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Introduction: A Postcard from the Editor

Max Koller

It’s January, a new year—and it brings me an exciting new challenge as I take over as editor of English Teaching Forum. This position gives me a much-welcomed opportunity to explore my love of the English language and my interest in other cultures.

My first exposure to the Forum was more than a decade ago when I was teaching English as a foreign language as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa.Teaching materials were scarce, and I was happy to have the Forum as a source of ideas I could adapt for my classroom.

Shortly after I became editor, I went through the archives and found those same issues of the Forum I had received as an English teacher in Africa. I paged through them, experiencing a pleasant sense of recognition, like the feeling you get looking through a long-forgotten photo album.

But now I am looking ahead to the new volume at hand. In each issue of Volume 42, we will present an authentic essay by a well-known American writer taken from a publication called Writers on America. Each essay will be accompanied by a lesson plan with various activities you can explore with your students. The essay in this issue—“A Postcard from America”—tells, among other things, about how Robert Olen Butler wrote a short story from the inspiration of an antique postcard picturing a biplane (similar to the one on the cover). We hope you will enjoy this special feature, which we think is a nice complement to the academic articles.

And now, as I embark on this new endeavor, I’d like to thank Bill Ancker, Paulette Estep, and David Hamill for helping to ensure a smooth take-off.

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