Dana Huff
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danahuff.bsky.social
Dana Huff
@danahuff.bsky.social
1.5K followers 350 following 230 posts
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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danahuff.bsky.social
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.
November 7, 2025 at 7:21 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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."
August 29, 2025 at 1:31 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
I’m looking the word up in the dictionary and all the meanings work. Incredible. #BelovedFebruary
Merriam Webster Dictionary entry for “pass.”
March 1, 2025 at 2:14 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 21, 2025 at 2:02 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
#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.”
February 20, 2025 at 2:34 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 19, 2025 at 12:56 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
This passage. It says everything. #BelovedFebruary
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
February 19, 2025 at 12:50 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 17, 2025 at 10:18 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.
February 15, 2025 at 6:32 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
Saturday reading.
February 15, 2025 at 6:24 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
I’m going to be turning this quote over in my head for a long time. #BelovedFebruary
“Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.”
February 14, 2025 at 1:29 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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."
February 11, 2025 at 5:20 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 11, 2025 at 1:21 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 11, 2025 at 1:19 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.
February 9, 2025 at 1:35 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.
February 8, 2025 at 6:48 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.
February 8, 2025 at 6:42 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.
February 8, 2025 at 6:39 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 5, 2025 at 2:25 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 5, 2025 at 2:22 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 5, 2025 at 2:19 AM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 3, 2025 at 11:31 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 3, 2025 at 11:27 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
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.”
February 3, 2025 at 11:25 PM
danahuff.bsky.social
#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.”
February 3, 2025 at 2:27 AM