Short Story Anthology Assignment

This semester, I am teaching a literature and composition course centered around short stories collections. For this course, I chose writers specific to the region where we are located in Appalachia, with one obvious outlier from Louisiana. Students read Frank Yerby, Ernest Gaines, Crystal Wilkinson, Dorothy Allison, and Ron Rash. As I worked on the syllabus for this course, I kept thinking about the final assignment. Since it is a composition class, I wanted to have an essay, but I also wanted to so something a little different. I’ve done unessay projects in this course, but since we were doing short stories, I decided to have students compile a small short story collection, write an introduction for the collection, then write a reflective essay on the process.

One of the main aspects of this assignment is that students must have five stories in their anthology. Three of the stories must be ones that they read in class and two must be stories that they have not read in class but connect thematically, stylistically, historically, or in other ways with the stories they read in class. Since most of my students do not have a firm background in literature, I have been, over the course of the semester, compiling a list of possible stories for students to read and add to their anthologies. You can find that list following the description of the assignment.