The first Scrabble post of the semester featured first names that are also common nouns, making them playable in Scrabble. Today’s post includes place names and words derived from places, or toponyms–more proper nouns that are playable in Scrabble because they’re also common nouns. Studying these words offers you additional opportunities to broaden your vocabulary and up your game.
afghan: a wool blanket
alamo: a cottonwood poplar tree
alaska: a heavy fabric
berlin: a type of carriage
bermudas: a variety of knee-length, wide-legged shorts
bohemia: a community of unconventional, usually artistic, people
bolivia: a soft fabric
bordeaux: a wine from the Bordeaux region
boston: a card game similar to whist
brazil: a type of tree found in Brazil used to make instrument bows (also brasil)
brit: a non-adult herring
cayman: a type of crocodile, also known as a spectacled crocodile (also caiman)
celt: a type of axe used during the New Stone Age
chile: a spicy pepper (also chili)
colorado: used to describe cigars of medium strength and color
congo: an eellike amphibian
cyprus: a thin fabric
dutch: referring to each person paying for him or herself
egyptian: a sans serif typeface
english: to cause a ball to spin
french: to slice food thinly
gambia: a flowering plant known as cat’s claw (also gambier, which is a small town in Ohio)
geneva: gin, or a liquor like gin
genoa: a type of jib (a triangular sail), also known as a jenny, first used by a Swedish sailor in Genoa
german: also known as the german cotillon, an elaborate nineteenth-century dance
greek: something not understood
guinea: a type of British coin minted from 1663 to 1813
holland: a linen fabric
japan: to gloss with black lacquer
java: coffee
jordan: a chamber pot
kashmir: cashmere
mecca: a destination for many people
Reading for Monday
At the beginning of class today, I will distribute copies of an opinion piece on Scrabble and a student’s final essay and annotated bibliography devoted to the game. Before Monday’s class, read and annotate both–not simply by underlining and circling words but by writing questions and observations in the margins or between the lines. As you compose your annotations, consider how and where the student might have incorporated any additional details from the opinion piece, “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” into his essay or his commentaries in his bibliography.
On Monday, during your Scrabble debriefing, I will check your annotations for the sample student essay “The Depths of Scrabble” and the opinion piece “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.” Afterward, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively complete an exercise on the readings, and we will conclude class with a discussion of the two.
In class on Monday, I noted that the writer of “The King of Storytelling” mistakenly refers to Marc Hye-Knudsen’s article “How Stephen King Writes and Why” as his primary source. If you are researching an author, such as Stephen King, your primary sources are pieces of writing composed by that author–in King’s case, short stories and novels–as well as published interviews with the author. If King is the subject of your final essay and annotated bibliography, your primary source–or at least one of your primary sources–is “Strawberry Spring.” Hye-Knudsen’s article “How Stephen King Writes and Why,” other critical essays devoted to King’s writing, and reviews of his fiction are secondary sources.
If you are researching blogging in the classroom, Matt Richtel‘s New York Times article “Blogs vs. Term Papers” would be a primary resource because it is a firsthand report on the practices of the platform’s supporters and detractors in higher education.
For research on writing longhand, the Atlantic article “To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand” serves as a secondary source because its author, Robinson Meyer, reports on the research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer published in the journal Psychological Science.
Similarly, if you are researching smartphone use, “A Break from Your Smartphone. . .” serves as a secondary source because its author, Allison Aubrey, reports on the research published in PNAS NEXUS, a publication of the National Academy of Science.
If the subject of your research is writing longhand or smartphone use, you are welcome to include both the primary source and the secondary sources listed above as two of your four print sources.
If you are researching limiting screen time beyond smartphone use, Maryanne Wolf’s “Skim Reading is the New Normal . . .” serves as your starting place. Wolf’s article is a hybrid of sorts; it’s an opinion piece that serves as a secondary source for research conducted by educators and researchers in psychology and humanities, including Anne Mangen and Ziming Liu.
The interview that you conducted with your classmate is a primary source because it is the interviewee’s firsthand account of his or her experience with the subject that serves as your focus.
Theoretical Frameworks
As part of the conclusion of your final essay, you will identify a theoretical framework that would guide your research if you chose to develop your final essay and annotated bibliography into a larger project for an upper-level course. To offer examples of how to apply those frameworks to your subjects, I created the table below and distributed copies in class.
