Robert Munsch’s Mud Puddle reads like a tiny masterpiece of oral storytelling compressed into thirty-two pages: brisk, comic, cumulative, and animated by a single, delightfully absurd conceit — a mud puddle that repeatedly “jumps on” a child and gets her “completely all over muddy.” The story began as a tale told in a nursery school … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
Thomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munsch turns a domestic, wintertime battle into an energetic miniature drama: a small boy resists the ritual of being bundled for cold weather, and the adult attempt at care escalates into a comic standoff. The narrative depends on repetition, mounting absurdity, and a tight point of view that keeps the reader … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
At first glance The Paper Bag Princess is the kind of picture book one might read in five minutes and, in good conscience, tuck back on a shelf. Read closely, however, it behaves more like a miniature manifesto: a tight, witty demolition of fairy-tale expectations that nevertheless leaves room to teach — not by sermonizing, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
Kristin Müller’s Potter’s Studio Handbook is the sort of practical-intellectual hybrid that appears, at first glance, to belong strictly to the bench: measured lists, sequences of photographs, and angled hands shaping clay. Read closely, however, it reveals itself as a small pedagogical manifesto — a sustained argument about how technique, habit, and deliberate constraints generate … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The American Night: The Lost Writings Vol. 2 by Jim Morrison
The American Night reads like a ledger of a mind habitually on the verge: on the verge of revelation, of collapse, of translation from flesh to myth. Volume 2 of these “lost writings” collects material that refuses the safe categories of “poetry,” “memoir,” or “manifesto.” Instead it offers a hybrid text — lyric fragments, dramatic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The American Night: The Lost Writings Vol. 2 by Jim Morrison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wilderness: The Lost Writings Vol. 1 by Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison’s Wilderness reads like the private notebook of a performative prophet: half-oracular lyric, half-fractured meditation, constantly shifting between erotic delirium and cold metaphysical curiosity. As a volume of “lost writings” drawn from a celebrity-poet whose musical persona already blurred the line between poet and performer, Wilderness asks a reader to do two things at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wilderness: The Lost Writings Vol. 1 by Jim Morrison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Lords and The New Creatures by Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison’s The Lords and The New Creatures arrives at the reader like a recorded improvisation—uneven, urgent, and saturated with moments of startling clarity. Originally assembled from two short volumes first issued in the late 1960s, the text functions less as a conventional poetic sequence than as a series of charged tableaux: flashes of eroticism, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Lords and The New Creatures by Jim Morrison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Riders of the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors. by John Densmore
John Densmore’s Riders of the Storm is at once an intimate memoir and a corrective history: part loving excavation of a band’s inner life, part juridical record of what fame does to art and friendship. Written by the Doors’ drummer, the book performs a delicate double move — it insists on the primacy of the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Riders of the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors. by John Densmore
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive is less a dispassionate life-history than a rite of remembrance: a fevered, piecemeal canonization of Jim Morrison that helped turn an already mythic rock singer into a modern Prometheus of American pop-culture. First published in 1980, the book occupies a peculiar position between popular … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The Penland Book of Ceramics reads like a field diary kept at the intersection of craft pedagogy and artistic confession. Edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott and assembled from the teaching tradition of the Penland School of Crafts, this handsome volume (Lark Books, 2003) aims not simply to catalogue techniques but to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The New Renaissance Mindset 