Hello fellow pilgrims. Things have been quiet here on the blog front, but some great new things are happening in the background. One of these projects is a brand new short course with Signum University’s SPACE program. SPACE is an online, interactive, non-credit short course program. It is really quite a gorgeous program for folks who want to engage in great discussions and learn about things they love.
For example, there are ongoing series in creative writing, languages (like Old Norse, Old English, Latin, and Japanese), and book studies (like Herbert’s Dune and Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth). There are also new courses up for offer each month. In September, these include:
- Le Guin’s Earthsea Series: The Farthest Shore and Tehanu by Robert Steed
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Text, Translation, Film by Liam Daley
- The Other in the Ancient Egyptian World by Shawn Gaffney
- The Realm of Arnor by Knewbetta
- Tolkien and the Romantics: Nature and Ecology by Will Sherwood
The trick with course availability is one of the lovely features of SPACE. Each month, a slate of courses goes up for offer in the SPACE system. Folks that have joined the program and purchased course tokens have a chance to bid for their favourite short courses.
As I have an idea I wanted to test, I proposed “Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy.” This short course will be an experiment in reading or rereading the iconic Anne of Green Gables as if it was a fantasy book rather than as realistic youth fiction (as it has traditionally been sold). In the course description and video teaser below, I make my pitch for why this experiment could turn out to be really cool.
But … my “Fantasy Anne” course is up against a whole block of amazing courses. For this short course to find its way into the world, it needs the votes. You can find the link to the course description here. Signing up is pretty easy, and tokens for classes run $100-$150, depending on how frequently you take the journey!
As I talk about in “Living in a World with Octobers,” friends of the Anne books and films know that October is a special month for Anne. If you’d like to take this new course, you can sign up here.
Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy: Part 1: Anne of Green Gables (SPACE Module Description)
Within weeks of its 1908 publication, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables became a bestseller. Over the years, this charming orphan story put Montgomery and her imaginative Prince Edward Island on a global map.
Despite the fact that Anne of Green Gables is Canada’s bestselling novel throughout the world—or because of it—Montgomery was ignored by the literati and scholarship. Montgomery was a public intellectual, the first female Canadian fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and invested Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Still she was dismissed as “just” a children’s writer, a regionalist, or a woman. It was 25 years after Montgomery’s death before children’s literature and feminist scholars began to recover her work as worthy of study.
While there is a robust field of Montgomery scholarship, there are areas where our focus is sometimes too narrow. One of these is the category of “realistic” fiction. While there is a kind of verisimilitude about everyday life in the late Victorian era in her work, the realism is pressed to the margins of definition as Montgomery romanticizes the worlds she creates. And can we disagree that there is something magical about Anne herself? By changing our way of approach and by looking at Anne of Green Gables as a fantasy novel, what can we unveil in this classic novel?
Native Prince Edward Islander and Montgomery scholar Brenton Dickieson will lead students through a rereading of Anne of Green Gables using the lenses we use to study fantasy and speculative fiction with the goal of allowing one of the greatest living children’s books to live in new ways.
Required Texts:
Anne of Green Gables is available cheaply in paperback, in public domain digitally as an eBook, in Kindle, and in a variety of audiobook readings. The pre-publication manuscript is transcribed in book form and is available in a full online form, with a French translation and reading resources at https://annemanuscript.ca/). Anne of Green Gables is available in 40+ languages, and students are encouraged to read in other languages, provided they know the English text well enough to comment.
Knowledge of the other eight Anne novels or Montgomery’s other work is not necessary.
Recommended text for writers, literary critics, and literature students:
• Elizabeth R. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance (1994; 2014; available in print and eBook)
Recommended biographical resources:
• Montgomery’s selected diaries are fully available in print with an index. Her complete diaries are available in print up to the mid-1930s. There are selections of her letters available in print.
• Critical Biography: Mary Henley Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (2010; available in print and kindle)
• Young Adult Biography: Liz Rosenberg, House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery Paperback (2020), with illustrations by Julie Morstad (available in print, Kindle, and audiobook)
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
Good news on reading about your new work, Brenton. I wish you every success with it. The courses that you describe look very interesting and when more time emerges I think that they will be one of the things that I would like to do.
And am I right in thinking that you are also working on a new project with Sørina Higgins?
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Thanks Stephen! Yes, we are moving ahead with that anthology with Sørina … trying not to have too many pots boiling on the stove at the same time though.
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Looking forward to enjoy what comes from the pots that you have bubbling on the stove!
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What a wonderful idea, to read the famous book again, but through a different lens. I don’t know if that would be possible for me as someone who has read the book several times. Though it always did feel like a fantasy to me, or perhaps a perfect reality you’d wish was true. It is for that reason so many travel out to PEI to see the house that was a framework for LMM’s imaginings. I actually did make a video about the place too. Here’s the link https://youtu.be/DSx1QFB53WE?si=t6Q45FbLAtPK9FEU
I visited last summer. Oh what a joy!
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Another video! I will take a look. And I do think it is a cool class idea.
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It definitely is. Would love to hear about the outcome when your students have been through the course.
And thank you for your time.
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