The start of school is here.

It shifts our lives and gives us a longing for cooler mornings. Porch railings will soon wear a thin mist until the sun rises, and you can almost hear the first leaves tumbling down the street. ‘Tis the season for leg blankets, hot mulled cider, and a good read to savor in stolen, silent moments.

In a town like Cassville, fall is not just a change of weather — it’s a change of pace. We move from the dog days of summer to the quiet rituals that help us settle in: attending weekend football games, stacking firewood, swapping recipes, and for some of us, finding that one book we’ve been saving for a season just like this.

In my English classes at Crowder College, the new semester and changing season come with their own reading harvest. Over 16 weeks, my students will read somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 words and write between 12,000 and 15,000 words.

That’s more than just turning pages and filling up notebooks. It’s an exercise where critical thinking is born and honed to a clean, keen edge. It also gives us pause, to slow down enough to listen to another voice, to wrestle with an idea, and to learn how to shape our personal perspectives in return.

Storytelling does that. True.

Each semester, our reading list changes to match the pulse and pace of life around us. This fall, the conversation in our classroom comes with a distinctly Cassville flavor: our novel selection is The Bouvier Blunder by Jon Horner, Cassville’s mayor, (and Kerry Hays, co-author). It’s not every semester that a syllabus includes a work from someone who might be sitting across from you at a city council meeting.

When my students open Mayor Horner’s book, they’re not just reading a novel; they’re reading something rooted in the same streets and sensibilities that shape their own daily lives. Conversations about the plot and its cast of characters will drift beyond the walls of the classroom and into coffee shops, kitchen tables, and, yes, front porches.

But the mayor’s novel is only the beginning of our literary season. Like any good bookshelf, our reading list branches out in multiple directions.

In “The Rhetoric of Fiction,” we explore short works that teach the art of subtlety. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is a single, unbroken sentence that carries the weight of a lifetime of mother-daughter tension. Virginia Woolf’s “The New Dress” pulls us into a single moment at a party, showing how self-consciousness can turn even polite company into an ordeal.

These are quiet stories, but they linger. I tell my students: you can read them in the time it takes for your coffee to cool, but you may think about them all afternoon.

The mood shifts with our “Who Dun It” selections. Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” delivers a twist that leaves even seasoned mystery fans grinning. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” reminds us why Sherlock Holmes remains a touchstone of detective fiction and why certain puzzles never go out of style.

My students love these stories because they reward both curiosity and careful reading, skills that serve them well far beyond literature.

From there, we step into speculative worlds with Science Fiction. E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” was written more than a century ago, but its vision of a world run entirely by technology feels startlingly current. Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” compresses the fate of the universe into a few pages, ending with a line that has sparked more than one spirited discussion in class. Both stories are eerily prescient of our current ponderous predicament with Artificial Intelligence.

Science fiction, I remind my students, isn’t really about the future; it’s about asking “what if” right now.

Our “Literary Canon: Yesterday & Today” section is where tradition meets reinvention. We read Eudora Welty’s humorous “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s poetic “Yellow Woman,” and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”

Alongside them are the dark edges of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the exploration of memory preservation in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” a conversation overheard in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Curtis Harrell’s raw and haunting “Hunger,” and the nascent beginning of the Gothic in Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful “The Cask of Amontillado.”

These are stories that show how fiction, whether written in 1846 or 2016, still speaks to the same human desires and fears. Exciting!

In a way, my students’ semester is a kind of porch conversation in book form. Intellectual curiosity drives our search for the truth of human nature, the way we, as a critical thinking species, seek answers about life. Before long, we’re kneedeep in questions about character, motivation, and meaning.

Some stories make us laugh; others stop us in our tracks. More than once, I’ve seen a student lean back in their chair after finishing a story, look up, and simply say, “Aha!” That’s when I know the story has done its work.

And here’s where you, Cassville, can join in. You don’t have to be enrolled in my class to be part of the conversation. Read along with us. You might find yourself comparing thoughts with a neighbor, your barber or the person sitting next to you at the ballgame.

I can’t promise you extra credit, but I can promise that you’ll be part of something that will spark your imagination, as immaculate in its conception as its application. Our community could share a season of reading that stretches from the college classroom to porches all over America’s Real Hometown.

If you want to go even deeper, I’m happy to share the same Q&A prompts my students use, not as homework, but as conversation starters.

They’re meant to be asked out loud, maybe over pie at the diner or while waiting for the next pot of coffee to brew. Fiction is meant to be lived with, talked over, and debated about.

What do you say, fellow Cassvillian? This fall, let’s read together. School is always open, because learning is lifelong. Find your spot — maybe on a front porch as the wind shifts and the first hints of woodsmoke drift in the air — and let one of these stories keep you company. The world will keep turning, the leaves will keep falling, but for a little while, we can all be in the same place: caught up in a good story, right here in Cassville. Drop me a line and join the conversation.

Terry Held is an English instructor at Crowder College, Cassville. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Crowder College. He would appreciate hearing what you think. He can be reached at TerryHeld@Crowder.edu.