Peter Ho Davies, "What You Know"

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. The narrator of "What You Know" advises his students to avoid "narrative clichés." What are clichés? Does Davies himself avoid producing such clichés in his own story?

2. What are the emotional states the narrator moves through over the course of this story? How does the narrator feel about Clark's suicide at the beginning of the story, at the middle, and at the end? The narrator says, "Writers only create; readers judge." How do you judge this story?

3. The narrator describes his teaching practice as follows: "I teach them what Forster says: that there are stories and there are plots." What is the difference between a story and a plot? What is the plot of "What You Know"?

Questions for Writing:

1. "What You Know": the title that Peter Ho Davies has selected for his short story bids his readers to consider what they know and how they know it. One way that we come to know the world is through the media; another way is through what our teachers tell us; other ways involve writing, thinking, and using our imaginations. What is the difference between these ways of knowing? Is there anything you can't know? Will never know?

2. Some readers find Davies' short story disturbing because the narrator is callous, calculating, desperate. Davies has this narrator explain to his students the difference between a "story" and a "plot": the former is just a list of what happens, the latter is what a story means. Why has Davies presented us with this unflattering account of the inner life of a creative writing teacher? What does his story mean?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Davies tells a fictional story about an act of violence and its consequences; Beth Loffreda explores the stories that the media and local townspeople told each other after the real life murder of Matt Shepherd. Both authors are trying to get at some truth that the media can't represent: what is this truth? Is it the same truth for both authors? In what ways would the media have to change if they were going to try to tell the kinds of stories that interest Davies and Loffreda?

2. In "The Wreck of Time," Annie Dillard proposes to "take the measure" of the past century which, she says, some find special because of "its nuclear bombs, its unique and unprecedented Holocaust, its serial exterminations and refugee populations . . . ." What has Davies taken the measure of with his short story? With Dillard and Davies in mind, what would you say is the most useful response to random acts of violence?

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