The table is by no means comprehensive, but it demonstrates how your essays and annotated bibliographies can develop into larger projects for a variety of disciplines. I did not include “Strawberry Spring” in the table, but I asked you in class what theoretical frameworks you might apply to a research project on King’s fiction. A literary framework is an obvious choice–you could analyze one or more of the narrative’s elements–but three others to consider are these:
History: a study that examines “Strawberry Spring” as commentary on the Vietnam War.
Psychology: a study that explores King’s depiction of his narrator as a prototypical serial killer.
Business: a study that explores King’s active role in the marketing of his fiction and the ways that his authorpreneurship can serve as a model for writers and entrepreneurs in other fields.
Today in class you will use the HPU Libraries website and Google Scholar to locate, read, and annotate additional sources for your final essay and annotated bibliography. The work that you submit at the end of class today should include at least one handwritten MLA-style annotated bibliographic entry. The sample entry that I composed as a model for you appears below.
Cardell, Kylie, and Victoria Kuttainen. “The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 2012, pp. 99-114. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030697.
“The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir” explores the implications of the blending of truth and artifice in David Sedaris’s writing. In the words of the authors, Sedaris’s “memoirs have attracted controversy for their blurring (or, as we argue, contesting) of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction” (Cardell and Kuttainen 100). While some critics, such as journalist Alex Heard, believe that “Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the non-fiction label” (qtd. in Cardell and Kuttainen 103), Cardell and Kuttainen assert that Sedaris’s use of hyperbole, a staple of his prose style, is ethical in the context of the humor memoir.
Cardell’s and Kuttainen’s essay would serve as a useful source for a study of Sedaris’s mingling of the real and what he refers to as the “realish” in his writing (qtd. in Cardell and Kuttainen 99). It could also play a significant role as a source for a comparative study of the writing of Sedaris and other memoirists who blur the line between fiction and nonfiction.
Kylie Cardell, Ph.D., author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of Autobiography, is Associate Professor of Humanities at Flinders University. Her co-author, Victoria Kuttainen, Ph.D., author of Unsettling Stories and The Transported Imagination, is Associate Professor of Art and Creative Media at James Cook University.
Note that the blog format of the annotated bibliographic entry above is different from MLA format, which features paragraph indentations and double spacing.
The bibliographic entry above and the three paragraphs that follow total 241 words. The minimum word count for the entire assignment (essay and bibliography together) is 1,800 words.
If you compose five annotations of the length of the one above, you will be well on your way to completing your 1,800-word minimum, and your bibliography may be longer than your essay.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To up your game and increase your word power, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.
Yesterday’s class focused on a review of the sample student essay and annotated bibliography “The King of Storytelling,” an exercise that should continue to serve as a guide for you as you develop and revise your own essay and bibliography.
The notes that follow address points of content and form, some that we addressed in class, others that we didn’t. As you continue your own research and writing, revisit these notes.
Content
The essay’s introduction does fulfill its basic requirements: It addresses the writer’s purpose for compiling it, clarifies what drives the research and what interests the writer in the subject, and also states what questions the writer seeks to answer.
The body paragraphs of the essay do include a minimum of two quotations from two of the five sources; however, the student does not mention all of the sources in the body pargraphs. In the introduction, he lists the five sources, but two of them are simply referred to as “two other articles” (par 1).
The student misses the opportunity to draw on lines from “Strawberry Spring” as examples of the writing strategies that King recommends. In the third and fourth paragraphs, the student mentions King’s advice to avoid using adverbs that end in ly and to avoid passive voice but offers examples of neither.
Consider again the examples that I projected on the screen:
“‘He got another one,'” someone said to me, his face pallid with excitement” (273).
“He got another one,” someone said excitedly.
The first sentence, which is King’s, is more effective than the second one because the ly-ending adverb “excitedly,” which modifies the verb “said,” contributes virtually nothing to the story or to the reader’s experience of it. “Excitedly” is abstract; it isn’t something readers can see. They can, however, see a “face pallid with excitement” (273), an image that indicates that the speaker’s heightened state of emotion isn’t all together pleasant since “pallid” is a paleness associated with illness.
