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Welcome to ElderwiseIn-person, online, and hybrid classes Winter Term 2025 Registration is Open! > Literature

Literature   

 
  • Yiddish Author, Jonah Rosenfeld 

  • ONLINE: A Zoom invitation link will be sent one day before class begins.

    Rachel Mines, Yiddish translator, will present several short stories by Jonah Rosenfeld, an immigrant to New York from Eastern Europe. Rosenfeld’s psychologically rich fiction, first published in Yiddish 100 years ago, portrays rapid social change, family dysfunction, generational and cultural conflicts, emigration, wars, and pandemics. His stories are as relevant today as ever. We will read and discuss Rachel’s translations of several of Rosenfeld’s stories. Specific stories will be announced closer to the time of the class so registrants can read them in advance. Book purchases are not required for the class, but they are available from the publisher, Syracuse University Press, and from online booksellers such as Amazon. Rachel Mines, Ph.D., from Vancouver, Canada, retired from teaching English in 2020. Her two collections of Rosenfeld’s short fiction The Rivals and A Plague of Cholera were published in 2020 and 2024 respectively. For more information about Rachel and her translation projects, visit https://www.rachelmines.com.

     

  • Fee: $15.00

  • Instructor(s): Rachel Mines

  • Dates: 1/16/2025 - 1/16/2025

    Times: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  • Sessions: 1

    Days: Th

  • Building: Online Course

    Room: Online via Zoom

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  • Brush Up Your Shakespeare 

  • IN-PERSON: The Elderwise classroom at the Vineyard Church

    Join us for Professor Russo’s Shakespeare 101. If you are already an ardent Shakespeare fan, you may come to appreciate him even more. If you know nothing about Shakespeare (or hate him, based on a negative experience in a high school English class), spending these two hours getting to know him a little better may make you a fan. Peggy Russo retired from Penn State University in 2015 after teaching in the English Department there for 30 years. Throughout her career, she specialized in “Shakespeare in Performance,” a method whereby students learn to take plays from the page to the stage by “seeing” plays in their mind’s eye, acting out scenes, viewing film versions, and attending live theatrical productions.

     

  • Fee: $15.00

  • Instructor(s): Peggy Russo

  • Dates: 1/23/2025 - 1/23/2025

    Times: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  • Sessions: 1

    Days: Th

  • Building: Vineyard Church

    Room: Classroom at the Vineyard Church

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  • Book Club 

  • ONLINE: A Zoom invitation link will be sent the Friday before each class session begins.

    Using prepared questions and our own observations, the discussion each month will explore a book from current best-seller lists. Selected books for the Winter 2025 term are:

    January The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride    
    Please read before the first class session.

    Published in 2022, 400 pages Historical Fiction

    When a skeleton is found in the bottom of a well in Pottstown, PA in 1972, the investigation is hampered when the crime scene is washed away by Hurricane Agnes. The novel then returns to the 1920s and ‘30s to detail the lives of the residents in the mostly Black and Jewish neighborhood.

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    February The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

    Published in 2008, 309 pages Mystery

    First of a series with Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two. When her estranged friend leaves her a key to a locker in the Copenhagen train station, she finds a suitcase containing a three-year-old boy, naked and drugged, but alive. Nina must decide what to do with this unknown child, while forces are trying to hunt both of them down.

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    March H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

    Published in 2014, 320 pages Non-fiction

    This story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators explores grief, falconry, and the author's journey to train a goshawk. Fierce and feral, her goshawk's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death.

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    Please read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store before the first class session.
    The facilitators will send a list of discussion questions for each book to all registrants prior to each Book Club session.

    Kathleen and William Hillegas are long-time members of both Elderwise and the Book Club. Both are avid readers, and look forward to a lively exchange of ideas, opinions, and interpretations.

