Favorite Stories Research Articles

4th-Grade Readers … Not Too Old to Snuggle

Teachers and parents are well aware of the benefits of reading out loud to children, especially young children (Allington 2001; Davenport et al. 2004). Our kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms are filled with the lovely sound of teachers reading books out loud, children reading books to themselves, and guest readers, like the school principal and students' parents, being invited to read to the class. The image of little 5-year-olds snuggled up in the school library on cozy bean bags, listening to favorite stories, is quite familiar to us. But what about those great big, hunkin', 9- and 10-year-olds? You know, the ones who are taller than their teacher. The 4th-grade kids for whom, for many, the early signs of puberty are already beginning. Surely, they're too old to snuggle up and read with an adult? And furthermore, if they aren't fluent readers by 4th grade, don't they need major reading intervention? And if they're adequate readers, shouldn't we just focus on those needing more help? Moreover, shouldn't individual reading with 4th graders take place at a sensible school desk or table with a wide berth between the child and the teacher, or even more comfortably on a computer, where serious intensive instruction can occur? Or should it? Christine Finnan asks educators to consider that elementary age students have needs for nurturing and caring that are unique to their developmental stage. In her book, The Upper Elementary Years: Ensuring Success in Grades 3-6, Finnan notes that many 4th-and 5th-grade classrooms are significantly different from primary-grade classroom environments. More specifically, students typically experience a classroom environment that shifts its focus from nurturing children to teaching content (2009, p. 122). This shift may be in direct conflict with the student's continued developmental needs for nurturing. According to Finnan, upper elementary children have rather basic desires: accomplishment and affirmation, belonging and connection; academic, social and physical engagement (p. 99). One example of how 4th-grade students may benefit from snuggling up with a buddy to read is taking place in a rural South Carolina public school. The Cool Cats reading buddy program is a partnership between the College of Charleston's School of Education, Health, and Human Performance and Cainhoy Elementary School in Huger, South Carolina. Cainhoy is a rural, Title I, public school where 96% of the students are African American and 88% qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. In this pilot program, preservice teachers from the College of Charleston are recruited and earn a stipend to travel to the rural school and read, one on one, with 4th-grade students, most of whom are struggling readers. Over the seven-week sessions, there is no articulated reading program, no prescribed curriculum, not even one uniform book that is used. In addition, all 4th-grade students are invited to participate. Students accompany their buddies to the library, pick a cozy spot, and snuggle up and read. The only instructions are for 4th graders and college-age students to split in half the time spent reading out loud. Sounds easy, right? But does it work? Consistently, after each seven-week reading buddy session, 4th-grade students raised their oral reading fluency (ORF), as measured by the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Scale (DIBELS), an average of just over 20 words per minute. The results of this pilot are noteworthy; and upon reflection, the individual attention, physical connection, and human interaction may be the components that contributed to improving students' reading scores. Moreover, when the two 4th-grade teachers reflected on the program, they described children who wanted to come to school on reading buddy day and who valued the connections with their buddies. TABLE 1. Comparison of ORF scores with Reading Buddies and Successmaker Computer Program Intervention Type Beginning ORF Ending ORF for 7 Weeks (words per minute) (words per minute) Change Reading Buddies 80. …

Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work. I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work. I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 Peter Nicholls Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work. I: The Young Genius 1885–1920. A. David Moody. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xv + 507. $47.95 (cloth). The obligations of a new biographer of Ezra Pound are onerous indeed. All the favorite stories have to be told again, even though as David Moody wryly observes, informants like Ford Madox Hueffer contribute more to “the myth and the legend of Pound” (113) than they do to the historical record (Hueffer’s famous accounts of Pound’s flamboyant dress during his London years, for example, vary erratically in their mix of colors from one anecdote to another). In this the first of two volumes, Moody is meticulous in recording Pound’s multifarious activities up until 1920, though in covering all the usual bases his prose sometimes shows traces of fatigue. Hueffer’s famous “roll” of derision in face of the painfully stilted language of Pound’s Canzoni, for example, is rather blankly reported as Hueffer “falling over and rolling about on the floor” (112). Vivid this is not, but Moody’s focus is characteristically elsewhere, pressing the stories that make up “the myth and the legend of Pound” to yield more than the cartoon strip they have for some time threatened to become. In this case Moody wonders shrewdly: “if the master [Hueffer] felt the errors so strongly, why had he published four of those ‘canzoni’ in his review?” (112). As so often, of course, the story is Pound’s and is designed to contribute to the narrative of [End Page 571] his systematic self-modernization. Yet the disentangling of a distinctive “modernism” from the toils of nineteenth-century decadence was not at all as straightforward as such “mythic” moments of redirection suggest. Pound’s early career was a mix of self-advertisement and self-coercion, it seems: having worked with dedication on versions of the Japanese Noh plays, for example, he would soon after condemn them as “too damn soft” and “celtic” (278). The self-criticism would not prevent a continuing fascination for the form, but it was one means by which Pound sought publicly to curb his own enthusiasm for things which often looked distinctly un-modern. The achievement of Moody’s biography is to get behind that public façade, not by some fictional projection of interiority but by looking intently at the poetry itself. The biography is called Ezra Pound: Poet, and the bluntness of the title almost deliberately conceals the real radicalism of the move. For where Humphrey Carpenter, for example, in his biography simply accepts Hueffer’s derisive “roll” as adequate testimony to the hopeless passéisme of Canzoni, Moody takes the trouble to read the poems and in doing so he convincingly reveals Pound’s own investment in the volume as (in the poet’s words) “a sort of Purgatorio with the connecting links left out” (135). Canzoni, in fact, is only one of Pound’s early volumes in which Moody discerns a comparable structural “arrangement” of the poems, and his readings of them invite us to see that Pound’s later denigration of his “stale cream-puffs” has prevented us from really grasping the seriousness of what he was trying to achieve at this point in his career. Moody is almost alone in taking Pound at his word in his advice to Elkin Mathews about Lustra. Resisting Mathews’s demand for the deletion of certain poems he insisted that the book be taken as a whole: “Even certain smaller poems, unimportant in themselves have a function in the book-as-a-whole. This shaping up a book … is almost as important as the construction of a play or a novel”(286).1 Pound, then, was arguably trying to do more in these volumes than he has generally been given credit for, and Moody is right to observe of some of the poems in Personae that “the care over sound and syntax . . . is indeed exquisite,” (106) for it does seem that if these early works are “experiments...

