Teaching Notes for Flat Stanley Reports Back to his Third Grader
Use in the classroom to discuss: genre play and formation; the formation and organization of a story collection; interpersonal orbits; family dynamics; partnership; gender (roles); observation and surveillance; execution events; historical reenactments; home-town murders; serial murders; methods (of murder); aesthetics (of murder); gender dynamics (of murder); vocal fry; the death drive; dump sites; humor; mass media murder narratives; the weight of witness; the Zettai Ryouiki scale.
Pairs well with You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories; The Movie My Murderer Makes Season II; Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message
Flat Stanley Reports to His Third Grader by Jennifer A. Howard
68 pages.
Perfect bound.
Flat Stanley knows the routine script of a routine murder. The fresh breakfast and the unplanned baby, the middle-parted hairstyle and the unsexy sock, the exhusband and the household hierarchies—all follow Flat Stanley from mail post to mail post. What is it to harm? What is it to hurt? What is it to want a love in which one is safe? Jennifer A. Howard’s Flat Stanley Reports Back to his Third Grader considers the context: does watching every episode of Forensic Files give one the ability to avoid injury
Jennifer A. Howard edits Passages North and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University in Michigan's snowy Upper Peninsula. She has two previous chapbooks—How to End Up (New Delta Review) and You on Mars (The Cupboard Pamphlet)—and one cat.