Springheel Jack . . . “I saw those two words in the paper this morning” (269).
Springheel Jack . . . Those two words in the paper this morning were seen.
Springheel Jack . . . Those two words in the paper this morning were seen by me.
The first sentence, which is King’s, is more effective than the second and third ones because it is written in active voice. Because the narrator is performing the action in the sentence, seeing the words in the paper, readers are looking over his shoulder, seeing the news story for themeslves. In the second sentence, no one performs the action. In the third, the narrator is present but is the recipient of the action. Both the second and the third sentences distance the reader from the narrator, making them passive observers of a passive narrator.
Including such examples would enable the student to enhance his essay in several ways: (1) he would demonstrate his understanding of active voice, passive voice, and ineffectual ly-ending adverbs, (2) he would illustrate how King draws on his own writing advice in his fiction, and (3) he would synthesize information from a secondary source (Marc Hye-Knudsen’s “How Stephen King Writes and Why”) with information from a primary one (Stephen King’s “Strawberry Spring”).
Such enhancements are always the products of revision. Only after rereading your sources and annotating them can you begin to see how they complement one another.
Form
The parenthetical citations include only the author’s last name, and in some cases only part of the last name. The only quotation that should not be followed by a parenthetical citation is the one from the student’s interview with his classmate.
The bibliographic information for two of the three scholarly sources is incomplete and the entries are marred by errors of mechanics and style.
Wherever the parenthetical citation (Knudsen) appears, the student should have replaced it with a (Hye-Knudsen 8) or (Hye-Knudsen, par. 12), depending on whether the source is paginated. Additionally, if the words are actually Stephen King’s, the student should attribute those words to him with a parenthetical citation for an indirect quotation: (King qtd. in Hye-Knudsen 8) or (King qtd. in Hye-Knudsen, par. 12).
Neither the bibliographic entry for Brown’s article or Hye-Knudsen’s includes the title of the journal where the article was published. The absence of the titles coupled with the absence of page or paragraph numbers in the parenthetical citations may lead readers to wonder whether the student actually accessed and read the articles or simply read abstracts or excerpts. More troubling than the omission of the journal names are the references to Brown’s short article as a book. No careful examination of a text would lead the reader to conclude that it’s a full-length book if it’s only a few pages long.
Next Up
Tomorrow you will have the class period to continue your research and writing. Although you will be working on your laptops and tablets, you will still be required to submit a handwritten exercise at the end of the class period. It will consist of a bibliographic entry for a source that is not one of the articles distributed in class; in other words, one that you have located on your own. To ensure that you have ample time to complete your bibliographic entry–including the publication information, the summary, the commentary, and the author’s credentials–give yourself a head start by completing part of the entry before Wednesday.
Some of you have probably located an additional source on your own and drafted a bibliographic entry for it. If that’s the case, you will simply have to transcribe it for tomorrow’s exercise, which means that you will be able to devote class time to locating, reading, and/or taking notes on additional sources.
This morning in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, you and two or three of your classmates will discuss your individual notes of “The King of Storytelling,” then collaboratively compose a two-paragraph response that addresses at least two specific details in the project: one in the essay and a second in the annotated bibliography.
You are not required to quote “The King of Storytelling,” but your response should offer concrete particulars. You should not write in general terms about the project’s form or content.
As you review the essay and bibliography, keep in mind two crucial differences between “The King of Storytelling,” written in 2024, and your own project in progress: (1) the assignment did not require students to address a larger project that might develop from it and what would serve as its theoretical framework, and (2) the assignment required annotations of two pargraphs rather than three. In the earlier version of the assignment, the second paragraph consisted of both the commentary and the author’s credentials.
Tomorrow’s blog post will serve as a follow-up to our examination of “The King of Storytelling” and provide more details about its content and form.