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Thoughts on reviewing

The July 2007 issue of CCR elicited review process horror stories. I expect that everyone has their own vast collection. I certainly do. However, I found that picking my favorite story to be like choosing my favorite offspring. Therefore, rather than focusing on a single tale of woe I have tried to extrapolate some key points from across the suboptimal reviewing I have observed. I write this essay from the perspective of an author who has years of accepts and rejects. However, this note is also greatly informed by my refereeing activities over the years (on PCs, reviewing for journals, editorial boards, etc.). My intent is to make general observations in the hopes of contributing to a conversation that improves our overall review processes and ultimately helps us establish a stronger set of community values with regards to what we expect and appreciate in papers. While I strive for generality I do not claim the observations are unbiased or that I have closed all my open wounds in this area. Before going any further it is important that I note several things:

“Emma Zunz” Revisited

Every critic who writes about Zunz (1) points out that Emma is one of Borges's rare female protagonists; that hers is a detective story but lacks a detective, and that, despite the fact that Emma's crime is resolved, the story is unfathomable. Rarely mentioned is that Zunz reworks one of Borges's favorite story models, a narrative whose the protagonist invents a plot in which he or she has not only a principal but often a tragic role. That plot reduces a life of infinite possibilities to a straight line leading to disaster. This process is enacted in muerte y la brujula, in which Erik Lonnrot, an overly inventive detective, constructs a rabbinical solution to the murder of a rabbi, enabling his antagonist, Red Scharlach, to ensnare him in his own plot--a clever rewriting of Lonnrot's interpretation. In El jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan, Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy working for the Germans during World War I, must tell the Germans to attack a city named Albert. To do so, he murders a man with the same name, is arrested, and has his name linked with his victim's in the news. Prior to their decision to transform life into plot, these characters, like Emma lead lives composed of random events beyond their control. By imposing a plot on their lives, they act the role of fate with regard to their own existence and ironically turn into fictions within fictions. Also typical of Borges (and re-enacted in Zunz) is the plot's need for blood. This sacrifice in Zunz is double and reminds us how the artist must sacrifice life for the sake of art: Murder and suicide are images of each other. The ultimate literary source for Borges's master plot, as Efrain Kistal (2) has suggested, is Guillaume Apollinaire's tale El marinero de Amsterdam, which Borges and Bioy Casares translated and included in their 1943 anthology Los mejores cuentos policiales. (The story disappears from subsequent editions of the collection, as if Borges wished to cover his tracks, though in his 1946 essay paradoja de Apollinaire we see he still respects the avant-garde poet while disdaining the avant-garde.) Zunz, like muerte y la brujula is nominally a story of revenge: On January 14, 1922, Emma who lives in Buenos Aires, receives a letter from Brazil informing her that her father, referred to as Mr. Maier, died from taking an overdose of Veronal, the commercial name for barbital, a sleep-inducing drug. The ambiguous name of the letter's author is either Fein or Fain, as if the narrator, momentarily assuming the role of reporter, had only heard a version of it: If he had seen the letter, he would know if it was signed Fein or Fain. Despite this curious ploy, the narrator is able to paraphrase the letter, in which Fein/Fain informs Emma that, sehor Maier habia ingerido por error una fuerte dosis de veronal y habia fallecido el tres del corriente en el hospital de Bage. (69) In spoken Spanish, there would be no difference between Fein and Fain, just as there is no difference between Ginzburg and Ginsburg in muerte y la brujula, so the reader is alerted to the problematic existence of homophones--words that sound alike but which are visually different. We are advised to distrust what we hear, though this caution soon extends to all sensory perception, especially vision. Borges, especially after his 1940 introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares's novella La invencion de Morel, with its hilarious attacks on Dostoevski, Proust, and Joss Ortega y Gasset, was a declared enemy of literary realism, psychologically true-to-life characters, and the novel. But in Zunz, his narrator meticulously enumerates, in novelistic fashion, Emma's sensations on reading the letter from Fein/Fain: malestar en el vientre y en las rodillas; luego de ciega culpa, de irrealidad, de frio, de temor; luego, quiso ya estar en el dia siguiente. Acto continuo comprendio que esa voluntad era inutil porque la muerte de su padre era lo unico que habia sucedido en el mundo, y seguiria sucediendo sin fin. …

