I often begin my fall classes with a lesson called Beginnings. I choose opening sentences from several works of fiction and nonfiction, and then discuss with the students what we can glean about the books from those first sentences. For example, from the opening of Anne Enright’s The Gathering—“I would like to write down what

My mother was a teacher. Her mother was a teacher. And her mother was a teacher. Small surprise that when I was a child and people asked me if I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up, I emphatically said no. Then, long after I had grown up to become an editor and