Description
Faculty Meeting at the Millhouse is a collection of stories featuring veteran high school math teacher Margaret Carnahan and her colleagues, who gather each payday at the Millhouse Pub for “faculty meetings,” where they unwind and share the tales that bind them. Filled with lively characters, heart-warming moments, and humor, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever been in a classroom—teachers and students alike.
Praise for Faculty Meeting at the Millhouse
“Reading Faculty Meeting at the Millhouse is akin to a delicious session of Friday night barroom eavesdropping, when you’ve hit the jackpot and the table next to you is the teaching staff of your local high school. Carla Beard’s long teaching experience is evident in these charming stories from someone who’s truly “been there.” This book contains all the tireless tenacity, tiny heartbreaks, soul-deep laughter, ferocious care, and unbreakable solidarity of being a classroom teacher.” —Amy E. Casey, author of The Sturgeon’s Heart
“A collection of charming short stories of life from a teacher’s perspective that promise to tickle your heart and touch your funny bone.” —Lynette Eklund, author of Weird, A Monster-maker’s Journey from Small Town to Hollywood With OCD
Lois Barr –
Faculty Meeting at the Millhouse
By Carla Beard
In her collection of stories about teachers, students, administrators, and parents at Hamptonville High School Carla Beard says, “Our stories tell us who we have been and who we can be.” In just one hundred and twenty-four pages, the author recreates an engrossing tale of big mishaps and little victories that take place every day at schools around the country. Her thirty years of teaching have served her fiction well. She has an ear for the gossip that spreads through faculty lounges and in the parking lot after faculty meetings. The faculty meetings in the title are in fact gatherings at a local pub called the Millhouse every payday. In the Millhouse and other venues around the fictional town of Hamptonville the central narrator, a feisty and big-hearted math teacher, spins stories about her colleagues, her pupils, and her own family that will ring true to anyone who has worked for a long time in any institution dedicated to the public good: a school, a university, or a hospital. Her stories are addictive. Like potato chips, you can’t just have one, but unlike potato chips, her stories are nourishing. Her characters are memorable and her writing is lively and well-paced. In thirty years, students become colleagues and we learn in the final chapter that the narrator’s mother, now in a facility for memory care, was once a librarian at Hamptonville High. The author has a light touch but doesn’t dodge difficult topics. In her stories some of the cheaters get caught and the good deeds get repaid. These are not simple stories, and they do not offer easy solutions but a fly on the wall look at people grappling with life’s problems.