Joyce and Yeats: Easter 1916 and the Great War

Joyce and Yeats:Easter 1916 and the Great War Wayne K. Chapman Joyce and Yeats both registered in their work the significance of the 1916 insurrection in the context of the Great War of 1914 to 1918. As Parnellites, both writers were disappointed nationalists. The lost opportunity for Home Rule and the shame on Ireland for Parnell's downfall are signature issues in the Christmas and Easter sequences of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for these were issues in Joyce's Triestine journalism during the years of his struggle to rewrite the novel he first composed as Stephen Hero. The Parnellite sympathies of both writers are manifest in the elegies of 1891 "Mourn—And Then Onward!" by Yeats1 and "Et Tu, Healy" by a nine-year-old Joyce.2 Only two fragments of the latter poem now exist but they give evidence of the source from which the eleven stanzas of Mr. Hynes's recitation, "The Death of Parnell," and for the epiphany developed in Joyce's favorite story in Dubliners, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." In connection with a generally younger group of self-sacrificing requiem poets, the "Easter Poets" of the 1916 Rising, Yeats's own poetry matured technically and thematically. Mirroring in 1914 Yeats's conventional trope on illumination achieved in compensation for a sacrificial "dead king"—"His memory now is a tall pillar, burning / Before us in the gloom!"—the maturing Joyce preferred unconventional idiom in praise of the day that Ireland's spirit was to rise up again. Ejaculating against both the "modern hypocrites" and the "fawning priests," and preferring the metaphor of the phoenix to that of Christ at the harrowing of souls from hell, Joyce defiantly quaffs his pint in libation to an "Uncrowned King" whose family name is invoked with "Joy," the radical stem of his own name placed in apposition: [End Page 137] They had their way: they laid him low. But Erin, list, his spirit may Rise, like the Phoenix from the flames, When breaks the dawning of the day, The day that brings us Freedom's reign. And on that day may Erin well Pledge in the cup she lifts to Joy One grief—the memory of Parnell.3 And with that bell note in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," the cork flies out of Mr. Hynes's bottle of stout, marking the story's important epiphany about paralysis, or arrested development, in Irish public life. In Joyce's novels, the agency of the artist is even more pronounced as a political observer and conscientious, if somewhat objectified, player. Turmoil and conflict are primary elements of art as they are of life. * * * It might have pained the young Stephen Dedalus not to "know well what politics meant" and "where the universe ended" but Joyce's opinions were well informed in the unpublished paper he decided to translate into a novel in 1904.4 Rejected by Dana, A Magazine of Independent Thought and viewed as an outline for the novel, Joyce's essay "A Portrait of the Artist" espoused "urbanity in warfare" (PSW 218). There, "warfare" was only a rhetorical figure of speech. "Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world, already the generous idea had emerged from a thirty years' war in Germany," Joyce said, in other words, since 1870; and, like the annunciating angel, the artist would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come . . . the competitive order is employed against itself[;] the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action. (PSW 218) Conceived in "Dublin 1904," A Portrait of the Artist was then christened in "Trieste 1914" and made to bear the dedication of its penultimate sentence: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (Portrait 252–53). A difference, however, registers between two times, the imagined and real. In a dream sequence initiated by "a heavy bird flying low through the grey light" [End...