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, we will discuss locating sources and will review a model annotated bibliography entry. After that, you will have the remainder of the class period to work on an annotation of your own
Since today’s Wordplay Day occurs on Halloween, this morning’s Scrabble blog post is devoted to words for ghosts. Two of the words (banshee and eidolon) are seven letters long, enabling a player or team to Scrabble, or bingo, earning an additional fifty points for the play. Another two are eight letters long (barguest and fairyism) and can be formed by adding letters to a word played previously.
banshee: a female spirit in Gaelic folklore that wails to warn of a family member’s imminent death. Note that this word is featured in Stephen King’s short story “Strawberry Spring,” which we studied in class on Monday.
barguest: a goblin (also barghest)
bogy: a goblin
daimon: a spirit (also daemon and demon)
eidolon: a phantom or specter
fairyism: the quality of being like a fairy (not really a ghost but a great word)
haint: a ghost
kelpie: a water sprite in Scottish folklore known for drowning sailors
wraith: a ghost of a person, often appearing just before that person’s death
Yesterday in class, for the interview and bibliography exercise, you selected a phrase or sentence from your interview and introduced it with a signal phrase or clause. You also drafted a bibliographic entry, including a three-paragraph annotation (with a paragraph of summary, a second of commentary, and a third that identified your subject as a freshman at High Point University, majoring in . . . ).
Although you are not required to type your complete interview, I encourage you to do so. If you decide to include in your annotated bibliography or your final essay a phrase or sentence other than the one you included on your worksheet, having a document file of your complete interview will enable you to easily copy and paste.
Transcripts of my own interviews with students are included below as models for your own.
Interview with Jesse Brewer
Jane Lucas: Jesse, what experience did you have with playing Scrabble before you encountered the game in English 1103?
Jesse Brewer: So, whenever I would go up to my grandmother and grandfather’s house in Pennsylvania, we would play Scrabble pretty consistently there. We had a lot of fun playing Scrabble at my grandmother’s house whenever I was a young child.
Lucas: Has Scrabble changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
Brewer: While I wouldn’t necessarily say it has changed my perspective on reading or writing, it has most certainly introduced me to new words which allows me to read or write more capably in everyday situations.
Lucas: Will you continue to play Scrabble after the conclusion of the semester?
Brewer: Yes, my grandmother is still going to want to play it every summer.
Interview with Ava Salvant
Jane Lucas: Ava, what experience did you have with playing Scrabble before you played it in English 1103?
Ava Salvant: I didn’t have any experience with Scrabble beforehand. I didn’t know how to play it at all.
Lucas: Has Scrabble changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
Salvant: Probably it has influenced my ability to write. Not always when you sit down to write do you know the exact words you want to say. You kind of have to go with the flow. You have to put as many words as you can down on the board in Scrabble or on the paper when writing.
Lucas: Will you continue to play Scrabble after the end of the semester?
Salvant: I might come back to it a few times to refresh or just use as a pastime.
Note that no quotations appear in the transcripts of the interviews because I am not quoting the interviews; I am presenting the interviews themselves, which is why there are no works cited entries either.
Bonus Assignment
As practice in creating a file of an interview transcript, type the interview that you conducted with your classmate yesterday.
Directions
Review my interview with student Ava Salvant posted in the sample papers folder on Blackboard.
Using that file as a model, type your interview and save it as a Microsoft Word file or PDF.
Print a copy of your interview, and submit it at the beginning of class on Friday, November 7. You are not required to post a copy online; you will turn in only a paper copy.
An annotated bibliography is a list of sources on a subject that includes a summary of each source. Some bibliographies include additional information, such as commentary on the source and the authors’ credentials, which is the type of bibliography that you will compose along with your final essay for the course.
Key Features
Your final essay, an introductory essay of three or more paragraphs, presents the subject of your bibliography and addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What interests you in the subject, and what question, or questions, do you seek to answer about it? Also, it considers what larger project might develop from your final essay and annotated bibliography, and lastly, what would serve as its theoretical framework? In other words, through what academic lens would you examine your subject?
A complete MLA-style bibliography entry for each source.
A one-paragraph summary of each source, followed by a shorter second paragraph that addresses the purpose that the source might serve in a larger project. Would it serve as a point of comparison or contrast to another source? Would it support or challenge an idea presented in another source? Is it a secondary source that sheds light on the meaning of a primary source? The last question pertains primarily to bibliographies that focus on one of the writers studied in the course. Lastly, a brief third that names the author and includes his or her credentials.
