The Hovel
“Hard by here is a hovel. Some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the tempest.” – King Lear
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
The literary tradition imaginatively chronicles the experience of sinners and sufferers through the ages. When engaged with, it both enlarges our own limited perspective so we may see compassionately through the eyes of others, and also holds up a mirror to human nature – in particular, our weakness – thereby highlighting our need for true relationship. CenterForLit’s blog, The Hovel, aims to act as a doorway to this kind of community by facilitating life-giving conversation about the reading experience, literary education, and literature’s great ideas.
Picture Books…for High Schoolers?
If you are already thinking about the reading list you will assign to your students next fall, congratulations – you are way ahead of Missy and me! But let me offer one piece of advice as you assemble your curriculum: Assign children’s picture storybooks to all of your students in the first few weeks of the school year…
“Another Golgotha”
Holding my breath, suffocated by the burning odor of bleach, I took up my sponge against the scarred and yellow linoleum of my first apartment’s kitchen floor. The war raged long. Arms weary, knees bruised, I scrubbed like my life depended on it. And when I rinsed the host of suds at the end of a long afternoon…the floor did not look any cleaner. I obsessed over that kitchen floor for the whole first year of my marriage. I took it as a black mark against my identity as a homemaker…
Conflict–The Heart of Every Story
“Write me a story,” I said to the girls in my junior high composition class. “It is due next Wednesday.” That was the extent of the assignment I gave them. No limits, no rules, no guidance – nothing. Admittedly, I was new. As a first year teacher, I had no way of knowing what I was in for, or how grave an error I had just made. If I had been more experienced, I would have been alarmed by the eager light coming on in the students’ eyes. These were aspiring writers, after all. They had always wanted to change…
“Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild!” – Grace for the Dog Days of Winter
February’s doldrums are upon us. The festive season is long gone, and summer break is far beyond our reach. As an antidote, I would like to recommend Mem Fox’s classic picture book, Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild! (Harcourt, 2000). If you are anything like me, you will relate to the protagonist in this story immediately – and her experience might help you redeem the Dog Days of winter…
A World Without Books and Other Catastrophes, or Why I Hate the Desert Island Game
On our first BiblioFiles podcast episode, Ian posed the Desert Island Question: If you were confined to a desert island with only three books, which would you choose? He and the rest of the CenterForLit staff laughed when I struggled to name three. I couldn’t decide. I was paralyzed. How could I possibly narrow it down to a mere three titles?…
Christian Books and Christian Reading: Part Two
Ernest Hemingway’s prize winning 1953 novella The Old Man and the Sea opens on Santiago, an ancient fisherman, who is mired in an epic streak of bad luck. He has not caught a fish in many days – so many, in fact, that he is near starvation and has been shunned as cursed by the other fisherman in the small village where he lives and works. The novel tells the story of his last voyage, in which he travels farther out into the Sea than anyone has ever dared, and catches the greatest fish in history. As a master fisherman,…
Joy and Death in Tolkien
It’s tempting to think that reading fantasy is about escaping from one’s own world. I’d bet that everyone has wished at least once that they could join their favorite characters in their world—things always turn out better, or at least they seem far more exciting through the eyes of our favorite authors. But I think to dismiss fantasy literature as escapism is to ignore the central attraction of a good fantasy novel: its capacity to recast universal truths in winning ways…
Christian Books and Christian Reading
If you have never read Jack London’s classic 1908 short story, “To Build a Fire,” you should put it on your winter reading list. This harrowing description of a man’s struggle for survival in the sub-zero temperatures of the Yukon Territory will make this season’s coldest day seem balmy by comparison…
An Apology for “The Hovel”
I think my husband is tired of letting me name things. Our life is becoming a living encyclopedia for the work of William Shakespeare. We have a car named “Hal,” a plant named “Brutus,” and I’m trying to figure out how to convince Ian to let me use “Miranda” as the middle name of a future daughter. (I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for The Tempest.) Needless to say, when it was time to dream up titles for all of our new endeavors at CenterForLit, nothing was safe. I suggested an alternative Shakespearean title for every new…
Just Another Reason I Homeschool: A Meditation on Jayber Crow
In award-winning author Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, twice-orphaned Jonah searches for answers to the eternal questions: What is the nature of God? What is prayer? Is life a random series of disconnected events, or a linear, purposeful, meaningful path? These universal questions all converge upon Jonah’s more personal questions of identity: Who am I? Am I what I do? Do I, in fact, choose my profession, thus bearing the immense responsibility of making myself? Or am I born to a calling? Crow describes this undetected pressure to create an identity for oneself as a kind of subtle bondage…
Happy New Year from a Happy New CenterForLit!