Harmon Jackson

Harmon Jackson Brittany Hampton The crickets weren't chirping too awful loud the night I mourned for Harmon Jackson. I had never laid eyes on him, but I had heard his story about how he saved that little girl from drowning in the river and the two of them nothing but mud from top to bottom paraded through the holler like they were somebody important, because I reckon that day they had been. And there was also the time Harmon Jackson stood up in the little church across the way where they stand and shake all over and said, "Preacher, I got something to say." And he told the whole congregation that God had put something on his heart, and there'd be no rest for him until he said his peace, so he just said it right then that he thought church ought to be on Saturday, like it was back in the Bible times, and you can imagine the whipping he got when he got back to the house that day. They say he picked out his own switch for that beating, a right big branch and told his Daddy that if he was going to take a beating on account of his religion, he wanted it to be a darn good one. But my favorite story of Harmon Jackson was the one about the banjo. He had his own banjo that his Daddy got from some feller from Virginia, and they say he would play one song and no others, and he played it for hours on end, and nobody ever knew what it was. He'd sit out on a rock near the creek, and people would crowd around him and shout out guesses of the tune's name, but only Harmon Jackson knew what he was playing. And they say he smiled and nodded his head as he sang it, paying no mind to anything but the song. And it was on account of all this that I took up a notion to love Harmon Jackson. I would sit in front of the fire on Sunday evenings and think on the life I might have with that boy someday. He would take me up to Cumberland Falls to get married right there in the water. We'd stand in the shallow water and balance ourselves on the slippery rocks, holding on close to each other so we wouldn'tbe carried over the falls. And I reckon a boy like Harmon Jackson with such a wild spirit would need him a house full of little boys to run around the woods and build forts and carry on with. And when the snow would fall in big, puffy flakes and ice would form little pictures on our windows, Harmon Jackson would gather our children around the fire, inside our 55 warm little kitchen. He'd close his eyes and let his dark hair fall over them. He'd reach that strong arm of his behind the chair and pick up his banjo. The thing would be all shiny, seeing that I would polish it up for him every morning, and he would plop it onto his lap. He wouldn't play anything for a few seconds; he'd like to sit there and feel the weight of the banjo on his lap, thinking to himself that it belonged there. He might even feel a little guilty that he left it sitting behind the chair all day, without so much as plucking a string as he passed. And right when I would look away from that handsome man sitting in the chair, he'd start to playing, but he wouldn't sing. He'd just sit there picking while I would wash our supper dishes in a big pot of steaming water and him teaching our children the song without a name. So when my Mama came home from town, saying she had a sad thing to tell me about that boy Harmon Jackson and how he had died, I just shook my head and said, "No, Mother." I wouldn't hear such a thing, because it meant that our waterfall wedding and our children would be no...

Bolstering the Short Story

Clouther continuedfrom previous page Michelle Regalado Deatrick's story "Backfire" hits its targets. The story is long and ambitious, with explosions and deaths. Like many of the stories, it deals with a father who does not always make wise decisions. Like many of the stories, it gets in an Fbomb . I can see why guesteditorJane Smiley selected it; I probably would have picked it from hundreds of submissions, too. But the story loses momentum in its final pages, and in the seven long pages between climax and lack of resolution, I lose confidence in the narrator—not so much that I don't believe him, but enough that I don't put down the book, shake my head, and say damn when I'm done. With the pleasant comes the regrettable, where the reader is wise to remember thatpart ofbeing a student is learning whatdoesn't work. In Matt Freidson's "Liberty," the Statue of Liberty is "blue jeans, rock and roll—green as dollars, her arm soaring up into the air like the guitar in 'Hotel California.'" Lesson learned: references to The Eagles don't save clichés. Gregory Plemmons's "Twinless" offers the following: "As I listened to the rain and jiggle of distant thunder on the windowpane, finally the rest of the signal wobbled on through, scratchy as an old record, the word suddenly flung forth from the darkness like a luminescentFrisbee as it shimmered across my brain." Metaphors aren't the strength of this anthology. One of the anthology's greatest strengths, however, is its diversity in approach. The familiar complaint about MFA programs producing the same story over and over is not realized here. In the first story, Jennifer Shaff's "Leave of Absence," the narrator is planning to visit outer space; in the second story,AmberDermont's"Lyndon," the narrator visits Lyndon Johnson's reconstructed birth site. Those are different trips. The next entry, Andrew Foster Altschul's "A New Kind of Gravity," takes place inside a shelter for abused women. Although each of the three stories shares a narrator doing his orherbest not to think about someone lost, where and how and why these narrators avoid these someones make the anthology interesting. It's a credit to Smiley's editing that she managed to assemble disparate voices mining such universal human feeling. Elsewhere, Smiley's editing is more suspect. Some of the stories are more concerned with cleverness than emotion. Albert E. Martinez's "Useless Beauty OR Notes on Esquire's 'Things a Man Should Never Do After the Age of 30'" takes as its organizing principle a list from a men's magazine. I suppose a story could transcend this framework, but why try in the first place? Jessica Anthony's "The Rust Preventer" centers on a forty-year-old man in love with a monkey. Nothing much happens in either of these stories. But here is the opening paragraph of my favorite story: On Christmas Eve, Dad came home from the mall and hammered up a bedsheet in the doorway to the living room. No one was allowed in, and there was crashing and cursing behind it. I had been scanning TV commercials for any last-minute gems I might have missed during my six weeks of Christmas requests, Mom was locking the windows, and my older sister, Lovely, was talking on the phone with her boyfriend, Roger, a kid who would mainly twist my ears whenever he saw me, saying, "Now hear this!" The story never slows, and I never lose my interest. When I finished it, I flipped back to the first page to read the name again. If Sean Ennis publishes a collection, I'll have the gratitude ofknowing I knew him back when. I'll be the insufferable guy insisting he liked The White Stripes after the first album, not the third. This is an anthology for the patient and optimistic. This might not be what the editors intended, but it's not a bad thing, either. Kevin Clouther teaches English at Bridgewater College of Virginia. Hisfirst novel isforthcomingfrom Algonquin Books. Bolstering the Short Story Christopher Coake The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 Edited by Laura Furman...

