The Worlds of Harriet Henderson: Fiction as a Window into the English Classroom

Steve Shann’s latest book is a novel called The Worlds of Harriet Henderson. It’s about 15-year-old Harriet Henderson who has a new English teacher, Molly McInness, and all at once school seems full of possibilities. But, inspired by Molly and impelled by her own adolescent restlessness, Harriet makes an impulsive decision, a decision that takes her, her teacher and her new friend into complex and dangerous worlds. The novel is a natural extension of Shann’s earlier articles and books arguing that mythopoetics–the use of intuition and imagination to reveal the ordinarily unseen–is a legitimate scholarly methodology. In this article, Shann uses extracts from a 2015 journal he kept as he began to think about writing a novel.