as absolute truth. Modern scholarship views the Hebrew Bible as an anthology that expresses diverse ideas through stories rich in ambiguity. Join us to see if you agree. This class will take a fresh look at the Hebrew Bible. By closely examining biblical narrative, we are challenged regarding motive, moral character, and psychology. Robert Alter gives us tools to address those challenges in The Art of Biblical Narration (not required). We will dig deeply into selected material alongside 30-minute lectures from Professor Amy Jill Levine (The Old Testament, a Great Courses series). She is a widely sought-after speaker who has delivered talks on biblical subjects to academic and non-academic audiences, many of which are available via YouTube. Each week we will watch two lectures and struggle with selected texts.

In this deep dive into the elegant and accessible poetry of Mary Oliver, we'll study a wide variety of her poems in depth and then have fun doing our own writing. You'll have an opportunity to share, but this is always optional. We hope most of all that students enjoy the process of creating a poem—it's not as difficult as it appears. We welcome aspiring or practicing poets of all levels, but take particular interest in those who are new to the craft.

How low can a family go? For Faulkner’s Compsons it is alcoholism and child abuse, mental impairment and mutilation, promiscuity and incestuousness, madness and suicide, warped time, and raging revenge. Then, rinse and repeat!

“The Sound and the Fury” is a recondite telling and re-telling of the coming of age of four children amidst this dissolution and the decay of the South’s Lost Cause mythology. But there is a Black family deeply entangled in this story, and the voices and actions of “the help” stand in muffled but meaningful contrast to the surrounding disintegration. Join us in taking on the book that made Faulkner’s reputation and explore whether the past is, indeed, ever really past.

Required text: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, with an Introduction by Casey Cep, Vintage International Edition (2025), ISBN 978-0-679-73224-2

No class on 1/28.

Virginia Woolf is considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century because of her modernist “stream of consciousness” technique and because of her feminist essays. She was also at the center of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, writers, and philosophers who came to define the intellectual life of England between the two world wars.

In this novel, published in 1927, a large family and their guests spend summers in a house in the Hebrides, just as Woolf and her family spent summers in St. Ives in Cornwall in the Southwest of England. The novel presents the personalities and tensions among this large cast of characters. Additionally, Woolf raises issues of gender, change, bereavement, finding meaning in artistic creation, and the ways that memories and the past continually impinge on the present. Join us as we explore To the Lighthouse.

Required text: To the Lighthouse, the Virginia Woolf Library Annotated Edition. ISBN 978-0-156-9073922. (Please obtain this edition so we can all be, literally, on the same page.)

Join us for an engaging literary journey through brief, captivating lectures on the rich history of short forms of literature. This class is designed for participants to dive deep into the art of concise expression, primarily through the reading and writing of short literary constructs. You'll have the opportunity to share your insights and discoveries in lively small group discussions, within a collaborative learning environment.

Our focus on brevity will invite you to experience and contribute to the literary legacy of the shortest forms—including sentences, maxims, aphorisms, anecdotes, couplets, quatrains, characters, captions, comments, notes, and tweets.

Our rich reading list features timeless works, including Sei Shonagon's enchanting "The Pillow Book," Benjamin Franklin's clever "Poor Richard’s Almanac," and Ambrose Bierce's sharp and witty "The Devil’s Dictionary."

Embark on this exploration of literature’s succinct forms and discover the power of words in their most concise and transformative expressions!

Required texts: They are all Dover Thrift Edition paperbacks, and the total cost of the six books is $30: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagaon ($5), The Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce ($5), Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard’s Almanac ($4), Women’s Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations ($5), Book of African-American Quotations ($8), Music: A Book of Quotations ($3)