Week 2
Class Ground Rules
Read all the assignments before class.
Keep yourself on mute unless called on.
Raise your hands electronically.
Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.
Discuss the author's story, not your own story.
Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.
Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.
Listen to and respond to others with respect.
READ (at least twice): "L. DeBard and Aliette," pp. 41-78. (Published in Delicate Edible Birds, 2015.)
A tragic romance between a polio survivor and her swimming teacher set against the backdrop of the 1918 flu pandemic.
Think About:
The first paragraph, how it sets the scene and the beauty of the language.
The relevance of the flu epidemic of 1918.
The narration—third person, but present tense—how does this influence the story?
The characters—L. DeBard and Aliette, and the development of their relationship.
The seduction.
The son, Compass.
The ending.
READ: Articles about the real people who inspired this short story.
Ethelda Bleibtrey: American Olympic Swimmer
Bleibtrey was a dominant backstroke swimmer, but entered and won gold medals in three freestyle events when there were no women's backstroke events at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. She won a gold medal as member of the winning U.S. team in the women's 4×100-meter freestyle relay, together with teammates Margaret Woodbridge, Frances Schroth and Irene Guest. The team set a new world record in the event final. Individually, Bleibtrey also received gold medals and set world records in the women's 100-meter freestyle and the women's 300-meter freestyle.
She started swimming to help recover from polio, which she contracted in 1917. In 1919, she was arrested for "nude swimming" because she removed her stockings at a pool where it was forbidden to bare "the lower female extremities for public bathing." The subsequent public support for Bleibtrey led to the abandonment of stockings as a conventional element in women's swimwear.
Source: Wikipedia
Click on the photo below for Ethelda's story.
READ: Lauren Groff on how the story came about
"I had written a really, really poor, failed novel based on Abelard and Heloise… I think it’s a really beautiful love story, and it didn’t work because I wasn’t ready to tell the story yet. That winter was a really hard one for me… I felt like I was bursting out of my skin in a lot of ways. So I did what I normally do when life gets a little hard, I read a lot. I read this wonderful collection of poetry called Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt, and she is a ridiculously talented poet, and it was about the 1918 flu epidemic. And then at the same time, the idea of women athletes has always been fascinating to me, primarily because my little sister Sarah is a professional triathlete, and her presentation of her body as her living [is] in a way that’s based on prowess and not based on physical beauty. That presentation of the female body as a work of art is amazing. And so I started researching a lot of old figures in sports who were women, and Ethelda Bleibtrey popped up. She was ridiculous. She had polio, and then she tried to get her body back in shape by swimming and became a multiple gold medalist at the Stockholm Olympics. She’s just unbelievable. It was just the confluence of three large ideas… I just knew when they met and exploded, that was the story that I had to tell. So, that was lucky… That happens once in a while, and when it does you just have to be humble and grateful, and it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you want it to." Flavorwire interview, Feb. 6, 2009
Link to Week 2 class recording: brandeis.zoom.us/rec/play/Mc7TdrP4mOxsyIVnixN5QTrQpdygiB0p7W1us1D7jd8AQa6ylgFz_rAQWS2LJR1RLkZQygCuRHGCHeQS.tPRGQAFsW3WsrpiD