Dana Huff

@danahuff

Nerd. Teach for social justice. Instructional Coach, English Dept. Co-Chair, writer, reader, book & education blogger. EdD from Northeastern. #BlackLivesMatter. She/Her. Blog at huffenglish.com. #ITeachEnglish #EduSky

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Dana Huff@danahuff· Nov 7

I hope to see you at #NCTE if you're going this year. I'm presenting on Saturday, "It DOES Just Explode: How to Resist the Canon by Dreaming in Student and Teacher Voice." #NCTE25

Announcement that says "I'm Presenting" at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention taking place from November 20-23 in Denver. The conference theme is "Dream Boldly." In the background are colorful and stylized images of the Rocky Mountains under a spray of stars.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Aug 29

A little bit of a mini-rant: Yesterday, an author whose work I respect posted a snarky comment about people with doctorates who insist on being called "Dr." (Full disclosure, I am one of the people she was complaining about.)

A meme with a woman wearing glasses and short blond hair and a bearded man in a blue-striped shirt. The text says "When your PhD is in: Education, Social Sciences, Honorary... Excuse me! It's Doctor!" next to the woman. Next to the man it says, "When your PhD is in: Astrophysics, Bio-Medical Engineering, Aplied [sic] Mathematics... Call me Bob."

Dana Huff@danahuff· Mar 1

I’m looking the word up in the dictionary and all the meanings work. Incredible. #BelovedFebruary

Merriam Webster Dictionary entry for “pass.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 21

The writing in this chapter was exquisite. I loved the first few sentences #BelovedFebruary

“BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 20

#BelovedFebruary

“But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 19

This passage about Paul D made me think about Faulkner’s statement That I quoted the other day. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is the way cycles of trauma work. Paul D’s presence at 124 could have offered healing. It seemed like it might. But he leaves. #BelovedFebruary

“He did not put his hat on right away. First he fingered it, deciding how his going would be, how to make it an exit not an escape. And it was very important not to leave without looking.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 19

This passage. It says everything. #BelovedFebruary

“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 17

I’m struck by the bird imagery used to describe Sethe. She is compared to a hawk, a bird of prey, and birds also often symbolize freedom. It is such a fascinating image. #BelovedFebruary

“So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shavings now because there wasn’t any wood.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 15

Does anyone call out nonsense better than Baldwin? I am here for this take down.

Whatever unsettling questions are raised or evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely and ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 15

Saturday reading.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 14

I’m going to be turning this quote over in my head for a long time. #BelovedFebruary

“Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 11

I have an important announcement.

Image of Beyoncé wearing platinum braids. Ticketmaster confirmation for ticket purchase. The confirmation reads: "You got em. Let the anticipation begin."

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 11

And this passage that follows. #BelovedFebruary

“And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 11

This passage is a good example. #BelovedFebruary

“They sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line; cane, rain and rocking chairs.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 9

Here is today’s bread. My shaping needs work, but it was delicious with French onion soup.

Two loaves of French bread on a cooling rack.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 8

Amy describes the tree on Sethe's back. "What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this." I'm curious about Amy's background. Who is she? Why is she running away? Why does she help Sethe? #BelovedFebruary

“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 8

This whole passage, when Beloved describes what it was like being in the grave. #BelovedFebruary

“In the dark my name is Beloved.” Denver scooted a little closer. “What’s it like over there, where you were before? Can you tell me?” “Dark,” said Beloved. “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” She raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 8

Also, I am a baker and cook, and specifically, I bake bread, so the passage describing Sethe baking bread was highly relatable. Baking bread calms and centers me, too. #BelovedFebruary

Like kneading bread in the half-light of the restaurant kitchen. Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 5

I love this image. The description is economical, but I can SEE this so clearly. I also can’t help but think of ghosts. #BelovedFebruary

“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust holding hands.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 5

And Sethe’s remark. I’m curious how mothers reading this book respond. My own response is recognition. My children are always my children. I never stop wanting to protect them. #BelovedFebruary

“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 5

It’s so startling and sad to see the words “risk” and “danger” associated with loving your child. #BelovedFebruary

“Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 3

And Amy’s comment to Sethe. She’s talking about way more than Sethe’s feet. This sentence is going to stick in my head for a long time. #BelovedFebruary

“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 3

And Sethe’s warning to Denver. Gives me chills to think about. #BelovedFebruary

“Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 3

I’m fascinated by the concept of “rememory” in chapter 3 of Beloved. I understand it to be the way a place holds on to memories of the past. #BelovedFebruary

“I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 3

#BelovedFebruary

“What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 3

This quote hits so hard when you learn Baby Suggs’s history, a story that is all too common. Reminds me of a quote from Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad: “one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.” #BelovedFebruary

“A man ain’t nothing but a man,” said Baby Suggs. “But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.”

Dana Huff@danahuff· Feb 2

I mean, come on. This sentence. #BelovedFebruary

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Dec 25

Merry Christmas from Velma.

A gray and white tabby cat sits in front of a Christmas tree on a hardwood floor.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Dec 17

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers! #Booksky 💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 12:

Cover of Wuthering Heights by artist Ruben Toledo. The cover features a stylized, cartoonish image of Catherine Earnshaw wearing a green dress and red shawl. The moors and ghostly trees are in the background.

Dana Huff@danahuff· Dec 15