This Is My Best

This Is My Best

Class | This program is completed

541 Main Street New London, NH 03257 United States
AIL Classroom, Lethbridge Lodge
4/14/2026-6/2/2026
1:00 PM-3:00 PM EDT on Tue
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$60.00

This Is My Best

Class | This program is completed

In 1942, Whit Burnett compiled the first edition of This Is My Best. The title page called the 93 authors (selected from a list of 169 by librarians, literary critics, and persons professionally connected with reading, writing, teaching, or publishing) the greatest living writers. The authors were given no guidelines for “best,” so even that standard is whatever each author chose. All portions of the United States are represented.

Our Adventures in Learning class will enjoy the most recent 2004 edition, grumbling of course about those of our favorites who were not included and about choices of one work where we would have selected another.

A joy of this text is the breadth of contemporary writing across genres, authors, and particular pieces we know the writers themselves chose.

We will immerse in reading and discussing with, of course, in class writing to clarify our own responses to “surprise insights that only an author can know.”

Required Text
This Is My Best
Retha Powers and Kathy Kiernan, editors
ISBN-10: 0-8118-4829-9

Marashio, Nancy
Nancy Marashio

When Nancy Marashio began teaching in 1964, English majors concentrated on learning literature. Her students were the ones who helped her see their need to experience writing about what mattered to them; in turn, their work as writers deepened their understanding of literature and language.

After teaching high school and middle school students for two decades, Nancy became a professor at River Valley Community College; at all those levels writing remained the core of her teaching. Even now, when she meets past students, they emphasize the transforming role writing still plays in their lives.