Preliminary Work—What to Complete in Class Today
Personal Interview
Your final essay and annotated bibliography will focus on one of the authors we have studied or one of the elements of the course, including (1) blogging in the classroom, (2) limiting screen time, (3) writing longhand, and (4) playing Scrabble. As a starting point, you will conduct a short personal interview that will serve as one of the sources for your project. If you decide that you do not want to use the interview that you conduct today, you are welcome to include another one in your project. Keep in mind, however, that the interview you include in your project must be conducted with a student currently enrolled in section eight or eighteen, and the subject of the interview must be the subject of your project.
Questions to ask your interviewee include the following:
What experience, if any, did you have with the subject (the reading or the aspect of the course) before you encountered it in English 1103?
Has it changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
Will you continue to pursue the subject (read more work by the author, continue the classroom practice or activity) after the conclusion of the semester?
After you conduct your interview, compose on the worksheet provided a sentence in which you introduce a quotation from the interview with a signal phrase, such as, According to . . . , or [insert first and last name] notes or observes or points out that . . . .” Your quotation will not be followed by a parenthetical citation because it is a form of oral communication (without page or paragraph numbers). See the sample on your worksheet.
Follow your quotation with an annotated bibliography entry in this format:
Annotated Bibliography
Last Name, First Name. Interview. Conducted by Your First Name Your Last Name. Day Month Year.
Your bibliographic entry will be followed by three paragraphs. See today’s worksheet for details.
Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography Assignment
Begin by conducting a short personal interview and composing an annotated bibliographic entry for the interview. For more information, see today’s worksheet and the paragraphs under the header PRELIMINARY WORK—What to Complete in Class Today.
Compose an annotated bibliographic entry for the source that serves as the starting point for your research. See the list of texts that follows.
Use the HPU Libraries site, and Google Scholar to locate a minimum of three additional reliable and relevant print sources (articles, essays, and/or books) devoted to the same subject. Compose your summary, commentary, and credentials paragraphs in complete sentences, introduce quotations with signal phrases, and include parenthetical citations where needed. Your bibliography must include five sources, four of which must be print. (Your personal interview is a nonprint source.) If you wish to include an additional non-print source, such as a video, you may include that as a sixth source. Also, if you choose to use both articles on limiting screen time that were distributed in class (Allison Aubrey’s and Maryanne Wolf’s), you will need to include an additional print source.
After you have composed your annotated bibliography entries, write an introductory essay that (1) presents the subject of your bibliography, and (2) addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What question do you seek to answer about your subject? Also, (3) What larger project might develop from your bibliography? Would it be a project for a course in psychology, science, education, or another discipline? What would serve as its theoretical framework? In other words, through what academic lens would you examine your subject? Address all five of your sources in your essay and quote at least two of them.
Though your introductory essay will precede your annotated bibliography, you will compose it last because you will need to reread and summarize your sources before you will know how to address them in your essay.
Directions for Researching, Drafting, Revising, and Submitting
Devote today’s class primarily to conducting a personal interview and composing an annotated bibliography entry for the interview. You will have two additional Wednesdays to work in class on your final essay and annotated bibliography before you post your revision to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog.
Before class on the due date: Post a copy of your revision to Blackboard and to your blog. In your blog post, omit the first-page information included in your file submitted to Blackboard (your name, professor’s name, course and section, and date). Add to your blog post an image that documents some part of your writing process away from the screen, such as the summary of your source in your journal, today’s worksheet, or a page of your draft. Also, add an embedded link to a relevant website. Even though your work for this assignment will take place primarily in front of the screen, your writing process still involves putting pen to paper, and photographic documentation of that on your blog is a requirement of the assignment.
Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came into My Life.” https://janelucasdotcom. files.wordpress.com/2025/08/a0461-3.thedaylanguagecameintomylife_keller.pdf.
King, Stephen. “Strawberry Spring.” Nigh Shift. Anchor, 2011. pp. 268-82.
An A final essay and annotated bibliography includes these components:
An introductory essay of three or more paragraphs that (1) presents the subject of your bibliography, and (2) addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What question do you seek to answer about one of the subjects that you’ve studied in the course or about one aspect of the course? Also, (3) what larger project might develop from your bibliography? Would it be a project for a course in science, psychology, education, or another discipline? What would serve as its theoretical framework? In other words, through what academic lens would you examine your subject?
