We will discuss six stories in this class, five of them chosen from Immigrant Voices: 21st Century Stories. Each of the authors is an immigrant to America, from Russia, China, Bosnia, Iran, Peru, and Mexico. But whatever a writer’s country of origin, the stories pose similar questions of identity: “Who am I in my new country? To what extent can I--or do I wish to, or is it even possible to--adapt and assimilate? What relationships can I now have with the country I’ve left behind and with the family who remain?” Though the stories differ wildly from one another, they are united by grappling with such essential questions—and united also by the imaginative power of the experiences their fiction creates. 

The class will follow a modified Great Books seminar method. Participants will read a story each week and discuss it at our class meetings. Discussions will be structured, guided, and based in the text. Our format will not only leave room for contributions, insights, and differing interpretations--our class will depend on these!  Typically, I begin each meeting with a question that opens up the story and points us toward the heart of it. Always my goal is to question, facilitate and lead, far more than it is to instruct.

In 1981, Charles Newman and his wife Suzanne accepted overseas positions in Budapest, a city where they returned to teach multiple times. They’ve also worked in New Delhi and Gangtok, Karachi, Tokyo, and Moscow—and Charles has taught at the Waring School in Beverly, MA on five separate occasions, beginning in 1985 and ending in 2019. Theirs has not been a linear path: they circle back to the places they love. One of those loved places is Middlebury, Vermont, where they returned for five summers as Charles earned an MA in Literature at the Bread Loaf School of English. He did his undergraduate studies at St. John’s College—the “Great Books School”—and at Columbia University.

Charles and Suzanne moved to the Berkshires just a few months ago and are happily embarking on their newest life adventure. 

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