“Marley was dead: to begin with.” Charles Dickens wrote those long, long, long fun-to-diagram sentences, and then he wrote these.

There is a kind of satisfaction from doing a deep dive into a novel with friends. It is like you have gone down the rabbit hole together into a wonderland – a place either or not – that is a true shared experience. This is a gift we can give our students in lit circles if we can tread carefully […]

The poems of Poetry 180 were always live and available on the Library of Congress website. However, no more. There is a list of them, but not the poems. This is unfortunately.

Characters in literature help us explore possibilities because they can do what we might only to able to imagine. Their lives help us work through how problems, reactions and outcomes might interplay, how the situations might develop; outcomes are the results of choices humans make in real life, so rather than testing our theories on real people, characters help us […]

Pádraig Ó Tuama chooses poems that resonate often because he chooses poems that we can so easily place ourselves in. I knew the situation in Rick Barot’s poem “The Singing” and you do, too, if you have ever waited for the diagnosis about your car in a dealership waiting room.

…aren’t mysterious sauce experienced writers add to their concoctions. They are patterns of words formed by vocabulary – diction – and syntax – the way words are strung together. There are many fancy names for these patterns, which we can learn to recognize and to use. Start by looking for patterns in words, phrases and sentences. What impact do they […]