Hot for Teaching

A back-to-school playlist, interviews with Sam Lipsyte & Amanda Shires, Leslie Jamison on Barbie, an excerpt from Edan Lepucki's new novel, inside the new Jay-Z retrospective, and more

This week I pivoted careers, and stepped away from (most of) my freelance writing and bookstore job. I started teaching. 8th grade English and history at a Brooklyn charter school. To say I was excited would be an understatement. To say I was exhausted by Friday afternoon would be, too.

Professional development was in one of the school system’s high schools. I walked in Monday morning to a welcoming sea of diversity, of first-time teachers, teachers new to the system, principles, and instructional leads to coach us.

So far, I have learned about culturally responsive teaching, about the importance of truly seeing students, and about the strength of the student-teacher relationship. The school teaches “warm demanding,” something us new teachers felt firsthand as we roleplayed classroom situations and our coaches nudged us to be incrementally stronger with every iteration. I am excited to return tomorrow.

I have seen firsthand how demanding teaching can be. My partner has been a teacher for over eight years, and I have seen the time and effort she puts into her lesson planning and professional growth. I didn’t know how rewarding it is to be part of a school where everyone is pulling together to create social change. And I have just started…

Are you a teacher? Do you have any advice for someone entering the career? For teaching ELA, ELA special education, or history? I would love to hear your thoughts.

A Back to School Playlist (30 songs, 1 hour and 51 minutes)

Largehearted Likes:

1. This list of the best reading chairs
   I have been searching for a comfortable reading chair for our bedroom, this list was a great starting point. Do you have a favorite reading chair?

2. Samantha Maxwell at Paste on tomato sandwiches

   Tomato sandwiches are one of summer’s greatest joys. I’ve been finding ripe, local, field-grown tomatoes at farmer’s markets (while waiting for my own to turn red in the backyard) and putting them between slices of white bread slathered with Duke’s mayo and (heretical to purists) a random slice of cheese almost daily.

Largehearted Links

1. Sam Lipsyte’s interview with

   Kurt Vonnegut Radio
   |
   On the tight plotting in his newest novel

   “This time, I set these strictures. I said this was happening in a week. And I knew which week it was. And I looked at the calendar from 1993. And I looked up weather reports from those days in 1993. So I would know exactly what was happening and what was happening in the news. And I knew I wanted it to end with a certain weather event that had happened and was very meaningful to me.”

2. Amanda Petrusich’s remembrance of Sinéad O’Connor
   O’Connor was never quiet about her pain, even when it would have been easier to swallow or evade it—in fact, being unapologetic about the crippling weight of certain sorrows was the defining characteristic of her work.

3. An excerpt from

   Edan Lepucki
   ’s new novel, Time’s Mouth

4. U.S. Girls & Bootsy Collins covered Leon Russell’s “Superstar”

5. New short fiction by Brittney Uecker at

   Short Story, Long

6. Amanda Shires was interviewed by

   Don't Rock The Inbox

7. Alice Elliott Dark
   on writing critical notes

   Our writing, our made thing, exists both separately from us as an object that can be experienced by a stranger who has no knowledge of who we are, and it is an avatar of our choices, preferences, tastes, abilities, sensibilities, defenses, beliefs, intelligence, and blind spots. Critiquing a piece by a student or friend goes best when this is understood and a balance between the two established.

8. Inside the Jay-Z Retrospective at the Brooklyn Public Library

9. Ann Patchett on reading and writing
   Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

   AP: Allan Gurganus, my sophomore year of college at Sarah Lawrence. Allan taught me how to work, then throw it out, then work some more. Preciousness is the death of writing, especially when you’re a beginner. At nineteen I would have happily spent a week crafting one perfect sentence. Allan didn’t let us do that, which was an enormous gift since one perfect sentence gets you nowhere.

10. Leslie Jamison on Barbie at the New Yorker
    The first time my daughter asked for a Barbie, soon after her fifth birthday, I felt the sense of dread that comes from watching the protagonist of a horror film jimmy open a locked door at the end of a dark hallway.

11. Chelsea on her new publishing house, Rose Books
    ”I just noticed a trend in a lack of risk-taking from mainstream publishers and also agents,” Hodson tells NYLON. “Once a writer was trying to take their career to the next level, I noticed a lot of pushback on books that I felt were amazing.”
    

Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts

A playlist for the anthology The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature

Daniel Magariel’s playlist for his novel Walk the Darkness Down

Dave Fitzgerald’s playlist for his novel Troll

David Connor’s playlist for his novel Oh God, The Sun Goes

David Joy’s playlist for his novel Those We Thought We Knew

David Lawrence Morse’s playlist for his story collection The Book of Disbelieving

Janice Deal’s playlist for her novel The Sound of Rabbits

John Milas’s playlist for his novel The Militia House

Kate Doyle’s playlist for her story collection I Meant It Once

Rebekah Bergman’s playlist for her novel The Museum of Human History

Sati Mookherjee’s playlist for her poetry collection Ways of Being

Stephanie Bishop’s playlist for her novel The Anniversary

Tim Murphy’s playlist for his novel Speech Team