Week 8
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): "The Midnight Zone," pp. 68-83. (Published in Florida, 2018.)
A mother suffers a concussive blow at a hunting camp and instructs her young boys to “keep me awake with stories.”
Think About:
The mother and her view of "motherhood."
The setting and its relationship to the story.
The role of storytelling.
The mother’s hallucinations/visions.
The panther.
What is the midnight zone?
Is there growth/transformation in this story?
"Lauren Groff on the Cult of Motherhood," from New Yorker interview, May 2016
I'm a good mother and want to spend as much time as possible with my kids, but I travel a lot, I shut myself away from my family to work every day, I do not do birthday parties, and I went to one play-date in my life and wanted to break the Perrier bottle on the floor and stab myself with it. We have intense conversations in my house about apportioning responsibility, because neither my husband nor I wants to assume roles based on messed-up collective assumptions about gender dynamics. I think that, in our society, the idea of motherhood is pathologically ill, and even well-meaning people assume martyrdom in a mother. Guilt and shame are the tools used to keep people in line; the questions I get most at readings or in interviews are about being a mother and writer, when I'm expected to do this this sort of tap dance of humility that I have no desire or ability to dance. I think people are mostly kind and don't know that, when they ask these questions of women, they are asking us to perform a kind of ceremonial subjection—that we’re not allowed our achievements without first denigrating ourselves or saying, with a sigh, “Yes, that’s correct, I’m a writer and a mother, and it’s so hard, and, no, I don’t do it well.” The truth is, doing these things is hard because being a good parent is always hard, but the difficulty of parenting is separate from the difficulty of work. My children are very happy, smart, funny, wonderful, and their father is an extraordinary nurturer: they are missing out on nothing. This is to say that, for a long time, conflicting ideas about motherhood and all its attendant expectations were eating me up from the inside and I needed to write something about it.