Swede Land's precocious western poetry, woven throughout Peace Like a River as excerpts from her ongoing manuscript about the outlaw Sunny Sundown, offers teachers a rare classroom opportunity: a novel containing a second, embedded narrative voice that students can analyze both on its own terms and in relation to the main story. Because Swede is only nine years old for much of the novel, her writing also raises interesting questions about how a child character's creative voice reflects, distorts, or processes events she is too young to fully understand. A lesson built around Swede's poetry teaches close reading of verse alongside prose within a single unit, which many students rarely get to practice together.

A productive starting exercise asks students to select two or three of Swede's western excerpts and place them side by side with the chapters of the main narrative they appear near, looking for thematic or structural echoes between the two. Students often notice, once prompted, that Sunny Sundown's confrontations with villains bear a clear resemblance to Davy's own situation, suggesting that Swede's writing functions as a kind of coded processing of events she witnesses but cannot fully discuss directly. This exercise teaches students to read intertextually within a single novel, a skill that transfers directly to later coursework involving frame narratives or embedded texts in more complex literary works.

It is worth spending some class time on the western genre itself, since students unfamiliar with its conventions, such as the lone gunfighter, the corrupt or absent law, and the showdown that delivers rough justice, will miss much of what makes Swede's choice of genre significant. Swede is not writing in a random style; she is drawing on a specific American literary tradition that itself grapples with questions of justice outside formal legal structures, which directly parallels the novel's own central concerns about Davy and Jape Waltzer. Briefly introducing this genre context before analyzing Swede's poetry in depth gives students the background needed to make a genuinely informed argument about why Enger chose this particular embedded form.

Analyzing Swede's Development as a Writer

Beyond the thematic parallels, Swede's poetry offers a rare chance to track a character's development as a writer across a novel, since her western excerpts shift in tone and confidence as the family's real circumstances grow more dangerous. Students can be asked to trace this shift directly, noting whether Sunny Sundown's world becomes darker, more violent, or more morally complicated as the Land family's own situation deteriorates. This kind of tracking exercise teaches students to notice craft choices an author makes to mirror plot development through a secondary, embedded text, rather than only through direct narration, which is a more advanced literary skill than most students have previously practiced.

• Pair each western excerpt with the main-narrative chapter it appears near.
• Identify at least one parallel between Sunny Sundown and Davy's situation.
• Briefly cover western genre conventions before deeper analysis begins.
• Track shifts in tone across Swede's excerpts as the plot intensifies.
• Ask what Swede's writing reveals that she cannot say directly aloud.

Writing Prompts Built Around Swede's Voice

An essay prompt asking students to argue how Swede's western poetry functions as a commentary on the novel's main plot, rather than as decorative interludes, pushes students toward the kind of intertextual analysis this unit is designed to teach. A stronger version of this prompt asks students to select a specific turning point in Swede's writing, such as a shift toward darker or more violent content, and connect it directly to a corresponding event in the main narrative that likely prompted the change. This kind of specific, evidence-anchored prompt produces far more focused essays than a general invitation to "discuss the role of Swede's poetry in the novel."

Grading these essays requires the teacher to hold two levels of the text in mind simultaneously, evaluating whether a student's claims about Swede's poetry are textually accurate and whether the connections drawn to the main narrative are genuinely supported rather than forced. A rubric line specifically addressing the strength and precision of the parallel drawn between the two narrative layers helps distinguish between essays that make a thoughtful, well-evidenced connection and essays that simply assert a resemblance without demonstrating it through specific textual detail from both the poetry and the prose.

Using This Unit to Teach Voice More Broadly

Because Swede's writing is distinctly different in register and style from Reuben's narration, this unit also offers a natural opportunity to teach students about authorial voice and how a single author can convincingly render multiple distinct voices within one novel. Asking students to identify specific stylistic markers that distinguish Swede's western poetry from Reuben's first-person prose, such as diction, rhythm, or genre-specific vocabulary, builds a concrete vocabulary for discussing voice that many students have previously only used in vague, impressionistic terms. This vocabulary transfers directly to creative writing assignments, where students are often asked to develop a distinct voice of their own.

As a closing activity, some teachers ask students to write a short original passage in the voice of one of the novel's characters, using Swede's embedded poetry as a model for how a character's own writing might reveal something the main narration does not state directly. This kind of creative extension reinforces the analytical work of the unit while giving students a lower-stakes, more playful way to demonstrate their understanding of voice, and it often produces genuinely revealing insight into which students have internalized the distinction between narrative voice and authorial voice, a distinction that continues to matter throughout their later literary study.