Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, perhaps the most dog-eared book on my shelves, doesn’t give advice on writing poetry. Instead, it’s what Einstein –his contemporary — might have written if he had been a poet. Compare the Theory of Relativity to this statement: “People have already … Read More
Author: Kate Stover
“The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.”
This 2015 winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction – “a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty” that is “highly provocative, thoughtfully presented” — is a meditation on race as a social construct. Written as a set of letters to his young son, it raises many … Read More
“Felicity rubbed a bit between her fingers. It was gray, just grit.”
This is how the great-granddaughter of Iowa farmers Walter and Rosanna Langdon describes what’s left of the topsoil on the original family farm when she visits it in the closing pages of The Last Hundred Years Trilogy by Jane Smiley. We can see the how this family’s decisions played … Read More
“We should expect no one will understand this.”
“With grammar, it’s always something. “
This is the first sentence in the chapter titled “Plurals before Swine: Blunders with Numbers” in Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. The tone is light-hearted, which, as the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer noted, makes it readable “even for those … Read More
“I used to think that if faculty teaching improved, student learning had to follow suit.”
Now, however, Saundra Yancy McGuire believes that even the best teachers will not see the kinds of learning gains that are possible “as long as students do not come to our classrooms prepared to learn efficiently and independently.” This book shows faculty members how to teach students how to learn … Read More
“Rosa was a perfect example of an only child, thought Claire – she behaved herself, but it was because she was always on the stage and the lights were always up. “
If you were a novelist, what compliment would you most like to see in a review of your work? A comparison to Tolstoy, perhaps? That compliment was in fact given in the British newspaper, the Guardian, in a review of Jane Smiley’s novel Early Warnings, the second … Read More
“Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.”
This memoir by Russell Baker encourages readers to write their stories for the generation that hasn’t yet asked for them. He shows us why he believes this: he will always regret not knowing better the person who told him how to see the world and his role in it. After … Read More
“I raise my chin and say nothing.”
This is the final line in the poem “When Are You Coming Back? I’m Getting Tired of Waiting” from a collection of poems about grieving titled The Widow’s House by Sharon Chmielarz. It is one example of how the poet has achieved a “mastery of tone.” Tone is a slippery … Read More
“A writer’s goal is to light up the sky.”
“The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders.”
Recently, I visited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, MA, which has the chair that Emerson sat in while he wrote his famous essay “Nature.” As a fan of what Anne Fadiman calls “You-Are-There Reading” I had to reacquaint myself with this wonderful piece. When it was published in 1836, … Read More
“Asking someone to make a prediction represents a very simple route to raising curiosity and hence represents a very simple route to stimulating the brains of our students and preparing them for their learning.”
Can small changes in strategy result in significant improvements? This new book for college instructors by James M. Lang argues convincingly that they can. While some of the techniques are not new – my mother asked her students to make predictions 40 years ago – all the strategies are supported … Read More
“I have often pictured her stage-managing a fashion show of monsters.”
As unlikely as it sounds, this quote comes from a letter of recommendation for an associate dean of student affairs applicant, who also happens to be the former lover of the creative writing professor who sends all of the letters in this hilarious expostulatory novel. His comments become “more elaborately … Read More
“[L]adies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”
Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described the differences in … Read More
“Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely?”
No contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo. His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in the sequel Everyone’s … Read More