Events, Classes, and Seminars

Dickens turns his pen onto a satiric look London’s pursuit of Money and Society, and a bitter one at the state of the poor and those whose living are derived from the great and polluted River Thames, the powerful controlling symbol that unites many of the characters and plots in the novel.

Through journaling and discussion, we’ll work our way toward a greater understanding of the novel Tokyo Ueno Station’s view on contemporary Japan, and the fractured structure Yu employs to explore one man’s memories. Over the course of our time together, we’ll gain insights into our own places, decisions, losses, and joys, reading and journaling toward a finer understanding of life’s fragility and resilience.

In this four week Delve, we’ll revisit four iconic works of middle grade fiction—Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Julie of the Wolves, and Jacob Have I Loved. We will come to these books as adults with new questions. Throughout the course, we will weave between how the books existed in their time and what they have to offer us now.

This eight-week opportunity to read Middlemarch, Eliot’s masterpiece of 19th-century provincial English lives, will encourage engagement across whatever distinctions we use to label or group us as readers.

Join us for a Delve seminar in which we will explore a wide range of visual art alongside short essays and books by artists, novelists, philosophers, filmmakers, and poets. Together we will read a series of classic unconventional short texts, both old and new, that examine the complex roles color (culminating with a deep dive into the color blue) plays in literature, the fine arts, philosophy, music, and daily life.

While Greek Mythology has never truly left the cultural zeitgeist, it’s clear that lately these old stories are at the forefront of the contemporary imagination. Over the past several years, no less than hundreds of retellings of Greek myths have been released in cinematic, best-selling novels, inventive scholarly works, and piles of poetry. What is compelling us to fervently consume these symbolically rich but often fraught tales of gods and goddesses, monsters and oracles, full of brutality, rebirth and transcendence?