Field Notes

Teaching All Quiet on the Western Front to modern teenagers felt a little bit like trying to emotionally connect exhausted raccoons to a sepia-toned war documentary while they dissociated under fluorescent lighting. And listen: I understand that All Quiet on the Western Front is objectively an important book. I appreciate the anti-war messaging. I appreciate the empathy-building potential of forcing American teenagers to sit inside the perspective of young German soldiers dur

Let’s get one thing straight: dark humor is not your average knock-knock joke. It’s the kind of humor that tiptoes on the edge of taboo, pokes fun at the grim, and somehow makes you laugh when you probably shouldn’t. If you’ve ever chuckled at a morbid quip in a novel or smirked at a bleak punchline, you’ve experienced the strange magic of dark humor. Today, I’m diving headfirst into this twisted, witty world and exploring dark humor's literary impact. Buckle up. Why Dark Hum

Nobody tells you that grief has a dress code. But it does. There are things you are supposed to say and a certain speed at which you are supposed to say them, and after a while, if you are paying any attention at all, you realize the whole performance is less about the person you lost and more about making everyone in the room comfortable enough to keep eating the cold cuts. I have been writing about my sister’s illness and death in ways that do not always behave. The writing

There’s something deeply unsettling about realizing your fiction has been trying to tell you something before you were ready to hear it. I used to think I was just writing atmospheric stories. Weird systems. Endless hallways. People trapped inside structures that made them feel small, monitored, exhausted. Characters moving through fluorescent worlds where every decision felt pre-approved before they even made it. And then one day I had the deeply unfortunate experience of re

How Real Housewives, Diss Tracks, and Shakespeare help us Read and Read REAL HOUSEWIVES OF ATLANTA: FANGELA OF ANGELA There is a reason some insults survive for centuries while others disappear immediately. People still quote William Shakespeare because he understood that the best insults are not just mean. They are creative. They paint pictures. They use rhythm, imagery, exaggeration, comparison, specificity, and emotional precision. Even students who swear they “hate poetry

One of the hardest things about teaching close reading is convincing students that this is not some weird academic performance they will never use again after high school. Because honestly? A lot of them think literary analysis is basically just: “Find symbolism nobody asked for.” “Pretend curtains are depression.” “Write paragraphs like a haunted Victorian thesaurus.” And I get why they think that. A lot of students have spent years being rewarded for sounding analytical ins