Apr 28, 2026
🎧 Listen Here What Four Weeks of Close Reading Actually Does For the Writer: Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. We began with that quote and I want to come back to it one more time before we close because that quote is not just about Atticus Finch. It is about every one of us who has spent time inside these two books over the last four weeks. We came in with assumptions, opinions and if we read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school we also came in thinking we knew what it was. Myself...
Apr 21, 2026
🎧 Listen Here Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. ~ Charles Lamb Harper Lee uses this quote at the front of this book for a reason. Not as decoration. Not as a charming literary gesture. But as a thesis. Because To Kill a Mockingbird is not about race in Alabama in the 1930s. That story is present and it is real and must be named. But underneath, running the full length of this novel quietly, is a story about what a man loses when he becomes a man. What gets left behind in the long...
Apr 14, 2026
🎧 Click here Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; boney mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three...
Apr 8, 2026
🎧 Listen Here “Respect for a person’s conscience does not mean accepting moral relativism.” ~ John Paul II, 1993, para. 32-34 Ask yourself a couple questions: Are moral standards culturally-defined making it impossible to determine what is truly right or wrong? Or, is it true that each person created “in the image of God” and so possess both the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it? Where do you land and why? These questions matter because...
Apr 1, 2026
She heard her father’s voice, a tiny voice talking in a warm comfortable past. “Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world, I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” ~ Go Set a Watchman 🎧 Listen Here There is a moment in Go Set a Watchman that most readers never reach, that you might not have reached, where Jean Louise Finch stands in the balcony of the courthouse in Maycomb, Alabama. The same balcony she sat in as a child. But now,...
Mar 24, 2026
🎧 Listen Here “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment…. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God…. His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” (CCC, 1776). Welcome to the overview conversation that kicks off...
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...
