Three Times in Cyber Print!

My third story to be published online has just come out! The story, "Fines Double in Workzone," was published in the autumn issue of Antithesis Common. Check it out!

http://www.antithesiscommon.com/Issue5/toc.htm

My second story, "Dreamers," was published in the summer 2003 issue of The Square Table.

http://www.thesquaretable.com/Summer03/dreamers.htm

My first story, "Lighthouse," was published in the summer 2003 issue of Arbutus magazine, which has since gone belly up, so I can't link to it. I guess that frees that one up for another round of submissions!

It's great to see your name in print, whether online or in hard copy! So I have two more stories floating out in the void...we'll see what comes of them.

Back to the essays...

Student Generated List of Summer Reading Books, excerpt

As promised, here is the compiled list of summer reads my students tackled this summer. This is not an exhaustive list, only a brief, truncated one. These tend to be the most interesting titles, although there were many other books that could have been placed here. It is, in a sense, refreshing to see the variety of titles. I hope they enjoyed their books as much as I did mine.

Bee Season
Tuesdays with Maurie
Heat
The Lovely Bones
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Cell
The Boys of Winter
Bleachers
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Million Little Pieces
The DaVinci Code
Angels and Demons
The Chosen
The Secret Life of Bees
The Devil Wears Prada
Requiem for a Dream

...And the Inevitable Sorrow of Summer Reading

And so it ends. Summer is over and the beach reading has to disappear. Which really is the sorrow of the whole process, the ending. Summer is such a freeing time for us all, a time to read and write without the constraints, and, for me, the requisite guilt that comes with them, of class obligations. Now we're back to it, back to prescribing books and assigning essays. But the hope is that there are readers out there, young people who are as voracious for the text as they are the iPod and the Play Station. I believe that there are, only we don't see them because they are hidden under the blanket of bad press their generation consistently garners. As a society, we'll have to wait and see. As a teacher, I'll get a more immediate chance today.

Students in my senior English classes sit down today to write the traditional summer reading essay, an opportunity for them to divulge what they found exciting or boring about their summer books. We moved to a choice system this year, as opposed to previous years where we simply dictated what books students would read (although I still do that somewhat for my AP class), and I am now anxiously awaiting the results. In my next post I'll share with you some of the books the students read this summer, and give some snippets of their reviews.

The first week is over, and the year has officially started. No turning back, now.