Jan 21, 2026
🎧 Listen to Teaching Here A deep dive on the journey of analyzing a memoir: Value, Structure, Plot Prefaced by a medical report summarizing her mother’s various hospitalizations, this heartbreaking memoir reconstructs the sad and turbulent events of Lauck’s childhood, which was overshadowed by the illness and early death of her mother. In 1969, five-year-old Lauck stayed with her mother at their home in Carson City, Nev., preparing her mother’s breakfast, helping her get...
Jan 10, 2026
🎧 Audio Teaching Here “Lauck has constructed a riveting narrative from the awful mess of her life.That she has managed to do so fills me with an admiration for which I cannot find words. The best I can do is to suggest that you read this book.” ~ The London Times The Creation of Blackbird: 1995-1999 Thirty or so years ago, I unearthed the astonishing story of my adoptive mother’s illness and death, and then my adoptive father’s sudden death from a heart attack eighteen months...
Dec 3, 2025
By Becky Ellis “As happens with the frightened and unprepared, we scattered. Some of us would be caught. Some of us would be killed. Probably some of us would go crawling back. Sadie, Lizzie and I made it north to a town we were told was in Iowa.” – Percival Everett, James 🎧 Click to listen here Narrowing Down James: Which Plot Structure Fits? One of the most interesting questions about James is also one of the most puzzling: what kind of story is it? Is it a story of transformation and...
Nov 19, 2025
By Becky Ellis “The more I pretended, the more I understood that pretending was the most honest thing I could do.” ~ Percival Everett, James 🎧 Click here to listen Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn presents Jim through Huck’s perspective—filtered, limited, and often patronizing. Jim speaks in dialect, acts the role expected of him, and remains quite one-dimensional to readers. Percival Everett’s bold retelling does not merely shift perspective. Instead, Everett creates a wholly new...
Oct 14, 2025
“They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything… They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out.” ~ Pap in Huck Finn 🎧 Listen Here Examining the Three Faces of Authority Huck Must Escape How does Mark Twain and his relationship with Father play into what Huck experiences with Pap? This question arises, naturally when we understand the five key archetypes in all story as Booker lays out in the...
