One of my favorite short stories is Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It was one of his last, written in 1898. He died a few years later of tuberculosis. He was forty-four years old.

In “Gooseberries,” Ivan Ivanych tells two friends about his brother’s lifelong desire to own a farm. The brother dreamed of growing and selling gooseberries. And it happened. The dream, though, blinded the brother to those around him. His wife, who financed his dream, died at a young age. The peasants who worked...

In the 1990s, I taught middle grades in an all-Black boys’ school on Chicago’s West Side. I was the only English teacher, left to stem students’ past education struggles and create interest in the world of print. After a few false starts that no doubt felt familiar to what they had already experienced in school, my students and I figured something out about literacy—it really does emanate from the personal: personal connections, interests, uses, etcetera. Because of that, anything that...

I lived off and on—mostly on—for six years in Anderson, Indiana, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A good part of it was spent in the house shown here. I lived in all three apartments at one time or another. They were my college days. Anderson was an automobile factory town. General Motors parts plants spread across a large swath of the southeast side, employers of over 25,000 people in the late 60s, early 70s. My step-grandmother and step-grandfather worked at Guide Lamp and Delco-Remy,...