And They Lived Happily Ever After

When I was a little girl, my favorite stories were fairy tales. There was always a beautiful and bright princess who managed to get herself into some difficulty. But no matter how dire her circumstances, Prince Charming came along and gave her a kiss or put the slipper on her foot and rescued her just in the nick of time. We all know how the story ended: and they lived happily ever after. Sometimes when I talk with diabetes educators, it seems as if we believe we are living in a fairy tale. We think that if we and our patients and other health care professionals and administrators like us do a good job, we are like those princesses. No matter what happens, someone will come along to rescue us. But I have some bad news. There are no handsome princes in the world of health care. That is not to say that the picture is completely grim (or Grimm as the case may be). There have been many positive changes in the more than 20 years I have been an educator. A greater understanding of diabetes and its consequences, new technologies, and new therapies have made our patients' lives easier and improved …

Literary Protagonists Read the Bible

My connection with the Bible actually began before I was born, on the day my parents decided to name me Zeruya. This name, that is so out of the ordinary, so biblical, always brought in its wake questions and inquiries so that at an early age I found myself being compelled to explain: It's from the Bible, she was King David's the mother of Joab, Abishai and Asahel. Nonsense, they'd argue, it's a boy's name because in the Bible sons are named after their father; and I, fighting for my femininity, would reply, That's not true, because in Chronicles it says, 'Whose sisters were Zeruiah and Abigail. the sons of Zeruiah; Abishai, and Joab and Asahel, three.' Her sons were named after her because she was the king's sister, I'd explain painstakingly, and when I'd hear stories about King David I always felt a sense of familial pride, or familial shame, depending on which story it was, not to mention the feats of my biblical brothers, which always excited me, and I was always inclined to feel real maternal responsibility toward them. I remember before the Six-Day War, when we used to visit Jerusalem, we'd look out from Ramat Rachel toward Bethlehem in the distance, and my father would point to the city that belonged to Jordan and say, There, that's where you were King David came from here and you were his sister. When my real brother, Aner, protested enviously, my father would point to the Hebron hills in the distance, which could only be seen when visibility was good, and tell him, And that's where you were born. These were, of course, my favorite childhood stories. We weren't told bedtime stories about Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, and I only became acquainted with Cinderella and Snow White after I had chil dren of my own. From the age of three we were told Bible stories, the story of Joseph, which we particularly liked because of its poignant happy end ing, the story of David and Goliath, David and Jonathan, and the story of Hannah, who like our mother was for many years unable to bear children. I remember how we used to beg our father to tell us one more story, just one more, until excited and exhausted we agreed to go to sleep.

Learning to write letters

If we want children to use different forms of writing competently, this will include letter writing, and so we need to plan relevant, meaningful activities to stimulate them. Interesting ways into letter writing can be found through favourite stories and imaginative and role play. Children need an audience for their writing, and this can be a real person or an imaginary character.

To enter the castle of fear: engendering children's story writing from home to school at KS2

This paper describes a small‐scale writing project in which a class of KS 2 primary pupils were invited to import their own narrative interests into a task designed by their teacher and the researcher within the constraints of the National Literacy Strategy. By employing an adventure genre, based on problem and puzzle solving, pupils were encouraged to introduce familiar scenarios and characters from their favourite stories in books, comics, videos or computer games. The work produced has been analyzed to highlight the different ways in which boys and girls engaged with key aspects of narrative and how this enabled discussion of gendered literacy practices in which boys and girls held an equal stake. The author discusses the importance of developing strategies by means of which children's understanding and transformations of their preferred modes of narrative pleasures can be housed within the current literacy framework.

Inattentive, and: Rebirth as Deliverance, and: Tic Douloureux, and: Serafina, and: After The Pillow Book, and: Missing e, and: Damn Fag

Inattentive Forgets to do her chores, prefers to play alone, loves to read but cannot finish a book, traces rows of curlicues on her PeeChee during class, knows all the answers but is too petrified to speak, and when spoken to at home gazes glassily into space saying "Yes, Mother," but hasn't grasped a word. One day, sent to the garden to cut a sprig of rosemary for potatoes, she was half an hour later found perched on grass-stained knees, scissors lost, errand unremembered, her lips kissing dandelion pompoms into air. Is she normal? The mother wants to know. Un-inclined to diagnose, to label, I listen as her child recounts a typical day at school, her favorite story- She's obviously smart enough to read the exam room's every pamphlet. Is she gifted? Just a fidget? Who's to say what's weed, what's wildflower? She seems to me more dreamy than distracted: lost thinking her long, long thoughts. [End Page 123] Rebirth as Deliverance This is stupid, she thinks. A baby doesn't need to wrestle to be born, like a chickadee pushing out of an egg. Still they wrap the ten year old in a blanket, press down on her with pillows. It's dark in there, and she can't breath. This is stupid, she thinks, and demands to be set free, but they only squeeze her tighter in the makeshift womb. It's her new mom's idea, something to bring them closer, help them bond. This is stupid, she thinks, that woman will never be her real mom. It's a long and difficult labor, and the girl resists their urgings. "Don't you want to be reborn?" the therapist asks, more threat than lullaby. This is stupid, she thinks, and answers a sullen, "No." Thirty halting minutes later as video whirrs and the adoptive mother hums her daughter's name, the smothering blankets part to reveal blue silence - her icy face fixed in defiant grimace. [End Page 124] Tic Douloureux For weeks, months, he feels nothing. Then a slight breeze brushes his face, he absentmindedly strokes his moustache or a grandchild kisses his cheek, and the ice pick stabs just below his left eye, making him wince and water, spasming his face into lopsided grimace. No one can tell him why it pokes him, how long it will last, or who gave it such a glamorous name. But we all agree it's excruciating. Worse than birth pains, or a kidney stone. This sudden electric shock like a drill bit spinning against his zygoma. This burnt matchstick held to his eyelid. The medicines we try only make him sleepy. And the nerve surgery: rhyzolysis, could paralyze half his face. Just when he thinks he can't take it anymore - it vanishes. For weeks, months, he feels nothing. Sometimes a year passes and he almost forgets. Then, reading a book one evening, or gazing at some family photos, he turns to watch a hummingbird at the feeder, an eyelash falls and grazes his cheek- a little tickle, that sends him. [End Page 125] Serafina That day the sky seemed torn open like a letter. All morning on the television bodies falling in flames as steel and glass towers crumbled. Unable to look any longer, my partner and I wandered the late summer garden- the kniphofia in tatters, a few pears bruised and fallen near the birdbath, our own city shining and intact in the distance, but the sky eerily quiet, not a plane, not a bird in sight. Come evening we walked to the neighborhood bistro. How oddly soothing to watch the hostess guide us to our favorite table, offer us menus, fill our glasses with iced water - her movements calm and assured, as if nothing astonishing had happened. How the votive candle's gentle flickering lit my partner's face, and the bread and the oil the...

