SOURCE: Greenbaum, Vicky. “Beyond the Bookroom: Modern Literature, Modern Literacy, and the Teaching of E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.” English Journal 86, no. 8 (December 1997): 17–20.

In the following essay, Greenbaum discusses the role of teachers in establishing and perpetuating the literary canon and offers strategies for teaching The Shipping News, a novel that Greenbaum proposes as a notable contribution to recent fiction.

My path as literary explorer reaches back to my first day on the job. On my first teaching assignment, twelve years ago, my friendly and sympathetic department chair spent a late August day touring me around the school site from my classroom to the cafeteria to the (then vital!) ditto machine. Our final stop, the bookroom, sat behind an unmarked door. This bookroom seemed bathroom-sized, with a similar musty-damp smell. Rickety shelves loomed, crowded with hardback stacks from every discipline. My department chair, Lori Osantowski, watched sympathetically...