Literary Roundtable: Choice and Consequences

Literary Roundtable RESCHEDULED FROM NOVEMBER! Now on Monday, January 8 at 6 pm.
New VENUE: Hudubam Booktraders, 110 Franklin Street, #101, Clarksville, TN 37040

Our hosts will lead a discussion about choice and consequences and time travel in This Time Tomorrow (Emma Straub) and "Dead Men's Path" (Chinua Achebe, Girls at War and Other Stories).

Hosts:

Joanna Grisham is an instructor in the Department of Languages & Literature at APSU. Joey holds an MFA in creative writing from Georgia College. She was named a finalist for the 2021-2022 Very Short Fiction Contest at the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival and a finalist for the 2021 Ember Chasm Review Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Gleam, The Emerson Review, On the Run, The Write Launch, Construction Literary Magazine, and other places. Her first chapbook of poems, Phantoms, is forthcoming in 2023 from Finishing Line Press.

Gregory Glover is pastor at First Presbyterian Church. Greg holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies from Princeton Theological Seminary and is an avid reader.

Discussion Themes:

Choice and Consequences, Time Travel

1) Are notions of time travel useful as heuristic devices for self-examination and life-course evaluation?

2) Is it possible to live an examined life--to live fully--with "no regrets"?

3) Are there life paths that should be foreclosed and not explored (ever, under any circumstances)? Why or why not? Is tradition (or religion) a reliable guide to the good path or a constraint on finding better paths?

4) What gives with "midlife"? (And when do you stop "celebrating" birthdays?) 

5) What's with the cat? 

6) Do you want a "do over" or two or six?

On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, and her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her sixteenth birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush—it’s her dad, the vital, charming, forty-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could? 

Girls at War and Other Stories reveals the essence of life in Nigeria and traces twenty years in the literary career of one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed writers. In this collection of stories, which display an astonishing range of experience, Chinua Achebe takes us inside the heart and soul of a people whose pride and ideals must compete with the simple struggle to survive. Hailed by critics everywhere, Achebe's fiction re-creates with energy and authenticity the major issues of daily life in Africa. Achebe's short story, "Dead Men's Path," asks whether it is better to take the "traditional path" through life or to chart a "new course"--modernity versus tradition, urban versus rural life, and Christianity versus Indigenous religion, as well as the overall effects of European colonization in his native Nigeria. Originally published in 1953 while Achebe was still an undergraduate.