Week 7
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): "Snake Stories," pp. 204-214. (Published in Florida, 2018.)
A woman muses about snakes, climate change, and evil in the world while finding goodness and comfort in her husband.
Think About:
First person narration and what we learn about the narrator.
The husband and what we learn about him.
The place of snakes in the story.
The thread about the raped woman.
The thread about the old boyfriend.
The hint of politics/the timeframe.
Story Event Timeline
Genesis - Adam and Eve story.
Distant Past - Boyfriend rapes narrator in shower one summer after a party.
Fall 2016 - Olivia and Omar get divorced. Three rapes happen in neighborhood. Narrator finds beaten woman. Trump wins the election.
January 2017 - Narrator and husband walk home from party on New Year's Day. Trump takes office.
February 2017 - Scott Pruitt (climate denier) appointed to head EPA.
Groff's View on the Misinterpretation of Genesis
I have been haunted in my life by so much of that strange book, the Bible: the wives made into pillars of salt, the seraphim, the begetting and the begotten. I am haunted now by Genesis, the moment when God, having made the stuff of this planet — the firmament, the waters, the lights, the animals — breathes into his new creation, we poor humans molded of clay, and says:
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
I am haunted by this passage; this passage has long been haunting our planet. Our disintegrating climate, our rising seas choked with plastic, our dying trees, our extinct animals, can all be directly traced to a profound and devastating misreading of it. For dominion, men these past few thousand years have not read good custodianship, caregiving, a maternal nursing of the gifts we have been given: they have read domination. The whelp of domination is that nasty biting creature, supremacy. Where supremacy exists, there is always suppression. Where suppression exists, there is destruction.
Lauren Groff on Our Climate Crisis, An Essay for the #ClimateVisionaries Artists' Project for Greenpeace, January 1, 2020. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LvbOMzw8bOHHABJF8tQ2KpQEdiB3IBmJ/view?usp=sharing