Something from nothing: exploring dimensions of children's knowing through the repeated reading of favourite books

Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio explore some of the dimensions of knowing that children, teachers and parents may engage together during story‐time. They reflect on some of their own long‐term relationships with children and children's books, especially Phoebe Gilman'sSomething from nothing (published in 1992) and Simms Taback'sJoseph had a little overcoat, published in 1999. The authors probe issues such as why children ask to hear a favourite story over and over and why they suddenly abandon all interest and move on to a new book. They explore the meaning of the silences that sometimes arise during story‐time, pooling around the young listeners as the last words of the book are read. Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio remind us of the value of literature in the lives of children and they affirm that the reading and re‐reading of favourite stories enables the understanding of complex human issues and contributes significantly to social, emotional and spiritual growth.

The O Bruadair Inheritance: Some Left a Name Behind Them

"Up Tipp!" my great-aunt Nellie would shout, even late in her life when I first visited her in Clara, County Offaly, and her memory-filled mind had begun to drift. Official records at the Custom House in Dublin say that she was born in Portumna, in the eastern part of County Galway, but one of her favorite stories was of the time her father took her to a hurling match and became so excited that he threw—or as she put it, "pegged"—his hat into the air. Her father was a Tipperary man for sure, and her brother—my father's father—claimed as his birthplace the crossroads village of Toomevara, not far the heart of the heart of that hurling-mad county. Eventually, the family settled in Clara, where my great-grandfather, a harness-maker by trade, found steady work at the Goodbody factory; my paternal grandfather and grandmother both emigrated from Clara to New York City. My father, who was born in Manhattan, in turn emigrated north of the border to Prince Edward Island more than a half-century ago. I was born and grew up on the Island but have settled, apparently permanently, in Massachusetts; four of my six siblings, too, have dispersed as if at the four winds' will. God only knows where our children, and our children's children, will end up as this familial diaspora continues. In Ulysses, James Joyce constructs an elaborate conceit comparing the Irish experience and that of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and at times I have found that analogy disquietingly apt for my own family's nomadic movement over several generations. In fact, struck by a story my father told me about the central role the family phonograph played in his immigrant Irish home on Manhattan's east side, I composed my own conceit about how recordings by the Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman or the Irish tenor John McCormack might represent the Ark of the Covenant for a newly displaced people: Though common as a steamer trunk upended deep in steerage, taking space, that Edison Victrola seemed a cubit-measured casket for plates of black shellac encased in upright shelves below the crank-wound works. [End Page 9] Tempered tablets etched in finespun whorls like fingerprinted code, those waxen disks composed a tabernacled covenant for homesick exiles fixed in heartsore hope before the upraised lid.1 I like to think that, in many respects, that poem fits the description Seamus Heaney has applied to "Digging," the famous opening poem of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist: "a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem."2 I did indeed build this poem, titled "East Side Story," to carry a lot of weight—the combined weight of personal, familial and tribal history. But I hope that, like Heaney's in its far more subtle way, my poem—concluding wistfully with "Holding at forearm's length an old recording / I can almost feel my father's father / link his arm with mine"—also works a variation on the theme (really, more apologia than apology) that W. B. Yeats addresses in the prefatory poem to his volume Responsibilities (1914): "I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine."3 So doing, "East Side Story" not only expressed my desire but, in its own way, fulfilled that desire to link myself both to my father's boyhood world of New York City in the 1930s and to a larger sense of my Irish and Irish-American heritage on the paternal side of my family. Perhaps an overly ambitious lyric, it was—I now suppose—my own attempt at "going down and down / For the good turf," as Heaney puts it.4 Describing my father's telling of the story of how his father's fellow Irish immigrants, some of them friends and relatives from Clara...