     

  • Fee: $45.00

  • Instructor(s): William Hillegas

  • Dates: 1/27/2025 - 3/24/2025

    Times: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  • Sessions: 3

    Days: M

  • Building: Online Course

    Room: Online via Zoom

  • 1st Session is on January 27; 2nd Session is on February 24; 3rd Session is on March 24

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  • Serial Killers in Fiction and Film 

  • IN-PERSON: The Elderwise classroom at the Vineyard Church

    Serial killers are scary. Longtime local residents might remember John Norman Collins, who terrorized the Ypsi-Ann Arbor area in the late 1960s before he was arrested for killing seven young women. Serial killers have also been terrorizing innocent victims in whodunits, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, and movies for almost a century. We will take a look at various examples of the genre – from classic mysteries like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, to thrillers like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, to the introduction of forensic scientists and profilers, many of them women, who work with the police in catching the killers. Class participants are asked to read a serial killer novel (or two) they might want to recommend to the class. David Geherin is Professor Emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of ten books on crime and mystery fiction, three of which were finalists for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award. David’s latest book, Organized Crime on Page and Screen, has just been published. His current book project focuses on serial killers.

     

  • Fee: $15.00

  • Instructor(s): David Geherin

  • Dates: 1/28/2025 - 1/28/2025

    Times: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  • Sessions: 1

    Days: Tu

  • Building: Vineyard Church

    Room: Classroom at the Vineyard Church

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  • Strings Attached: Novels Featuring Puppets 

  • ONLINE: A Zoom invitation link will be sent the Friday before each class session begins.

    Throughout history, puppets, marionettes, and ventriloquists’ mannikins have played a role in the arts, as evidenced by their presence in various classical and popular entertainment media. Participants in this class will be reading two 20th century novels in which puppetry plays a role in character and plot development. The first class session will be devoted to Angela Carter’s gothic novel The Magic Toy Shop (1967), while the second week’s discussion will focus on poet Rita Dove’s novel Through The Ivory Gate (1992). Cecilia Donohue retired in 2013 following a 25-year career of undergraduate instruction, graduate teaching, and academic administration. She now resides in east Tennessee with her husband Bill and their menagerie of horses, cat, and dog. Currently an associate editor of The Steinbeck Review, Cecilia has written extensively on America’s southern authors and poets, notably Robert Penn Warren and Anne Tyler.

     

     

  • Fee: $30.00

  • Instructor(s): Cecilia Donohue

  • Dates: 2/3/2025 - 2/10/2025

    Times: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  • Sessions: 2

    Days: M

  • Building: Online Course

    Room: Online via Zoom

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  • From Anecdote to Story 

  • IN-PERSON: The Elderwise classroom at the Vineyard Church

    Come with an Anecdote, Leave with a Story. An anecdote is a simple retelling of something that happened. Our lives are full of anecdotes. A story paints a narrative transformational journey with a beginning, middle, and end. This fun and interactive workshop presents a blueprint of how to start with an anecdote and develop it into a story with a well-developed plot with characters that the audience can support, and ultimately, relate to. There will be brainstorming, prompts, and sharing of creativity. There is no pressure to arrive with “the best anecdote ever” and no stress about finishing a full story by the end of class. Barbara Schutzgruber is an award-winning storyteller of folktales, ballads, and personal stories of resilience. Since 1987, she has presented programs, workshops, and showcases throughout Michigan, as well as nationally and internationally. Barbara holds a master’s degree in children’s literature from Eastern Michigan University and is the co-author of Beyond the Sword Maiden: A Storyteller's Introduction to the Heroine's Journey.

     

  • Fee: $15.00

  • Instructor(s): Barbara Schutzgruber

  • Dates: 2/6/2025 - 2/6/2025

    Times: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  • Sessions: 1

    Days: Th

  • Building: Vineyard Church

    Room: Classroom at the Vineyard Church

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  • The Fire This Time 

  • IN-PERSON: The Elderwise classroom at the Vineyard Church
    Please read The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, before the 1st session.

    Published 53 years after James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, includes essays and poems that echo Baldwin’s jeremiad while situating contemporary experiences about race in the 21st century. Following Jericho Brown’s poem, “The Tradition,” and Ward’s Introduction, the book is divided into three parts: “Legacy,” “Reckoning,” and “Jubilee.” Our two discussions will move through these sections, from beginning to end. How these writings interface with Baldwin’s will be considered as well. Kevin Eyster is a Professor Emeritus at Madonna University in Livonia, where he continues to teach courses in literature.

     

  • Fee: $30.00

  • Instructor(s): Kevin Eyster

  • Dates: 3/20/2025 - 3/27/2025

    Times: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  • Sessions: 2

    Days: Th

  • Building: Vineyard Church

    Room: Classroom at the Vineyard Church

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