Little Astronaut
A newborn rests her head
On the Earth of mother.
Everything else
Is outer space.
--J. Hope Stein
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Week 5
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 (at least twice): Antonya Nelson, "Naked Ladies," (from Family Terrorists, 1994, Houghton Mifflin). PDF posted below.
A family discovers something about their mother.
Think About:
Laura's view of her mother's job at the House house.
Laura's view of her mother's relationship with her own children.
Laura's view of her mother's relationship with her father.
Differences between the House and Laughlin families.
The significance of the naked ladies drawings.
Click on the top right corner below to open the story.
Naked Ladies - Antonya Nelson.pdfPurely Optional - Listen to Lorrie Moore read "Naked Ladies"
Purely Optional - Antonya Nelson Talks About Her Writing
Antonya Nelson Biography
Antonya Nelson Biography
Antonya Nelson was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1961, the daughter of two English professors. She earned her B.A. from the University of Kansas in 1983 and her MFA from the University of Arizona in 1986. She has published seven short story collections (The Expendables, In the Land of Men, Family Terrorists, Female Trouble, Some Fun, Nothing Right, and Funny Once) and four novels (Nobody’s Girl, Talking in Bed, Living to Tell, and Bound.) Her work has appeared in The New Yorker (17 stories), Esquire, Harpers, and other magazines, as wells as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the MFA and Ph.D. programs in creative writing at the University of Houston. She has won the Flannery O'Conner Award for Short Fiction, the Rea Award for Short Stories, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is married to fellow writer Robert Boswell.
Link to Week 5 class recording: brandeis.zoom.us/rec/play/jse3zZfRD_DHcPrxgPHu04xOmUU-qDXogY1MYkyql02xxGRZHPc384b-zAfXrPtkgaTnuuJ7B_vABfk.YwO9dZ2drVoxRR0L
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