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Scott Shields

A Night at the Opera

November 23, 2010

Up until now I’ve avoided opera—not out of malice or a disdain for the music (my dad had a large collection of classical LPs he used to play when I was a kid which included a number of opera scores, and I remember enjoying them), but simply because I didn’t feel qualified to give an intelligent [...]

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Who Am I? (A Reader’s Inventory)

November 10, 2010

Image via Wikipedia In a recent post to the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) website, an elementary school Reading teacher shared an exercise that she does with her students. The idea is for the students to write down 100 things about themselves as readers. The point of the activity is to help the [...]

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“Try to See It My Way” (Writers and Negative Capability)

October 13, 2010

Image by Getty Images via @daylife “The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.” —Leo Stein, American art collector and critic In an 1817 letter to a friend, the poet John Keats describes one of the qualities that makes writers [...]

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Who Is My Audience?

September 29, 2010

Image via Wikipedia Mark Twain claimed that, before he ever published a book, he would “always read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows: 1. Man and a woman with no sense of humor. 2. Man and a woman with a medium sense of humor. 3. Man and a woman with [...]

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Pipe Dreams

September 15, 2010

Image via Wikipedia I find it curious that my all of favorite writers were smokers. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Abbey, William Faulkner—all of these wordsmiths were avid devotees of either pipes or cigars (or both). So why is it that writing and tobacco seem to be such close bedfellows? For [...]

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