80
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Hitting HOME
with the New Story Project:
BY BR IA N GLOV E R
TEACHING WITH THE North Carolina Literary Review IN NORTH CAROLINA
IF YOU’RE READING THIS JOURNAL, YOU LIKELY TAKE
an interest in writing. You might even think you’ve got good taste; secretly, you might be a bit of a snob about it. At the very least, you’re here to find out what makes NCLR’s editors tick. But how did you get that way? How did you first start chasing the good stuff? Maybe your parents passed on the habit at home. Maybe chance threw you a teacher with the rare love of a well-turned phrase or the rarer talent of faking it. Maybe you once found yourself in a cool, air-conditioned public library with time on your hands, a burning summer day outside, and the strong conviction that someplace, some time just had to be better than here. As you read more, your taste twisted and climbed, blossomed and excresced. In your mature judgment, that hero whose slim paperback sustained you through the ninth grade revealed feet of clay and fists of ham. You loved the
writer who seemed to have lived in your very skin, and then you got bored with yourself and sought out the new, the different, the ultimate otherness of others. You learned new words and ditched some old ones. You kept reading. When I teach literature, I try most of all to guide my students onto that path. I toss them my favorites and other people’s favorites, hope something sticks, shout like Robin Williams when the situation demands it. But I know my choices on the syllabus will never equal the jolt of the student’s own discovery – that writer nobody told her to read, who did that one thing she’d never seen before, that changed everything. In my profession we spend a lot of time showing young people the best that’s been thought and said, but not enough helping them find their own ways in. So while I can’t require the ECU bookstore to stock its shelves with
You loved the writer who seemed to have lived in your very skin, and then you got bored with yourself and sought out the new, the different, the ultimate otherness of others. BRIAN GLOVER earned his PhD at the University of Virginia. He teaches English at ECU, where he received the Bertie Fearing Teaching Award in 2013 (and more than one student paper from his composition classes has been selected for ECU’s W. Keats Sparrow Writing Award). He writes about British and American autobiography and is currently at work on a book about culturally Northern writers from the US South. He is also a member of the NCLR editorial board, and he was awarded a BB&T Active Learning and Leadership Development Incentive Grant for a project related to his use of NCLR in his short story classes.
The author has shared his assignment description with NCLR’s readers. Read it online, or download it from NCLR’s website. NCLR editors welcome more essays about using NCLR in the classroom. Featured within this essay are the opening pages of the stories Glover discusses, all designed by NCLR Art Director DANA EZZELL GAY. All of the back issues are available for purchase from NCLR, and there are enough copies of most issues that they could easily be used for a class.