Week 1

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.
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 - Before reading the short story, please review:

The Reading Guide for an overview of the short story form and how to approach them. https://sites.google.com/view/exploringlaurengroff/reading-guide

Think About:

Is there anything you would add to the reading guide?
Any elements you would dispute?
What draws you to the short story form?

"My pieces, although their background is the scenery and characters that bounded my childhood, are intended less about the real and ascertainable past than about the memory of it....Some of the events in the stories are true to fact some not." — Nancy Hale

READ (at least twice): Nancy Hale – “Earliest Dreams” (from Where the Light Falls, pp. 5-8).

This story is a description of a childhood memory.

Think About:

The unusual narration.
The role the senses play in the story.
What can we tell about the child's feelings from these descriptions?
Why do you think the story is divided into three sections and how do they differ?
Why do you think the narrator is looking back at this time?
The power of Hale's language and descriptions. Find sentences or descriptions that particularly resonated for you.

Nancy Hale Biography

Nancy Hale was born in Boston in 1908, the daughter of Impressionist painters Philip L. Hale and Lilian Westcott Hale. She was a frequent model for her parents’ paintings, a practice which she reportedly hated.

Hale’s body of work includes more than 100 short stories, seven novels, seven short story collections, two memoirs, and a biography of Mary Cassatt. She won 10 O. Henry awards for her short stories.

“I specialize in women,” Nancy Hale said. “Women puzzle me.” She felt that she knew how, “in a given situation, a man was apt to react.” Women, on the other hand, vexed and intrigued her. Read more...