A Taste of Hope

 Thank you Christopher Kimball. My doctor prescribed The Mediterranean Diet, and I tackled it like I tackle everything, with books. I now own six books on this specialized subject, including the ATK version. Mostly they left me overwhelmed and a little frustrated. I bought your Milk Street Tuesday Nights Mediterranean cookbook because it is inexpensive quality. I read my cookbooks. I wasn’t eight recipes in before I was drawing up a grocery list. I cooked it tonight. Greek-style Spinach Rice with Shrimp and Dill was so good. I could eat it on repeat for a very long time, and it was so easy! 

I’d gotten weary in my pursuit of better health, but there is hope on the horizon again. Now if only it was on the scale. 

Pascal. He’s still got it.

 When I first began my Crow Hook project, Pascal’s Pensees was one of the first books I chose to read, and I loved it. His insights into human nature and his adoration of the Divine fascinated me. It’s been a decade working on Crow Hook, and I’m reading Pensees for the fourth time and I still love it. It’s going head to head with The Head Beneath the Altar and Olive the Lionheart. Both books have persuasive reasons for reading them, but I keep picking up Pascal. It’s nice to know the classics can still stand on their own.

Graywall: Teaching Mimetic Theory to Young People

 I will reach the likely height of my academic career this July when I present a paper at The Colloquium on Violence and Religion about teaching basic Mimetic Theory to children and adolescents using famous books from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Lord of the Rings. Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory has largely been a movement of “adult converts.” It is time for us to begin raising our “cradle Girardians.” To do that we must convey the perplexing ideas our own original programming struggles with to new, fresh minds. For me stories or games are my goto for teaching children, and in this case the capacity of story to convey rich, entangled and complex ideas moved it to the head of the class.

I think my system is a lot of fun, relying on books so popular they were made into movies or television shows and sticking to small portions of the big ideas for each lesson. If you are teaching a young Girardian and my paper intrigues you leave your email address in the comments, and I will send you a copy.

No Fear: A Defense Against the Dark

Asking parents to let their children read Frederick Douglas’ experiences as a child slave turned out to be a bigger ask than I had anticipated.They were ready to mutiny and return to Egypt with such tried and true favorites as Ben and Me and Johnny Tremain. It is hard to let children in on the secret that the world has dark corners and some of them are close to home. This experience pushed me to develop, No Fear, a guided reading experience involving history and children’s classic fiction. We begin by discovering that bad things happen and we end by thinking of ways to overcome bad things. The history is drawn from Penguin Random House’s excellent Who Was…Series and the classics include The Bad Beginning, Jungle Book and Charlotte’s Web.

I’m very proud of the resulting curriculum. My happiest imaginary readers are middle-grade students snuggled up on the couch with a parent for a read and a chat. Classrooms could use their read-a-loud time to work through the lessons. Matilda could work it out for herself or perhaps with a friendly librarian’s help. Querying is a chore, but I’m learning the ropes. Hopefully I’ll find the right agent soon.

Simply Hooked

 Expanding my homeschool/school club curriculum, Crow Hook, meant finding adults eager to teach students historical texts. I quickly realized I had been very lucky in my friends and fellow co-op moms. Most people finished school and are glad to be done. Teaching Crow Hook means at least a willingness to read the texts. Many people found it intimidating for me to hand them a reading list and wish them luck. Slowly the idea of writing a curriculum for adults presented itself, and I’ve been working away at it ever since. As I wrote the idea presented itself as having a life of its own apart from Crow Hook. People might really enjoy reading the texts for their own sake. I certainly had.

Simply Hooked is a four part collection of one hundred texts, some interesting, some important, sometimes both. It is a no pressure guide that simply opens doors without demanding readers walk through them. After a brief introduction, (readers are encouraged to rely on the included introduction that accompanies most of the texts) there is a Reader’s Guide with tips to make reading easier and a set of Prompts that hope to inspire the reader to take the connections deeper.

It means a lot when I say I like it better than Crow Hook.

Crow Hook

 Developed as a homeschool co-op class, Crow Hook is my history through literature curriculum for middle to high school students. I love it because there are no grades or tests just good dusty fun. I say dusty fun because the core of the experience is historical texts that are either interesting or important, usually both. Some examples would be the Tao Te Ching, The Wealth of Nations, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, A Long Walk to Freedom are important works. Physica, The Book of the Dead, The Jungle, Of Plymouth Plantation are interesting. 

The full course takes four years with twenty-five lessons a year. I ask students to read part or all of a text, and then I have fun activities for the group to explore the work together. I think it would make a great school club as much as it does a homeschool class. My favorite part of it all is an ever changing game called, “Slides.” Making connections between the texts is the most important part of interacting with them, so I continually create challenges to connect one work with the others to earn points, win competitions and build team spirit. It’s a great opportunity for kids to feel smart who might not show up on the school radar. 

Novelzzz

 In my mid-thirties I discovered that I require a creative outlet. For me, it is non-negotiable. Studying was incompatible with raising six small children, so I poured myself into a novel. I have a complete rough draft, but the plot is less than satisfactory. I’ve been letting it percolate and may soon be bringing it out for an update. In the meantime two other novels have sprouted from the same rich ground and I’ve worked on them as the spirit leads. 

I like working on novels. Finishing one to the level of personal satisfaction would be a treat. My protagonists are all female, either young or stunted so in need of growth. I like to be funny, but my core issues in each novel are serious. I am working to find the balance. Whether I publish a novel or not, I grow as a writer when I settle down to the rhythm of writing one.