The situation, Vivian Gornick explains in this book about the art of personal narrative, is the context or circumstances, while the story is “the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). Gornick argues that the most difficult and important work of memoirists is to understand why… Read More
Author: Kate Stover
“Can you tell a story that doesn’t begin, it’s just suddenly happening?”
In each of the six short stories in this collection, which won the 2015 National book Award, things suddenly happen on the first page: there are no descriptions of the setting, no background information. Instead, the story seems to be already happening. In an interview, author Adam Johnson said, … Read More
“This all sounds very messy”
What I’m looking for – perhaps what we’re all looking for – are learning principles that are most likely to lead to long-term retention – even if they’re messy. In Small Teaching, Jim Lang describes a learning principle called “interleaving” that requires two things: spacing out learning sessions, and … Read More
“Keeping secrets was the family business.”
Five Intriguing Ideas from 2016 Books
This blog focuses on one idea from one book each week, and so selecting just five from the 50 or so that I’ve published in 2016 is a challenge. But after looking through them all, I have to say that the ideas that I enjoyed the most from the books … Read More
Five Best Novels of 2016
The five novels that rose to the top of my 2016 list are:
The best word to describe Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton is exquisite. What I love about Strout is her ability to dive right in to the heat of the moment without engaging in melodrama or … Read More
“Attributes like confidence, enthusiasm, and likability can be perceived in the briefest of exposures.”
In The Spark of Learning, Sarah Rose Cavanagh describes a study where students were asked to rate professors after seeing 30-second videos of lectures that had no audio. The students’ ratings predicted with surprising accuracy the professors’ actual end-of-semester evaluations. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that in teaching … Read More
“There’s work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled!”
This may be Margaret Atwood’s greatest masterpiece. In Hag-Seed, she retells Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by turning it inside-out and adding a layer. It’s a play within a play within a novel. This restructuring results in a hybrid form of story-telling that’s actually very funny. In her version, prisoners discuss … Read More
“Bernard Shaw said you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.”
This is how Michael Billington, “the” British theater critic, who has reviewed more than 9000 plays over the last 50 years, begins his piece on “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles. Charming, gossipy, insightful, authoritative, knowledgeable, and passionate, Billington is a great writer. It’s hard to imagine what kind … Read More
“To look closely with the attention of questioning changes everything.”
“It is,” Jane Hirshfield writes in this collection of essays about poetry, “if undertaken fully, revolutionary.” More stimulating than a triple-shot of espresso, these essays show what can happen when a great poet sets out to describe how poetry is primarily “an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception.” … Read More
“If anything has been learned from this century of research on learning, it is that learning is not one thing but many things.”
What I love about this book is its informed and nuanced contribution to the “lecture vs. active learning” discussion that has been bubbling up for some time now at college campuses. The authors say that decisions about teaching methodology must be based on learning outcomes. This isn’t new – I … Read More
“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”
I predict that this opening sentence of Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth, will become one of those classic opening sentences that creative writing instructors refer to when talking about creating tension right out of the gate. Who is Albert Cousins? Why did he bring gin to a christening party? … Read More
“You need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth commissioned “today’s best-loved novelists” to retell “the world’s favourite playwright’s” dramas. Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl is based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play that Tyler said she hated because it’s “totally misogynistic” and the people “behave … Read More
“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”
In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means “breaking” the form of the traditional novel. He said, … Read More
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.” It’s a guide for dreamers – for people who … Read More