Thanks for stopping by! I am thrilled to welcome you to our online community for Lit Lovers. Every nook and cranny of the CenterForLit website has been redesigned and expanded to serve you better. Inside, you’ll find a dozen ways to participate in the Great Conversation – a conversation about books and ideas, about homeschooling and parenting, about sin and grace and redemption. And don’t worry: we still offer all the curriculum materials and classes you depend on. In fact, we’re making more all the time…
Matters of Conscience – Reactions to Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman”
I ordered Go Set a Watchman for myself back in February, as excited by the reported “discovery” of Harper Lee’s prequel as the rest of the nation seemed to be. To Kill a Mockingbird stands a beacon of American literature and a guardian of the American Southern identity which it helped to forge. The shadowy figure of Harper Lee, so evocative of her mysterious character Boo Radley, continues to stir the imagination of the public. Is it any wonder that the possibility of another Lee masterpiece stirred the blood of readers who cut their teeth on her original work? We desired the new manuscript…
Making One Lesson Count
What if you only have time to read one book with your student this year? Should you throw your hands up in despair and enroll him in the local government school? Well, it’s up to you, but you might be missing a great opportunity. You would be surprised at how powerful just one lesson can be. In fact, a well-designed discussion of a single book can dramatically affect the way your student reads all other books for the rest of his life…
Preparing Students to Think about Modern Literature
I sing of dirty dishes and the man…Today, June 16, marks the 24 hours that Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joycean geeks commonly refer to it as “Bloomsday.” If you have heard of Ulysses before, the context was most likely negative. Perhaps you categorize it with other “modernist nonsense” or “perverse drivel.”…
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Don’t look now, but summer is just around the corner. It’s almost time to engage in that most ridiculous of all homeschooling rituals: planning next year’s curriculum while simultaneously trying to finish last year’s curriculum. It’s totally unrealistic and invariably overwhelming, but most of us do it anyway – or at least feel guilty for putting it off…
Freedom from the Law of the Booklist
It was spring of my oldest son’s eighth grade year, and I, like homeschool moms all over the country, was planning for the fall. Except this time, my son would be starting high school. This time, it would “count.” Panic replaced my usual plenary excitement as I wondered what colleges would be looking for on high school transcripts and how I was going to prepare my homeschooler to convince them that he had mastered everything. I flew through reams of paper creating a plethora of booklists, each one longer and more ambitious than the previous, and frankly wore myself out…
Monster Stories
Sometimes the simplest interpretive detail can give us amazing insight into a classic book. A question as basic as “who is the protagonist?” can often unlock the whole story and help us avoid unfortunate misinterpretations…
The Balm of Gilead
I recently read Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead. Robinson’s first person narrator, a character by the name of John Ames, relates the story of his family, three generations of pastor-fathers. In a lengthy letter that reads like a journal, Ames shares this history with his son. Seventy-year-old Ames’s voice reflects his age, at times wandering, at times repeating himself, but always striving to make sense of the troubling dysfunction and beautiful theology bequeathed to him by his forefathers. As I read, I was struck not only by the believability of Ames’s voice, nor the author’s elegant use of imagery and…
Plagued With Doubts
We discussed Great Expectations the other night in our online class. Great stuff! The kids had a million comments – in fact, they waited online for an hour after class to read their favorite parts out loud, just to laugh at Dickens’ crazy characters. I even got a call or two from pleased moms, saying their kids really enjoyed it. Still, this morning I am plagued with doubts. I was teaching without Missy for the first time in a while, and I left the class feeling pretty insecure…
A Homeschooling Mom’s New Year’s Resolution: Part Two
Is it possible that even our deficiencies as homeschoolers are part of God’s gift to our children? I don’t know about you, but my kids are turning out a lot like me – not that they’re carbon copies, but there are, say, family resemblances. Realistically speaking, my kids are sinners, and no amount of spit and polish, no quantity of education will change that. Although it’s painful to see my sins reflected in my children, it has historically proven to be a blessing in disguise.