Marshall Islands Legends and Stories (review)

Marshall Islands Legends and Stories. Collected and edited by Daniel A. Kelin II. Illustrated by Nashton T. Nashon. Honolulu: Bess Press, 2003. 252 pp. Like the collector and editor of these tales, I have had the privilege of listening to many Marshallese men and women of all ages share their stories with me. Kelin's collection is refreshing in many ways, and disappointing to this anthropologist in others. This collection of legends and stories from the Marshall Islands begins with acknowledgments and an introduction by the collector and editor that convey his enthusiasm and gratitude for the privilege of being given the stories that follow. In general terms Kelin describes the settings of the storytelling sessions, the assistance of translators, and the power of his story collecting experiences. As he states, this was a labor of love, as he trekked to eight of the Marshalls' 28 atolls, recorder in hand and often translator in tow. He sought chiefs' permission and respected storytellers' silences. The text is divided into sections based on the geographic location of the tellers. Distinguishing between the eastern and western atoll chains, Kelin begins with the Ratak (eastern chain) and includes stones and legends from the five atolls he visited, as told by the 13 tellers among those atolls. He introduces each storyteller, offering a photo and a brief biological sketch for many. He follows the Ratak stories with Ralik (western chain) tales, representing three atolls and five dri-bwebwenato (storytellers). The biological sketches and comments about the personality and narrative styles of the tellers are thoughtful inclusions, and add much to the immediacy of the collection. Further, the editor opted to include many of the framing devices of the storytellers, and the comments addressed to his or her audience. These also engage readers, drawing them in and increasing awareness of the original setting of the stories. Another successful addition is the use of pronunciation guides and translations of key terms in the margins of the text. Other collections of Marshallese legends and stories assume prior knowledge or linguistic familiarity. Kelin's collection contributes to the accessibility of these stories to non-Marshallese speakers, and encourages the reader to share his respect for Marshallese lives by using their vocabulary. Beyond the above noted characteristics, this collection benefits from the editor's skills in storytelling and writing. His abilities contribute to the stories' entertainment value, particularly for a non-Marshallese audience that may be unaccustomed to the style and form of Marshallese legends. They are wellwritten and maintain a more natural narrative pace than most of the nearly literal transcriptions/translations of earlier collections. My favorite stories involve Letao, the Marshallese trickster figure and the ways Marshall Islanders have engaged this character to make sense of and fun of the serious challenges of social change. I also have a deep appreciation for the editor's decisions to include the storytellers' repetition of chants and songs. This decision highlights the persistence of ancient knowledge, genres, and common motifs. Many of the chants are conveyed in an older poetic dialect of Marshallese that requires difficult interpretation. The meanings are neither clear nor obvious. Their inclusion is an excellent means of preserving ancient knowledge, yet they also raise questions for me about language and translation that are not specified in the introduction. The narrative authority of the editor sometimes emerges at the expense of the many who translated for him. Which stories were told in English? Who did the translation on each atoll? At what point were the stories translated? This brings me to my disappointments. It is now standard practice for folktale collections to include personal notes, biographical information on the tales themselves, as well as relevant cultural and historical material, maps, artwork, pronunciation guides, and source notes. …

Theorizing New Play Development in Canada

I’d like to begin with some of my favourite stories about play development in Canada. The first takes place in 1907, the inaugural year of the Earl Grey Musical and Dramatic Competition, which was begun by then-Governor General Earl Grey to encourage Canadian theatre. Betty Lee, in Love and Whisky: The Story of the Dominion Drama Festival, recounts the development of that year’s winning play, Allan Danvers, devised and presented by a group from Winnipeg. At a loss to find a suitable script that would fit the allotted ninety-minute time limit, the man charged with the production, one Major Devine, decided that the group must create a new play. As Leyden Shiller, a cast member, tells it, “‘[t]he plot of Allan Danvers was blocked out by Major Devine over a plate of devilled kidneys in the old Marriagi Hotel. It was finished with the help of two collaborators, [local newspapermen] Ernest Beaufort and Wilson Blue‘” (qtd. in Lee 69).

Book Review: Nourishing Faith through Fiction: Reflections of the Apostles' Creed in Literature and Film

