Writer Allan Gurganus works with students at
Tyner Academy.
Playwright Katori Hall discusses her works with students at Signal Mountain Middle-High School.Some authors offer images so vivid, readers feel as if they’re tumbled through a wormhole into another universe. Consider this passage in which a woman who slaved and strategized out of poverty suddenly recalls her childhood home:
“It stood near a cliff where the wind off the ocean was always blowing. As a child it seemed to me the ocean had caught a terrible cold because it was always wheezing and there would be spells when it let out a huge sneeze which is to say there was a burst of wind with a tremendous spray…(The house was) leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way. Probably it would have collapsed if my father hadn’t cut a timber from a wrecked fishing boat to prop up the eaves…”
That was from Arthur Golden’s bestselling “Memoirs of a Geisha. Soddy-Daisy High School students had the chance to ask Golden about how he recreated pre-war Japan when he visited them last year as part of the Southern Lit Alliance’s Writers in Classrooms.
“Not only had the students read the novel carefully, but their very fine teacher had encouraged them to think about it deeply,” Golden says in an email, adding that their questions tested his own insight. “I’d go again tomorrow if I could.”
Names of Writers in Classrooms for the upcoming school year will be revealed at an October Southern Lit Alliance fundraiser held at the Flying Squirrel. In 2013, 26 writers participated