A complete works cited/bibliographic entry for a minimum of *five reliable and relevant sources, four of which are print. Alphabetize the list by the writers’ last names.
A one-paragraph summary of each source followed by a shorter paragraph of commentary, and a third that names the author and includes his or her credentials.
An A final essay and annotated bibliography complies with the requirements above and is also cohesive and relatively free of surface errors.
A B final essay and annotated bibliography effectively meets all of the requirements above but may be flawed by minor issues of organization and/or surface errors.
A C final essay and annotated bibliography meets most but not all of the requirements above and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
A D final essay and annotated bibliography meets only a few of the requirements above and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
An F final essay and annotated bibliography fails to meet the requirements above and may also be flawed by substantial issues of organization and/or surface errors.
Tomorrow morning, before you begin work on your final essay and annotated bibliography, we will revisit Stephen King‘s “Strawberry Spring” and discuss the answers to your collaborative exercise on the story.
For that exercise, I asked you to determine whether you could identify any details that indicate why the narrator may have murdered any of his victims. Although there is no indication that the narrator knew Gale Cermann, Adelle Parkins, or Marsha Curran, he did know Ann Bray, which he reveals after he tells the readers that she was editor of the school newspaper: “In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth I had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date–turned down on both counts” (275).
I also asked you to identify words and phrases that illustrate how the story is not only a horror story but also a commentary on war, the Vietnam War in particular, and the Vietnam era. I offered these examples as models:
King’s description of the snow sculpture “caricature of Lyndon Johnson” (269) signifies the derisive responses to the President’s Vietnam War policy.
The description of the snow sculpture “caricature of Lyndon Johnson” (King 269) signifies the derisive responses to the President’s Vietnam War policy.
Some of the words and phrases you may have identified include these:
In addition to those questions on your assignment sheet, I asked you to try to identify the two literary allusions in King’s story. The first is an allusion to J.R.R. Tolkein‘s The Lord of the Rings trilogy: “You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo or Sam go hurrying past” (269). The second is an allusion to a poem by Carl Sandburg, titled–perhaps unsurprisingly–“The Fog” (272).
Noteworthy Blog Images and Embedded Links
Kudos to the twelve students who took the initiative to respond to Thursday’s blog post and detail their selections for the most effective images and embedded links in the analyses. For their efforts, those students, whose names are listed below, have been credited with a bonus assignment.
The image featured above, from Reese Danback’s post of her analysis, “Seventy-Four Classroom Pets Later,” does not include a page of her handwritten draft or her journal notes. However, the act of writing the names of the tombstone can be construed as part of her writing process–and it may have inspired her to craft a title that emphasizes the multitude of deaths that Edgar and his students experience.
Embedded Links
These students’ embedded links in their analysis posts were mentioned by their peers as particularly effective choices:
When you add a link to your blog post, be sure to embed it in a word that is part of the sentence; otherwise, the link name will create a faulty line of prose.
The link in Chloe Freeman’s analysis, “Fingers to Freedom,” a page devoted to Helen Keller on the website for the eye research foundation named for her, is a model I recommend. The link is embedded in Keller’s name in its first appearance in the analysis.
Next Up
At the beginning of tomorrow’s class, we will continue our discussion of “Strawberry Spring.” Afterward, you will have the remainder of the period to devote to your preliminary work for your final essay and annotated bibliography. Details TBA.
Today in class we will read Stephen King‘s short story “Strawberry Spring,” which was published in Ubris magazine in 1968 and included in King’s first short story collection, Night Shift (1978).
For the collaborative exercise that you will complete after we read the story, I will ask you to determine whether you can identify any details that indicate why the narrator may have murdered any of his victims. Although there is no indication that the narrator knew Gale Cerman, Adelle Parkins, or Marsha Curran, he did know Ann Bray.
I will also ask you to identify words and phrases that illustrate how the story is not only a horror story but also a commentary on war, the Vietnam War in particular, and the Vietnam era.
Lastly, I will ask you to try to identify the two literary allusions in King’s story. We will address these questions near the end of class today or at the beginning of class on Wednesday, and I will post the answers on my blog.
Next Up
We will review “Strawberry Spring” at the beginning of Wednesday’s class, and you will have the remainder of the period to begin your initial work for your final essay and annotated bibliography.
Jane Lucas 