The major assignment for my American Literature class this year is to write a Personal Anthology. Each student picks a theme that they feel strongly about, like courage or identity or friendship. Then you find 30 works of American literature and art that relate to your theme and write responses to them. At the end of the year everyone makes their anthology into a book. We have to use the following: 5 poems
4 essays
3 songs
3 short stories
4 art works
2 quotations
2 novel excerpts
2 items of special interest (comic strips, etc)
5 items of interdisciplinary origins (items that have to do with your other classes)


My topic is "Coming of Age". Some of these have only items, since I didn't want to share the response, and some have only responses because of copyright stuff. I'm always amazed at how much I've changed in some ways since the first entries. The Introduction helps explain that, though.

"Home Before Dark" by Judy Collins
"Inner Seasons" by Terri Windling
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
"On Children" by Kahlil Gibran
"Only Sixteen" by Sam Cooke
"The Pomegranate" by Eavan Boland
"Sweet Fifteen" (a newspaper article)
"Strawberry Wine" by Deana Carter
A quote by Mark Twain
"God of Abraham, God of Isaac" by Joel Rosenberg
"Coming of Age" by Tim Flohe
"Four Dialogues" by Erma Bombeck
"The Healing of Womanhood" by Marja Lee Kru˙t
Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
"A Lesson in Passion" by Kasey Skylar
"The Fool" by Mary Hanson-Roberts
These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder
"Myth of the Teenager" by Michael Platt
"Swimming to the Other Side" by Pat Humphries
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
"Russian Notes 9/7/01" by Micheal White
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
"Sunrise Ceremony" by P. K. Weis
"I Think I Must be Growing" by Raffi
And two that I wrote:

"Glass Slippers"
"On Coffee and Adulthood"