I’ve used Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby in my English methods course for many years. I’ve taught it in my own ELA classrooms (Here are some ideas I’ve used introducing the book to students). As a teacher educator, I use it to model and provide guided practice in curriculum development. As we talk about lesson plannings, students and I also talk about the novel. I lead demonstration lessons, and students workshop group lesson plans. Invariably students home in on the novel’s magic realism...

I’m not an avid fan of William Blake’s poetry. I’ve read it, first as an undergraduate many, many years ago and again as a graduate student many years ago. I probably wouldn’t have read his poems otherwise. There’s something to be said about making people read things they normally wouldn’t. Of course, finding meaning in what we read is both a personal and social act. What Blake means to me has as much to do with who I am and the world in which I live than it does with who Blake was or wrote....

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...