I recently needed to assign my students a brief bit of nonfiction in order to write a summary paper. While choosing Rachel Carson’s “The Marginal World” is a little unorthodox for this assignment, I wanted something they could both enjoy (more than other options, at least) and learn from. “The Marginal World” is an oft-forced-upon-students…
Holy Toledo! We have just finished covering short stories in my home school co-op English 1 class. This week I slid into a brief bit of short nonfiction and assigned my students March, Book 1 and Martin Luther King Jr.s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter was one of three suggestions of short nonfiction that…
I think that A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin took me so long to read because it is a book of short stories. In a way, there are no cliffhangers to keep the pages turning between the stories. But how about that title? I love it. Is it a manual for cleaning women…
I heard some advice at the writing conference I went to last spring, and I keep hearing it. Or at least I keep repeating it and other authors nod their heads like they are familiar with it. If you haven’t already guessed from the title of this blog entry, the advice is for writers to…
I am a fan of Keri Smith’s books. They’re not novels, they’re journals or activity books of sorts. I think they get called “anti-journaling”? Among her most famous titles are: Wreck This Journal This Is Not a Book Finish This Book Mess Guerilla Art Kit How to Be an Explorer of the World Tear Up…
This list doesn’t have to be huge, for me. I was really looking for classic detective fiction after teaching Victorian Gothic to my students and Poe twice. I’m also a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and covered The Hound of the Baskervilles. Then with a new Agatha Christie movie just around the corner, I…
Some days (okay, many days) I just enjoy listing. It’s enjoyable, for me, to list. Maybe I should make it into a visual artform. I noticed recently that I didn’t have a book set on my TBR for Valentine’s Day. Not that Valentine’s Day is the biggest deal, but the truth is I like to…
I have boarded the dot/bullet journaling train. Let me explain. First, there is some argument about whether or not it is called dot journaling or bullet journaling and about whether or not those are the same thing. From what I can tell, they can be used interchangeably to refer to journaling in a blank book…
We’re weeks into the new year (already!) and I have done some New Years reading (which is mostly planners). I did pick a book from my New Years best books, but I was mostly getting myself all ready for a transition into dot journaling. Please don’t just hear that and run away. I’ll review the…
Let’s just wrap up this year (which ended a few days ago, now) with a triple-review of Christmas-related reading. (For my original list of Christmas recommended reading—from which I pulled these titles for this year—click HERE.) And off we go… THE GREATEST GIFT The Greatest Gift is the story on which the movie It’s a…
This afternoon I am doing a thing. I have been building up to it lately, though I might have been building up to it for years. There is a part of me, for the last several months, that has thought, “May, 2022. It’ll come soon enough.” Turns out it’s not soon enough. So this afternoon…
For the holiday season, the entire homeschool co-op read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have already reviewed this book and also a couple of the movies related to it. I also listed some more movies that are adapted from it. I imagined I would have time this year to watch all of these, but…
Before I get to the Christmas reviews (and try to bang them out this week before we get to the new year), I have a book that I read for Thanksgiving. Yes, Thanksgiving does have some books. Well, sorta. Certainly there is not a huge amount of them (like Thanksgiving movies and let’s not even…
After I posted the last blog entry (“Published!), WordPress notified me that it was the 500th blog post on The Starving Artist. Whew! So I did a little digging and found out this, as well: my first post was on October 17, 2012, “A Meandering History of The Starving Artist.” My first book review was…
Well, folks, I have been published. I have been pushing harder and harder over the Pandemic, trying to veeeery slowly re-warm up my writing career so that when I am done homeschooling (May of 2022) I will have a place to jump from. I am still extremely far from writing full-time but I am so…
I have wrapped up the mythology unit in my Freshman English co-op class with American Born Chinese. Now it’s time to review the book that I used as the cornerstone of the unit. It might surprise you, but I went with Gods and Heroes: Mythology Around the World by Korwin Briggs. Of course, this won’t…
It was October when I was at a great Southern Pines, NC bookstore called The Country Bookshop with a coupon, so my choice of Cooking for Wizards, Warriors and Dragons by Thea James (co-author of the award-winning The Book Smugglers fanzine) was not just about enjoying fantasy books nor just about me having a project…
I read the Harry Potter series almost every Halloween-time. Last year I started the series by reading and then reviewing the illustrated version. This year I am doing the same thing with the Minalima pop-up edition, just it’s taken me a couple months to get around to reviewing it. (And, in fact, I waited for…
I know most of you can empathize, but it has been a busy season. I hosted Thanksgiving for thirteen and I go all out (and then multiply what you were thinking by ten), my daughter’s birthday fell the day before this year, we are still in a pandemic, I have Christmas to make happen on…
While a fellow at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s annual conference earlier this year, I ended up hanging with the other parent-writer fellows and parent-writers (like in the Zooms and chats, because the conference was Pandemic-virtual). One of these people was the impressive Sarah Twombly. There was just something about her… she did give…
the starving artist 