By John R. May. Franklin (WI): Sheed & Ward, 2001. ISBN 1-58051106-6 (paper). Pp. x + 138. $18.95. This small volume reflects a lifetime of reading and viewing by a man of both faith and letters. John R. May is one of the deans of the academic study of theology and fiction, whether literature or film. In this book readers are let in on many of May's favorite stories, whether presented as novels, plays, short stories, or, in particular, movies. At the same time, May includes with his faith-informed criticism a dialogue with relevant biblical texts and contemporary theologians, all toward the end of illuminating the Christian story as outlined in the Apostles' Creed. It should come as no surprise that many of May's favorite storytellers have their spiritual roots in his tradition, the Roman Catholic Church, even if all have not remained within its walls: Graham Greene, Frank Capra, John Ford, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Federico Fellini, to name but a few. However, May has praise to offer Protestants as well: Ron Shelton for his movie Bull Durham, C. S. Lewis, and John Updike, among others. Even the stories of Steven Spielberg, Ken Kesey, and Woody Allen become occasions for May's faith reflection. May finds a means of organizing his disparate reflections around Houston Smith's suggestion that all the major religions of the world are striving to answer the same three fundamental questions: the universe experienced as benign, indifferent, or malignant? Is salvation a matter of the head or the heart? Is it gained alone or with others? (14). Christianity's distinctive answers to these questions correspond, for May, to the Trinitarian sense of the world that unfolds in the Apostles' Creed. He therefore shapes his reflections around Stories of the Creator Stories of the Savior and Stories of the Lifegiver in the three sections of this slim volume. May states that one of his purposes in the book is to share understanding of the meaning of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith for us,' but though May does this through his explication of the Apostles' Creed, what seemed to this reviewer the stronger motivating drive for the volume is May's appreciation of the Christian dimensions of literature and (13). Alumni Professor of English and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, May desires to provide his readers with faithful reflection on stories that have shaped him and that he wants us also to experience. It is interesting to note that May's book is the second of a recent, and unplanned, ecumenical trilogy of books in which contemporary fiction and/or film is brought into sustained dialogue with the Apostles' Creed. Bryan Stone's Faith and Film: Theological Themes at the Cinema (2000), which discusses sixteen films that illustrate basic themes of the Creed, was the first to come out. A Methodist and Professor of Evangelism at Boston University, Stone seeks to engage popular culture in Christian dialogue. A second study is David Cunningham's Reading Is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film (2002), which also starts with the Creed and then looks for that which exemplifies and explicates it by engaging the whole person--body, mind, and spirit--theologically. Cunningham, an Episcopalian systematic theologian, endeavors to make theology live today. …

The Best Medicine

The Best Medicine is a collection of short stories about special patient/physician relationships. These real-life stories are unique in that they are told from the perspective of both the patient and the physician. Each story begins with a synopsis of the setting and the background of the patient followed by the patient's account of how the relationship with the physician developed. Patients' perceptions of the qualities and characteristics of the physicians who calmed their fears, engendered their trust, and solidified their relationships are very insightful. The second portion of each story begins with a description of the physician's background, training, specialty, interests, and philosophical precepts that shaped his or her approach to life and to medicine. This is followed by the physician's account of how the special relationship with the patient developed and progressed. In almost every case, the central themes of openness, honesty, humanity, connectedness, and respect for patients can be found. I was impressed with the diversity of both patients and physicians that was encompassed in these short stories. In every story, I gained insight into the ways in which each physician encourages the building of trusting relationships with his or her patients. In addition, each physician revealed the things he/she had learned from the patient and the relationship. The book demonstrates that the patient/physician relationship transcends all specialties, genders, socioeconomic strata, and family structures. It stresses the importance of the emotional aspect of the physician, debunking the myth of the cold intellectual who only analyzes tests and prescribes treatment. The book also underscores the concept that a strong patient/physician relationship is therapeutic and leads to better outcomes. Often, the patient/physician relationships described took in family members, who were then enlisted as members of the support team. Each patient's trust allowed the physician to have special insights into symptoms and treatment responses that helped the physician know how to better help the patient. One of my favorite stories is under the section entitled “Lessons in Love.” Ms. Alvarez is a mother of 4 children, 2 of whom are retarded and 1 of whom is autistic. She developed a strong bond with Dr. Elisa Nicholas. From this patient/physician pair, I learned that parents are frequently stronger and wiser after having gone through such suffering. It seems that these persons are more apt to understand what is important in life. Dr. Nicholas relates the story of being invited to lunch at the home of one of her patients. While most doctors wouldn't go, she went and was truly blessed. One of Dr. Nicholas' profound observations was that when you invest in relationships with families, they allow you access into their lives, which allows you in turn to gain insight into how to live your own life. These relationships help keep physicians from becoming burned out and remind us why we chose to practice medicine in the first place. In the current health care culture, with its fetish for technology and its outright attack on autonomous patient/physician relationships, this book is both refreshing and reaffirming. What we do as physicians is important and unique. The patient/physician relationship is a privilege that we should make the central theme of our health care system. I would highly recommend this book to medical students, residents, and seasoned practitioners.

Young Children’s Emotional Attachments to Stories

In the interest of developing a more holistic and integrated understanding of young children’s experience of stories, this study describes preschoolers’ emotional attachments to stories and the cultural beliefs and practices which surround such attachments. Thirty‐two European‐American, middle‐class families, participated in an interview study of their children’s story attachments, and five of these mothers also participated in a short‐term, longitudinal diary study. Every child experienced at least two emotional attachments to stories. Children were captivated by stories presented in different media, with many attachments occurring around video stories in addition to books. They expressed their attachments by repeatedly requesting the story, expressing strong feelings, and enacting the story in pretend play. Story attachments were social in two fundamental ways: children created relationships with the characters in their favorite stories, and story attachments emerged in the context of relationships with caregivers whose beliefs and practices supported such attachments.